Top 5 Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business These five digital marketing instruments will help bring your strategy up to speed.
By Dasha Kroshkina Edited by Russell Sicklick
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It's estimated that more than half of the global population has online access. That's why, whether it's a small business or a big corporation, any company should seriously think about its digital marketing strategy. From Search Engine Optimization to website analytics, marketing tools are the key to having a constant flow of leads and making significant profit for your business.
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Following is a list of top five digital marketing tools available right now:
1. Automated webinar
An automated webinar is a pre-recorded webinar that simulates live activities so that participants think they are a part of a live event but you only host it once. It's a great way to scale your business. Webinars can also serve as part of the sales funnel and be used for explaining any complicated facets of your business. It may be a complex product or an unusual concept or the lack of sufficient demand on the market. Thanks to using webinars, companies can automate the sales process, saving resources and time. Hence, if you want to cultivate your potential customers, a webinar can be an attractive method for moving clients from one rung of the funnel to another. But remember that for webinars to be successful, you need a very high demand from the potential audience because you want the users to pass preliminary registration, to come to the webinar and to watch it in full. At each of these steps, the number of listeners may be reduced by as much as 70 percent. That's why webinars are more suitable for B2C companies. For instance, according to 99firms statistics, a single webinar can generate approximately 500 to 1,000 leads. This is why more than half of all companies use automated webinars as promotional tools and implement them in their marketing strategy.
Several companies have started using webinars as their main source of leads. For instance, StudyFree created daily webinars, explaining the advantages and opportunities associated with studying abroad, as well as the product itself. These simulate live webinars, with a presentation, a Livestream, and even live comments. With this strategy, StudyFree has more than 150 webinars running every day in different time zones, countries and languages.
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2. Chatbots
A chatbot is not a novel tool. It's an instrument based on Artificial Intelligence software that interacts with people in a natural way through text chat windows. However, companies often invest heavily in this instrument to make their communications with a potential client more personalized and efficient.
For instance, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have all implemented the chatbots from such aspiring startups as Chatfuel and ManyChat. Insider predicts that the global annual cost savings derived from chatbot automation across the insurance industry alone will surge from $500 million in 2020 to $5.8 billion in 2025.
According to Accenture's research, the top five trends on the chatbot market today are the development of artificial intelligence, the growing use of instant messengers, cost reduction and ease of development, interaction between bots, and bot-enabled payments. Chatbots provide multiple benefits to the company. By offering 24-hour customer service and tirelessly responding to customer queries, chatbots can support and scale the organization's customer relations and may even replace their sales managers because of enhancing personalization with Artificial Intelligence. Basically, chatbots reduce processing time and improve employee productivity. In general, the use of this technology can improve the company's business performance by 5% to 25%.
3. Voice Search
Voice Search will bring your SEO strategy to a new level. The average number of voice searches per month is one billion. Voice search utilizes innovations like Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Amazon's Alexa. More and more users are now talking into their search bars instead of typing, whether they use voice-activated AI assistants on their desktops or smartphones. The popularization of voice search changes the keywords and phrases people use to find what they are looking for online. This tool will not only track keyword distribution but can also assess your search visibility and report on fluctuations in the number of keywords used to sell your advertising.
4. User-generated content
UGC is any type of content (texts, videos, photos, etc.) created not by the brand itself but by its users, customers, and clients. Brands then share UGC on their social media channels. Users can also create close-knit and engaged communities where they share such content with each other.
UGC has many benefits and directly influences organic growth. The mechanics of social media companies are built on the principles of UGC or user-to-user communication. What's more, it can be a bigger trust generator than in-house content. Experts suggest that user-generated content will become the new word-of-mouth.
5. Virality
Virality is the digital product's ability to self-propagate. Clubhouse is the latest example of this. Marketing teams usually have to think about ways to stimulate users to share content or an entire product with each other. But even if a product is good on its own, there is no guarantee that it will be swept up by a wave of hype without the use of some viral know-how.
There are different tools to make a product go viral, such as the "invitation-only" system with limited access to products that creates the fear of missing out. In a matter of just six days at the end of January, 1.1 million people joined Clubhouse, although access is only provided by invites. Today, people not only ask their friends for invites, but can find them for sale on eBay and Alibaba. The invite system creates an additional incentive for users to share information about a service with their friends.
In the case of Clubhouse, these tools worked in conjunction with the announcements made by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who used Twitter to advertise their decision to join the nascent service - and with that, the whole world learned about Clubhouse.
Digital marketing tools are a significant means to enhance each process within your organization, promote your services, generate qualified leads, and, what's more, increase sales.
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