Marketing is a vital department for small businesses and startups. It’s the only way small businesses can compete with established companies. Thanks to technology and different pricing models, small businesses can use the same marketing tools established businesses use today. However, due to the many tools in the market, small businesses may be challenged to identify the right tool for their practice. Here are marketing technology ideas small businesses and entrepreneurs can use to grow.
Sales and Marketing Automation Tools
Sales and marketing automation tools help businesses bring their sales and marketing to one place. These tools include sales and marketing integration, sales performance assessment, collaborative environment, reporting, and general analytics.
A small business with a small sales and marketing department doesn’t have to buy separate marketing and sales training software programs because they’re already combined in one tool. Many small businesses have reported positive results with sales and marketing automation tools like HubSpot and Salesforce.
Conversion Optimization Tools
Great sales and conversion require using the right conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools. You need to engage visitors by making them leave a piece of their contact information through which you’ll engage them. This can help you increase sales.
Not all visitors will leave their contact information, but if you do it right, you’ll be part of the best websites whose conversion rates are 11% or more. Some leading CRO tools for startups like Wordstream’s Landing Page Grader, Unbounce, and Optimizely, help improve a company’s CRO.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tools
Due to greater exposure to technology today, customers, including B2B clients, first search for items and seek other people’s reviews before they buy anything. When potential clients search for products online, they should see you as a top product/solution for their needs. To achieve this visibility, you need to rank higher on search engine page results (SERPs).
SEM involves paying for online ads to position you at the top of Google search (and other browsers) when your customers search for a related product or service. In addition, use effective content creation (blog posts, tutorials, videos, social media posts) and search engine optimization (SEO) to rank for free through organic traffic.
This combination ensures that even if you don’t pay for marketing ads, your customers will still find you because your content ranks higher. In both paid ads and organic traffic, you must use the right keywords. Some SEM Marketing tech tools that can help you in ranking your website or content are WordStream, AHREFs, and SEMRush.
Email Marketing Tools
Social media posts, webinars, and video campaigns are relatively new marketing channels for customer outreach. While these are contemporary and effective communication methods, they shouldn’t distract you from the oldest effective strategy — email marketing.
When digital marketing was beginning, it was also called email marketing because that was the basic form of digital communication back then. While it’s the oldest form of digital marketing, email marketing is still one of the best digital marketing strategies with an impressive ROI of $36 for every dollar a company spends.Email marketing remains the best marketing tactic for small businesses and startups.
Today, technology has improved email marketing for customer generation and sales. Tools like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Klaviyo help marketers target and easily reach their audience, as well as analyze open email rates and responses. This way, you’ll know who to pitch to after they open your email. Most marketing or sales programs also have built-in email distribution capabilities.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
Finally, technology has made customer relationships or lead management simple through CRM. You need to engage your customers and give them a great experience to keep them coming and help refer you to others.
Small businesses benefit more from CRM because of their specific niches and targets. Many CRM tools integrate marketing and sales teams and help them read from the same page to get a good understanding of each prospect and customer.
CRM tools like Hubspot, Zoh, and Salesforce help small businesses exchange sales and marketing data between marketing and sales teams to improve customer engagement. In the process, these teams can identify customer problems or company challenges that need addressing.
Endnote
Small businesses are the most challenged in terms of budgets and most advantaged in terms of technology. In sales and marketing, there are plenty of tools and categories to use. Used correctly, these tools can help small businesses compete with established ones and grow exponentially.
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