How Digital Marketing Tools Benefit E-commerce Stores

Marketers depend heavily on digital marketing tools to help them create campaigns to promote their brands, services and or products, online. These tools are some software that helps marketers to become more effective and efficient in their marketing campaigns through real-time insights into the campaigns. Marketers use them in marketing campaigns for quantifiable results, automated tasks and audience insights to enhance their marketing strategies. They are also very effective to improve targeting and reach which help to enhance marketing campaigns. Following are some of the top direct benefits e-commerce stores derive from the use of these tools.

Content Management (CMS): If you use CMS tools, you can you create, manage, and distribute high-quality content very widely on the internet. The right content management tool helps to make it possible for you to easily draft, edit, and publish content in one location and make it widely accessible to others on the internet.

Landing Page Builders: If you want your website landing page to capture leads easily, you must make sure, the landing page is compelling and easy to navigate. This is because when users click on your link in an email, social media post, or any other digital platform, it takes them to a landing page of your website. You need good landing page builder tools like Leadpages and Unbounce to build great landing pages to serve this purpose. These tools are very versatile and easy to use. Tools like Leadpages for instance have a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor that can help you out even if you do not have coding experience. Its A/B testing capabilities and optimized templates enable marketing teams to create high-converting landing pages to capture leads. Unbounce lead builder tool helps marketers create high-converting landing pages that match their targeted keywords. It further optimizes conversions with A/B testing to identify the most effective landing page variations.

Email Marketing: Effective email marketing tools help create, send, and track email marketing campaigns. Tools like Klaviyo can help you design professional-looking emails through a customizable template builder and as well helping to manage subscriber lists. Some of these tools aside from being very easy to use and customized, they can be designed to pull in your products, discounts, and images automatically, and even help to segment your marketing emails with built-in segmentation tools.

Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC): With pay-per-click marketing, marketers are only required to pay when a user clicks on their ads. For PPC ads, you can rely on a platform like Google Ads that lets you create and optimize ads that appear on Google search and partner websites. You can also try popular social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and X if you want to target specific demographics. These platforms have very effective in-house tools you can easily use.

Design: Website design is very important if you want your e-commerce store to be effective. You can thus easily use design tools to create visual content that is appealing and attention captivating. Popular tools like Canva, a digital template editor, and Adobe Photoshop which can help you whip up valuable assets like infographics and illustrations for social media. You can rely on Canva’s brand kit integration to maintain visual consistency across campaigns while Adobe Photoshop, on the other hand can even go beyond basic editing to do wonders with your marketing photos. It is very handy for color correction, blemish removal, and background changes. This allows marketers to fully customize various assets, like infographics and website banners for effective marketing purposes.

Analytics Reporting: Marketers rely on analytics tools to track and visualize data for their digital marketing campaigns. With the most popular of these tools, Google Analytics for instance, marketers can easily see traffic sources, user engagement duration, visitor demographics, and much more. These data are helpful for marketers to better understand their audience, what ads they gravitate toward, and their products preferences.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO tools can help your website to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) and capture organic traffic. Tools like Google Search Console are helpful for marketers to understand how their websites perform on Google. Ahrefs digital marketing tool for instance is great for conducting keyword research. It helps marketers to identify high-volume, low-competition search terms that align with their businesses. The tool is also great for uncovering broken links on your website. It provides insights into your competition, including what keywords work for them and how much traffic they get as a result.

There is also Semrush which is yet another versatile SEO tool. It is a keyword research platform that equips digital marketers with a varied SEO toolkit making it possible for marketers to identify high-volume keywords, analyze competitor strategies, and track their website's ranking over time. The tool helps in auditing on-page SEO to ensure content is search-engine friendly and also offers tools to track backlinks.

Social Media Marketing (SMM): You need the right tools to make social media management (SMM) more efficient. These tools are helpful to schedule social media posts and analyze performance. Tools like Buffer or Later are quite handy in this quest. Even though popular social media platforms like Facebook and X let you schedule posts ahead of time, an SMM marketing tool can help create content consistency across different social media accounts.

While Buffer tool is quite helpful to curate high-performing content, customize posts for each platform, and schedule them for optimal engagement times, it also offers analytics to track clicks, shares, and follower growth, providing insights to optimize social media strategies and maximize campaign reach. Later tool on the other hand has a user-friendly interface that allows marketers to schedule posts across multiple social media platforms. You can also use Later to curate visuals with built-in editing tools, preview posts before publishing, and adapt captions to each platform.
 
Project Management: If you use an effective project management tool, you can efficiently plan, manage, and execute projects collaboratively. This is exactly why digital marketers like to use tools like Asana and Trello to plan content calendars, track progress, assign tasks, and brainstorm ideas. Asana for instance has great features like Kanban boards and progress tracking which enable marketing teams to stay on the same page and easily identify bottlenecks. The tool acts as a digital command center for busy digital marketing teams, streamlining project management by enabling marketers to create tasks, assign deadlines, and collaborate on campaigns. 

Best Online Tools and Software for Affiliate Marketing

If you want to succeed in affiliate marketing, even if you’re an influencer, content creator, or deal site owner, you need essential online tools to help you maintain a competitive edge in the business. You must therefore endeavor to stay informed about the latest trends and technologies that can help enhance your marketing activities. These here tools are quite handy for maintaining a competitive edge and ensuring continued success in the business. Following are carefully selected tools and software that are about the best online tools you can rely on if you want to succeed in affiliate marketing.

 

1. Analytics Software: The most reliable analytical tool out there online is Google Analytics. If well deployed, this tool helps to provide valuable insights into your website traffic, conversions, and user behavior. Data generated by this tool helps affiliates to make vital data-driven decisions to enhance their marketing.

2. Content Creation and Management: If you are an influencer, blogger or plain content creator, Content Management Systems (CMS) are handy tools you can depend on. They are great systems for managing your content online. Best CMS tools out there are Blogger and WordPress. In the context of content creation tools, there are tools like Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud that are handy to facilitate content creation and website management.

3. Affiliate Networks: These networks help affiliates to sign-up easily and start earning income almost immediately as they start promoting products on the platforms. Notable affiliate networks in this category are Strong Future International, SFI, Amazon Associates, ShareASale, and CJ Affiliate.

4. Email Marketing Software: These are tools that help email marketers to smoothly send marketing/promotional messages to hundreds of thousands of their contacts in a matter of seconds. Best of these tools out there are MailChimp, ConvertKit, and ActiveCampaign. These tools enable affiliates to build and manage their email lists, create engaging campaigns, and track their marketing results effectively and efficiently.

5. Social Media Analytics Tools: Bloggers and Influencer affiliates often rely on social media analytics tools to measure reach, engagement, and campaign performance on social media. Most of the most popular social platforms like Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube have reliable in-house analytics tools for this purpose.

6. Social Media Management Tools: The best and most popular tools in this category are Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social. Most social media marketers rely on these tools to schedule posts, manage their social accounts and effectively analyze engagement.

7. Affiliate Plugins: Affiliate marketing plugins are very handy tools for affiliate marketing. Particularly on WordPress, tools like ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Links help affiliate marketers to manage and cloak affiliate links for better tracking and user experience.

8. Ad Management Platforms: These platforms are particularly very suitable for affiliates using paid advertising. The best of these tools out there are Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager. These tools are quite suitable for precise targeting and optimization.

9. Affiliate Tracking Software: Accurately tracking your marketing results is quite essential for affiliate marketing success. The best of such tools out there are Impact Radius, Post Affiliate Pro and Cake. These tools help affiliates to accurately track clicks, sales, and commissions earned.

10. SEO Tools: The best traffic for an affiliate marketer is organic traffic. That is where SEO tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMrush come in very handy. These tools help affiliate marketers to optimize content, Moz, conduct keyword research, Ahrefs, and track rankings, SEMrush.

Why eBooks are Such Important Digital Marketing Tools

The term “eBooks” simply means “electronic books” which are digital books that are published, accessed, and read on the internet using smart devices, e-readers in particular. They are very much unlike books published on paper. EBooks are extremely popular among digital marketers because they are very handy content marketing tools. As the use of electronic devices and the internet continues to rise, eBooks are increasingly becoming popular as online marketing tools as well. This popularity stems from the fact that when compared to regular traditional books, eBooks are more handy and useful for online marketing purposes. They easily fit into digital marketing strategies most digital marketers are comfortable with.

 

Why EBooks Trump Traditional Books Most Times

With the growing popularity of electronic reading devices like tablets and e-readers and the deepening of the internet for information gathering, processing and distribution, eBooks readily trump traditional books in flexibility and use. Specifically for marketing purposes:

EBooks are Cheaper to use: In most cases, eBooks are relatively less expensive than traditional physical books. They are handy, easy to carry around and easily accessible. Most marketers always have an eye on costs, hence they prefer going for eBooks than physical books. Sharing the same information with their customers using printed media would be far more expensive than using eBooks. When marketers use eBooks for marketing purposes, they are able to strictly control their marketing budgets This allows them to channel their financial resources to other areas of the business where resources are needed more.

EBooks are Interactive: Easy interaction means high flexibility which eBooks are quite handy for. Marketers are today able to tactically use the internet to build deeper relationships with their customers by consistently interacting with them on a more personal level. EBooks are very hand devices for this interactive relationship between businesses and customers on the internet. If professionally written, some eBooks offer interactive features, such as audio or video clips, hyperlinks, or other multimedia elements. These elements help to enhance the reading experience of users. They allow readers to experience and interact with the business in immersive ways that aren’t quite possible with traditional books.

EBooks are More Easily Accessible: Many eBook platforms usually offer highly flexible options for readers. With these options, visually impaired readers can easily adjust text size, font, and background color to make it easier for them to read. As marketing tools, this flexibility makes it easy for markers to use eBooks to expand their marketing reach. With eBooks, marketers can easily cater to the differently-abled and reach a segment of the market that might not have been easy to reach otherwise.

EBooks are More Portable to Handle: Business owners can carry hundreds or thousands of eBooks on a single device, such as a smartphone or e-reader. With eBooks, you can literally take your library with you wherever you go. What this means to business owners is that it has become easier than ever before for them to put long-form information into the hands of their customers. They no longer need to incur huge costs on shipping and delivering physical books to customers. EBooks help them to save money by cutting out delivery processes and their attendant costs.
 
EBooks are Digitally Searchable: For digital marketers , nothing can be more convenient for marketing than searchable content. You can quickly search eBooks for a specific word or phrase. This makes it really easy to find specific information or passages. It also makes it easier for customers to find the information they are looking for. Businesses do take advantage of this to effectively share long-form information that answers several questions their customer base may have. This helps to keep the customers better informed. If customers easily find answers to their concerns, it puts them in a better position to do business with you. Helping customers to easily find answers to their questions can give you a competitive advantage over your competition. 

 
How eBooks are Important in Digital Marketing

In digital marketing, eBooks help businesses to easily reach a wider audience. The reason is because eBooks can be easily distributed online and accessed by anyone with an electronic device and from anywhere there in internet. This makes them a hugely effective marketing tool for businesses looking to expand their reach beyond their local areas. For specific marketing purposes, eBooks are:

Great for Market Analytics: You can easily track the performance of eBooks with online analytics tools. Doing so allows businesses to see how many people have downloaded and read their eBooks. This is in addition to other valuable and important marketing metrics such as how long a reader spends reading and where they were located. This gives vital marketing info to businesses to enable them fine-tune their marketing strategies by making adjustments as needed in their strategies.

Suitable for Lead Generation: EBooks are great tools for leads generation. Through CTAs on your website, you can offer an eBook as a free download in exchange for an email address. This way, businesses can build a responsive email list by collecting valuable contact information from interested users. Such email list can with time become a very valuable marketing asset for email campaigns or targeted advertising. Presently, the internet operates on and relies heavily on data. Business owners can access the right data online to enable them to better understand the spending habits and online behavior of their customers. This vital info can enable businesses to formulate strategies to cater specifically to the needs of these customers. This way, business owners can better market to their customers in a laser-focused way for better results. This is something that was hugely challenging for businesses a few years back.

Great for Showcasing Brand Expertise: Business owners also use eBooks to showcase their expertise and establish themselves as thought leaders in their niche industry. With professionally written eBooks on topics related to their business niche, business owners can concretely and concisely demonstrate their expert knowledge and credibility to potential customers. This is one credible way eBooks can help businesses to earn the trust of their numerous customers.

How to Unlock the Huge Potentials of Affiliate Marketing

Marketing is a very important component of any business. The reason affiliate marketing readily lends itself to many ambitious online marketers. Affiliate marketing is a simple performance-based business model involving Product Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers, all involved in a mutually beneficial business partnership. Affiliates only get paid commissions for work done. To unlock the huge potentials of affiliate marketing, you must know the basics, what it is, how it works as well as the benefits it provides for businesses, affiliates and customers.

 
Here is How it Works

Affiliate marketing involves three key players: the product merchant, the affiliate, and the consumer. The product merchant is the business that offers products/services for sale. The affiliate is the individual/company that promotes the merchant’s products/services. The consumer is the end-user who purchases the products/services. All three parties are in the partnership for mutually beneficial reasons. The merchant wants to sell products/ services and the affiliate helps him to do so. The consumer is desirous to purchase quality products and the affiliates helps to make the products available to him. By the arrangement, the merchant gets to sell products and the consumer gets quality products to purchase. The merchant is happy to sell quality products, the consumer is happy he gets quality products to buy and the affiliate is happy that he helps sell quality products and earns commissions for his efforts.
 
For easy sales attribution purposes, a unique affiliate link/code is made available to the affiliate. The affiliate uses this unique affiliate link/code in his blog content to promote the merchant’s products/services. When a consumer clicks on this affiliate’s link or uses the affiliate’s code to make a purchase, the sale is correctly tracked and the affiliate is credited with the sale. The merchant then pays the affiliate a percentage of the sale-amount as commission. The more sales affiliates generate by this arrangement, the more commissions they earn. What an affiliate can earn is limitless as a result of this arrangement and it can be quite huge depending on how good and how hard working the affiliate is in the business.

Ultimately, affiliate marketing is a powerful marketing arrangement that helps to increase sales for a business through cost-effective marketing. It provides affiliates a great opportunity to earn unlimited passive income while at the same time helping to make quality goods/services available to consumers. Businesses can thus leverage the marketing efforts of affiliates to reach many new customers and markets. That way, businesses can directly increase their sales and grow brand awareness.

Here are Reputable Affiliate Marketing Platforms you can Work With

If you’re interested in starting an affiliate marketing program for your business, it is advisable to sign up with reputable affiliate marketing platforms to take advantage of their marketing tools, training, customer care, large affiliate networks and a great pool of quality products/services to promote. You can take full advantage of the many resources available on the platforms to help you get started. Presently, there are many reputable affiliate platforms available that provide the tools and the right support needed to launch and manage an affiliate marketing program.
 
Characteristically, each platform offers its own unique benefits and features. For this reason, it is hugely important for you to diligently evaluate your affiliate needs before choosing the affiliate platform that best meets your requirements. Following are some of the most common and reputable affiliate marketing platforms you can choose from and the benefits they offer.

Strong Future International, SFI: Strong Future International, SFI is the largest affiliate marketing program in the world. You can join it FREE and with no obligations whatsoever. It has millions of affiliates on its program and with hundreds of thousands of quality products/services to choose from to promote. SFI is a global business available anywhere there is Internet on the planet. It offers free marketing tools and training, unique affiliate links for each affiliate, handles customer care, computes commissions and makes pay-outs monthly on or around the 10th of every month. You can start earning commissions almost immediately as soon as you join SFI.

Rakuten Marketing: This popular platform provides businesses with a wide range of tools and resources to help them launch and manage their affiliate marketing programs. It also provides its affiliates with a variety of tools and resources, including tracking, reporting, customer care and payment management. It is quite a user-friendly platform.

ShareASale: ShareASale is a very popular platform with marketers because it helps to connect businesses with affiliates. It offers a wide range of features and tools to help businesses launch and manage their affiliate marketing programs. This includes tracking, reporting, customer care and payment management tools.

Shopify: Shopify is another very popular e-commerce platform. It provides businesses with the tools they need to launch and manage an online store. The platform offers a robust affiliate program in addition. What is really unique about Shopify is that it has an extensive selection of apps. These apps allow businesses to leverage the marketing efforts of affiliates to increase sales and reach many more new customers. These unique Shopify affiliate program apps provide businesses with an easy way to manage and track their marketing efforts and sales online.

Amazon Associates: Amazon Associates is about the biggest and most well-known affiliate marketing platform online. It is uniquely designed especially for people who want to market Amazon products. The platform offers a very wide range of products to affiliates while providing the affiliates with a variety of tools and resources to help them promote Amazon products. These tools include but not limited to text links, banners, and product widgets.

ClickBank: One great feature of ClickBank is that it is one of the most popular platforms that provide businesses with a wide range of tools and resources to help them to seamlessly launch and manage their affiliate marketing programs. Its unique tools and resources available to affiliates include tracking, reporting, customer care and payment management tools.

Commission Junction (CJ): Commission Junction is yet another very popular platform that connects businesses with affiliates. It provides a wide range of tools and resources to help businesses launch and manage their affiliate marketing programs. These tools/resources include tracking, reporting, customer care and payment management tools.

Here are the Main Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Cost-Effective Marketing: Affiliate marketing is a highly cost-effective way of marketing products/services online. This is because product merchants are only expected to pay affiliates commissions only for the sales they generate. Doing this directly eliminates the need for large upfront marketing costs and greatly reduces business risks for merchants.

Enhanced and Increased Reach: Affiliate marketing allows businesses to reach a wider audience by leveraging the large audiences and marketing efforts of affiliates who themselves are independent business persons. This increased reach can lead directly to more sales and increased brand awareness.

Increased Sales: Increased awareness leads to increased sales. For this reason, affiliate marketing can help businesses increase their sales by leveraging the immense marketing efforts of affiliates. By partnering with affiliates, businesses can reach many more new customers and break into markets. This helps to increase their customer base and sales.

Passive Income Opportunities for Affiliates: Affiliate marketing is an opportunity to take some marketing actions just once and the returns from these actions continue to yield results going forward. It thus provides affiliates the good opportunity to earn passive income. Affiliates achieve this by promoting the products/services of businesses they are passionate about. Doing this allows affiliates to earn money while doing something they enjoy.

Increased Access to New Customers: Affiliate marketing provides businesses with access to many new customers. These are customers they may not have been able to reach on their own without the efforts of affiliates. By partnering with affiliates, businesses can leverage affiliate efforts to tap into new markets and reach many more new customers. This helps to directly increase their customer base and sales.

Affiliate Marketing Earning Potentials

The earning potentials of affiliate marketing are infinite. It is a performance-based business model. This means that the more efforts affiliates put in to promote products/services, the more commissions they earn. They only get paid commissions for work done. Many affiliates as a result earn just a second paycheck from affiliate marketing whereas others earn full-time income from the business. Affiliate marketing is one marketing frontier that is still growing and very rapidly too. That also affects its earning potentials.

Summary
 
If you study the foregoing closely, it is possible for you to understand and unlock the huge potentials of affiliate marketing all by yourself. By knowing what it is, its basics, how it works, its main benefits and how to earn money from it, you’ll be well on your way to unlocking its huge potentials. Knowing the most reputable affiliate marketing platforms you can choose to work with can quickly help you to unlock its potentials.

Top 8 Awesome Email Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Among digital marketers, email marketing is one of their most widely used digital marketing strategies. The reason is simple. Email is cost-efficient to use and with a very good ROI. In addition, it is typically a simple, clear, and efficient way to communicate with customers and prospective customers. You can only get these advantages from email marketing if your emails get to their recipients. On that score, there’s a lot you must do to ensure that your messages reach the right audience. It is only when they do you can expect to be able to turn your leads into customers efficiently. Therefore, to ensure your emails get to the recipients and as sent, you need the assistance of smart software and tools. These tools are designed to make your marketing easier by helping you to automate several tasks to increase your chances of success. Email marketing tools can help increase engagement with your emails and improve the chances of success with your email marketing strategies. This is why you must carefully choose the most efficient email marketing tools without sacrificing dependability and security. Online, there are numerous email marketing software solutions available for marketers to choose from. Many of these tools offer flexible capabilities/solutions that can be tailored to practically any market. Choosing the right email marketing tools for your email marketing strategy can have a significant impact on the success of your email marketing campaigns.

 

Find below some of the best email marketing tools you can choose from to boost your email marketing campaigns.

1. Mailchimp Tool

Mailchimp is a very popular email marketing platform among marketers. It is a very sophisticated platform with fantastic features like drag-and-drop email editor, email notifications, contact segmentation into subgroups, and simple analytics monitoring. Mailchimp is popular with marketers because it has a free plan that enables users to deliver up to 12,000 emails to almost 2,000 recipients regularly. It also offers premium monthly subscriptions for marketers who can afford the fees. One main advantage of Mailchimp is that it enables marketers to configure delivery times depending on time zones and geolocation-based segmentation. In addition to that, marketers can readily integrate Mailchimp with Content Management Systems like Wix and WordPress as well as eCommerce platforms like Shopify, and a variety of other platforms to increase its effectiveness.

2. Benchmark Tool

Benchmark’s email marketing tool is free and comes with a robust marketing package. Benchmark’s email solution is ideal for ambitious email marketing campaigns. This tool provides some complex capabilities like Google Analytics tracking, social network integration, and heat mapping all for free. In addition and if you so desire, you can get a convenient drag and drop builder, minimal automation, and reporting capabilities with Benchmark tool.

3. ActiveCampaign Tool

ActiveCampaign tool boasts of a CRM option and live chats in addition to email marketing. It is a great tool that marketers find helpful to find relevant prospects using tools like lead scoring. This is made possible by integrating a CRM into their marketing operations. You can also use the system to add interactive content to your emails, thereby allowing your audience to have varied experiences depending on your segmentation. ActiveCampaign’s template designer is quite user-friendly and easily adaptable. However, you must be ready to pay subscription fees to take full advantage of ActiveCampaign tool.

4. ClickFunnels Tool

ClickFunnels is an email marketing program that is built around sales and marketing funnels. With ClickFunnels software, marketers can develop an automated succession of landing pages, autoresponders, emails, and webinars. They can do all these even without needing to know how to code. ClickFunnels allows businesses to design whole sales and marketing funnels. The main advantage of this is that the tool brings together automated advertising & distribution solutions all in one place. It provides you the tools and methods to market, distribute, and send messages over the internet. A higher grade version of ClickFunnels tool requires subscription fees to put into operation. Platinum version subscribers can contact customers by focused emails, social networks, text messages, and computer notifications at any moment and from anywhere.

5. MailerLite Tool

MailerLite tool helps marketers to personalize and automate their emails to connect with their customers. MailerLite is quite unique marketing software which stands out for its clear, attractive user interface and responsive customer care. You can easily connect MailerLite to other online programs that allow you to exchange information, simplify workflows, and improve your overall user experience. The tool comes with three editors to help marketers build dynamic and engaging campaigns. If you want to create sophisticated marketing processes, MailerLite is the tool you need. With it, you can use triggers to send emails or change custom fields regularly when interacting with your customers.

6. Instapage Tool

Instapage tool includes most of the things marketers need to create and optimize high-converting landing pages. The tool is handy to provide solutions that help to reduce cost-per-click and increase return on ad expenditure. With Instapage, you can develop appropriate mobile-responsive landing pages and interactions without using a developer. The tool makes it easier to increase visitor engagement and conversion rates by creating distinctive landing page encounters for each advertisement and target audience. A major advantage of Instapage tool is that it has a unique AdMaps function feature. This feature allows you to view your ad campaigns and link ads to suitable post-click web pages all in one location.

7. ConvertKit Tool

ConvertKit is a powerful email marketing tool that is really quite suitable for expert bloggers, content writers, and digital entrepreneurs. The tool is not only powerful, it is quite simple to use. Its most distinctive aspect is that it lets marketers give content and rewards to anyone who signs up for their email newsletters. The tool has simple auto-responders that let marketers generate drip emails using its emailing platform. ConvertKit allows you to send personalized messages to your segmented audience which help to enhance conversions. The tool allows marketers to create and execute email campaigns smoothly and provides them the ability to automate tasks and create customer marketing channels. When compared to other email marketing tools on the market, ConvertKit is really affordable but you can only have access to most of its fine features though, by paid subscription only.

8. GetResponse Tool

GetResponse is a great email marketing tool which is quite suitable for small business marketing. Online marketers use it extensively to create strong, simple emails within one easy-to-use interface. You can effectively use it for landing page optimization, conversion channels, and email automation. GetResponse is also very handy if you want to customize your email subject headings using your recipients’ personal information like the recipient’s identity, birth date, and postal code. If you simply pick this while composing your email subject line, it will be applied to all the contacts you’re emailing with the help of their email IDs. You can easily make email lists with GetResponse in an incredibly simple way.

Effective Marketing Elements of eCommerce Pay-Per-Click and Social Media Advertising

It is difficult to grow your eCommerce business without effective advertising. Effective advertising helps eCommerce businesses to deepen their online presence and to reach more customers. It takes many marketing strategies and tactics to get good advertising results. You can use some of these strategies singly or in combination depending on the type of products you are marketing. If however you are able to effectively combine some of these strategies, you can achieve many of your marketing goals. Among these strategies, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising and Social Media Marketing are really quite popular with eCommerce business owners. Here is why.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one great way eCommerce business owners can deliberately and directly reach their audience. They can succeed to directly reach their audience through PPC advertising on Google, You can only do that through specific strategies that can help to boost your chances of success. Some of these strategies include:

Diligent keywords research: By using Google Keyword planner and other research tools, you can find out what keywords your potential buyers are using to search on Google for the type of products you are marketing. When you use these keywords in your marketing content, Google adds your products in the search results of such searchers.
Using Google shopping ads: Such ads are usually created for transactional keywords. The ads will display your products and their prices on the SERPs of search engines.
Using retargeting ads: Retargeting ads are very technical and effective ads. If for instance a visitor has visited some pages on your website, you can send them ads related to those pages. You can directly target a shopper who has visited a product page with the right ads for that product. Doing so makes the shoppers more receptive to your ads.
Adjusting bidding according to your goals: You can achieve better success with your bidding if you increase your ads quality score through high-relevant ads and better click-through rates. That way, your ads can show up more for your preferred keywords.
Building relevant landing pages: For best ads results, your ad copy must align with your landing page copy. That helps to improve your chances of getting more leads and conversions.

By the time you are through with executing these tactics, you can best improve your performance through A/B testing knowing fully well that there is no single ad that works for every business the same way. For this reason, you must test various ad campaign elements to know what works and how. That’s one credible way to improve your marketing performance.

Social Media Marketing

Worldwide, many people are on social media to connect with friends and to have fun. However, many social media users also follow businesses and check out information and product offers on the platforms. On social media, many eCommerce brands do provide value to their audience through content that can solve their problems. This is why eCommerce businesses focus on social media platforms where they can easily reach their ideal customers. Specifically, eCommerce businesses can effectively use social media for:

Customer care
Posting product tips
Sharing products breaking news
Displaying product use cases
Providing industry information
Featuring influencer content
Making promo/discount announcements
Directly selling products
Making new products announcements
Featuring User-Generated Content (UGC)

These days and in many business niches, you can locate influencers, experts and celebrities who have gained tremendous following on social media due to their years of excellent and outstanding performance in their chosen business niches/professions. As a result, such influencers and experts do have audiences who trust their product recommendations. Many eCommerce businesses usually take good advantage of this relationship to promote their products. What matters most for an eCommerce business owner however is to make sure the influencers they choose to market with are in their niche and they have the right audience of followers, without which marketing with such influencers will not be very effective.
 
In addition, eCommerce businesses can sell products directly out of the sites of some social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest by taking advantage of their in-house marketing tools. On social media, there are many opportunities for eCommerce business owners to promote and sell their products. Experienced online marketers never fail to take full advantage of these opportunities.

How Small Businesses Can Improve Their Social Presence

If you are a small business owner and you are not on social media, you are losing out on your social presence. With over 4.5 billion active users on social media, it is one place you cannot afford to be out of if you know what’s good for your business. Without social media, when you create a blog post, you may not be getting enough likes and comments. For someone who is keen on promoting a business, that scenario can be depressing. Communication/interaction is usually a two-way street on social media. So, if you want to create meaningful and authentic customer opportunities to interact with you, social media is where to be. It directly helps your business to increase its social following and even reach its target audience much better. That helps its social presence the more. If however you believe your social network is good enough, you can take a step back, identify and analyze the exact areas that may require more of your attention. That is quite like getting your priorities right, that is, and working a bit smarter.

If you want your small business to improve its social presence, pay more attention to the following.

Deliberately Seek to Build Relationships

All business is about human beings and being human enough in all your business dealings helps to build lasting and mutually beneficial relationships. On social media therefore, your priority should be to build relationships and not just followers. It is a huge mistake on social media to present your business without personality. People are more curious to know about the personality behind your business than what the business is promoting. When dealing with any business, people want to feel they’re dealing with fellow humans instead of unfeeling robots because they want to build relationships. Therefore, human presence on social media has become an important expectation among many followers. With photos and bios of the vital team behind your business well known on social media, it helps to enhance personalization with your social media followers. That translates to building the much-needed connection and social presence. This is why the followers who regularly interact with you and your content are by far more valuable than those who totally ignore you.

Make a Firm Commitment on Social Media

Making a firm commitment on social media may be hugely challenging but it is worth the while. Having a solid social media strategy is one way around the challenges. Explore all ways to prioritize social media in your marketing activities. You can start by choosing your platforms carefully, establishing your goals, structuring your content calendar, selecting your social media team, and automating your social media strategy as much as practicable. You must however be sure your social media strategy matches your goals then set metrics to measure your success. Jumping from one social media platform to another is not helpful. Carefully select the platforms that can directly help you to build your social media presence then work with those platforms. What should always be at the back of your mind is how to leverage these platforms to help your business with with customer retention, brand awareness, lead generation, and consequently more sales.

Choose Only Relevant Platforms

In recent years, social media has grown exponentially. The platforms together with their in-house marketing tools have managed to develop some kind of specializations. How then do you know which platform(s) to work with? That depends on relevance to your type of business particularly as they relate to your audience and business goals. This is besides the fact that their huge popularity is good for most businesses. With over 4.5 billion active users spread among the very popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and others, you have some choice options available to you. Taking a hard look at your business, your business goals and your success metrics, knowing what roles these platforms are capable of playing to help you out based on their peculiarities and in-house marketing tools, you can decide to make your choices based on their relevance. You can build your social presence much faster, if you have the right social media strategy and you are using the right social media platforms for your business.

Social Media Marketing Tips for Newbies

If you are new in digital marketing and you haven’t joined social media yet, you are missing a lot. You are missing the power of social media platforms you can effectively leverage to market your business. Social media provides excellent opportunities for marketers to build a strong online presence, build a strong brand, nurture leads/customers, share quality content, do promos as well as effectively engaging and retaining customers. What else do marketers really need online they cannot get on social media? If you are new in social media marketing, here are tested ways you can start out and get real benefits from marketing on social media particularly when you open accounts on the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

 
 
Always Create Unique and Compelling Content

Content matters a great deal on social media. If your content is unique, educational, informative and of high quality, it helps to establish a distinct personality for your account. That is what makes your business distinctively different from your competitors and your customers notice. It evolves into some unique social identity for your business. You can nurture this identity with your own unique style of posts, unique content, visuals, graphics, logos, comments, interactions and unique hashtags. Doing these things regularly and consistently helps to build a great audience of followers for your business. You can validate and amplify your USP by posting links to blogs and articles that are talking about your business, highlighting its accomplishments or promoting its news. That helps your business a great deal because third party validation is one of the cornerstones of a successful social media marketing strategy.

Make Yourself Valuable

Social media users are always online to look for value. Without providing real value, you cannot hope to build a good following fast enough. Your first major challenge should therefore be to go about building a community of followers that are organic, relevant and engaging. Expert marketers recommend that you can go about this by introducing yourself to the social media community and getting them to notice you. Follow other accounts, engage and interact with these accounts by way of intelligent, relevant and unique comments. You can deliberately comment on popular influencer accounts and offer genuine input, feedback or expertise, helping your followers find what they’re looking for online, answering their questions and meaningfully engaging with them online. If you can do these things consistently, genuinely and intelligently, more people will start to pay attention to you. That helps to build your own audience of followers pretty quickly.

Take Advantage of Social Media Tools

Every social media platform has its own unique tools to assist marketers. You can take advantage of these tools to market effectively, promote your brand, grow your online authority, schedule your posts, share your posts, and interact with like-minded marketers by joining groups and suchlike marketing activities. You can save good time to create more content if you use tools like HootSuite to link all of your social media accounts together and schedule posts to appear at per-determined times across multiple social media platforms. With the help of these scheduling tools, you can develop a calendar of the best times to post based on the audience you would like to interact with and let the scheduling tool do the rest. Doing this allows your content to be automatically posted for you without having to manually do it yourself multiple times a day thereby enabling you to have audiences in different time zones and servicing them all adequately and simultaneously.

Network with Your Connections

Even when new in social media marketing, you can leverage the power of your connections when it starts growing. You can effectively market on social media and generate sales if you are able to use the media as a great tool to create a wide global network you can dependably leverage on to market your business. It allows you to get to meet a lot of people in your industry you can relate with and do business with. To enhance this, you can purposefully create relationships with thought-leaders and people of influence that have a wide group of followers in their own right. That helps to expand your network exponentially. You can identify influencers in your business niche, reach out and collaborate with them and they will in turn reciprocate by helping to promote your brand. On Twitter, a single re-tweet from the right influencer can help your brand/content to get in front of a whole new lot of hundreds or even thousands of potential customers.

Be Genuine and Authentic with your Followers

Reputation matters a lot in social media marketing. The reason you must endeavor to be authentic and genuine at all times in the content you post. Why people respond to authentic content positively is because they always want to interact with real people and not computer bots. That way, they tend to take appreciations and acknowledgments more personal if they know it is from real people. To enhance this, never fail to acknowledge and thank members of your audience/followers for complementing, posting and sharing your content. If you endeavor to return these little favors whenever you can, it will help grow your community/followers. Your audience engagement will grow in tandem as well.

Adhere to Community Rules of Each Platform

This is hugely important. Many social media platforms take their community rules very seriously. If you breach any of these rules, you get sanctioned. Such sanctioning may include but not limited to cautioning, taking out your content, temporary suspension or outright ban. You are visited with these sanctions when for instance you use the wrong or abusive language, bullying or when you promote any prohibited merchandise like drugs and firearms. Most social media platforms can greatly enhance your business if you stick with their community rules. Opening an account on social media platforms is free of cost. All they demand from you is to strictly comply with their community rules and regulations. That in all fairness is not too much to ask when weighed against the huge benefits you derive from being on the platforms.

Blogging as an Effective Online Marketing Tool

Blogging is for everyone who has something useful to say that others will like to read. Blogging for business is now hugely popular amongst online marketers because they’ve found blogging as an effective online marketing tool. You can get these benefits too if you blog the right way. Here is what you can do.

Create a Blog: You have a choice either to create a free blog from Blogger, WordPress or some other free blogging platforms online or you invest in your own unique blog domain. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but what really matters is how to post your blogs regularly and unhindered in their visibility online and it allows you to effectively promote your products and or services as you want.

Have a Blogging Plan: A planned blog is a more effective blog. You can therefore plan out your blog topics ahead of time with clear writing and posting schedules. Your audience is always expectant and in order not to disappoint and lose their following, you must give them what they expect from you on schedule. That is where planning your blog is very essential. You must dedicate specific times to blogging and stick with the schedule. That is the best way to avoid time crush that can force you to deliver poor quality blogs and even out of schedule.

Source Topics/Ideas from Your Customers: Let’s face it, the real reason you blog is to satisfy an audience. That audience is made up of mostly customers and potential customers. Your blog is effective if you post what they want to read. The best way to know what they want to read is through FAQs from your customers. Some of these FAQs can become potential blog posts. It is such blog content that can be really informative and helpful to your readers. If you blog about issues you know your customers really care about, your blog becomes much easier and less time-consuming to write even without compromising quality.

Build an Audience for your Blog: From this audience, you can have your own contact and email list. These are very useful tools for online marketing. You can segment and market more effectively to an audience you’ve build up over time yourself. Once your blogs posts are relevant, qualitative, educational and informative enough, your audience of loyal followers will grow naturally.

Promote your Blog Content: You can take advantage of online communities to promote your blog. When a blog is not deliberately promoted, it is less effective. You can take full advantage of social media to promote your blog and grow its following. Social media posts can be the perfect vehicles to drive readers to your blog content. If you join social media groups that have an affinity to your business objectives, they can feed your blog interaction.

Outsource Blogging Responsibilities: For some people, blogging can be a very tedious exercise. If you are in this category, you can outsource your blogging responsibilities to professional/freelance bloggers at mutually agreed terms which may include but not limited to paying some fees. That takes the burden of tedious blog writing off your back and it makes it much easier to keep your blog updated with smart content and on schedule too.

Make Only Easy-To Read Posts: The big secret about blog effectiveness is that people don’t necessarily want to read.  They simply want useful information. Not many readers have the time and patience to read long and complicated articles. For this reason, a blogger must always strive to make easy to read blogs. Expert bloggers recommend the use of short paragraphs, breaking up long sentences and the use of appropriate formatting for blogs to make for easy reading and comprehension. After writing a blog post, you may choose to read it out loud yourself. That way, you can easily identify if the content doesn’t flow as expected.

Encourage Feedback from your Readers: Encouraging feedback from your readers is a great way to keep them engaged and to collect useful information for your blogging efforts. Have close relatives and friends read your blog and give useful advice how it can be improved upon particularly in terms of content and style. If you want to do exceptional work in your blog, you need to get sincere inputs from some other persons who believe in you.

Consider Guest-Blogging: For more inbound traffic, you can reach out to other marketers and reach a deal as a guest blogger. Guest blogging can help you to feed your own blog readership because when blog readers see your posts on associated websites, they follow the links to your blogs. Guest blogging helps to build your online reputation. That translates to more inbound traffic to your own blog.

Pay attention to your Industry: Paying attention to your industry is how your blog can be more useful and better noticed. Take note of what is trending in the industry and what others are saying. That way, you can craft great blogs that will make your brand to stay relevant in your marketplace. If your blog speaks with authority as some kind of expert in your industry, it gets better attention. This you can do by using your blog to react to current events in your industry, provide solutions and recommendations, and contribute to trending discussions on important industry topics. By doing so, you’ll not only be creating more content, this content will help your website to rank higher in Google SERPs. That inadvertently helps to establish your brand as a voice of authority and expertise in your industry.

Create Amazing Headlines: Yes indeed! Amazing headlines easily grab readers’ attention many of who never really get to read the full blog anyway. Marketing experts reveal that many more people habitually read headlines than read the real content. That’s why they advise that bloggers should always make the headline the most crucial piece in their content.

Share Customer Stories: Yeah, every customer always has a unique story to tell. These stories can be a treasure trove of information for more blog posts. If these stories are success stories, so much the better! Through such stories, you can seize the opportunity to celebrate these customers. This in turn will help to highlight the contribution of your business to their success stories. As an added blogging advantage, customer stories usually take less time to write since you do not have to create content out of nowhere. It is as simple as calling up your customers and asking them to share their success stories. That helps you to create happier customers in addition to getting valuable information for your blog content.

Effective eCommerce Email Marketing Tools

Digital marketers rely immensely on email marketing tools to enhance their businesses. When in search of email automation and Artificial Intelligence, AI, to boost your marketing business, you’ve got to think email enhancement tools. Many of these tools have special adaptations to eCommerce businesses making them more effective thereon. In reality, different email marketing tools have different capabilities. It is best to use the right combination of tools that help to enhance your email marketing strategy.

Here are some of such tools you can take a look at.

SparkToro Tool

What this tool does is to provide you with a platform that can help you find and identify all sources of influences your audience might be interested in. Meaning, the tool has audience intelligence capabilities. With SparkToro’s Audience Intelligence capabilities, you can have access to difficult-to-get data about your audience’s preferences. This is in terms of what they read, listen to, watch, and are generally interested in. Having access to such a database is an invaluable source of knowledge that helps you come closer to your store’s audience. Such information helps you to understand what your audience wants or might need from you. If through such research intelligence you get to know what your audience likes, it helps to increase your chances of creating engaging and compelling email content. If you do so consistently, you can manage to save valuable time, money and efforts in your marketing activities and still be able to get good results.

Mailtrap Tool

Marketers find Mailtrap tool very useful for email testing. It is a very powerful tool for email testing since you can basically use it to run your email tests and improve on the emails before they are actually sent out. By using this tool, marketers ensure their approved/final emails are near perfect. What that means is that after the testing, the emails have all the necessary elements, like a great subject line, the right text in terms of photos and graphics volume/ratio and so on are in the right proportions. That helps to make a huge difference in terms of email deliverability and marketing conversions. With billions of emails sent out daily, most marketers know very well that low-quality and spammy emails are most likely going to end up in spam folders. Mailtrap tool helps to prevent that.

Grammarly Tool

No matter what you do in terms of the visual aspect of your emails, they must be easily readable to be effective. That is where Grammarly tool comes very handy. This tool helps marketers to send clean email content with no typos and grammatical errors. Grammarly tool provides users with AI-powered writing assistance. That helps to make sure that your email content is of high quality and will thus resonate with your audience as expected. This is because when email content is well structured and mistake-free, it helps people to better focus on the content and the meaning behind it. If it does that, it makes it more likely that readers will understand what the marketing message is all about and what the marketer is actually saying. Even if you have limited vocabulary, Grammarly tool as an effective digital writing assistance tool easily provides you with vocabulary recommendations for your content. That helps you in no small measure to find the right words to express your brand’s identity and to capture the attention of your readers better.

WebFX Tool

WebFX tool is a very effective Readability Test Tool. As a great choice digital writing assistance tool, WebFX tool helps in enhancing the content of emails. It allows you to input content and test its readability at the same time. With that, you can easily create content that’s easy for your readers to read and comprehend. By creating readable and easy-to-get email content, you can significantly increase your chances of having your email subscribers engage more with your emails. If they do, chances are higher that they can get to take such desirable actions like visiting your web store more often and taking advantage of the offers you might be sharing at any point in time.

Designmodo Tool

Designmodo tool is an extremely versatile tool that offers a wide range of website and email design solutions that business owners can use to create their eCommerce websites. It is a particularly very good tool for designing beautiful and efficient newsletters that attract the attention of readers compelling them to read the newsletters. Such newsletters are very useful to marketers for audience engagement. What this means is that if you use Designmodo tool to build your email newsletters, it allows you to create responsive email content that somehow helps to boost awareness and engagement for your business.

Visme Tool

Visme tool parades very unique credentials. It is a design-software that can be used for creating all sorts of graphics, including infographics and videos. If you want to make your emails as visually compelling as possible, Visme tool is what you need. Given the fact that most people are generally better able to process visual information than text information, emails that appeal more on visuals are generally more engaging. If you want your emails to keep your audience more engaged, be sure you provide them with more interesting visual content. Visme tool is the right tool to help you out in that quest.

Finally, based on experience and recommendations from expert marketers, if you deploy these tools well enough as part of your email marketing strategy, they can help you to get the most out of email marketing as a very powerful and effective channel of communication.

Best of luck with your email marketing activities!

Creative Digital Marketing Campaign Tips for Small Businesses

If you run a small a small business online and you do not have creative digital marketing as an integral part of your marketing strategy, your business will struggle. To run your small business successfully online, promoting the business in the right and appropriate manner is imperative. You can only do so by using the right tools, the right techniques/tactics and in an appropriate manner. Doing business in virtual world is hugely competitive and if you don’t know what you are doing, you may actually be hurting your business if you are unable to promote it well with the right techniques and online tools. Here are some tips that can help you out.

 
Tip 1. Be knowledgeable about online marketing tools and techniques. It takes a good knowledge of online tools and methods of successful digital marketing to create an effective digital marketing. It is not all about creativity and originality that seems to occupy the thinking of most digital marketers. There is not one perfect marketing technique either. Every business owner keeps trying to do things that help him to get desired results. This is because there is no one-size-fits-all thing in digital marketing. What works for your business is what you do in your marketing campaigns. Fact is, there are literally hundreds of different marketing techniques which successful marketers have used and are still using. You can also try out such methods to see if they’ll help you get the results you want.

Tip 2. Integrate social media into your content. Incidentally, since the advent of social media, consumers now prefer to see social media integration into their content. If you are a business owner, before spending any money to develop content for your customers, do not ignore social media integration into the content. This is because social media allows you to easily reach out to a much larger audience made up of followers/friends built up over time. Viral sharing can also make that content reach friends of friends which can be in the region of hundreds of thousands of prospects within a short while. That is great for marketing. Business owners who are unable to properly leverage their content through social media usually find it extremely difficult to achieve their marketing goals. Before creating content therefore, be sure it is the type of content that can be leveraged through social media to reach a very wide audience of prospects in quick time.
 
Tip 3. Don’t rely exclusively on SEO. Relying exclusively on search engine optimization, SEO as a form of creative digital marketing is a great marketing mistake. Granted SEO is the type of strategy that can improve your website rankings and bring more traffic to the site but it is also capable of getting your potential customers bored with your site. Combining SEO with other website marketing techniques is a better option. This is because prospects come to your website mostly to learn or know about things through your content, not just to merely click on your ads.

Tip 4. Don't focus all your marketing efforts on optimizing keywords only. This approach may prove effective for some businesses but for others it may prove to be a huge waste of time. This is because search engines through their sensitive algorithms have a great habit of penalizing or even yanking off or removing websites that flout their strict rules. No matter how great your keyword/phrase is, if you use it excessively on your content, search engines will see it as “keyword stuffing” and your website can be penalized for that or even banned altogether. That can become a huge disaster for your marketing campaigns.

Tip 5. Trying to overly attract visitors to your website with pop-ups is a marketing mistake. This tactic may easily draw attention, but it is actually an ineffective way to draw visitors. You know why? Pop-ups are annoyingly and irritatingly slow and they tend to bug browsers. Worse still, search engines appear to hate pop-ups and they often penalize websites for using pop-up ads. Well-designed and natural looking ads are thus preferable. 

Tip 6. Do not create too much content for the sake of it. For content creation, quality rather than quantity is always the best option. You may want to create too much content to promote your business, but be careful. Even if you actually craft copious information about your products, it should not be at the detriment of quality. In content marketing, quality not quantity is king. Technically, if you overload your web pages with content, it reduces their relevance with the search engines. Users may thus perceive it as spam. The best way around that is to balance the amount of content you have with cleverly created SEO. SEO may be a huge factor in any marketing campaign but without some creativity and originality in the way you write and distribute your content, it cannot be of much help to boost your SEO results.

Tip 7. Make your website design simple but attractive. Avoid creating a website that looks like the next big design trend. Functionality is more preferable in website designs. Even though some businesses take advantage of the latest graphics software to create websites that may appear over the top in style, these sites may be functionally poor. All you need is a simple but functional website since prospects that happen on your website are there for information not entertainment. They naturally expect to find a site that is easy for them to navigate and use.

Tip 8. Creative digital marketing requires that you test your ideas before launching them. The best way to test an idea is to launch a short version of it and gauge your response. If it doesn't convert well enough, then you know that it needs more work on it to make it better. If however it converts well, you can determine whether or not you were able to tweak it properly. If your ideas don’t get tested well enough, it is difficult to determine what will work and what won’t. Being creative and implementing digital media correctly can earn good results but it takes time for tests to be carried out and perfected.

Effective Digital Marketing Tools to Manage your E-Commerce Store

Digital marketers depend on in-house digital marketing tools to manage their e-commerce stores effectively. Even if they are marketing out of popular and reputable e-commerce marketplaces where buyers and sellers come to make wholesale transactions, they need these tools to succeed. Sometimes, it is the availability of digital marketing tools they helps marketers to decide which e-commerce platform to pitch their marketing tents with. E-commerce platforms like SFI TripleClicks.com, Alibaba.com. eBay, Amazon and a host of others offer an array of digital marketing tools to help e-commerce stores connect with the right buyers and propel their sales.

Here are some of the digital marketing tools that sellers have access to on popular E-commerce marketing platforms.

Analytics Tools

You cannot succeed in digital marketing if you are unable to accurately measure your results. That is where in-house analytics tools come in very handy for sellers to measure results. With the benefits of analytics data and information, digital marketers get to understand how they can best reach their audience with effective marketing. Analytics info enables marketers to see what is working and what is not in their marketing campaigns. Exactly why, analytics have become a very huge and indispensable part of digital marketing. Popular wholesale e-commerce platforms characteristically provide powerful analytics tools to give marketers real time insights into their target markets and the performance of their online e-commerce retail stores. These analytics usually provide accurate and real time information on platform-wide trends for the larger benefit of affiliated e-commerce stores.

Ads Management Tools

Affiliated e-commerce stores can run their own paid ads for the direct benefit of their own stores. To do this effectively, even if they want to run many different ads at the same time, they can take advantage of in-house built-in advertising tools. Marketers can run ads on the platforms and the tools help their products to rank well in searches for relevant keywords. These ads management tools also help marketers to target ads based on geography and click history. Arguably, the best part about these tools is that your business can benefit from Pay-Per-Click, PPC, advertising. Meaning, you are only required to pay for ads when users actually interact with your listings through verifiable clicks.

Lead Generation Tools

In-house lead generation tools allow marketers to target offers directly to one single prospect at a time. This lead generation tactics is unique in its own right and very effective too. It is a bit different from the other digital marketing tactics in mode of operation and effectiveness. One unique lead generation tool peculiar to Alibaba.com is a Request for Quotation, RFQ feed. It is an important section of their website where B2B buyers can post their wholesale needs. Sellers can browse these requests and try to match the needs as much as they can. Matching sellers and buyers easily is always a great marketing experience and mutually beneficial to all parties.

Content Marketing Tools that Get Quick Results

Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves creating and promoting any marketing content online. Marketers use content marketing primarily to generate brand awareness, increase social media following, increase website traffic, and ultimately to generate customer leads and sales. A good content is one that is educational, engaging, informational and even entertaining. Such good content helps marketers to attract traffic, get leads and customers. Practical examples of the types of content tools used by content marketers are e-books, blogs, online courses, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, glossaries, industry news, videos, images/graphics and banners, podcasts, and webinars. Digital marketers try to capture the attention of their target customers by publishing these content tools on their business websites, promoting them through social media, through email marketing, SEO, and even paid ads.

As pointed out by experienced marketers, some of the most popular content marketing tools that get quick results are:

Video Marketing: The use of videos online is hugely popular and widespread among marketers because it gets quick results particularly when promoted on social media. Many popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram encourage video content on their platforms. Now, videos are so important on YouTube that it has become the second most popular search engine after Google. Many shoppers now use it to find information about all kinds of products. Many rely hugely on YouTube product reviews to make their buy decisions.

Blogging: This is readily the most common content marketing tool among digital marketers. A good blog content spiced with relevant keywords for SEO helps to generate organic search traffic to business websites. If you blog regularly by writing articles in your business niche with informative content, it helps to demonstrate and firmly establish your industry expertise in the eyes of your readers. Blogs are very useful content marketing tools that have proved successful for creating some impact for increasing sales revenues. This is more so for products where customers can read reviews and write comments about personal experiences through blog feedback.  

Infographics: Infographics are a form of visual content designed to educate people. They often use charts, images, numbers, and minimal text, to communicate information quickly and clearly and give an easy-to-understand overview of a topic. The reason they tend to attract readers attention better and faster at giving out very important marketing info quickly. They get good results too just like videos.

eBooks: These are a long-form content type designed to inform and educate readers. They are similar to blogs in many respects except that they give more details in espousing a subject matter as well as the expertise on the subject. On business websites, eBooks find use as token gifts to get sign ups. That way, they serve as efficient lead magnets to collect the contact details of people who sign up to download the eBooks. That helps the marketer to build up a credible and reliable prequalified email list quickly. Every sign up thus represents a potential customer if followed up with appropriate emails from the marketer.