The skills of great writers of blog or social posts can be blunted if they are having to navigate around the internet taking time to post everything manually. Time is something that no small business has enough of. So the right tools in Digital Marketing are really force multipliers that make your efforts both effective and efficient.
Here’s a quick list of some capabilities that digital marketing tools have – can you think of ways to put these to work for your business? Or can you think off ways to use the time these tools would free up to improve your business in other ways?
Monitoring Tools
- Reputation Monitoring – there are a lot of places people leave ratings and reviews about your business. There’s no way to effectively or efficiently browse them to see when people leave good and/or bad reviews. Find a tool that does the looking for you and notifies you when a review is posted
- Social Monitoring – the same can be said of social media. There are a lot of social media sites. While you can browse them all looking for your customers posts, tweets, check-ins, likes, comments etc. Wouldn’t it just be easier for a tool to do the monitoring and let you know if you have something to respond to?
- Identity Monitoring – The online directories out there have an impact on your SEO. Old/Outdated information can dilute or even negate the positive impact of having the correct information. Not to mention the problem if your customers are trying to reach you with the wrong phone number. A tool that scans the majority of listing sites and scores their accuracy would be useful. It would be even better if the tool allowed you to submit changes or access the user accounts directly from a central page instead of you having to navigate out to correct the information.
Social Media Posting Tools
- Posting Scheduler – Wouldn’t it be great if you could sit down and write and schedule all of your posts across a variety of social media sites from a single place and all at one time? Put things out when you want and where you want without having to stop what you were working on.
- Interesting Content – Wouldn’t it be great to pull content from all of your favorite sources in to a single location (even your own blog…) so that you could share things and schedule these posts at the click of a button instead of browsing the whole internet for interesting tidbits and sharing directly from the content?
Reputation Tools
- Response tools – Its great to be able to be alerted to positive or negative reviews. But wouldn’t it be even better to be able to easily respond as well. Maybe either with a pre-built message or a custom response depending on what is appropriate for the situation.
- Generate reviews – There are a lot of review sites out there. Wouldn’t it be nice to put them a little more under your own control. How about a tool that makes it easy to solicit reviews from customers. Either directly from your website, or via email. Then you can share these out to social media and review sites. Or collect them for other marketing efforts.
Simple Website Tools
- Mobile Friendly Website – The search engines are starting to demote websites that aren’t mobile friendly. There are tools that allow you to inexpensively create a feature rich mobile destination and provide a mobile redirect from your existing site. A great alternative to completely overhauling your current site.
- Bolt on Tools – Do you have a site that doesn’t do everything that you wish it could. But it is to expensive to update? There are cost effective ways to create coupon pages, review pages, video galleries, and more that can be accessed from your site without having to rebuild your existing site.
Analytics Tools
- In order to make informed decisions about your online efforts and digital marketing you have to have data. But the internet creates enough data about your digital footprint to bury a business. A dashboard that pulls just the most important data from your online (and offline) marketing service providers is a great solution.
- Email Marketing
- Website Analytics
- Social Media
- Online Banner Advertising Campaigns
- Search Ad Campaigns
- Social Media Ad Campaigns
- Call Tracking
It’s All Out There
The good news is all of these tools exist its just a matter of identifying what the right mix of tools is for your business and which providers have the tools you need.
If you are interested in learning more about your options for digital marketing tools and learning how easy they can be to use, contact MS Digital Solutions. Call 260-223-9202. I’ll be happy to help you understand the tools that are out there and how they can be put to use for your business.