Top Marketing Tools for 2020
Marketing trends are constantly changing. Companies that keep up with the latest technologies and developments have an edge over their competitors. The best marketing tools for 2020 allow brands to maintain their marketing best practices in customer service and relationship management, while effectively managing communications and automating tasks. Here are the top marketing tools you should look into for moving your business forward this year.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A robust customer relationship management system is the baseline for making the most of your marketing. Gather customer data including contact information, purchase history, buying behavior and communications preferences in one spot. A CRM allows everyone on your team to access the same set of information, allowing for seamless customer interactions and internal collaboration. Among the benefits of crm are easy integration with your email platform, meaning you can personalize and target email marketing messages to reach the right people at the right time.
Yoast SEO: If your business website runs on WordPress, it should have this free plug-in installed. Yoast has tools to improve your writing, with scores for readability that encourage you to write concise, easy-to-understand content. The tool also optimizes content for search engines, allowing you to set keywords and giving a rating for how well your content might perform in search. Yoast makes entering metadata easy, meaning you’ll be able to set social media preview text and images directly from your WordPress content page - no more poorly cropped images on your Facebook link previews.
Google Analytics: This free tool is the gold standard in measuring and understanding your website analytics. Insert a bit of code to get Google Analytics set up on every page of your site, then uncover mountains of data about web traffic, acquisition channels and customer behavior. Google offers free online training to help you master the system and dig deep into the insights it provides. More advanced users can set up tracking for e-commerce transactions, allowing you to see direct sales related to email marketing or paid social media campaigns.
Slack: At its core, Slack is a chat service that’s most frequently used for internal teams. The system’s channel setup allows departments to organize their conversations by topic or group, keeping communication in a central location and out of email inboxes. It’s popular with digital marketing experts, with plenty of public channels you can join to learn more about the latest trends, best practices and new marketing services. The tool also has the ability to do a lot more than log internal communication. Slack integrates with a number of other platforms, from project management to CRM to email marketing. Use it as much or as little as you’d like to track projects, answer quick questions and organize updates.
Later: If you’ve used social media scheduling services, you know planning out posts for Instagram and other visual platforms can be a challenge. Later has partnered with Instagram to work well with its API, allowing for smooth scheduling and auto-publishing to an Instagram business profile. The platform’s visual calendar makes it easy to drag and drop posts to different days and times. The visual preview allows you to see how posts will line up on your profile, making multi-post planning a breeze. For businesses hoping to drive traffic from Instagram to your website, the Linkin.bio features allows you to update and log links in your Instagram bio in one spot - customers click the link in your bio and see all previous links.
Google AdWords: Show your products to potential customers while they’re searching for them with Google AdWords. While this is not a new service, the platform is constantly evolving with new tools and targeting options. Place text-based, pay-per-click search ads with a target audience determined by location, age or other factors. The system makes keyword suggestions based on performance, and offers ways to optimize your ads to lower cost and increase results.
Digital marketing tools can help you stay organized, save time and achieve your marketing goals.
