Today’s audiences want to feel a connection with the brands they support. They want to be understood and gently enticed instead of receiving annoying, irrelevant ads. Personalization has become a buzzword in marketing for just that reason, and it’s a big part of inbound marketing.
Effective inbound marketing ensures that you’re continuing to attract customers with your content and digital experiences. And this requires that you are using all the right tools to learn about your audiences and build better relationships with them.
These six tools are the most useful for your inbound marketing strategy.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy that helps you manage your customer (you guessed it) relationships. You can track interactions and contact information all in one place. A good CRM software leverages tools like automation to streamline the data entry process and help you stay organized.
Salesforce is one of the most common CRM platforms, but other companies like HubSpot have CRM software that works great to integrate into your inbound marketing plans. Get extra help managing sales, contacts, leads, and productivity using CRM software.
CRM platforms also help you with lead tracking, which is crucial to attracting new clients and keeping tabs on people who have shown an interest in you. You can identify the biggest lead sources, determine where each lead is within your funnel, and take the right steps to seal the deal.
Email is one of the best ways to send content to your audiences. It’s safe to say that most of your customers probably have an email account these days—almost 90% of Americans over age 15 have an email account.
An email newsletter tool like MailChimp can do a lot of the background work for you. These platforms include tools for you to write, edit, and format your content in the application and add photos or images throughout. Email is an effective way to share blog posts, company news, research, and special offers with your audiences. In addition, email marketing campaigns target specific groups of customers or leads.
Because the world is digital, there is more data out there than ever before. Take advantage of tools that track and deliver analytics about your audiences across all of your platforms—website, email, social media, and more.
Google Analytics gives you insights into what your leads and customers are doing online, including clicks, page views, bounce rate, session duration, traffic source, and overall website performance. Tools like this tell you how your inbound marketing efforts are working—who is looking at your content and how.
Gathering all this data helps you optimize your content so you can keep making more personal connections, which drive your business forward.
Building a social media presence is a key component of inbound marketing. And while social platforms like Facebook and Twitter have built-in analytics tools, a solution like Hootsuite combines everything in one place. You can actually schedule posts to go out all at once on all your platforms using Hootsuite, helping you stay aligned and consistent across your channels.
Hootsuite also delivers important info about your social media content, helping you keep tabs on conversations that apply to you, store your content in the cloud, gain better customer insights, and calculate your social ROI.
There are a lot of project management tools out there these days, including Asana, Podio, Trello, Basecamp, and many more. These platforms are a must-have for your internal team. Using software like Asana, you can:
You’re able to do all the above in one system that keeps everything tight and organized. And staying organized is essential for your inbound marketing campaigns since customers depend on consistency from the brands they trust.
Any good digital marketer knows that SEO is king. Why not invest in a tool that helps you out with keywords and other SEO techniques that will boost your content to the top of the list? Semrush is an excellent tool that delivers great keyword data so you can choose the right words and phrases. Get access to data like monthly search volume and keyword performance on Google to enhance your content.
Yoast is a WordPress plugin you can add to your website, helping you create better pages and posts to attract and engage your audiences. You can set focus keywords and related keywords for each piece of content and incorporate structured data to improve how search engines analyze your site.
These tools will help you put the right investments into your inbound marketing plans, improving your online content, lead management strategies, and overall online presence.
But, sometimes, you might just need help coming up with content in the first place. The ContentBacon team can help. We know that your sales cycle won’t run without the right inbound marketing strategy. And our strategists, writers, editors, designers, and marketers help you match your copy to your brand.
To learn more about the services we offer, reach out to the ContentBacon team!