Marketers have more tools at their disposal now than ever before, with a multitude of media tools, CRMs, analytics programs, various software suites for email and lead management it can get a bit confusing as to what a small to medium sized business really needs to execute their marketing plan effectively. This blog takes a look at some of our favorite tools to run marketing campaigns and brand management with.
Having a way to effectively share files, which in the media industry can be pretty large. Many of the videos we make are well over 1 gb which requires a quick and easy way to distribute content between teammates. Many times, our Knoxville video production services are used by companies outside the area, which generally means having a film team remote. Robust file sharing options are a necessity anytime a production team is working across the country!
A few great tools for file sharing are Dropbox, mega and google drive. All work great, and have their special features, but any will get the job done effectively.
Email marketing is one of the most crucial areas for ongoing marketing and sales reach, your company should be collecting email addresses and distributing content such as interesting articles, news letters, sales, special events etc so stay in constant contact with your audience.
Here are a few great email marketing tools: Mailchimp, Hubspot, constant contact and zoho.
All will let you customize campaigns to an audience, a/b test marketing materials and utilize analytics to better target customers and improve content over time.
Website and Web hosting are the tools you need to build and operate a website. WordPress will likely be the most efficient way to create a website, many designers work exclusively on wordpress, and the and the sheer number of features, plugins, support and content make wordpress the go to choice for many companies. Your website must be hosted in order for others to see it. There are tons of web hosting companies, but we’ve had generally good experiences with hostgator, bluehost, dreamhost and liquid web.
Chat and Support for your customers and potential customer is key to maintaining loyal customers and promoting repeat business. In general repeat business is much easier to obtain than new customers, so keeping your customer as loyal as possible is a great way to maintain sales. Zendesk and live chat are some of the most popular tools that provide your customer service agents with an easy way to chat with customers on your website.
Web traffic statistics and advertisers are starting to notice big changes when it comes to video content and it’s importance. Some are expecting that around 80% of all web traffic in the new few years will be video traffic. It’s importance for even small business and brands cannot be overstated. Marketing web pages and email marketing that contain videos are around 40% more likely to be clicked on. This mean that your ppc spend, marketing email campaigns and web engagement can potentially rise by 40% just from having some video content included. This is a major deal for any brand. While generally most brands prefer to outsource the creation of videos, there are some important video tools that marketers should be aware of. In terms of video hosting, vimeo and youtube are by far the most common. Even if you prefer the look of embedded vimeo videos, youtube should also be utilized due to the number of searches carried out of the platform. There is a good chance your content will be found and viewed on youtube by someone searching it. Building subscribers is also a great way to build the number of viewers that your content has.
Analytics are really important to better understand who is searching for you, how they are finding you and where they are viewing you from. This will help you more effectively target new customers and improve your search engine ranking. For this it is hard to beat google analytics. Google provides a great set of tools to help you understand many questions about your content and also has robust integrations with other tools such as many email marketing and wordpress plugins.
Another component of analytics are SEO statistics and rankings. Generating as much inbound search traffic as you can is a great way to build sales over time. Using SEO tools like google keyword planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs or Moz allow you to better understand your SEO ranking, how to improve, what keywords you are ranking for and what your audience is searching for. Properly researching keywords to rank for then incorporated those keywords into blogs and website pages helps you to be seen on more google searches that are relevant to your business.
Small businesses in particular generally don’t have the manpower or resources needed to effectively market using every channel available without wisely using tools to increase productivity and make managing your brand easier and less time consuming.
We’ve worked with small and large businesses in every industry from automotive to healthcare across the country. If you aren’t sure what your marketing plan is or need help creating content, we can help!
Keeping your team on the same wavelength can also be a challenge especially currently as so many firms have many employees working from home. Most marketing activities should be do able from home with a remote team, but collaborating on projects will likely be a necessity.
Collaboration tools like google teams, google docs/sheets, zoom and Trello can be a great way to keep the team up to date on projects and let team member make contributions while working from home. They allow multiple people to edit one document or spreadsheet with annotations and changes. We’ve used all of these extensively as we manage projects across the country from our Knoxville location. While based in Knoxville, we’ve worked with clients in Europe and many states across the US.
While not exactly a tool, social media platforms such as instagram, facebook, twitter and linkedin are all great channels for your brand. Depending on what you offer, whether you are B2B or B2C, all or several of these channels can be a great way to build a following for your brand as well as communicate and share special offers and events for your brand. Some B2B companies can struggle to utilize social media, since typically they are targeting very specific decision makers within a company. For these B2B companies, Linkedin and even targeted facebook ads can be a method to effectively target the desired audience.
Volan Media’s marketing services range from Knoxville video production, branding, app design, startup marketing services, healthcare marketing, automotive marketing services, virtual reality video production, animation both 2d and 3d and web design. We’ve work with everyone from Knoxville small businesses to bay area tech startups.
