Personalized Marketing Lacks The Correct Tools

Less than 10% of marketers say they have the correct tools to deliver personalized one-to-one marketing, according to a white paper commissioned and released Thursday by Kahuna Mobile.

Personalization has been proven to radically increase the ROI of email marketing and segmented campaigns increase open rates by as much as 760%, according to the Direct Marketing Association.

Consumers are looking for relevant experiences from the brands they shop at. Consumers are more than four times more likely to respond to a personalized email than a generic one, and 72% of consumers are frustrated when they receive irrelevant emails per a recent Autopilot study that surveyed 1200 consumers. 

Yet, the higher quality data tools required for authentic and individualized personalization still remains troublesome for many marketers, according to the Kahuna Mobile report.

Marketers need to rethink their efforts to deliver one-to-one marketing, not just to keep up but stay ahead of the trends, per Julie Ginches, CMO of Kahuna.

The study surveyed top marketing professionals at Ascendant, an invite-only professional networking group, to pinpoint any issues marketers are facing when incorporating personalization into their marketing campaigns. Some 59% of respondents state they hold the title of vice president of marketing or above, and 88% market directly to consumers.

Every marketer surveyed expressed that omnichannel marketing was important, but only 6% believe they have a mature omnichannel marketing program.

Some 78% of companies surveyed responded that they were restricted in investing in omnichannel personalization by resources and inadequate time, while 91% of marketers expressed that they either did not have or did not fully utilize the tools they need for individualized marketing.

A further 72% of marketers responded that inconsistent data across technologies were a major challenge in implementing better marketing tools.

Personalized Marketing Lacks The Correct Tools

11 Free Tools You Should Use for Effective Online Market Research

Now with digital marketing, effective market research is no longer limited to big companies with big budgets. Small and medium-sized companies can also perform extensive market research using free or affordable digital tools.

To help small businesses conduct market research using effective digital tools, here are 11 tools you should use:

1. LinkedIn: Use this professional social networking website to learn about the corporate backgrounds of prospects and find shared connections who might help make an introduction. Search LinkedIn profiles of competing brands and their staff to find connections to important clients and suppliers. You can also find employees who are about to leave their companies – they’re generally very active in updating their profiles or seeking recommendations.


2. Job Posting Sites: See which kind of job postings a company has. You can often figure out their business strategy or plans based on the positions they hire and which locations are hiring.


3. Wayback Machine: This tool shows historical snapshots of websites so you can determine how their brand or marketing strategy has evolved over time.


4. Data.com: Data.com is a crowd-sourced online business directory with information for more than 29 million contacts from over 4 million companies. You can find the contact information for key people you want to connect with by trading with other members.


5. Google Trends: Use Google trends to estimate product demand for a particular market and to assess brand awareness of competitive products or services.


6. Google Alerts: Set up Google Alerts to notify you whenever competitor names or keywords related to your industry come up on social media.


7. SEC Edgar’s Database and SEDAR: This website lets you find financial information and filings for public companies.


8. PRNewswire and PRWeb: Use PRNewswire and PRWeb to go through online press releases for news regarding your customers and competitors. You can even expand the list to do research on their customers and vendors.


9. WhoIS: Use WhoIS to find the contact information of the people behind microsites and content sites. Sometimes you may discover that a review site is actually another form of content marketing performed by a digital agency.


10. Quora: Check what kind of questions a company’s staff have answered or asked – on Q &A site Quora. This is a site where users are required to to register with their real names and user profiles.


11. Slideshare: Find corporate and individual sales presentations that staff members from your competitors have uploaded to share online.

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Author: Ray Wang

Ray Wang is the Marketing Coordinator at View full profile ›

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11 Free Tools You Should Use for Effective Online Market Research

Methods and Tools Every Publisher Should be Using

In the world of affiliate marketing there are still many areas that require improvements. Affiliate networks offer a wide variety of tools for publishers and also give advice on how to optimise sale commissions. However, that is not enough if you really want to be competitive. In this article you will find some technical advantages that I think every publisher should have in order to generate more leads and sales. Of course, not every company has a team of developers available, but many tools exist online to improve your performance.

Conversion tracking

First up is conversion tracking for landing pages, deals, products and/or advertisers. Observe your traffic sources and ads and see how they perform. You can do this by using existing tools or services like Voluum. Personally, I both use this tools in addition to a self-developed tool.

Also, make sure that you know from which page of your website a conversion or (e-mail) subscription originates, so that you can optimise it when necessary.

Dead links detection

Broken links won’t make you any money. Manually looking and finding dead links takes a lot of work and effort. Also, a system to let users report broken links is not optimal, as broken links on your most remote pages won’t easily be discovered. Best is to can create your own tool that automatically finds broken affiliate links and replace them. There are also some WordPress plugins and other dead link checkers to help you cope with this problem.

Self optimising website based on performance

Self optimising websites or landing pages can explain themselves in many ways. Some websites automatically push their most popular deals or products forward to their homepage, where other websites categorise on search metrics. This saves a lot of time on sorting things out and it also improves financial performance. Work that you would normally do manually, after having to analyse the traffic and clicks on your site, can not only be done automatically but also continuously.

A/B testing based on conversions

A/B testing allows you to split traffic on your website, so that visitors experience different web page content or designs on version A and version B of a page, while you monitor visitor actions to identify the version that yields the highest conversion rate.

Most (performance) marketers are optimising by the amount of clicks. But it’s better to make the technical connection to be able to optimise on the amount of conversions. That’s because a high number of visitors clicks could just come from confused visitors. So try to close this blackbox.

Technical SEO done right

Although many of you have the skills and knowledge to do SEO, doing SEO right is actually quite hard. Of course, it’s important to have a fast website and have sitemaps available in html and xml, so a search spider can crawl and index your website.

When you are not a developer, there are many tips on how to improve technical SEO. Think about keeping your site free from cloaking, using redirects, and URL structure properly and preventing duplicate content.

Automatic quality checks on content

Another thing that can save you lots of time when done automatically, is checking and updating your content. Personally, I like to use a tool that checks sites for duplicate content. Make sure you are connected and make use of as much automatically generated data as possible. Doing things manually on a regular base is your big enemy for productivity, it should only be allowed when you want to do something special.

Automatic SEO checks on pages

A great tool to automatically check your SEO is Yoast. Actually Yoast is a game changer to boost your SEO. It’s a plugin for WordPress that can easily improve your SEO, even when you have moderate knowledge of it. The tool checks if your website is SEO-proof and will give you tips on how to improve your site SEO.

Methods and Tools Every Publisher Should be Using

Internet Marketing Tips and Tools To Help Small Businesses Grow Now

Although there are many ways to market your business to help you grow quickly, nothing is more effective than internet marketing. The reason is that it allows you to automate many of your marketing processes by using online tools and scripts. Marketing materials like emails, articles, and even videos can be scheduled to post when you need them to so that you are free to do other things. Borderless ecommerce techniques allow you to connect with your customers worldwide.

Before marketing your business on the internet, it is important to have a plan and create the assets you need to market. Assets are online properties where your business may be found. According to Priya Shah at Business2Community, the first, and a must have asset, is your website. A website is the home for your business online and the foundation for your internet marketing plan. The URL, or the domain name, is the “street address” for your business online.

Once your website is in place, there are certain internet marketing strategies that are an important part of your internet marketing plan. These strategies include search engine optimization of your website, creating business pages, and using specific industry portals for your business. Google, Facebook, and Twitter allow you to create a social marketing strategy to distribute your content and connect with your audience.

Google allows you to use several different internet marketing strategies to market your business. They include indexing your site in the search engines, building a business page to showcase your business, and advertising to help you drive traffic to your business quickly.

Facebook provides many of the same internet marketing opportunities since it offers fan pages and ads, and it is the top social marketing website online. Twitter allows for microblogging, which are short messages approximately 140 characters long, that allow you to communicate with and connect to your audience. Twitter also offers paid advertising opportunities for those who want to drive traffic quickly.

Internet marketing tools help automate many of your internet marketing strategies and complete marketing tasks quickly. According to Greg Nunan at Tech.co, there are many free tools that are essential to internet marketing success. These include tools to create digital documents, find ideas for content, make presentations and infographics, and spy on your competitors. Tools like autoresponders, although not generally free, allow small businesses to automate their email marketing campaigns and save time with menial tasks like subscribes and unsubscribes.

What are your favorite free internet marketing tools? Which internet marketing techniques do you use to market your business?

[Photo Credit 1 Stop Marketing Solutions]

Internet Marketing Tips and Tools To Help Small Businesses Grow Now

The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

The go-to guide to social media skills, now in an updated and revised Third Edition

The Social Media Bible is comprehensive 700-plus page social media resource that will teach corporate, small business, and non-profit marketers strategies for using social media to reach their desired audiences with power messages and efficiency. This newly revised 3rd edition addresses technology updates to the iPad, apps, Foursquare, and other geotargeted networks. New case studies and company profiles provide practical examples of how businesses have successfully implemented these strategies, using the newest social media marketing tools.

• Updates and changes to Google’s search engine algorithms


• More information on plug-ins, widgets, apps, and integration


• Updates on Twitter and Yammer and new information on Google+


• The latest in mobile marketing

Master the latest social media tools and deliver powerful messaging in the most effective way possible with The Social Media Bible.

check out For More Information

The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success

salesforce.com (CRM) Announces New Instagram-Focused Marketing Tools

salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) posted the following to its official blog on Tuesday:

Marketing and visual storytelling have been synonymous from the days of full page ads in newspapers and magazines, to full color billboards and television. In the digital and mobile world, there has never been a channel at scale to rival TV in its ability to powerfully engage consumers with the beauty of the visual image.

That is until Instagram launched in late 2010. Almost overnight, it attracted a large audience eager to use their ever improving smartphone cameras to share what they captured in a channel solely dedicated to visual storytelling. Instagram’s clever filters added to the experience, and passionate communities were born around different interests like fashion, food and travel.

It wasn’t long before innovative marketers recognized this global adoption and brands began setting up a presence on Instagram to take advantage of engagement levels that today include 70 million daily photo uploads and 2.5 billion likes per day. Global brands like L’Oreal, McDonald’s, KLM and Chobani were among the early adopters, utilizing Instagram to engage with customers, convert fans into brand advocates and find new customers.

When Instagram initially launched its advertising offering in 2013, its user community was 150 million strong. By June 2015, that community had grown to over 300 million globally. According to a recent report from eMarketer, Instagram is expected to represent over 10% of Facebook’s global revenues by 2017, including 28% of all US mobile revenues.

Today, we are excited to announce that Salesforce is offering a whole new set of tools for marketers to engage with customers on Instagram across our suite of Marketing Cloud products; Social.com for managing advertising campaigns at scale, Active Audiences to unlock and sync CRM data in Salesforce to optimize advertising and Social Studio for publishing, engagement, customer service, and analytics.

Already we are seeing great success with our customers who sync their CRM data and email lists with digital advertising. Here are a few examples:

• 
  

  Amusement park operator Cedar Fair saw 3X ROI by marketing season passes to last year’s day-pass holders, and to lookalikes of last year’s day-pass holders.

  
  


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  An online retailer reached 77% more of its email list by adding efficient Facebook advertising. The company saw a 17:1 ROI on ads that reached email openers, and immediately implemented coordinated email and Facebook advertising as an always-on tactic.

  
  


• 
  

  An apparel retailer earned a 10:1 ROI (return on ad spend) by reaching customers who had recently signed up for email in a store, and inviting them to shop online.

  
  


• 
  

  Apartments.com saw a 35% increase in engagement rates and 30% lower cost to drive traffic to its promotion using Active Audiences to reach subscribers and lookalikes.

  
  

“L’Oreal as the world leader in beauty, uses visual channels to communicate with our consumers, with the objective of promoting education around our beauty products. Our ambition of delivering beauty for all, requires a tailored approach in our messaging. Social.com enables us to be hyper-targeted in our social media buying, and serve the right message to the right audience. This is particularly relevant for retargeting on Instagram, as the platform is 100% visual.” —Marco Ruschioni, CRM Director, L’Oreal

With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Instagram integration, marketers can:

• 
  

  Advertise: Buy and manage Instagram advertising with Social.com. Now, advertisers have a single platform for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Most of the ad targeting available for Facebook is also available on Instagram, including Active Audiences. Active Audiences unlocks your CRM data in Salesforce to securely and powerfully reach your customers, target lookalikes, and optimize advertising within the customer journey. Using Active Audiences, Marketing Cloud customers can now sync audience segments to Instagram for targeted advertising.

  
  


• 
  

  Publish: Marketers want to understand the effectiveness of their Instagram campaigns in driving reach and effectiveness. They also want to use their most compelling Instagram content in other digital campaigns. Social Studio helps marketers publish great content to Instagram, track campaign performance, and share the most successful Instagram images with multiple teams and across social networks.

  
  


• 
  

  Engage: Marketers can earn a more relevant voice in the Instagram community by participating in conversations happening on their profiles. With Social Studio, community management teams can review discussions, automatically route and prioritize critical responses and collaborate as a team.

  
  


• 
  

  Service: The world’s leading brands are resolving customer service issues via social media, alongside email, mobile, live chat and other care channels. With the combined power of the Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, brands will be able to resolve customer service issues on Instagram in a timely manner and deliver a great experience.

  
  


• 
  

  Analyze: Our powerful social listening and analysis capabilities, born out of Radian6 and now part of Social Studio mobile app.

  
  

As Instagram says so eloquently; images are a universal language. Salesforce is now excited to offer marketers the opportunity to extend their reach to customers on one of the most engaging channels in mobile, and coordinate those efforts with every other channel in the customer journey.

At Salesforce, we have a history of leadership and innovation in digital advertising and social marketing. We are a partner to all of the major social networks, including Facebook where we are a Facebook Marketing Partner across Ad Technology, Content Marketing, Community Management, and Audience Onboarding. Additionally, Salesforce is a launch partner of Twitter’s Ads API program, Pinterest’s MarTech Developer Alpha, and LinkedIn’s Sponsored Updates program.

Learn more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud: request a demo or read the latest Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advertising Benchmark report, highlighting pricing and industry trends with aggregate data compiled from the campaigns of global brands.

salesforce.com (CRM) Announces New Instagram-Focused Marketing Tools

TrueShip Drops New Guide Covering 17 Ecommerce Marketing Tips & Tools You Need Now

SCOTTSDALE, AZ –(Marketwired – July 07, 2015) – TrueShip (http://www.TrueShip.com) has just released a brand new guide that reveals 17 ecommerce marketing tips and tools that you need now.

The expansive juggernaut that is the internet rakes in an estimated $1.5 million nearly every 30 seconds. In 2014, over $300bn was hauled in, setting a new annual record for US online sales. Experts are projecting that in 2015, sales will eclipse $345bn, marking the strongest year-over-year growth yet.

With millions of retailers competing in an increasingly crowded online space, a unique approach is necessary to break the mold and make one’s store stand out from the rest of the pack. As the leading provider of ecommerce shipping software, TrueShip routinely issues detailed guides that are designed to help its users earmark successes.

The newest guide by TrueShip delivers 17 ecommerce marketing tips and tools that everyone in this industry should be using, including:

-- Integrated FAQ pages that are self-learning.
-- Providing a multimedia shopping experience.
-- Utilizing multiple selling platforms.
-- Why email marketing is still very much alive. 
-- The importance of the live chat option.
-- Donating products to gain blogger coverage.
-- Making checkout as fast and as easy as possible.
-- Cross-promoting products. 
-- Cashing in on digital coupons.
-- Announcing sales and events to the press.
-- Price-matching to gain more conversions.
-- The benefits of integrated customer feedback models.
-- Long form content marketing and placement. 
-- Social engagement and referral tactics. 
-- Finding niche long tail keywords for content outreach.
-- Retargeting bounced users to improve conversions.
-- The value of a strong and automated returns policy. 
-- Illustrated infographic of must-know ecommerce facts. 

“A business is only as good as the tools that it can use to expand and generate revenue,” explained Michael Lazar, Director of Online Marketing at TrueShip. “In our new guide, we deliver 17 timeless ecommerce marketing tips and tools to help our users improve their conversion funnel.”

You can read TrueShip’s newest guide by visiting: http://www.trueship.com/blog/2015/07/07/17-ecommerce-marketing-tips-tools-you-need-now/#.VZx6YEYY3QI.

About TrueShip

#ShipSmarter — TrueShip is the original architect of multi-carrier ecommerce shipping software. ReadyShipper shipping software integrates into the most widely used shopping carts and online marketplaces. It is an easy-to-use order fulfillment solution designed to save e-retailers time and money.

Start a 14-day trial of ReadyShipper shipping software by visiting: http://www.TrueShip.com/products/ReadyShipper.

About ReadyReturns

#ReturnsHappen — ReadyReturns is a customer-facing, plug-and-play, self-service online product returns software solution. It integrates into virtually any website without any programming. ReadyReturns lets customers make returns from a website by filling out a simple form and printing the return shipping label. E-retailers set the rules of the returns, including things like return shipping and restocking fees.

Start a 30-day trial of ReadyReturns by visiting: http://www.TrueShip.com/products/ReadyReturns.

Embedded Video Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT61wv8wud8

Embedded Video Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY7ZCN_9myo

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

Press Contact
Michael Lazar
Director of Online Marketing
Tel: (877) 818-7447
Email: support@trueship.com

TrueShip Drops New Guide Covering 17 Ecommerce Marketing Tips & Tools You Need Now

LocBox Expands Its Local Business Marketing Tools With Support For Facebook And Google Ads

It’s been more than two years since I wrote about marketing startup LocBox, but co-founder and CEO Saumil Mehta told me that the company has been busy — it’s now up to 600 customers and is growing between 7 and 10 percent each month.

Most of those customers are small, local businesses, which is why Mehta hasn’t made it a priority reach out to the tech press. He’s making an exception, however, for a significant expansion in the LocBox model. The company already helps businesses encourage positive reviews and engage with fans through offers, rewards and contests. As of today, it aims to help with their Facebook and Google ad campaigns, too.

I’ve seen plenty of other online ad managers for small businesses (during our demo, Mehta mentioned AdStage specifically). However, those products are usually built for ad management specifically, and as Mehta put it, “There’s no marketing automation component, no landing pages, no email marketing.”

By combining ad-buying with LocBox’s existing tools, he hopes to offer local businesses “an all-in-one package” for their marketing needs, creating “a combination that does not exist today.” For example, they could use LocBox to create customized landing pages with either coupons or purchase options, then use a LocBox-managed ad campaign to promote those pages.

Mehta also suggested that LocBox has been designed with the local business owner in mind. So there’s a simple interface that doesn’t require much knowledge of the ins and outs of Facebook or Google advertising — he said it’s simpler than Facebook’s own ad manager.

Now, I’m not a small business owner myself, but for what it’s worth, all the ad creation tools and reporting dashboards that Mehta showed me were comprehensible. Despite that simplicity, LocBox can still improve campaigns, for example by optimizing the ad spending to maximum the return across different audiences.

The goal, Mehta said, is to present businesses with very simple options: “Push this button to get new customers. Push this button to reach existing customers.”

“We are not close to having ‘solved it,’ but at least we are trying to bridge the gap between businesses’ objectives and the crazy, really complex online marketing world,” he added.

And even though LocBox is starting with Facebook and Google, Mehta said he’s interested in other ad platforms like Yelp, as well.

LocBox Expands Its Local Business Marketing Tools With Support For Facebook And Google Ads

Three Paid Marketing Tools That Are Worth Every Penny

As a small business, Curve deeply understands the importance of keeping costs down. There are hundreds of different paid marketing platforms out there, from social media feeds to brand analytics platforms. How do you know which ones are worth the money?

Here are three paid marketing tools that we highly recommend to any marketers, social media managers, or entrepreneurs looking to build their online profile.

Note that Curve Communications is not affiliated with any of these companies. We just love them!

Litmus

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If you’re using an email newsletter to connect with your fans, how confident are you that your emails are showing up properly? This is a huge problem especially if your email newsletters are designed from scratch in HTML, but even pre-made templates might not be perfect on every single platform.

Litmus takes the guesswork out of it for you. You can send a preview email from your email-marketing platform like Constant Contact or Mailchimp to a special email address provided by Litmus. Litmus will then display your email on several dozen different browsers and devices, from iPhones to Outlook to Gmail.

Why is it worth your money?

The time and labour cost it would take to manually send these emails to different devices would be tremendous, especially if you’re managing several emails a week. Litmus cuts this process down to a single streamlined task, and provides a lot of other value-added services like HTML assistance, live editors, and useful webinars.

While the price is still steep, Litmus is invaluable if email marketing is a major part of your marketing plan.

Price: Plans start at $79/month, free 7-day trial available

Edgar

Edgar is a brand new social media automation platform. So new, in fact, that you have to request an invitation to be a part of it, but it’s definitely worth the extra effort. Edgar is all about helping you share evergreen content: articles and blog posts that can be posted year-round and aren’t time sensitive.

Let’s say you have a sale you want to promote twice a week. Normally, you would have to copy and paste the text of the tweet and manually schedule it every week.

However, if you used Edgar, you can schedule any promotional tweets to go out on Monday and Wednesday at noon. Next, you just write a couple of tweets (let’s say five) about your sale and label them as promotional. Edgar will then automatically rotate through the five promotional tweets without your input. If you want to add more tweets to the queue, change the times, or remove older tweets, this can be easily done through the dashboard.

Why is it worth your money?

First and foremost, Edgar helps you save an incredible amount of time. Manually scheduling hundreds (or if you’re like us, thousands) of tweets a month for different clients and accounts eats up a tremendous amount of time. We still look for great articles to share on our Twitter feed every day, but the process has been greatly simplified due to Edgar.

Price: $49/month

Hootsuite

When it comes to having full control over all your different social media accounts, Hootsuite is the undisputed champion. While Edgar is fantastic for helping you schedule your posts, Hootsuite does all that (although it requires more manual tweaking), and it helps you monitor and track hashtags, mentions, DMs, and anything else you need to be a social media superstar.

In Hootsuite, each account has its own page, and each page has a customizable feed so you can focus on what’s important. Have an account that’s used primarily for tweeting out marketing content? You can prioritize your scheduled tweets and anyone using #Marketing (or any other hashtag) on your feed.

What about a tech support account that focuses on responding to customer questions? You can prioritize Direct Messages and Mentions to make sure you can easily monitor anyone trying to contact you.

Why is it worth your money?

Hootsuite is invaluable for any company that has to manage (and track) social media accounts across different departments and product lines.

Hootsuite isn’t limited to just Twitter. Hootsuite is also compatible with LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, WordPress and Mixi. If you’re looking for one social media tool for your business, we strongly recommend using Hootsuite Pro.

Price: From $8.99/month for a Pro plan. A free user has limited functionality, with only two social media networks and very basic post scheduling.

Have any other paid platforms you love using? Continue the conversation below.

Three Paid Marketing Tools That Are Worth Every Penny

Social Marketing Tools That Build Your Reach and Credibility

As an early adopter of media since the early 80s, I love everything about media, its immediacy, urgency, fluidity, and ability to impact the masses and unify people and ideas in real time, in the moment.

Social marketing continues to be a powerful force for good, but as we know it can be a dangerous platform for bad too.

Through prior careers in entertainment and broadcast radio sales, and celebrating 8 years in my current social media consultancy, social marketing clearly is the most effective way to build branding, credibility and the bottom line.

Below are social marketing tools that can build your reach and credibility in today’s business world.

LinkedIn

This is by far a “must have” out of all the social marketing tools for anyone in business.

LinkedIn is a professional platform, that has become a standard for presenting and promoting yourself and your professional career. Not only can it be your online hub and resume, but it can be a content marketing platform, with it’s Pulse publishing feature.

A professional head shot, developed profile and consistent posting activity are what make you stand out and build your following on LinkedIn.

Facebook

Probably the most evolved social platform since it’s inception, Facebook combines the ability to get more personal, have a little fun, and promote your business now in an educational way. The benign monster of social networking, Facebook has and will continue to be a must in the world of social marketing tools.

A branded timeline photo and profile picture and defined content strategy can build a following and make your Facebook page grow.

Twitter

Still the most effective, real time, immediate, “in the moment” source and tool for getting and receiving information, alerts, announcements, events and using hashtags (#) to aggregate people around a particular topic or community. You can say a lot in 140 characters. Twitter is the viral platform of choice.

Tumblr

According to Tumblr, “We’ve they’ve “made it so easy to use it’s hard to explain”. This community is for anyone that wants to have a blog and put anything they want on it. Content, pictures, video, gifs, music, links, surveys, art, deep stuff, shallow stuff are all allowed as Tumblr has built and created an amazing blog community.

Instagram

We feel with our eyes. Nothing is more powerful than visuals, pictures and video and the popular mobile app Instagram is the most active, fast and fun hub for posting them with some highlighted text. Its slogan, “share your life” kind of says it all. In this case, a picture is worth a thousand words. Careful with what pictures you do post, especially since they can impact your brand and professional image immediately.

Blogging

By far one of the most effective activities that can establish your authority, credibility and stature as an influencer. With content marketing’s purpose to educate, inform and inspire, blogging is tops on the tactics that can really make you stand out, get noticed and remembered more. You can launch a blog, guest post on established blogs, or join a blog community, like Tumblr).

The stats speak for themselves when it comes to blogging. According to the 2014 The Blogconomy report, 77 percent of Internet readers read blogs, 61 percent of U.S. consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post, and 70 percent of consumers learn about a company through their articles rather than their ads.

Email Marketing

Building permission based email lists and harnessing them into professional email marketing programs, is one of the most effective ways to directly and personally communicate and build trust with people. Companies like iContact, Vertical Response, Constant Content and several more offer Free and low coast programs to set up an email marketing program.

Podcasting

Twenty-first Century radio that is archived and saved, podcasting is on the rise and is becoming a very popular format for content, interviews, features, profiles, and education across any industry. Adopted by sports, music, business, politics, as well as food, hospitality and several smaller niche industries, podcasting is easy to do, easy to find and podcasting communities such as Blogtalk Radio, Spreaker, and iTunes are thriving.

Listening to the spoken word is a more personal experience.

Video

Again, we feel with our eyes. Watching and listening is still the king of content. Recently, YouTube has been greatly challenged by some newer players including Netflix, Vimeo and Yahoo Screen. Again, let the stats speak for themselves:

• 1.8 million words – the value of one minute of video, according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research


• 45.4 percent of Internet users view at least one video online per month, according to comScore


• 100 million Internet users watch a video daily


• According to the Online Publishers Association, 80 percent of Internet users recall watching a video ad on a website they visited in the past 30 days.

If you own a small business or are in business for yourself, there’s a lot of compelling evidence suggesting that online video marketing should be in your marketing mix.

Networking

The trend is shifting back to networking in person, either at events and groups, or in small groups and certainly one on one, or on the golf course or at a sporting event. Nothing accelerates a relationship or connection more than meeting in person. Owning our time with people in person allows us to personalize and maximize our time. Social media is an amazing, effective bridge, but ultimately the goal should be phone calls or in person meet-ups.

Finding that right balance of online and in-person networking is essential to stay in touch, grow relationships and make new ones. Get more social, visible, and engaged in your community, industry, and primary social communities to reap the benefits of being “top of mind.”

Speaking

If you are comfortable with speaking in public, it can really open doors and give people a glimpse into your personality, story and style.

Volunteer or submit yourself to speak and if chosen, prepare focused content that gives people good information, tools, tips and insights that can help them grow their business or brand.

Training

Opportunities to educate, train or facilitate builds interest, credibility, and trust. If you have a training idea, workshop, webinar, course, or outline, find organizations, companies, or groups that can benefit from it. If you want to stand out, get noticed and be remembered, educate and help people learn something that can help be better at what they do or be more successful.

Get out, get involved, show up, join, share, connect, help, educate, inspire, and watch what happens.

Choose the social marketing tools that work best for you, your community, and your customers.  Focus on, own and commit to a few as your key hubs for activity and engagement and become known for them.

Social Image via Shutterstock

More in: Content Marketing

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Social Marketing Tools That Build Your Reach and Credibility

Most Recommended Marketing Tools By Pro Bloggers [Part 1]

This is the first post for “Recommended Marketing Tools” series – where successful bloggers share the marketing tools they couldn’t live without. Co-authored by James Richman.

Most successful bloggers are not only great storytellers. They know the best and most effective tools of the trade too.

In collaboration with James Richman of 1stWebDesigner, we’ve asked some of the most influential bloggers as to what are their 3 most recommended tools for content creation and promotion.

Kristi Hines

Kristi is one of the most trusted freelance bloggers in the online space.

Her blog Kikolani covers blog marketing and blogging tips for personal, professional, and business bloggers.

Tools Kristi Can’t Live Without

I am a marketing tool addict. I love seeking out new tools that can simplify specific areas of my business. While I was only asked to share three tools that I couldn’t live without in my business, I couldn’t help but sharing five that I use on a daily basis.

Cyfe

One of the biggest challenges of being a soloprenuer is finding the time to manage my clients and my business. I use a lot of different platforms for advertising, email marketing, invoicing, publishing, SEO, social media, and web analytics.

Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard software that allows me to see data from most of the platforms I use in one place. It saves me a LOT of time – without it, I would have to go to Facebook Insights, FreshBooks, Google Analytics, MailChimp, Moz, and several other websites to see my business data on a daily basis.

Rival IQ

Competitive research can be a great teacher when it comes to marketing strategies. I use Rival IQ to keep up with other freelancers in my space to analyze their website, search, and social media strategy. I also use it to help my clients identify areas in their online marketing that could use some improvement based on what their competitors are doing.

My favorite feature is the ability to quickly compare multiple business’s website titles, Twitter bios, Facebook descriptions, and other social taglines and get alerted when competitors make changes to any of these. It’s a great way to make sure your business is offering what your customers want.

Oktopost

As a freelance writer, one of the things I do for my clients is promote the content I create. This helps them accomplish their content marketing goals, including traffic generation, social engagement, and conversions. Oktopost allows me to promote content to all of my social channels in one platform and get social engagement and click through analytics.

My favorite feature is the ability to not only post to my social profiles, but also to Facebook and LinkedIn groups. Thanks to the analytics Oktopost provides, I can see which groups offer the most engagement for my content and keep up with comments that need replies within each group.

Danny Brown

While Danny blogs about marketing and social media and where we’re heading, he also blogs about what it means to us as humans.

How we can tell better stories; be better businesses; and live better lives. After all, business comes and goes; but we only get one shot at being good people, in life and in business. He’s the co-author of Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage, and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing.

3 Tools Danny Can’t Live Without

Sprout Social

It’s the only social media dashboard worth using if you’re serious about keeping tabs on engagement levels, topics that are important to you, and a mobile experience that replicates the desktop one perfectly.

It’s not as cheap as Hootsuite, but the features are more than worth the investment (besides, Hootsuite gets pretty expensive if you want the kind of reporting that comes with your Sprout Social license).

Buffer

It’s just perfection. Everyone is busy, and not always around when it comes to growing awareness of you or your brand.

Buffer makes it simple to schedule content delivery, and at a time when it makes sense for your audience. Their analytics are useful for seeing what type of content works, and they just make the web a better place.

MailPoet

This is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to create email lists, forms, newsletters, and more.

Their features are excellent, they complement the most popular email services, support is awesome, and the metrics really help you understand how effective (or not) your email list is. Excellent, and the one I recommend every time.

Jacob Cass

Jacob Cass is a strategic, multi-disciplinary designer & Art Director who has worked with clients such as Disney, Jerry Seinfeld, Red Bull, Nike & VitaminWater.

Although his skill set is vast, his major skill sets lie in the world of art direction, visual design, brand identity design, brand strategy, UX, UI design, interactive design (mobile + web design) and print design.

Buffer

It allows me to find great content to share, across multiple platforms, as well as give key insights to each post.

Follow Up Then

Allows me to follow up with people I email.

DropBox

Allows me to easily share files while having peace of mind.

Michael Q. Todd

Michael is the author of The 7 Pillars Book – daily updating guide to your building your online presence. He connects and promotes great people who will make a bigger difference by collaborating than individually.

He continually studies social media tools and strategies especially Twitter and Google+ to better facilitate that. Michaels goals are eradication of poverty and a sustainable economy by 2015. Prevention of the death of as many species as possible

3 Tools Michael Can’t Live Without

As a content producer these tools/communities help me the most not only for getting content shared but also for building relationships by the networking that happens inside them.

As with all things these networks benefit you the most when you go for the premium version.The features built into these tools make it very easy to go in quickly and find great content to share and also add your content to get shared.

My 3 favorite marketing tools are:

Scoop.it

Empire Avenue

Triberr

Lewis Howes

Lewis Howes is a bestselling author, entrepreneur who has built several multi-million dollar online businesses, and former professional Arena League football player. He hosts The School of Greatness, a talk show distributed as a podcast.

Howes co-wrote the 2009 book, LinkedWorking: Generating Success on the World’s Largest Professional Networking Website. The book is a guide to using the business oriented social networking site LinkedIn.

3 Tools Lewis Can’t Live Without

GoToWebinar

Aweber

It allows me to promote my webinars via email marketing.

LewisHowes (WordPress)

My WordPress blog allows me to post useful content to generate more leads for my business

Maria Elena Duron

Maria Elena specializes in creating community, connection and commerce working with high performing entrepreneurs, executives and businesses on how to manage their personal brand, the conglomeration of personal brands in their company and their business brand.

3 Tools Maria Can’t Live Without

Twitter

As founder and moderator of #brandchat, Twitter has been the most useful and effective community building, connection and relationship building tool. It’s also a great tool to keep up-to-speed with what’s important in my industry and to our connections.

Constant Contact

A whole fleet of marketing tools (campaigns, newsletter, event marketing, email marketing, social campaigns, autoresponders and easy social sharing tools) that help the small business owner build their list. The quality of your list determines the quality of your business.

LeadPages
Provides the instant “lead page” creation to be able to quickly segment your list building. Again, your list is key to the success of your business.

Brian Honigman

Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, freelance writer and professional speaker. He works with both startups and brands improving their content marketing, social media and search engine optimization efforts.

He’s spoken at NYU, UNICEF, Huffington Post Live, the American Advertising Federation and for other organizations and conferences.

He is also a contributing writer to Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, Forbes, the Next Web, Wall Street Journal and others.

3 Tools Brian Can’t Live Without

Buffer

Saves me time every day and allows me to quickly schedule social content for the weeks ahead while keeping in mind the unique nuances of each social channel I’m active on.

MailChimp

Allows me to quickly create a weekly newsletter that’s beautiful, simple and engaging. It’s a free way to build a healthy list of subscribers.

Contactually

Helps act as a mini-CRM to help me better manage the contacts in my greater network. Love using it on the go on mobile to help me better manage relationships with others when I have extra time.

Neal Rodriguez

Neal helps mid-sized businesses and enterprise level organizations meet and exceed the objectives for which their websites were developed.

He has a 10 year track record in generating exposure and revenue for companies from the search engines – SEO – major social media platforms, and everywhere else on the web.

4 Tools Neal Can’t Live Without

I’m not the typical marketer who solely uses tools developed specifically for marketing activities. As a content marketer, I help clients and myself develop content that has the best chance of securing viral exposure.

I use several tools for this, such as Google Trends, the Reddit Top section, and just recently I’ve found BuzzSumo to be key in finding content that has enjoyed viral or at least the most exposure among a given topic. From there I aim to tie it to a brand’s vertical and develop content ideas. I could also get ideas from random things that are occurring in my life at the moment.

Google Trends

BuzzSumo

Majestic

I also use some tools that are developed for marketing purposes. Such as Google’s Keyword Planner and Majestic. These are mostly SEO plays; they tell me how popular keywords are and the quantity and quality of links that are pointing to a website I may want get a link from.

Keyword Planner

Jeremy Goldman

Jeremy Goldman has been working with companies looking to take their operations online and inject “social” into their processes for over a decade.

Under Jeremy’s leadership, Kiehl’s won the 2009 WebAward for Outstanding Achievement in Web Development, achieved a Top 25 ranking in the L2 Digital IQ Index in the Beauty & Skincare category, and received a Top 50 Facebook IQ ranking amongst all luxury brands.

3 Tools Jeremy Can’t Live Without

Buffer

Such an easy to use interface that lets me send content to multiple social platforms at once. Plus, as someone always on the go, the ability to easily schedule content for the perfect time is a must.

Evernote
As a digital marketer, this is an no-brainer. Evernote lets me quickly and easily store random ideas for blog posts that pop into my head, wherever I am. If I find an article that inspires me, I can email that to Evernote, or use their easy Chrome extension to clip content. It’s the second brain I never knew I needed.

SocialBro

The most underrated platform out there for managing and parsing your Twitter following, SocialBro lets me surface interesting and unexpected relationships, create dynamic Twitter lists, target my content at the perfect time, and so much more.

Francisco Rosales

Francisco works with small and mid-size business on creating and implementing successful online strategies through social media, advertising, content and email marketing.

He is also author of the online courses “Likeable to Profitable” and “Email Marketing [not so] 101.” As well as he offers training and consulting and blogs at SocialMouths, an award-winning social media blog.

3 Tools Francisco Can’t Live Without

Mailchimp

Basically because I use email marketing as a lead generation tool, and there is nothing online that can compare to the effectiveness of email to drive conversions. Mailchimp simply because I consider it the best ESP in the market by far.

Facebook Power Editor

Just because Facebook practically killed organic reach doesn’t mean the platform no longer works to generate leads and drive business. The opportunities Power Editor offers to tap into different kinds of audiences of highly targeted prospects is not available anywhere else.

Insightly

I use Insightly as my CRM. Many of us focus too much on marketing and then drop the ball on sales. This gives me visibility of the opportunities and the relationships being established at the business level.

We hope these recommended tools by some of the influential bloggers help you better craft your content as well. Writing great articles is just half the battle. You need the most efficient tools as well to aid in your promotion and getting your content discovered by more and more people.

Watch out for the next Recommended Marketing Tools – Part 2 or share your own favorite marketing tools in the comments!

Most Recommended Marketing Tools By Pro Bloggers [Part 1]