The age of marketing and customer acquisition continues to mature as barriers to access to consumers are eliminated. Through the use of premium tools, the average business person and individual with the goal of increasing client base and reaching an international market is empowered.
Marketing and advertising no longer require 100 Million dollar investments but a sound mind, nimbleness and a relentless attitude. This new nimble marketing approach, often referred as growth hacking, essentially is the use of knowledge of product and distribution to find ingenious, technology based avenues for growth that usually exceeds the boundaries of what is typically expected or advised. It’s cheaper and easier to grow and reach mass markets.
One major element you need to be focusing on whether you’re a startup or well-seasoned company is growth, versus spreading your attention over a multitude of targets and metrics.
One of the most prominent examples of successful growth hacker type marketing is Dropbox. Dropbox is today worth approximately $10 Billion (Source: Bloomberg), after just 5 years and yet has spent very little on marketing. Their successful campaigns were driven by incentivizing customer referrals with more storage space via email and social media integration and ensuring a super easy signup process. The Dropbox team, and many others like Facebook, Twitter, Quora and Airbnb, have proven that you can start from zero and make powerful progress overtime.
Although their stories may be very different from your current business model, the key takeaway is that you do not need a huge budget to generate massive sales. Thankfully, identifying and using the right tools and platforms to supplement your marketing activities will cut your lead time significantly.
Merging Tools with the Sales Process to Achieve Growth
A common mistake is the belief that tools will automatically bring results without effort. In fact, tools multiply effort and vice versa. Never forget that effort is the one element in the equation that is mandatory.
In the same breath, it is not necessary to acquire tools that are developed to every imaginable task. It is better be the absolute best and be known for one special feature or characteristic than try to capture an audience for all. Your sales and process should identify a few key qualities and execute better that everyone else. That’s the goal.
In addition, your ability to use tools to personalize the experience for customers is a solid formula for achieving growth and successful marketing campaigns. Segmentation, personalization, recommendations, and the inclusion of custom database fields in email copy drive 360% higher conversion than a generic email message with a personalized salutation. This is exactly the type of communication and success that marketing automation helps make repeatable. (Gleanster, 5 Key Milestones for the First 30 Days with Marketing Automation, Nov 2012)
Here are 8 tools that are geared towards multiplying your marketing efforts while leveraging the power of social media’s virality to grow traffic, better analyze opportunities and capture sales opportunities.
Cyfe
Cyfe provides you with an “all-seeing eye” view of the entire gamut of your business from social media performance, SEO, IT, inventory management, sales, essentially everything you need to track within your business. Imagine a central, customizable dashboard that allows you to pull key data from all your frequently used apps and services into one location. That’s the power of Cyfe. Forget about logging into multiple accounts and screens, Cyfe gets it done in one.
The app integrates with tons of popular marketing tools already used by the masses and pulls data from each one to create your personalized dashboard. As you start using more tools to manage various aspects of your business, data overload is imminent and Cyfe will help you to rid the clutter and focus on data and stats that matter.
Pay With a Tweet
Pay With A Tweet allows you to grant users access to your content or services once they’ve tweeted or posted about it. This is an excellent way to naturally spread the word about your content or even the early stages of a product launch to achieve virality and reach without a huge budget.
The concept of paying via a social share across major platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ is powerful and coupled with analytics to help measure traffic, clicks, sales and demographic data it’s perfect for your next marketing campaign. Social sharing automation provides real results.
The impact of social reach on your business cannot be ignored:
– 40% of Social Media users have purchased an item online or in-store after sharing it or marking it as a favorite on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest (Econsultancy)
– 71% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals.
– After marking an item as Favorite: 50% of the social media purchases take place within a week & 80% of the social media purchases take place within 3 weeks.
– 53% of Twitter users tweet product or company recommendations
– 50% of hardware based tech companies acquire customers from Twitter
(Statistics Sources: Forbes, Marketing Profs & Exact Target)
Social activity impacts your bottom-line.
Vend
Vend is a retail web-based point-of-sale and inventory management software with a strong and modern feature set. Vend is easy to set up, operates on any device with a web browser (online or off), and works with hardware you already own. What’s awesome about Vend is its nimbleness and intuitive API integration with many other popular apps and services like PayPal, Shopify, Authorize.net and Timely to name a few. Functionality that allows users to discover product reviews online, use sales history to predict demand and manage inventory.
Vend also takes the monotony out of inventory and sales management as it is packed with additional features that cater to client relationship management and tracking client loyalty. This adds value to the whole sales process by providing you with data and opportunities to communicate with your customers within the perfect context. Even more important than simply having awesome content, is delivering it within the context of the customer’s needs, expectations and environment.
In fact: 68% of customers leave or ignore your offer if they perceive you to be indifferent to their needs and interests (Springer – The future of Customer Contact). While companies that prioritize the customer experience typically enjoy 60% higher profits than their competitors (Source).
Vend makes it easier for retail businesses to server customers. Its numerous integrations and powerful features make it a must use for any retailer ready to kick sales up a notch and modernize.
Hello Bar
The Hello Bar is a powerful yet simple free tool proven to boost website conversion rates via a call-to-action button within a horizontal bar at the top of your site. You create your bar and CTA around one of three goals: drive traffic, collect emails or point visitors to your social media channels.
The tool and service also tracks the number of clicks each header bar receives and allows color customization, custom page displays.
This free and easy addition to your website equates to a greater chance of visitors accessing and interacting with your content and product offering. In fact, a basic call to action implementation puts you in a better position than most businesses online as only about 30% use clear calls to action. In addition, 49% of sites fail to comply with basic usability principles, and 50% of online sales are lost because visitors can’t find content. (Source: Forrester)
Making your call to action relevant for your audience’s needs can have a huge impact on your business. Here are some interesting things to know when setting your CTA:
– Conversions can be increased by up to 90% by adding value to CTA copy
– Button colors greatly affect conversion. Green and orange hues tend to perform very well.
– 80% of shoppers place color as a primary reason for why they buy products (Kissmetrics)
– CTA’s placed above the web page fold have a higher conversion rate
– In some cases, larger CTA’s work better
(Statistics Source: Content Verve)
A simple call to action is a huge step forward for growing business.
Moz
If you’re focused on SEO and inbound marketing, then Moz is worth a try. It is a suite of powerful marketing tools that enable you to rank your online properties and social reach, analyze website errors, assess conversion strategies, discover SEO opportunities, conduct in-depth keyword research and practically everything you need for supporting any campaign you’re running online.
The diagram below from research done by Google, indicates that organic search traffic is typically among the last interaction in the purchasing process. It is vital that your business is prepared sufficiently to take advantage of search traffic.
Search, in essence, contributes:
– Conservatively, some $540 billion directly to global GDP
– Knowledge workers experienced search-related productivity gains of up to $117 billion, flowing from faster and more accurate access to information.
– Advertisers achieve a 7:1 ROI on investments in search-based marketing, and large businesses overall a 17:1 ROI on investments in search technology deployment across the enterprise
(Image & Statistics Source – Google Insights)
The potential impact of search on your business is huge. With the use of a toolset offered by Moz, you’ll be in a position to determine how you can leverage this powerful medium.
CrazyEgg
Knowledge is power and CrazyEgg shows you how visitors are interacting with your site by tracking where they clicked, where they stopped reading or watching your content, how specific segments of visitors behave differently and more.
One of the pioneers in the website A/B testing industry, they simplify the process. Placing marketers in a position of power to determine which messages and campaigns work based on real signals and results. A/B testing ties closely with the execution and ultimate success of your CTA’s and business growth.
GetResponse
If you have an online business, you need to do email marketing. An active newsletter that provides industry news with actionable tips will keep your customers engaged and build loyalty over time whilst boosting revenue and GetResponse in right on the money. A good mixture of promotional and informational emails will keep your customers coming back for more.
Another thing often overlook is email list segmentation. Segmenting an email list means breaking it down to different demographic groups, such as nationality, customer purchase history, age, gender and so on. Email segmentation of your newsletter will allow you to analyze your customer and understand what makes them tick. As a result, your subscribers will feel more unique as your emails become more personalized, and as a byproduct so will your sales.
Google Alerts
Reviewing the latest developments in your industry is vital and you need to know both yourself and your competition’s progress and position. There still isn’t a better service than Google Alerts for reviewing mentions of your brand, competitors or sector names. Simply, through the use of keywords, you can stay in the known and use this data to direct future campaigns. Talk about simple, free and powerful.
These services and tools are among the best in the industry for getting the best bang for your buck and boosting productivity in sales and marketing. The sooner you develop your precise processes to achieve your KPI’s, the better your position for achieving real growth.
Read more: Digital Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business and Increase ROIs