The coronavirus pandemic is a major disruption. Social distancing has upended our daily lives and taken a toll on businesses. Thankfully, many of us – especially my fellow marketers – are lucky enough to have jobs that we can do remotely. And because we can still do our jobs, the pressure is on to continue to generate leads. You may feel behind with the postponement of major conferences and meetings that were supposed to land you deals. You may be worried about losing the momentum you’ve built for 2020. But, there is no time to dwell on the past. It’s time to focus on fine-tuning your digital marketing efforts.
According to the CMO Council, “60% of a marketers’ time is devoted to digital marketing activities.” This makes marketers more than ready for this period of social distancing, as the nature of our work is almost completely online. Many marketers worked from home even before the pandemic made it a must. We have a unique opportunity to not only effectively transition our departments into this period of remote work, but also improve our capabilities. Take advantage of this time to re-evaluate your tool set for the current climate. With the right tools, you can fine-tune your marketing strategy for 2020 and adapt digitally. Here are a few of our favorite marketing tools that can help your business get back on track.
Many of us marketers would not be able to cope without our favorite marketing automation platform. These platforms help us save time by automatically running effective campaigns, generating leads, and creating reports. Even better, many marketing automation platforms position themselves as an all-in-one solution that can integrate with the other tools you rely on. The following marketing automation platforms integrate seamlessly with Rybbon, so that you can incorporate digital rewards into your campaigns with ease.
Marketo is a paid marketing automation software built to automate and measure marketing engagement, tasks and workflows. The software helps marketers target qualified leads, produce lead-to-revenue opportunities and execute automated, personalized marketing campaigns across multiple digital channels. A system like Marketo can be game changing for a marketing department, particularly when you consider the vast variety of integrations the platform supports. This platform is especially useful for the tech savvy, as it is flexible and capable of supporting highly sophisticated marketing automation. Leveraging Marketo in conjunction with another tool can extend its capabilities its well.
HubSpot is a comprehensive marketing automation platform that can serve as a central hub for your department. Newer companies love it as it is simple to navigate and offers several tools for free. You can set up web forms, popup forms, and live chat software for lead capture. Then, you can send email marketing campaigns, pipe all of your data into the free CRM, and analyze site visitors’ behavior. The more sophisticated marketing automation requires a license. From managing your content and social media to tracking emails and connecting with your leads, HubSpot can be an all-in-one solution — and it integrates seamlessly with other solutions you may use.
Building a human connection can be difficult through a screen. These tools can help! Whether it’s incentivizing your customers to act as brand advocates, or virtually walking a customer through a one-on-one training session, your customers will appreciate these engagement strategies. Plus, your finance department will appreciate the increase in revenue that will result.
Talkable helps e-commerce companies acquire and retain customers through one of the most effective marketing tools: referrals. Talkable offers a platform to maximize the impact of referrals: a built-in A/B testing suite, segmentation of offers, and controls for fraudulent behavior. It makes it easy to run multiple campaigns concurrently, with unique offers targeting different customers. Platform features include segmentation capabilities, an A/B testing suite, and customer service and fraud prevention portals. Ultimately, the platform helps online retailers acquire new customers, drive email newsletter signups, and increase customer lifetime value.
Intercom is a live chat system for support, sales and marketing teams. Its 3 main modules include a live chat module for communicating with users, an on-boarding module for sending automated emails to convert users into buyers and an educational module for answering a user’s questions. With Intercom, you can drive customer loyalty and engagement at each stage of the customer lifestyle.
Being in self-quarantine can be boring. Many of us are spending more time than ever scrolling aimlessly through our social media platforms to keep ourselves entertained – including your customers. Use this opportunity to post awesome social media content and capture their attention! You can implement a winning social media strategy with these tools.
Buffer is an easy-to-use software application for the web and mobile devices, designed to manage social media accounts across networks. It provides the means for a user to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, as well as analyze their results and engage with their community. Your team can plan, review content, and execute an effective social media strategy with this central hub. Once a post has been published through Buffer, the tool provides engagement stats such as clicks, likes, replies, comments, shares and more.
Think with Google provides free information on how consumer behavior changes in relation to the seasons, holidays, and other special events. You can use the various tools offered in this service to gather insights on shopping trends, search behaviors, and identify your next global market. Looking for something specific? Search Think with Google for data and consumer insights related to your audience, category, or market. The tool makes it quick and easy to find the studies and data points you are looking for.
Without face-to-face interaction, many marketing departments may struggle to stay connected. Even getting answers to what seem like simple questions can feel like a large obstacle to a worker stuck at home. This phenomenon extends beyond task-related work to interpersonal challenges that can emerge among remote coworkers. Research has found that a lack of “mutual knowledge” among remote workers translates to a lower willingness to give coworkers the benefit of the doubt in difficult situations. For example, if you knew your coworker was slammed with multiple projects, you may have been more patient about receiving a response from him. It’s important for teams to get ahead of these issues. Here are a few of our favorite tools that help keep marketing teams organized and aligned.
Zapier is an online automation tool that connects leading apps, such as Gmail, Slack, Mailchimp, and more. You can link two or more apps to automate repetitive tasks without coding or relying on developers to build the integration. It’s easy enough that anyone can build their own app workflows with just a few clicks. Maybe you get a lot of email attachments in your Gmail account and you want to save them to Dropbox. Every time you get an attachment, you could open up the email, click the attachment, and then save it to Dropbox. Or you can have Zapier automate this for you, saving you time and effort. The uses are endless – you can even automate Rybbon reward delivery with a Zap!
Asana is a desktop and mobile platform designed to improve team collaboration and work management. It helps teams manage projects and tasks in one tool. Teams can create projects, assign work to teammates, specify deadlines, and communicate about tasks directly in Asana. Asana is easy to use and flexible enough to handle any workflow — so you can get your entire company on the same page, not just your marketing team. Asana makes it easy to organize and see projects and tasks, enabling your organization to stay on track and move work forward. The visibility the tool provides makes it an excellent means to ensure company-wide alignment.
Now that your customers are working via desktop at home, it is more important than ever to ensure that your organization is easy to find via search engines. As in-person marketing strategies suffer, we must bolster our online marketing strategies. Effective search engine optimization can result in huge wins for your department. By boosting your search rankings, you can replace the in-person leads that may have resulted from a conference or event.
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress plugins available and it’s easy to understand why. Whether you’re running a personal photography page or you’re a SEO professional managing a website for a client, Yoast is a powerful tool that can help you make your site as search engine-friendly as possible. You do have the option to buy premium Yoast SEO extensions for some extra functionality, but its most important functions are part of the free plugin. Yoast makes it easy for you to do things like control titles and meta descriptions, set your targeted keywords and track how often you’re using them, manage sitemaps, and so much more.
Ahrefs is, first and foremost, a backlink checker. You want great sites to be linking to content on your website and as a result, boosting your search ranking. Identifying links has always been Ahrefs’ bread and butter, and sets it apart from its competitors. Apart from the SEO backlink analysis, for which it is well-known in the digital marketing field, it is also useful for keyword analysis and website rankings. Ahrefs uses different SEO metrics to analyse and provide quantitative results for every website analysis done.
Customer feedback is valuable information that will be used to make pivotal decisions. Top performing companies are top performing companies because they are always looking for ways to make their best even better. It’s more imperative now than ever to know your customer well and fulfill their needs. And with more of your customers at home, they may be more likely to submit their feedback – especially if there is a Rybbon incentive to earn. Here are a few of our favorite platforms for collecting customer feedback.
The tool’s ease of use is clear from the moment you create an account. It offers a large variety of templates and using an artificial intelligence powered extension of its often wizard-aided user interface, it will try to guess the appropriate format of a question based on its wording. It has a wide range of applications, including customer satisfaction, employee engagement, event registrations, feedback, and market research.
Alchemer is a highly capable online survey tool that can accommodate a wide array of tasks, particularly through custom coding. Those who are comfortable in coding within its scripting system or in JavaScript may be able to tap into even more power than its extensive, easy-to-use out-of-the-box features provide.
A tried and true tactic of savvy marketers is using marketing incentives such as swag, gifts, and rewards to cut through the noise and connect with customers. With digital rewards, you can reap the benefits of this tactic without any of the headaches. Virtual rewards are the perfect complement to your virtual marketing tools. They are a safe, contactless way to incentivize webinar attendance, referrals, offer a ‘thank you’ for a remote prospect meeting, and more. With digital rewards, you’ll get more engagement and deliver better results on your campaigns. And with our global delivery and tracking, reporting will be a breeze. You may be worried about the time and money required to include rewards in your marketing campaigns. Rest assured, you can cut 75% of administrative time and get 100% refunds on unclaimed rewards with Rybbon. Rybbon’s rewards integrate into the leading online marketing tools on the market, so you can leverage the power of digital rewards with ease.
These are just a few of the online marketing tools on the market, but there are so many to explore. Do you know of a great online marketing tool you’d like added to this list? Contact us to let us know. In times like this, it’s important that we support each other. By sharing resources, we can help businesses achieve their marketing goals despite disruptions.
Rida is a creative marketing professional who specializes in innovative marketing solutions for the technology space.
Rida is a creative marketing professional who specializes in innovative marketing solutions for the technology space.
