And we run down 5 tools small businesses need to succeed in 2019-2020

Post by Marilia Dimitriou

The key to business success in the modern age is to find the means to grow in a sustainable way, supported by a smart, adaptive marketing strategy. When it comes to small to medium enterprises, taking advantage of the right marketing technology can offer cost-effective solutions and help a company grow beyond expectations.

However, compared to large enterprises that have the budget to acquire lots of tools, SMEs need to find the best platforms that will provide the best ROI without costing a lot of money. In short, SMEs need to choose the tools that will help them achieve their marketing goals right from the start.

How marketing tech helps SMEs

Since the update of the infamous MarTech 5000, today’s landscape includes about 7,040 solutions that can simplify the tedious tasks of marketing, advertising and sales.

That’s a lot of tools. And many do offer great alternatives that can cover an SME’s marketing needs without the need to spend a fortune.

Platforms that simplify marketing automation, content marketing and CRM (customer relationship management) can benefit SMEs greatly compared to businesses that choose not to invest in marketing tech tools.

So, what are these benefits?

Save time

One of the greatest advantages of using marketing tech is saving time. For example, when it comes to email marketing, sending emails manually can be an extremely time-consuming activity that can hold you back from focusing on other pressing matters.

Using a marketing automation platform, for instance, will automate the process by providing you with time-or-action triggered workflows that will do more with less effort.

Since the number of emails sent and received has grown rapidly, reaching your prospects, leads or customers with automated campaigns will offer them instant solutions to their pain points.

Create better content

Creating the best content that will increase your engagement and conversion rate is always something that SMEs should aim for when they plan their marketing strategies. A great content platform will provide you with various tools to create and deliver smarter, more relevant and consistent content to your audience.

Creating and managing your content is the first step to boost your content marketing strategy and collect valuable customer data.

Increase product visibility

Modern marketing is all about using digital means to promote your products to a large number of people.

With the rise of active Internet users, product marketing has started focusing more on technology rather than conventional marketing methods to increase the ARR   and reduce the MRR churn   of a business.

By taking advantage of social media, marketers can use sponsored ads on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to maximize their brand awareness and attract new customers.

Efficient social media management

With 3.48 billion social media users worldwide, the most successful tactic to reach new customers is to have numerous social media accounts to engage with them. However, getting yourself to manage these accounts at once can be a fulltime job since creating the best posts or answering comments or direct messages can take hours or even days.

Using marketing tech to manage and monitor all of your social media accounts at once can help SMEs plan their posts and campaigns better.

Connect tasks

One of the solutions that marketers should use no matter what is the ability to integrate their apps and simplify their tasks. In this case, integration marketing technology allows marketers to connect their apps without requiring any technical expertise.

Integrations will allow SMEs to collect valuable data across different apps and create reports that will help them set the best KPIs   to ensure that their teams will make smart decisions that will benefit the companies long term.

Drive more sales and build customer relationships

SMEs that use platforms to organize their customer data will benefit greatly since it will help them determine which types of content have the highest engagement and conversion rate.

By learning more about their customers, SMEs can improve customer experience by sending exceptional targeted content and offers that will keep their audience interested and drive them further down the marketing funnel.

5 examples of MarTech tools that SMEs need

1. Moosend

When it comes to email marketing automation, the market has a number of MailChimp alternatives that can provide you with the right tools to get your email marketing automation strategy going.

Moosend, for example, is a great alternative to help you plan your email campaigns and automate them. With a free forever plan, you get to send an unlimited number of campaigns without losing any features.

Also, you can take advantage of Moosend’s pre-built newsletter templates and adjust them to your brand through a fast and easy drag-and-drop email building system that will save you time and effort.

When you’ll have your email ready, you’ll have to set up the automated workflow that will distribute your awesome email to your subscribers.

Since email is one of the best marketing channels any business should use to promote their brand image and products, investing in a great platform will help your business succeed faster.

2. Google Adwords

Google Adwords is a very popular and successful advertising option that allows you to promote your products using one of the biggest search engines worldwide.

While Facebook might be a worthy opponent, the problem-solving nature of search engines gives your customers more reasons to click on your ads and find a solution to their problem.

Taking advantage of AdWords’ bidding system can give SMEs full control over the money they spend on it and have the best ROI while avoiding unnecessary costs.

3. Buffer

Managing and posting on several social media platforms can be a lot of hard work, so what marketers need is a social media management platform to help them schedule their posts and automate the process of social media posting.

To do so, SMEs can take advantage of Buffer’s easy to use social media management platform to connect their social media accounts and schedule their next big post without switching between several social media accounts.

Adding Buffer to your MarTech Stack will help you manage and monitor your social media content and campaigns and through social media monitoring tools.

Compared to other social media marketing platforms, Buffer is a good value-for-money option to schedule posts that will engage all of your customers and lead them toward conversion.

4. WordPress

Since its launch back in 2003, WordPress has managed to establish itself as the most popular content management system, powering 34% of all websites, including Mercedes-Benz’s site.

WordPress’s success as the best CMS lies in creating personal blogs or multifunctional websites without having any technical skill whatsoever.

The Sartorialist has a great example of a simple scroll down blog that catches the eye.

WordPress also offers a variety of themes like Divi to display your content in style and various plug-ins such as Yoast SEO, a free plug-in that allows you to create content that is optimized for search engines.

5. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a great ecommerce platform that can easily be compared to Magento, one of the largest ecommerce platforms with more than 300,000 business clients. This SaaS platform offers affordable solutions to SMEs providing unlimited storage and bandwidth while it can be integrated with Facebook and the Google store.

Using a well-priced ecommerce platform can help SMEs not only promote their products but save significant amounts of money coming from ownership costs. Compared to other famous platforms, BigCommerce has the most built-in features that provide new businesses with cheaper solutions without compromising performance and quality.

Takeaway

To thrive, SMEs need to take advantage of the solutions that will give them more with less. Investing in cost-effective marketing tech tools is an excellent way to see your business grow and expand beyond measure.

The vast number of MarTech solutions can help businesses save invaluable time, increase brand visibility and create the best content that will convert leads into loyal customers.

So next time you search the market for the best tools, don’t forget to choose these that will have the greatest ROI without losing performance or quality points.

The post How marketing technology benefits SMEs appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Target audience: Businesses, brands, digital marketers, advertising agencies, SEO specialists, entrepreneurs, Web publishers, email specialists

Post by Megan Totka
ChamberofCommerce.com

Building a solid following on a social media platform promotes brand awareness — but how can businesses convert those casual fans into paying buyers? The most effective way is through email marketing. It’s such a powerful marketing tool that marketers earn on average $38 for every $1 spent on email marketing, making conversion of social media followers to email list participants so important to a company’s bottom line.

Social media and email marketing are different animals, of course. Liking a Facebook page does not always equal an opt-in for email notifications — but with some smart integration and timing, you can bask in the benefits of both.

Take a look at some ways to encourage your social followers to support you through email, too.

Social syncing

Cultivating an engaged social media following certainly increases brand awareness — but we know that email marketing is a much stronger asset when it comes to people actually clicking and buying in the moment. So how do you get those followers to also opt in to your email marketing list?

Well, you can start by asking. Make sure you are consistently posting your opt-in details. You can also create a call-to-action on social platforms like Facebook that prompt your followers to opt-in to email marketing.

Another way to grab the attention of social followers and prompt them to opt in to your email list is through offering premium content on your social channels. When they click your link for a free premium ebook, for example, they will also be asked to opt in. You can also host contests or giveaways that require an email signup to enter. There are a lot of ways to prompt your social fans to sign up for your email list too — just make sure it’s part of your schedule social strategy.

The email sales funnel

Once your social fans are also email subscribers, your opportunity to sell rises. Simply sending out a basic newsletter every week, however, won’t up your revenue. You need to make sure the email marketing platform you use offers the support you need to actually land sales.

Here are some of the most important features in email marketing you should seek:

Personalization

When emails are personalized, they have 2.5 times higher click-through rates and generate 6 times more sales than non-customized versions of the same emails. You want people to know that you care about their customer journey. With personalization you can create profiles of your customers using existing data and send emails based on behavior, age, gender, location and more.

For example, an online retail store sends out monthly offers to their email list for 10 percent off certain products. Before personalization, this retailer would have sent a blanket email offer with an image of a women wearing the product to everyone regardless of age or gender. Using personalization, the same retailer now sends different emails to segments of their list dynamically based on their age and gender dramatically increasing sales.

How they stack up

Campaign Monitor: With a one-time setup, relevant and personalized customer journeys keep audiences engaged over time. Campaign Monitor uses data from more than 260 integrations with business systems you already use to build hyper-personalized emails. You can use their drag and drop interface to easily create custom customer journeys to continually move people through your sales funnel no matter how they engage with your emails. Campaign Monitor also creates customer profiles for everyone in your list with information gathered from applications you’ve connected like Salesforce and Shopify. This allows for easy segmentation and highly effective personalized email campaigns.

MailChimp: The “merge fields” concept of dynamic email marketing was popularized by MailChimp. MailChimp offers basic personalization based on data you provide and it integrates with other apps, like Facebook. Marketers can offer suggested items to individual customers in email and remind customers about abandoned carts (both are paid upgrades). MailChimp doesn’t offer easy-to-use customer journey interfaces and what is offered is pretty basic.

GetResponse: This email marketing platform does offer automation workflows where users can create personalized email campaigns based on data. The customer journey workflow interface is a bit clunky and somewhat difficult to use. Another downside is GetResponse integrates with only 100 other business systems, so you need to make sure they integrate with systems you currently use before considering it.

Dynamic content

Email marketing should never take a one-size-fits-all approach. You need different messaging for different customers with different needs. Email marketing platforms should let you accomplish that easily, without much adjustment and with the same branding and design.

How they stack up

Campaign Monitor: You can slice and dice your audience parameters easily by demographics (male/female, age, etc.) and expose different messages to unique audiences within the same email campaign. Campaign Monitor’s drag and drop email template builder makes creating different emails for each segment and customer persona easy.

MailChimp: MailChimp does allow for list segmentation and you can send differenent emails to each segment. The downside is that most of this is done manually. The platform doesn’t create customer profiles automatically with the data entered or gathered from integrations. This is a major downside of MailChimp for marketers looking to easily create dynamic campaigns that wow customers.

GetResponse: The platform offers good data segmentation capabilities and the ability to dynamically send personalized emails based on customer profiles.

Customer service

While the best email marketing is automated, you really do need a human side to help you build the best campaigns. This includes technical support but also the ability to pick up the phone (or send an email) and receive a timely and helpful response.

How they stack up

Campaign Monitor: Campaign Monitor makes good on its claim to employ a “team of humans committed to growth.” This company is seems dedicated to great customer support. They offer 24/7 customer support as well as a dedicated customer success team to help customers generate the highest ROI using industry best practices.

MailChimp: The marketing platform relies on online technology to assist customers – mainly through live chat and technical support question/answer forums.

GetResponse: The platform offers live chat, email and phone support. If you want more one on one customer success coaching you have to purchase their enterprise services.

Combining social and email marketing efforts can really make a positive impact on your bottom line. Start with a smart social-to-email strategy, and follow up with the right email marketing platform.

The post Top email platforms to convert social media followers into customers appeared first on Inside Social Media.