The digital marketing software market is valued at $60.3 billion. And it’s expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15.5% over the next decade.

With a plethora of digital marketing tools in the market, choosing the right ones can be a daunting task.

However, it’s essential to invest in the best tools to enhance your digital marketing efforts and help you stand above the inevitable competition from your peers.Competition is a significant challenge for 27.1% of digital marketers today, as revealed in a survey conducted by Influencer Marketing Hub.

So which tools should you use to get an edge? 

You don’t need to spend time researching the best tools. In this article, I’ll introduce you to five digital marketing tools that can boost your efforts and give you an edge over the competition.

5 Digital Marketing Tools to Drive Better Results

Here are five digital marketing tools that address different areas of digital marketing. 

They range from tools that enhance website speed to ones for improving landing pages and enhancing overall user experience.

1. TinyImage

TinyImage is one of the digital marketing tools you need to invest in. It’s an image compression tool that reduces the size of your PNG and JPG images online by over 75%.

You don’t have to worry about the security of sensitive image files as well. TinyImage uses a secure 256-bit encrypted SSL connection. It also deletes your images within a few hours of uploading them.

How can TinyImage improve your digital marketing ROI? 

Larger-sized images take up a lot of bandwidth, which slows down loading times for your visitors.

Research by Digital.com shows 21% of online shoppers are dissatisfied by slow-loading pages. Half will abandon their shopping cart if a page fails to load fast enough.  

This app is most helpful for agencies that provide custom app development services. It helps them to compress images in a few seconds and convert apps into fast loading for their clients.

Use TinyImage to:

• Compress images without losing image quality
• Compare the file size of the compressed images to ensure you have the optimal file size
• Save time by compressing multiple images at a go

Price

• Free

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one of the best social media marketing tools in the market. It helps you manage all aspects of your social presence.

You can analyze the performance of your posts and Reels to find the best Instagram Reels to embed on your website. Also, you can also monitor your competitors, manage conversations with your audience, and plenty more.

Sprout Social boosts your social media marketing efforts. And according to research, effective social media marketing results in higher sales for 55% of businesses.

What you can do with Sprout Social:

• Analyze the performance of your campaigns and get insights into areas of improvement
• Uncover current trends and opportunities to engage with your target audience through social listening
• Schedule and publish posts across multiple platforms

Price

• Standard: $249 per month
• Professional: $399 per month
• Advanced: $499 per month

Enterprise: Custom

3. Zendesk

Customer support plays a crucial role in creating a better customer experience for your e-commerce store and optimizing your digital marketing efforts.

And Zendesk is one of the best tools you can use to ensure provide personalized customer support.

It’s AI-powered AI chatbot, live chat, help desk ticketing system, and other solutions help you provide instant and right customer support.

Why is it one of the best digital marketing tools to boost your ROI? 

Zendesk has helped generate numerous leads, sales, and signups for its customers with its low-cost ownership offers.

How Zendesk can help your business achieve better marketing results:

• It offers an AI-powered chatbot and live chat that answers instantly to customers’ questions.
• It offers the right reporting and analytics software that help you get real-time insights for your business.

Price

• Free: $0
• Starting: $19 per month
• Suite Team: $55 per month
• Suite Growth: $89 per month
• Suite Professional: $115 per month

Suite Enterprise: Reach out to them

4. Ahrefs

Keyword research tools are important for any digital marketing strategy. And Ahrefs is one of the best there is. It’ll help boost your SEO strategies to improve your website’s visibility and ranking in SERPs.

It’s not just a keyword research tool, but an all-in-one SEO toolset that analyzes the ranking difficulty of keywords, simplifies backlinking, and more.

You can use it to scan your website for technical and on-page SEO problems that may be holding back your ranking.

Ahrefs also lets you keep tabs on keywords your competitors are ranking for and get insights into the SEO strategies they are implementing. 

Additionally, you can use it to get content ideas that have the potential to draw traffic to your site and find link prospects from a database of over 14 billion web pages.

Ahrefs also provides access to other free digital marketing tools like a backlink checker and AI writing tools

What you can do with Ahrefs to boost your digital marketing ROI

• Find keywords for YouTube, Amazon, and Bing and generate additional keyword ideas using AI to reach a wider audience
• Find backlink prospects to increase your SERP ranking and enhance your credibility
• Visualize your SEO progress using interactive graphs

Price

• Lite: $99 per month
• Standard: $199 per month
• Advanced: $399 per month

Enterprise: $999 per month

5. Hotjar

Google has clearly stated that it rewards content that provides a good page experience. Hotjar is one of the best digital marketing tools you can use to gain insights on ways to improve user experience and also optimize your store for conversions.

It provides heat maps that you can use to see your website visitors’ activities and identify friction points. The heatmaps show you how your visitors move, click, and scroll.

You can also compare user behavior across different devices using Hotjar to identify opportunities to increase conversions.

And if you serve video ads on your website or any other type of ad, you can conduct surveys and collect feedback from your customers to learn how they’re affecting their user experience.

What you can do with Hotjar to improve your ROI:

• Watch full recordings of your visitors’ journey on your site to find and fix user experience issues
• Access all user data from a single dashboard, including feedback, metrics, and session recordings
• Automatically generate relevant surveys using AI and get automated summary reports of the responses

Price:

• Basic: Free
• Plus: $39 per month
• Business: $99 per month
• Scale: $213 per month

Start Leveraging the Best Digital Marketing Tools Today

Leveraging digital marketing tools is crucial if you want to enhance your ROI. And these are the 5 best tools available in the market that you can use.

They all serve different aspects of digital marketing but with similar goals—improving audience engagement, driving conversions, and maximizing your marketing efforts.

Go ahead and give them a shot to take your digital marketing efforts to the next level and boost your ROI.

The post 5 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools for 2024 to Skyrocket Your ROI appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

I buy companies, and I start by identifying what offer is going to be ideal to increase cash flow and have the company pay for itself.

4 Types of Offers Every Company Should Have (at a minimum)

Four different offers at four different price points.

1) Free Community with Highly Desirable Free Content (Education)

2) Core Offer (Do It Yourself or DIY)

3) Upsell (Done With You or DWY)

4) Upsell (Done For You or DFY)

Example: Paintbrushes

1) Join our community of painters
2) Buy our brushes
3) Join a paid group painting class
4) Let us Paint for you.

We Identify Each of the Offers With the Same Survey

We Identify Each Of The Offers With The Same Survey. do this with a simple 4 part survey that we build in Google Forms.

The survey can either:

Be sent to everyone on your mailing list once a quarter,

Or

Be sent to everyone who uses your product or service.

Format We’ve Found That Yields the Best Results Via a Survey

• Motivation
• Reason
• Time Commitment
• Email
• First and Last Name
• Phone Number
• Demographic Question
• Benefits Question
• Frustration Question
• Conversation Invitation

Motivation

A reason to fill in the survey. We’ve found the best thing to offer is a free draw for a giveaway for a new product or program you’re about to release.

Example: “Fill in this form to take part in our $7,000 giveaway! We’re giving away 7 copies of our latest $1,000 training that helps you (GET_SPECIFIC_RESULT) that we called [NAME_OF_PRODUCT].”

Reason

This is where you explain the significance of the survey and how ultimately the results help them.

Example: “We want to help YOU! This survey is going to let us know what sticking points or areas of frustration you have with regards to [NICHE]. “

Time Commitment

Here you want to let them know that the survey won’t take long to complete.

Example: “The survey only has 7 short questions and should be finished within 2 minutes max.”

Email

This is where we ask them for their email address to continue communicating with them in the future.

Example: “We’d like to offer you future giveaways, offers and tips in addition to having the most up to date contact information to notify you if you have won. Please share with us the best way to email you for these things”

First & Last Name

This is just to keep track of individual responses

Example: “What is your first and last name so we know who we are contacting if you win?”

Phone Number

Here you’re going to get a secondary form of contact information that also has a higher response rate.

Example: “In case we can’t reach you via email what’s the best phone number to reach you at via SMS?”

Demographic Question

This question lets you know something about your audience. Either geographical, income, competition, or something that is useful relevant information. It’s important that you create this as a multiple choice question.

Examples:

“So we know which languages to include in our product development, Where do you live in the world? Please select one of the following:”

“So we create a product that matches your needs the best, which best represents your yearly salary? Please select one of the following:”

“So we know your experience within [NICHE] which of the following companies have you purchased products or programs from? Please select one of the following:”

Benefits Question

This is where you create a list of Needs/ Wants or Benefits you think people may want. You want at least 20 of these, and you’re going to ask them to select 3.

This will give you a clear indication of the needs and wants of your audience… and will give you the next 3 products or programs to develop. Be sure you word them carefully and create variants of the benefits including do-it-yourself options and done-for-you options. You cannot really have too many of these. This is the most important part of the survey.

Example:

“Which of the following do you most want us to provide for you? (please select 3)”
Do say: “I’d like to have more energy”
Don’t say: “Energy”
Do say: “I want to build my own race track
And say: “I want someone to build me a race track
Don’t say: “I want to do racing”

Frustration Question

Here you’re going to learn the frustration holding them back from getting the results they want.

You’re going to want to list at least 10 common frustrations. Include F.E.N.C.E.

Combined with the previous answer this gives you the classic headline format: “How to get A,B,C without the frustration of X”

Example: “What have you found to be most frustrating when trying to get the results in the previous question? Please select one:”

Conversation Invitation

This last question is an invitation to have a deeper discussion about their results… and of course another chance for a conversation to make a sale of the new product. As a beta tester.

Example: “Would you be willing to jump on a 5-minute call to discuss the answers in full?”

Conclusion

Once this survey is a natural automatic part of what you do… you will constantly have feedback on new products to develop.

We typically recommend creating a new survey with new options every 3 months to follow trends you see in the industry you’re in.

This is one of the SOP’s I bring into a company when I first join.

The post 4 Types of Offers That Can Instantly Increase Revenue appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

This debate seems to be as old as the concept of sales…and many things in life, but we will keep it to sales and marketing for the purpose of this article.

Many I speak with will fall solidly in the “quality” camp. In fact, I guess that for many of you reading this, your answer might be quality. Some of you might answer “both” just because you know me and how I like to set up a topic.

But, deep down inside, we probably think about quality as the winner of the debate.

…and to a large extent, there is truth to this.

That said, if you’ve “grown-up” in any serious sales environment, you may sit on the other side of the equation. And while you may not agree with anything else he ever said, you might think that Joseph Stalin was onto something when he stated, “quantity has a quality of its own.” 

When I started my sales career 25 years ago, I worked for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. In that environment, you were handed a phone book, sat down in front of a phone, and told to start dialing—often with no training other than what you picked up during licensing. If you’ve ever seen the movie Boiler Room, you have a good sense of my early days. The premium was on quantity, not necessarily quality.

This, too, was a practical approach. That was then. What about now?

The Debate Is Wrong

The debate about quality versus quantity is wrong. You can’t possibly decide on one versus the other in the discussion. Ultimately, as you may have suspected, you need both—and one other element I’ll mention shortly.

So, why do you need both quantity and quality?

Many of you have worked with some sort of email marketing. How effective is it to send just one email to the database? Not very. What if it is a perfectly crafted email written by a resurrected Ogilvy or Collier? Still not very successful. And, realistically, how many of us consistently maintain an open rate of 100%? One immaculately constructed email simply isn’t going to reach everyone. 

You could say the same about our approach to content on social media. What are your chances of going viral with one post and suddenly putting yourself on the map? It could happen, but I wouldn’t bet on those odds, no matter how good the video is—even in a world where a 10-year old makes $55 million a year on YouTube. 

So, let’s apply this to your sales efforts. What if you were to reach out to a handful of people every few months with a top-quality value-laden message? Either you get lucky, or more likely, you end up with nothing. And yet, for many agency owners and solopreneurs I speak with, this is their “sales plan.”

Here is what I see frequently happen with salespeople and business owners alike. You put some effort into your prospecting or, more often, get a referral or two. You catch a few wins along the way, and then suddenly you are busy, and money is coming in. 

Are you still prospecting? Probably not.

And therein lies the issue with the debate about quantity over quality. You need both, and it is missing a critical factor in the equation—sustained effort.

There are few overnight successes. Many reading this article are familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk. We know him as a super-successful guy with a massive following on social media. But he regularly talks about the fact that it took hundreds of videos before he had any meaningful traction.

I ran a video series for a couple of years, RightMind Mashup, and I shot 22 straight weeks of video before someone mentioned they had seen any of them. It was my brother-in-law. And while I love him, he isn’t exactly my ideal customer. It wasn’t until week 36 that I closed a sale due to the videos. 

At this point, I’ve generated over $900,000 in sales from that series, but it took sustained effort and ultimately more than 70 videos. I had quality content. I needed quantity to start making a difference. But, the driving force for both elements was sustained effort.

Success Formula

Beyond needing both quantity and quality, you must give some thought to the ratio of each factor. It looks something like this:

Quality + (Quantity/X) x Sustained effort = Success

I know. Algebra might not be your favorite subject. Oddly, it was one of mine, but I digress.

The divisor, X, in the equation indicates that you need to adjust the quantity to sustain the quality. What do I mean by that?

There is no question that it is challenging to keep up a high volume of quality content over a sustained period. Unless you have a content team, it might be nearly impossible to produce content as you continue to run your business and manage clients. So, you have to adjust the quantity to sustain the quality.

When someone joins my mastermind group, they often talk about how they want to produce content every day to help boost their business. For most, this isn’t realistic. 

Writers know all about “writer’s block.” Musicians have similar issues. I would imagine that every “creative” out there suffers from this at times. Trying to go from zero to daily content on a social media platform is a recipe for frustration and burnout, or at a minimum, a reduction in quality.

So, adjust the quantity so you can sustain the quality.

The same formula holds for your sales efforts. Keeping up a high volume of quality sales calls (applies to all communications: email, messenger, texts, etc.) over time is challenging if you don’t have a salesperson. As an aside, I caution business owners against hiring a salesperson too soon. They are expensive, and unless you have a rock-solid, documented sales process, you are throwing good money after bad results.

When referring to quality in your sales calls, this involves more than what you say. While that is important, most of your success depends on your consistent follow-up with prospects. Pre-pandemic, the average salesperson—and, if you are a business owner, you are a salesperson—followed up with prospects twice. In 2021? Once.

According to Hubspot, the number of calls needed to reach a prospect increased from 8 pre-pandemic to at least 18 calls since 2021.

Conclusion

In short, the quality of your sales depends on the quantity and sustainability of your follow-up. The third element, sustained effort, is the multiplier that defines the length of your success in the market. 

As buyer behavior continues to evolve, our sales efforts must adapt. As a young investment guy, I could get away with the quantity approach because this is how everyone did it, and no one had Caller ID. Buyers today educate themselves online, screen calls on their mobile devices, and work from home. These circumstances change everything about how we approach prospects today.

Rather than engaging in a debate of quality over quantity, continue to maintain quality with forward sustainability —this is the key to your long-term success in business.

Rather than engaging in a debate of quality over quantity, understand that you need both in a way that you can sustain long-term. This becomes the formula for future success.

Dominic Cummins

Founder of RightMind, Inc. Dominic helps leaders and entrepreneurs find and fulfill their purpose. At RightMind, we believe you started your business with a great purpose in mind. The challenge can be helping your clients “get it.”

Learn More About Dominic

The post The Answer to the Quality vs. Quantity Marketing Question appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Analyzing and monitoring your competition is fundamental to business success.

From Fortune 500 companies to startups—businesses need an idea of where they stand in the marketplace. Most importantly, they need to know how to use that information to help them stand out.

That’s why competitive reports are such a huge part of business success. It’s a roadmap telling you what to do, what to avoid, and what to try. Without it, you’re attempting to get from Point A to Point B with a blindfold on. With it, you’ve got supervision.

Competitive reports look at competitive benchmarking, competition overview, SEO strategies, and more. Ecommerce businesses, SaaS businesses, and marketing agencies can use them to figure out their short-term and long-term plans.

Every business owner has two options:

1. Know what the future can hold for their business
2. Guess and hope the future is bright

We’ll take the first option—and we’ll bet you will too.

What should a good competitive report include and how do you take what you’ve learned and apply it?

Why Does My Business Need a Competitive Report?

Businesses need competitive reports for 4 reasons:

• To better understand your target audience by research how they find and engage with your more established competitor
• For market research: Understand what is currently available on the market and where your business fits in
• To get an estimate of your future marketing budget
• To identify effective marketing tactics, etc.

Competitive reports are much more than copying your successful competitor’s marketing tactics. It’s actually nothing close to that because copying would never bring you ahead. (If you need marketing ideas, check out DigitalMarketer Lab!).

Competitive research is about understanding your target market and distinguishing your unique value proposition and consequently your unique marketing strategy to conquer it.

Competitive Research = How are your competitors doing and where you do stand in comparison?

Your Brand’s Unique Identity = What’s your USP (and how does it differ from the competition)?

Original Marketing Ideas = Your brand’s unique identity strategically creating awareness, engagement, and conversions using competitive research to know how to stand out from the competition!

Every competitive report needs 6 parts for a holistic understanding of your competitors, how your brand identity makes you unique, and what original marketing ideas come from it.

Competitive Benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking means collecting the performance data of your competitors and comparing it to your business. You can use these metrics to measure and monitor your business performance against your competitors. For example, if your competitors are ranking for the 3 top spots on search engines, you want to see where you’re ranking for those same topics. Are you slightly below them or on no-mans-land page 2?

You can choose your own performance indicators to track and compare. These may include:

• Public traffic data (from tools like Ahrefs, Alexa and Similar Web)
• Organic rankings
• Brand awareness and sentiment (based on brand mentions), etc.

These performance indicators are your KPIs. They’re a fundamental part of your competitive report, but don’t consider your competitive report written in stone. It’s a fluid document meant to help you identify opportunities. Adjust it as needed (especially if your KPIs change in the future).

Competitive Benchmarketing needs to answer the question: What are your KPIs?

Basic Overview of the Competition

Aside from your KPIs, there are secondary metrics that will help you find competitors to keep an eye on. These aren’t your primary metrics (a.k.a your KPIs), but the smaller metrics that still tell you a lot about what that competitor is doing and where you stand in comparison.

These secondary metrics are things like:

• Backlinks
• Organic traffic
• Social media followers
• Social media engagement, etc.

Tools like Ahrefs, Keyhole, and Similarweb will help you collect all this necessary data.

Basic Overview of the Competition needs to answer the question: What are our secondary metrics of focus?

Detailed Dive into Organic Search Engine Optimization Tactics

There are two types of marketing interruption-based and intent-based. Interruption-based marketing is all the sponsored posts on your Instagram or Facebook newsfeed. It’s the commercial before your Hulu show or the ad in the middle of the YouTube video you’re watching. Intent-based marketing is more focused on answering someone’s question. When someone looks for a “black bookshelf” on Google, they have the intent to find a black bookshelf. Intent-based marketing helps your black bookshelf show up in their search results.

You can use Google Smart Shopping to get in front of the right audience and you can use organic search engine optimization tactics. Look at some key search engine optimization tactics your competitors are using:

• Which keywords are they focusing on?
• How are they optimizing their title tags and meta descriptions?
• Are they optimizing their old content and how often?
• What does their site architecture look like?
• How are they organizing their main navigation?
• What’s their internal linking strategy?
• What are their most successful pages (i.e. those that rank for the most competitive search queries)?
• What’s their semantic optimization strategy? 

Try running a few of the most important pages through a tool called Text Optimizer to determine whether your competitors are doing a good job optimizing for search intent:

One of the most actionable steps here is to look at Content Gaps, i.e. researching which keywords your competitors are ranking but your site is not. This is a great way to expand your content strategy to include new keywords. Ahrefs provides this analysis, so it is both easy and effective:

Organic Search Engine Optimization Tactics needs to answer the question: What organic SEO tactics are our competitors using, where do we stand, and where are there opportunities for us to rank higher?

Competitors’ Backlink Research

Backlink research is important for many reasons but don’t just use it in an effort to “steal” some of those tactics or claim some of those links. Remember, you don’t need to copy marketing strategies from your competitors. You just need to figure out what they’re doing to see the gaps that you can fill.

Look at a bigger picture:

• Who are your competitors’ promoters (i.e. people who link to them) and how did your competitors win their hearts?
• Which PR tactics seemed to work best for your competitors and why?
• How are they utilizing content to generate backlinks?

The purpose of competitive backlink research is to understand what works for niche publishers and how you can build your own long-term relationships with them to outmatch your competitors in the long run. There are quite a few backlink checking tools that would help you create this report.

Competitors’ Backlink Research needs to answer the question: What’s our competition’s backlink strategy, where do we stand, and what opportunities are available for us?

Social Media Growth and Engagement

This section of your competitive report is an overview of your competitor’s social media channels. Some of the companies you research could be direct competition but others could have a similar audience and you’re figuring out what garners attention and engagement.

Create a quick chart summarizing your competitors’ active social media channels, number of followers and friends, and their overall activity. Use these metrics as either your goal or numbers you want to far surpass.

Keyhole can help you with this section:

Social Media Growth and Engagement needs to answer the question: What are our competitors doing on social media and what are companies with the same customer avatar as us doing?

Social Media Tactics to Take a Note of

While researching social media growth and engagement, you probably came across some inspiring ideas. Things that you haven’t done yet, but you know your audience would love (and engage with!).

Highlight some creative tactics your competitors are using on social media. In this section, forget about numbers! Highlight what you find ingenious. You’re not looking for what yielded great results, you just want ideas that your brand could take action on. My advice: take lots of screenshots!

• Did your competitor use humor when replying to a customer?
• Did you like their video they uploaded for a holiday?
• Was their sponsored update particularly creative and attention grabbing?
• Did they manage to get attention from a niche influencer?
• Did you like the idea behind their social media contest or poll?

This section is supposed to inspire your social media team. Discourage them from copying anything your competitor did on social media (this could quickly turn into a reputation crisis). Instead, let this section be a conversation starter for your team to come up with their own ideas.

Social Media Tactics needs to answer the question: What strategies should be we implement on social?

Every Business Needs a Competitive Report

It’s impossible to name a business idea or model without competition. There’s competition to get to space these days, and we’ll safely assume the competitive reports from those companies are hundreds of pages and a foot thick when printed.

A competitive report is one of the keys to marketing success. But, you have to make it actionable, or else it will collect digital dust on your desktop. Use it as a starting point for your brainstorming meetings and continue to bring it up as you ideate new marketing strategies.

Distinguish tactics to discuss and use unified communications to come up with the ideas to improve and expand those tactics, as well as find unique angles and maintain your brand identity.

Because a competitive report is like getting a crystal ball and getting to ask it what the future of your business is.

The only difference is that you have to put work into creating that future, but luckily your competitive report is telling you exactly what to do.

If you need marketing inspiration from the top marketers around the world, you can join DigitalMarketer Lab to access Insider Trainings, Workshops, Playbooks, and Certifications. Learn what’s working in Facebook ads today, how to use Google Smart Shopping, and how to turn brand awareness into net profits.

Become a Lab member today.

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the brand NINJA at Internet Marketing Ninjas as well as the founder of numerous startups including MyBlogGuest, MyBlogU, ViralContentBee, TwChat and many more.

Ann Smarty has been an online marketing consultant for 10 years providing high-quality digital marketing consulting through her services and courses (both free and paid).

Ann Smarty’s content marketing ideas have been featured in NYtimes, Mashable, Entrepreneur, Search Engine Land and many more. She is known for her indepth tool reviews, innovative content marketing advice and actionable digital marketing ideas.

• Link
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

The post Everything You Need to Create a Solid Competitive Report appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

The big holiday season is fast approaching. 

Is your ecommerce store ready?

There’s a lot to do to prepare your ecommerce business for the holiday season

To help you out, here’s a quick Twitter marketing checklist for ecommerce businesses to use:

# 1. Research Relevant Hashtags and Set Up Your Tracking

Hashtags are key to Twitter success: Apart from letting your content get discovered by people outside of your circles, hashtags also help you and your team brainstorm more effective content and seasonal special offers.

Surprisingly, there are not many tools for hashtag research, so you will have to spend some time searching Twitter and trying to narrow down your list. To give you a head start, here are a few cool tools for you discover your best-working holiday-related hashtags:

1. KeywordTool.io

KeywordTool.io is a cool freemium keyword research tool that includes a very helpful hashtag research feature. For free, you will get a list of hashtags to research. If you upgrade, each hashtag will also be accompanied by helpful metrics:

• Google’s search volume (how many people were searching Google for this hashtag this month in the past year)
• Trend (Trend shows how the monthly search volume for a keyword has changed over the last 12 months)
•  CPC (cost per click if you invest in this keyword using Google Ads)
• Competition (This is the number of advertisers bidding on each keyword, relative to all keywords across Google. It helps you understand how competitive the keyword is. The table below will help you to understand the competition breakdown)

While those metrics don’t really rely on any Twitter-specific data (because Twitter doesn’t give access to much data they collect and own), those numbers can help you make a more informed decision as to the popularity of each hashtag. 

2. Hashtagify

Hashtagify is one of the few hashtag-specific tools out there. It analyzes millions of Twitter feeds to identify closely related hashtags. This allows you to expand your core list to more terms to research.

3. Text Optimizer

Another tool to discover terms beyond your initial “obvious” list, Text Optimizer uses semantic analysis to find underlying concepts that constitute any topic.

[All the concepts associated with Christmas. Any of these can become your core hashtag to research further!]

Mind that you will be able to use these hashtags on Instagram as well, so keep this list handy.

# 2. Find and Connect to Influencers

To make your holiday campaign work, try and find people that will help you spread the word. Lots of bloggers and Twitter influencers are looking for content and gift ideas for Christmas, so if you approach them with your freebie or ideas, they may be really thankful!

Buzzsumo is a great tool to find niche influencers and start building meaningful connections with them. Just type your keyword and look through the list. 

For each identified Twitter profile, Buzzsumo will show the number of followers, reply and retweet ratios which reflect how much unique content each influencer publishes versus how much content they repost from other accounts. Another useful metric here is “Average Retweets” which shows how many retweets each tweet of this influencer generates.

Both of these metrics help identify “real” influencers, i.e. those that retweet others and generate retweets from their followers.

[If your ecommerce store is selling makeup, target these influencers]

# 3. Keep an Eye on Your Competitors

How are you competitors getting ready for those big holidays and how early do they start? Keeping an eye on your competitors’ websites will give you lots of new ideas to use in the future.

Visualping is a great new tool to use for this type of tracking. You can add your competitors’ homepages (and possibly also blogs) and the tool will notify you via email and/or text message when there’s a change. It is a good idea to keep your competitors there continuously to always know when they are making updates to their sites.

Here’s more info on using Visualping for competitive intelligence.

# 4. Optimize Your Site for Conversions

Prior to launching your Twitter campaign, make sure to create a clear conversion optimization strategy. In other words, what is it you want your Twitter referral traffic to do on your ecommerce site? Specifically, for an ecommerce store, think about creating and/or optimizing these pages:

• Special offers page (e.g. “Christmas deals”)
• Product bundles pages
• Gift ideas
• Individual product pages

Make sure all of these pages look good and function well on mobile devices (Twitter traffic has long been mostly mobile), load fast and provide a smooth user experience. Moreover, create clear buying journeys throughout the site by setting up product recommendations, personalized CTAs and off-site engagement methods (like a cart abandonment emails).

Before launching your Twitter campaign you need to make sure you’re maximizing your odds to convert the traffic you’d get, on the entire store.

Using Artificial Intelligence, Dialogue provides a great way to personalize your site users’ shopping experience and turn them into your customers by providing smart product recommendations and suggesting best content based on each user journey.

Dialogue is easy to integrate using a Shopify app, so you can easily test it now while you still have some time.

Here are a few more great Shopify apps to consider for this holiday season.

# 5. Track Your Results

Finally, the earlier you set up your events and goals, the more data you will be able to accumulate. You will need all that data for an even more successful Twitter marketing campaign next year.

Finteza is a great web analytics suite which makes data analytics easy and effective. You can track your conversion funnels and how your Twitter traffic is interacting with it to identify possible issues and distractions that prevent your site users from making a purchase:

Conclusion

Holiday marketing is exciting, especially on such a fast-paced social media platform like Twitter. Yet, it can be quite overwhelming as well. It will be both easier and more effective if you come prepared though: Use the checklist above to make sure your holiday marketing campaign will be a huge success!

The post Pre-Holiday Campaigns: Checklist for eCommerce Businesses appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Online marketing is a many headed monster. The average marketer has to balance social, content, email, and other inbound marketing tactics. All while making sure to monitor the most effective, in order to constantly tailor their strategies to improve results quarter by quarter. Anyone who has done it, whether with or without a team, knows how exhausting it is.

Productivity becomes key if you want to juggle these correctly. The right tools are crucial, so you can automate as much of the process as possible, and cut down on the time spent doing the rest.

1. Text Optimizer

How does it make your team more productive?

• Quickly find topic ideas
• Find relevant questions on any topic to determine content structure

Text Optimizer is a semantic search analysis tool that helps you better understand your niche by giving you a list of concepts and entities that constitute it.

The tool is the ultimate content research tool as it lets you create content by using pre-built sentences and discover popular questions on any topic.

2. Mailchimp

How does it make your team more productive?

• Automate email marketing
• Track your marketing performance
• Take advantage of user profiles to build up your buyer’s performance

Mailchimp started out as an email marketing platform, but it has become much more.

Recently they have unveiled their automated marketing feature, landing pages (customized and optimized for your brand), and webinars that can be viewed by hundreds or thousands of people, depending on your plan.

That makes it a much more expansive platform that touches on multiple marketing avenues, not just email marketing.

Add that to the fact that their email templates and scheduling systems are actually easy to use, and you have a definite winner. No more frustrating and overly complicated drip templates! You never have to create, delete and recreate email lists, only to find the initial settings were wrong and it won’t let you edit. The platform won’t suddenly go down and leave you stranded.

Mailchimp can also be a powerful lead management platform. It makes it easy to monitor how your subscribers are responding, where it needs help and how to optimize the process. 

It also stores all your leads, interaction history and all the records you may need. It’s your ultimate email marketing productivity toolkit.

More resources:

• If you are looking for alternatives, there are quite a few email automation tools you can choose from based on your requirements and budget.
• Megaphone Marketing also has a very detailed article on lead generation where they offer a helpful screenshot on how to create an effective email automation workflow:

3. Namify

How does it make your team more productive?

• Quickly find a cool brand name for your new site or project
• Build your brand’s visual identity by accessing free logos

Are you planning to launch a new project, a (recurring) event or a new site? Finding a brandable (“snappy”) name is getting harder and harder.

Namify is a cool free app that I use any time I am planning to start a new venture. You need to type your target keyword and choose your niche, and the tool will generate a list of names that will be easy to remember and create topical associations. With each brand name, you will get a free logo:

They offer a list of generated business names for you to see some examples.

4. WebCEO

WebCEO is your SEO productivity tool. It includes lots of features, from a handy keyword research solution to position tracker (which also works for Youtube!)

Search engine optimization includes lots of tasks to carry on and data to track. It is nice to be able to keep everything under one roof which certainly helps productivity. I like this set of tools because they have everything a business needs without costing a fortune.

5. Google Spreadsheets

How does it make your team more productive?

• Store your data, lists, notes in one free dashboard
• Create an effective collaboration routine

Ugh, data. It is important, it helps us, and yet it is a bane for every marketer in the world. Isn’t there an easier way?! Well, yes, and this tool is that way. Google Spreadsheets is where I store and organize just about any data or lists or records I have.

Google Spreadsheets makes collaboration a breeze: You can share progress with clients and bosses, your team, and keep them for your own uses. This one really does cut down on a ton of time and effort, not to mention stress.

In case you don’t want to use another Google tool, there’s a solid variety of note taking and sharing apps.

6. Viral Content Bee

How does it make your team more productive?

• Get your content promoted across high-quality social media accounts
• Easily find high-quality content to keep our social media feeds active

It would be great if you could just post your content on social media, and everyone shares it out for you just because you have a call to action. But we all know that isn’t how it works. If you want to reach new audiences you need a more direct approach.

Viral Content Buzz works by putting you in contact with other social media influencers of varying audience sizes. You and those others exchange content, with each posting on behalf of the other. This gives you access to a whole new viewer pool, who will become aware of your brand from another that they trust.

It is a convenient and effective tool, and can lead to long term connections that can benefit yourself and the others you network with.

7. Finteza

How does it make your team more productive?

• Access web traffic analytics without spending hours trying to figure out settings and options
• Easily share multiple data points within one handy dashboard

Finteza is a web analytics platform with a strong focus on conversion optimization. The tool allows you to track and analyze your traffic sources, set up events to track and share reports among your teams.

Finteza helps you track all kinds of website performance metrics, from organic search traffic to website security.

The unique feature here is creating promotion and engagement campaigns based on your users’ location, or previous interactions with your website. This means a certain amount of brand loyalty already present to drive it. But if you have a foundation of support for, this is a great way to expand on it.

8. CoSchedule

How does it make your team more productive?

• Create your content marketing calendar to create a detailed plan and to-do lists
• Give access and assign tasks to different team members and track the workflow within a single dashboard

CoSchedule is a platform I have been using for a long time, and I love it. It makes planning content and scheduling it on social media so much easier. It works as a WordPress plugin, creating a section in your dashboard where you can plan posts, assign tasks, give details, schedule posts to auto-publish, and update social media.

This has not only cut down on content marketing tasks for me, but it has made running a team easier, and editing tasks easier.

9. Mention

How does it make your team more productive?

• Monitor your brand mentions without daily checking social media feeds
• Get alerted of mentions that need immediate attention

Reputation management requires you to keep up to date on all mentions of you and your industry. In the past I used Google Alerts and Hootsuite for that. Now I still use the first, but instead of the second I use Mention.

It sends alerts and lets you reply in your dashboard. But it is a lot more straightforward and cleaner than other social media dashboards I have used.

10. Buzzsumo

How does it make your team more productive?

• Find content ideas and evaluate how you can outperform your competitors
• Find popular niche search queries and questions
• Monitor industry trends

I have been a big believer in Buzzsumo from the beginning, and it still has no peers when it comes to sheer feature amount for the price. It is an all-in-one business platform that works by giving you all the power over the tool.

You can use the tool for just about anything: sales, CRM, support, social media, marketing, analytics, and a dozen others. You are only limited by your imagination.

Buzzsumo is a super awesome platform that works by taking information from across the web related to content, and offering it to you to use for targeting your own content campaigns.

Research content from any brand or competitor, see how it is performing, and find out how you match up. Buzzsumo is one of the greatest discovery tools on the web. They offer free searches and data, but it is worth paying for their pro services if you are really serious. Honestly, their agency package is probably the best deal, unless you are a really tiny brand or start up just beginning in the industry.

Do you have a tool you think deserves to be on the list? Let us know in the comments!

The post 10 Tools for More Productive Digital Marketing appeared first on DigitalMarketer.