Why companies need marketing tools in 2017

By now, information about marketing strategies is so widespread, it can feel like you know all there is to know about designing the perfect push. From SEO to visual infographics, most aspiring and current marketers have pretty well-stocked advertising toolkits.

However, even the most experienced and talented marketers in the world still need help once in awhile. No one should feel embarrassed about or ashamed of using marketing tools, especially given the increasing competition between organizations for consumer attention. In fact, there are quite a few specific areas that modern marketing tools can help you with to make your next advertising push that much easier and more fruitful.

Figuring out goals

Many companies with weak marketing strategies fail to set clear, strategic goals for those strategies. They don’t set parameters regarding how many customers they’re working to gain or strengthen relationships with through their marketing pushes. And if the goals aren’t set in the first place, it’s unlikely that the strategy will be successful – especially considering that people who have goals are up to 10 times more successful than people who don’t.

This lack of success can stem from a few sources, like not putting enough resources towards your goals since you don’t set them in the first place or not tracking your progress towards your goals since they don’t exist. As a result, marketing analytics tools are a great way to help organizations track their progress towards certain benchmarks – which is the first step to success.

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For example, Improvado.io allows organizations to manage their marketing and advertising analytics in one user-friendly location, which helps them track their progress towards specific marketing goals. This hub aggregates a business’ data from over 50 social, search, and display platforms. Businesses no longer have to spend hours pulling reports or rely on costly developers to build and maintain API connections and data warehouses.

Improvado.io works by automatically pulling data from multiple sources, like Facebook posts and Adwords ads, making it easy for users to compare cross-channel metrics in minutes. The tool allows companies to visualize data via their clean reporting interface or push the data directly into any 3rd party business intelligence tool like Google Data Studio or Tableau. It allows businesses to examine information from different sources side by side and better understand how to reach their milestones.

Improvado.io gives a marketer the flexibility to quickly see the reasoning behind fine-tuning campaigns and making strategic decisions backed by data. This way, you can figure out which specific marketing pushes are helping you reach your goals and which ones aren’t. As a result, you can cut the strategies that aren’t working and pool your resources into the ones that are, leading to increased ROI. Basically, tools like Improvado.io will not only help you set goals but easily track how each campaign is contributing towards your KPIs.

Improving specific strategies

Along with big-picture benefits, marketing tools can also help companies with specific aspects of their campaigns in ways that even the best marketers can struggle with.

For instance, conversion optimization is a significant priority for many businesses – after all, revenue is what keeps organizations running. The tough part is, a lot of consumers don’t directly engage with the companies they’re browsing: only about 3 percent of people who visit a website from an online ad will fill out a website form. It can get tough to get people who come to your website to do what you want them to do to increase the potential of them making a purchase.

Luckily, there are several marketing tools out there – including Wordstream’s Landing Page Grader and Unbounce – that can double, triple, and even quadruple your conversion rates by analyzing your existing pages and offering ideas on how to improve them to increase engagement.

Generally making life easier

Finally, you can bring out the big guns in terms of your marketing tools by implementing full marketing automation. These systems bring it all together by including analytics, tracking, website content personalization, email campaign management, automated alerts, and more. In today’s highly competitive business landscape, sometimes it’s a good idea to let the experts manage a significant part of your marketing strategy.

In fact, companies that use marketing automation to generate leads have a 53 percent higher conversion rate on average than those that don’t. This is largely because marketing automation programs, such as HubSpot or Ontraport, inform all activities with data from your CRM and third party sources – making everything customized to your specific needs. In today’s business world, this kind of assistant could be all you need to reach your specific milestones.

It’s understandable that certain companies want to maintain full control over every aspect of their marketing campaigns. However, in this day and age, using at least one or two marketing tools can greatly boost your business’s competitive edge.