March 20, 2021// Category: Digital Marketing
Today, your online presence is more important than ever. People simply aren’t browsing brick-and-mortar stores the way they used to, and most purchases are made online.
And what are they looking at? Your content and your messaging. That’s why getting your content marketing right is key to establishing and maintaining your online presence in 2021 and beyond – and that requires unique, ultra-relevant, compelling content directly at your audience’s point of need.
It’s a lot to get right, and it can be a confusing and intimidating process. But it all ultimately boils down to five main things: your website, email, social media, online targeting, and persona personalization – and there are lots of tools to help check these boxes.
Here are the 5 most useful and underrated marketing tools you should consider in 2021.
You can’t underestimate the importance of a user-friendly, intuitive, feature-rich website – and this can often be difficult to achieve.
The Wrong Web Platform Can Cripple Your Business
There’s a lot that can go wrong with a website. From a user and customer perspective, the wrong website platform can lead to:
From a more technical perspective, the wrong hosting platform can also lead to:
That’s why the right website builder is key. If you’re a beginner or you’re looking for a foolproof option, you can’t really go wrong with WordPress. Today, around a third of websites on the internet are WordPress sites, and there’s a good reason for this: it’s free, open-source, and really customizable, and easy to use.
In fact, WordPress comes with a built-in updates management system so you can update security, plugins, and themes quickly and easily from one administrative dashboard.
Plus, it’s super customizable to meet your needs, whatever they might be. You just need to find the right “theme” for your business – which will dictate the look and functionality of your site – and you’ll be good to go.
That said, there are a few extra plug-ins and considerations that will add key functionalities and features. We recommend, in particular, that you consider:
Next thing to get right? Emails. Believe it or not, emails are one of the most effective content marketing tools you have in your toolkit. In fact, it’s estimated that, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42, and 80% of professionals link emails directly to customer acquisition and retention.
This, in large part, is simply because people like emails and they open them regularly. In fact, the average open rate for a welcome email is 82%, and a simple abandoned cart email can result in 69% more orders for a business.
In short, this is low-hanging fruit that’s easy to get right. This requires an effective, easy-to-use email automation tool.
Here, a great and less widely-known tool is Omnisend. It’s less complicated than many of the top choices out there like HubSpot and Marketo, and it provides users with pre-built templates and automation to build abandoned cart emails, welcome series, transactional emails, and more.
What’s more, the tool helps users easily segment their customers – so they’re always sending the most relevant message to the right people – and it offers SMS text options so you can reach your audience in more places. Plus, it integrates with existing tools and platforms so you’ll have a totally synced technological ecosystem.
While email is the most effective way to get in touch with the people you already know, social media is the best way to get the attention of people you don’t know so you can introduce them to your business. After all, 53% of the world’s population is on social media. By generation, that breaks down to 90.4% of Millennials, 77.5% of Generation X, and 48.2% of Baby Boomers – which means that you will find your audience online.
But it can be difficult to get right since the most effective social media messages have to be targeted, relevant and timely — and this requires a lot of background information.
A great tool like SocialPilot can help. SocialPilot is a cost-effective, straightforward, comprehensive social media scheduling tool that allows users to:
This can simplify social media management so it’s one more thing checked off your list.
If you want everything else to go right – including your social media posts, your emails, and your website content – it’s important that you always understand your personas and your keywords. In other words, who is actually interested in your business, and what search terms are they looking for that relate to your business?
Here’s a little example that illustrates why this is so important and how things can go poorly with the wrong information:
Emily is a baker who opened her business, Emily’s Neighborhood Bakes, last year. She loves the wedding industry, and she’s hoping to get a lot of business making wedding cakes, so she creates a lot of content targeting brides and newly engaged couples.
Well, Emily doesn’t realize that most of her business actually comes from families looking to offload some work for neighborhood bake sales, and she’s getting 60% less business because she’s not talking to these people or marketing all the bake sales goods she can make. This is all because she has the wrong idea of who her customer is and what information they want to hear.
It’s an overly simplistic example, perhaps, but it highlights the importance of getting your actual personas and keywords right.
For persona building, a simple tool like Make My Persona from HubSpot can help guide you through the process and create complete, accurate personas for your business.
For keyword research, a tool like BuzzSumo can help you understand what content is performing best for a certain keyword. This can help you understand, at a glance, if competitors in your industry are using particular phrases, how they’re doing it effectively, and — by extension — what you need to do to beat them.
It’s not foolproof, and it’s by no means a comprehensive keyword strategy. But it’s an easy tool that will help you understand if your targeting and your content choices are on the right track.
Final note: don’t forget to personalize.
Consumers today only want to see messages and content that are hyper-personalized to meet their needs. You can blame Amazon and retargeting tools that show you exactly what you’re looking for even when you’ve just mentioned a product in conversation (scary, but undeniably effective). That’s why personalized emails deliver 6 times higher transaction rates and why personalization is shown to decrease acquisition costs by as much as 50%.
So personalization is something you can’t forget in 2021. Luckily, all the tools we mentioned above help with personalization, so there isn’t another one to add to your list. However, it’s important that you take advantage of these personalization capabilities and never let them fall off your radar.
Follow these tips, and you’ll have more effective content marketing in 2021. Need some help? Reach out to one of our experts and learn how Off the Lip can make a difference for your business.
We have a great network of vetted local talent that we use for white label work, and we would love to talk shop over coffee.