5 Best Digital Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

One of the great­est perks of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is that you no longer have to won­der and assume who your poten­tial cus­tomers are and what they want. With a pletho­ra of online tools at your dis­pos­al, you can eas­i­ly cre­ate ad cam­paigns and con­tent that are per­fect­ly tai­lored to your tar­get market.

But the avail­abil­i­ty and grow­ing num­ber of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tools make it pret­ty dif­fi­cult to choose the right one. On top of that, these tools are just that – tools, and if you don’t know how to wield them, you can­not expect results.

In this guide, we will show you some of the great­est dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tools for small busi­ness­es and how to make the best of them in a way your com­peti­tors can­not even imagine!

1. Google Ads

If you want to reach a wide audi­ence through clas­si­cal pay-per-click ads, there’s no escap­ing Google Ads. It incor­po­rates three net­works – the search net­work, the dis­play net­work, and YouTube. The search net­work is the most pop­u­lar adver­tis­ing space.

If you want clicks to result in some mean­ing­ful action, such as sign-up for your email list or sale, you have to tar­get audi­ences that are inter­est­ed in your prod­uct and ready to buy it. Now, here’s our secret.

Instead of assum­ing, guess­ing, going through end­less tri­al and error process, has­sle with track­ing user behav­ior online, enter con­tex­tu­al targeting.

Con­tex­tu­al tar­get­ing allows you to dis­play ads on web­sites and web­pages that are rel­e­vant to your prod­uct or ser­vices. It is based on users’ search behav­ior, but it finds users through scan­ning and uti­liz­ing web content.

For exam­ple, you cre­ate an ad for sen­si­tive skin prod­ucts and then dis­play it on a blog post about skin­care for peo­ple with eczema. There are two types of con­tex­tu­al tar­get­ing: the one we just men­tioned is key­word con­tex­tu­al tar­get­ing. The oth­er one is cat­e­go­ry con­tex­tu­al tar­get­ing, which sends your ads to the web­sites based on a gen­er­al cat­e­go­ry or top­ic. In this case, this would mean dis­play­ing your skin­care prod­uct on any web­site about beau­ty and skincare.

You can find a detailed guide on how to set up con­tex­tu­al cam­paigns here, while we’ll move on to the next step. How do you deter­mine the right key­words and topics?

2. Website Categorization

Web­site cat­e­go­riza­tion goes hand in hand with con­tex­tu­al tar­get­ing, allow­ing you to cre­ate a list of web­sites and web pages that are rel­e­vant to your prod­uct or ser­vice. Since you can­not sit all day and look for web­sites that may be the right fit, you can have a tool that does it for you.

Web­site Cat­e­go­riza­tion API is a tool from Whois XML API, one of the largest cyber intel­li­gence data providers. Thanks to its sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­nol­o­gy, it can ana­lyze mil­lions of pages using a full-proof three-lev­el process. This process incor­po­rates crawl­ing, ana­lyz­ing top­ics and key­words using machine learn­ing and human super­vi­sion of results.

By research­ing and cat­e­go­riz­ing domains relat­ed to your prod­uct, you can cre­ate a list of cat­e­gories, mixed cat­e­gories, or spe­cif­ic web­sites for your con­tex­tu­al tar­get­ing ads. This tool is sophis­ti­cat­ed enough to not fall prey to auto­mat­ic, out-of-con­text trig­gers that may dis­play your ads on irrel­e­vant sites.

At the same time, you can use web­site cat­e­go­riza­tion to exclude sites and domains you don’t want to asso­ciate with your ads.

This tool also allows you to ana­lyze domains behind your web­site vis­i­tors. This allows you to get a clear pic­ture of the audi­ence that vis­its your web­site, cre­ate well-defined cus­tomer pro­files, and fine-tune your mar­ket­ing strategy.

3. Pop-up windows

Some­times, a click doesn’t result in a sale. More than 70% of peo­ple who leave your web­site nev­er come back? This doesn’t mean your web­site or prod­uct is bad. Some­times peo­ple aren’t ready to pur­chase the prod­uct or want to con­sid­er oth­er options.

Gen­er­at­ing email sign-ups is one way to stay in touch with your web­site vis­i­tors and turn them into buy­ers. Pop-up win­dows can be acti­vat­ed by var­i­ous trig­gers such as exit intent, aban­doned shop­ping cart or good engage­ment with a piece of content.

These pop-ups can include lead mag­nets such as e‑books and tuto­ri­als, spe­cial offers, or a sim­ple pro­pos­al to sign-up for the newslet­ter. 

4. Interactive tools

Inter­ac­tive tools such as polls, games, and quizzes are an amaz­ing way to keep web­site vis­i­tors engaged, learn more about them, and gen­er­ate leads.

A sim­ple poll or quiz can help you under­stand what your poten­tial cus­tomers need. This way, you can seg­ment them into dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories based on pref­er­ences and behav­ior, which they dis­close vol­un­tar­i­ly and consensually.

For exam­ple, let’s go back to that prod­uct for sen­si­tive skin. Once they land on your web­site, you can cre­ate a pop-up that leads them to the quiz with a top­ic “How sen­si­tive is your skin” or “Take this quiz and we’ll show which day care cream is best for your skin”.

This way, you can tar­get them with very spe­cif­ic ads via remar­ket­ing or email cam­paigns. Much eas­i­er than the has­sle of cook­ies and track­ing user’s online behavior!

5. Email marketing tool

Final­ly, here’s how you can make sure all those cus­tomers on your email list don’t for­get about you and your prod­uct. Email is per­fect both for nur­tur­ing a rela­tion­ship with your cus­tomers and dri­ving sales.

When web­site vis­i­tors sign up for your email list, you can send them a wel­come email with offers or con­tent that is rel­e­vant to their inter­ests. You can cre­ate sev­er­al email cam­paigns based on the user’s lev­el of engage­ment with your emails.

Those who open your mes­sages with­out click­ing on the call-to-action (CTA) prob­a­bly need more lead nur­tur­ing con­tent, such as inter­est­ing advice and infor­ma­tion. Those who click on CTA’s and come back to your web­site can be encour­aged to shop with an auto­mat­ic email offer­ing a dis­count on the prod­ucts they were look­ing at. In email mar­ket­ing, it is impor­tant that the emails you send are ver­i­fied, val­i­dat­ed, and received by cus­tomers. One of the most com­mon caus­es of bounced emails is send­ing to unver­i­fied email address­es. For more infor­ma­tion about email ver­i­fi­ca­tion check out this website.

The pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less and there are plen­ty of amaz­ing tools that allow you to auto­mate and fine-tune your email campaigns.

Conclusion

These were the five best dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tools – and prob­a­bly the only ones you need to achieve amaz­ing results in no-time. As you can see, they work won­der­ful­ly when they are teamed up and used step by step.

All of them will allow you to learn more about your cus­tomers and build ad cam­paigns that ensure the return of invest­ment. Be patient and open to the learn­ing expe­ri­ence and your small busi­ness will soon start bring­ing in its first customers!

SOURCE: Mar­itime News