The digital age has given us a lot: driverless cars, virtual reality and Snapchat filters, but did you know there are lots of platforms on the internet that can directly affect your business?
You can use these online tools to expand your marketing campaign, create networking opportunities or even prompt extra productivity in your staff members.
Whether you’re making a blog that answers questions like “what's the FTSE 100?” or looking to increase sales of cupcakes with social media marketing - we’ve got a guide for you on some of the tech tools digital marketers use daily in their business.
We’ll cover:
Keyword finders
The rule of the internet is that no one looks at the second page of Google. If you can’t find it on the first page, then it simply cannot be found. This is why companies all around the world are scrambling to raise their websites’ Google ranking so that they climb the search results to the top, also known as Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO).
Keywords are a massive part of SEO, which will cause you to rise in the ranks of Google so that your website is guaranteed to be the option clicked on whenever someone searches for something vaguely to do with your business or even industry.
Keyword finders like Wordstream and Keyword Finder offer you a list of keyword options created from inputting the URL of your site to their platform. Wordstream for example will then offer you keywords by volume so that you can use the right keywords to promote your SEO content and use it in search advertising campaigns.
Majestic SEO
Link building is the foundation of affiliate marketing. Content creators, bloggers and writers are the backbones of link building. The content creators create content with links which point to a target URL within their posts that could be a link to your site, which will drive traffic from their audience to you.
The link will be unique to distinguish where the traffic is coming from, and you can offer the creator a commission based on how much traffic they get to your site.
However, there is the concept of backlinking. Backlinking will allow you to check over your affiliate links. Majestic SEO is a backlink tool that enables you to check on all the links that lead to your site. Commissioned creators might not be the only ones linking to your site, and others like unpaid bloggers and content creators might be using your site as a point of reference.
To make sure that you are not connected to any sites you don’t want to be, you can use a backlink checker like Majestic to see where traffic is coming from. You might want to adjust for the sake of knowing who is most interested, readjusting your demographic, or you might even see that an affiliate link isn’t offering the numbers you were expecting, and you are simply wasting money on their commission.
Suppose you feel that all this may be above your level of expertise and knowledge. In that case, the professionals at a digital marketing agency will be able to deploy this and other tools to help you gain a coveted page one Google placement.
Zoom
Zoom is not only the way you and your teammates get to know each other’s home décor choices while working from home. Zoom conversations can be repurposed for marketing, allowing your peers, clients and other stakeholders an inside look into how you and your business operates.
For example, you can host a webinar, showcasing all your knowledge about the industry, how that knowledge is used in your company, and how others can implement it and put it out into the world as a recorded mini-course on the subject.
Use it as peer networking content and host your own online industry event. Cut snippets from the conversation and use them as talking points for your social media marketing campaign or invite customers onto a live “Ask me anything” event with your CEO and brand ambassadors to answer questions and address concerns.
Slack
Slack is an organisational platform that will allow you and your entire team to congregate in one place. Separate projects into “channels” and add team members as they are needed. Slack also has the perk of adding a chatroom, so everyone in the team is just a click away.
Within the channel will be all the files, people and messages necessary to get the job done. With everything held in one place, your team members won’t waste time searching for files, they will communicate more efficiently and your entire office is sure to be more productive in the process.
Social media
It sounds obvious, but it’s worth mentioning that social media is the most effective means of marketing today. Over the past couple of years, it has also expanded to become a powerful eCommerce tool. Facebook, Instagram and others lead the way in enabling and promoting an online presence for many diverse businesses worldwide.
Social media users’ habits changed over time and suddenly every step of the buying process was done on social media. Not only were they finding what they wanted to buy, either organically with an algorithm, or by searching for it within the platform, but they were also researching the brands behind the product.
This was for a few reasons. Users want to trust who they buy from, so we're looking for relatable content about the team, they want to know you aren’t a scam, so are looking for a well-looked-after website, and they want to know that the brand’s priorities align with their own, so are looking for what the company stands for.
Using social media is a great tool to grow a company, as just about everyone is using it in some form or another anyway.
The aforementioned tools are available, some with subscriptions, some not, but all are tools that digital marketers use every day to engage with their clients to help promote their web presence and help them achieve Google page one search status.