Today everyone in the world is generating content - either brands are making it for their audience, or there is a lot of user-generated content. The content could be in any form, format, tone & emotion. Content marketing is the kind of marketing that thrives by creating valuable, consumable, shareable content and distributing it through various forms and mediums to reach to potential consumers. To Know more about Definitive Content Marketing Trends 2018. . We have created a list of top 50 tools for content marketing. We’ve also segregated them as per their essential utilities:

SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS TOOLS

• Socialbakers –Socialbakers tools are efficient to deliver data analytics and social media management tools for all sizes for marketing on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+, VK and Pinterest. This tool is useful for tracking various metrics & statistics.

• Cision – This Social intelligence tool let users monitor, analyse and engage with keywords across social media platforms which answers all questions relatd to Social media engagement. This tool also provides you with a customizable dashboard to search and analyse the sentiments in a single plate.

• Ahrefs - This SEO powerhouse runs on the largest keyword, backlink, and content indexes as of today. It has 5.4 billion keywords, crawls 4.1 million pages a minute, and finds 5 million new content topics daily! With Ahrefs, you’ll get much more up-to-the-minute SEO data than any other tool can provide.

• CrowdBooster – This tool lets you measure and optimise company's social media marketing, track your social media engagement with critical information like interactions, fan growth, and more and provide powerful analytics.

• Trendspottr – This social media tool uses real-time data to recognise trending topics across social media platforms before they potentially go viral, hence helping marketers to alter/change their content strategy efficiently.

• Simply Measured – Social analytical tool that provides the most comprehensive social media insights across channels to impact on company’s entire marketing funnel. The tool is also beneficial for those who rely heavily on detailed reports, such as a competitor comparison analysis, etc.

WEBSITE ANALYTIC TOOLS

• Alexa – It's a tool used to measure the reach of the site, boosts traffic and revenue. It is an SEO and competitor analysis tool. This web traffic tool also gives traffic data and global rankings for business websites.

• Webtrends – This tool provides analytical intelligence, including customer intelligence and behavioural segmentation, targeting and scoring, and much more. It is also used to map and optimise digital campaigns.

• Mixpanel – Mixpanel is a business analytical tool, which tracks user interactions with the web and mobile applications and provides tools for targeted communications with them. This tool contains the App test and user survey forum. Mixpanel also provides custom reports and measure user engagement and retention.

• Kissmetrics – This is an e-commerce consumer comprehensive tool that offers you the person-centric data in real time, and ties the secret project to public activity once a visitor becomes a customer. Kissmetrics combines behavioural analytics, segmentation and email campaign automation.

• Google Analytics – This tool provides Analytics Solutions for free to measure website, app, digital and offline data to gain customer insights, reports, measure the impact of social media and mobile on website traffic, measure conversion rates, other important consumer insights.

• Parse.ly – This is a web analytics and content optimisation software for online publishers. This tool allows administrators to track the performance of authors or topics, capitalise on web trends.

FUNNEL ANALYTICS TOOLS

• Squeeze CMM – This tool gives the meaningful & deep insights for content performance through content taxonomy. Also, it estimates the ROI of content, generates reports and tracks audience activity.

• Insight Squared – This tool provides Salesforce analytics solutions that enable SMBs to maximise sales and increase team productivity. Also, used for “operating system” for high-growth sales teams. It empowers sales operations leaders to help their team with analytics software for commerce, finance, marketing and support data.

• Bright Funnel – This tool gives a complete picture of marketing's impact on sales with the leading attribution and forecasting solutions for B2B marketers. Bright Funnel allows CMOs to attribute, forecast, and benchmark their demand generation efforts.

SEO ANALYTICS TOOLS

• SEM Rush –It is a competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research, it can track keywords for both paid and organic search campaigns.

• Moz – Moz offers an integrated tool for SEO, Inbound Marketing, link building, and content marketing. This application allows users to control social media, handle SEO campaigns, etc.

• BrightEdge – This is an SEO and content performance marketing platform to generate high organic traffic. It helps in creating SEO friendly content.

• GShift – This tool helps in creating a stronger Web presence with all-in-one SEO platform and reporting tools.This software improves the discoverability of your brand on search and social.
• SerpStat – This is an SEO tool used for backlinks analysis, rank tracking, keyword research, competitor analysis and site auditing. SerpStat conducts a thorough competitive analysis based on the SEO performance using domain lookup.

BLOGGING AND CMS TOOLS

• Tumblr – This tool known for its community of content creators. Tumblr is a microblogging place to host over 100mn blogs. One can subscribe it for free and directly use this through Instagram also.

• WordPress – The world’s most famous CMS and blogging software let users create custom themes, add plugins, publish content, moderate comments and most of the websites/Blogs are on WordPress. While the tool is customisable, it is a convenient one too.

• Drupal – This is an open-source CMS, powers millions of websites along with the add-on modules and designs, let companies or individuals tailor a site according to their needs.

• Contentful – This is Content Management platform, helping editors and developers oversee and serve content into mobile and web applications. Contentful is an API-first CMS tool focused on managing the structured content.

Automation Tools

• Pardot – It is a B2B marketing automation tool that helps to create more leads, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals. It is a lead management tool that lets marketers and sales people move prospects through the sales funnel.

• HubSpot – This is an integrated inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. This tool also creates personalised landing pages, emails, web pages and call to actions.

• Act-on – This is a tool of marketing automation, used mostly by medium-sized businesses. It developed an internal sales department to market the software directly to users with $74 million funding raised. The tool is a cloud-based platform which helps marketers organise campaigns, integrate marketing into sales and support systems, and measure results.

• SalesPanda – This is an inbound marketing automation software, which helps you create a robust online presence. SalesPanda also enhances traffic to your website & increases leads.

• Infusionsoft – This is an integrated sales and marketing software solution. The tool is apt for small businesses which combine CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, and payments solutions with a marketplace of apps, integrations, and partners.

• Marketo – A marketing self-regulation platform that integrates your email, social media, offline events, content, etc., also helps sales and marketing teams prioritise prospects based on demographic and behavioural criteria, measure performance of marketing campaigns.

Personalization

• Monetate – This tool provides big data insights, merchandising, e-commerce personalization, analytics, testing, and expertise that one needs to anticipate. Monetate takes a snapshot of every visitor, create multivariate tests and rules-based product recommendations.

• 40 Nuggets – This is a marketing automation tool for audience analytics. Primarily, it helps you to engage with and tailor content according to each customer.

• Average – This is a real-time web personalization solution that empowers marketers to better engage and convert website visitors without using developers. It personalises content and messages for your audience, by using information such as what they’re searching for, clicking, buying and more.
• Triblio – Create a personalised, multichannel email and web campaign in 60 seconds. Marketers can personalise messaging, content, and calls-to-action for their multichannel campaigns by persona, account and buying stage.

EMAIL MARKETING TOOLS

• iContact – This tool creates HTML emails, signup forms and sends campaigns to customer’s inboxes. The email marketing tool also tracks email campaigns. This email automation tool is useful for campaigns and list segmentations.

• Campaign Monitor – The tool makes it easy for you to create, send, and optimise your email marketing campaigns.

• RapidMail – This tool tracks reports in real time and creates awesome looking emails. RapidMail is an email newsletter software that also delivers statistics and insights needed to grow readership and subscription.

• GetResponse – This tool helps in sending email newsletters, campaigns, online surveys and follow-up autoresponders. With a simple and easy interface, the tool helps in distributing content to increase consumer engagement.

• MailChimp – Mailchimp provides marketing automation for e-commerce businesses and send automated emails, advertise and build the brand.This email marketing software helps to create a better subscriber base, automate and personalise emails.

SALES ENABLEMENT TOOLS

• Docurated – This tool maps the relationships between people and information to deliver contextual content. It helps to create presentations with repurposed content and surfaces users’ most relevant content.

• Savo – Savo provides the insightful, prescriptive platform that delivers the content to sellers within the context of each deal. It helps to benchmark users’ sales enablement process against the industry.

• Postwire – This tool creates a secret place to engage each prospect and client beyond emails, calls and meetings. Also, it enables you to edit posts and share various types of content. It manages relevant content for the sales teams that too in a single platform.

• Jive Software – This tool helps people & organisations work better together. It enables company-wide collaboration in one workspace. Jive Software empowers you to get the collateral out of the door quickly, stay organised, and enable better sales.

• SalesFusion – This tool helps in aligning marketing and sales with lead scoring, marketing automation.It is meant specifically for mid-sized B2B companies.

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT AND LISTENING TOOLS

• Tweetdeck – This tool is helpful for calculating the mentions of the brand and their hashtags, managing multiple Twitter accounts, scheduling tweets, and much more, all in a single Twitter platform.

• Hootsuite – This tool lets you manage multiple social media accounts, analyse the social media traffic, collaborate with other team members, schedule messages and tweets. One can schedule the posts on other social channels like LinkedIn and Instagram through this tool.

• Buffer – This tool helps in adding photos, articles, and videos and schedule the posts on social media accounts.

• Keyhole – This tool assists in maintaining real-time dashboard which shows the data of people who posted content with your hashtags. Also, it gives your reports on the number of Retweets and Impressions your campaign is generating.

• Sprout Social – This Social management tool lets multiple users schedule, publish and analyse social media posts across multiple platforms.

• Audiense – Audiense helps you to follow the trends on Twitter and capitalise upon them with a fully functioning Twitter listening and publishing tool.
• Social Mention – A search engine that searches for and analyses real-time aggregated content across 100+ social media platforms. Social Mention is a listing tool for Social Media mentions.

• Meltwater Buzz – Built on the Meltwater platform, the Meltwater Buzz social media SaaS combines monitoring and analytics with engagement to give users a complete lifecycle approach to social media community management.

Share with us your favorite content marketing tools and how effectively you can use them.

Content marketing is one key form of inbound marketing, where you attract customers to your company's website instead of going out in search for them. The customer attention is achieved via creating and sharing content through various formats. This can be done on any of the several social media platforms that exist in today’s online world. With the increase in awareness about the market and amount of information present online, the efficiency and results achieved via inbound marketing strategies is what is making the world take note of content marketing strategies. Traditional marketing methods are still widely used, but the greater return on investments is making people shift over to inbound marketing. Content marketing involves certain steps that achieve specific goals for the promotion of the company. In an ROI driven strategy, the focus is given on all types of content marketing strategies, to improve the overall sales and experience of the company. This, in general, it helps in improving the ROI of your company. This is one of the main reasons, why marketers in general, and even you, should go with agencies that cover all aspects of content marketing, The different types of content marketing elements: Content marketing strategies mainly adopt four major types of content, Social/Viral content: These are the content types which are created to be shared on the various social media platforms and to create a buzz. Such posts are focused on creating brand awareness and is generally focussed on getting views and attracting potential customers. Evergreen content: This is the content that is kept in the form of web pages and is search engine optimized. These pages are meant to be in the top search results for the topic that they cover, improving the reach of your company for potential customers. Link earning content: More the incoming links to your page, better is its visibility. With more links, the online presence of your company expands, bringing a larger visitor base to your site. Lead generating content: This content is created to push the interested visitors to engage with the company and experience the products or enquire about them. This type of content usually has a call-to-action button that gathers vital information like name, email id, contact number etc. of the visitor. These details can later be handed over to the sales team of the company to follow up with.

ROI:

Being ROI driven means to be careful about all the goals achievable by content marketing, for a wholesome development of the company and ultimately driving a better ROI. This implies that an agency should analyse and explore the potential of creating viral content for improving brand awareness and building instant affinity, planning an editorial calendar that pushes evergreen content to improve the searchability of your company and much more. To know more, visit here.

Strategies used by agencies:

The agencies first collect data from various sources like Google Analytics and analyze it. This data tells us about the state of brand awareness, social presence, social traffic, website traffic and other aspects of the company. This is important data for inbound marketing as these show the progress of the existing and previous marketing strategies. Based on this data, agencies can identify which aspect needs to be boosted and the most efficient method to do it. The strategies made this way will help design targeted content marketing strategies, using minimum resources and maximizing output. Wasted efforts would be minimized. These strategies include getting creatives made, creating blogs and tweets, using social media influencers, hosting online and offline events to spread the word etc. Depending on what the product is, a video or a photo or a blog is created. Collaborations with other blogs are made to widen the reach of the blogs. Hosted campaigns are also done on a similar basis with the same goals. Social media influencers are used to spread the word and share content with a large group of people to increase the share of voice. All these activities will be targeted at creating brand awareness, getting social and web traffic, keeping existing customers in the loop and while reaching to the newer potential ones. After this comes monitoring the effects of the applied content strategy on the online traffic on the company. Based on the variation in actual and desired result, the strategy is tweaked. This helps to increase the number of visitors and leads which can be used by the sales and customer care team to convert into sales, improving the ROI of the campaign. For more information refer here.

How does being ROI driven help:

Being ROI driven, one looks at the all-round improvement of the company. You will want to increase your customer base, make existing customers come back for repurchase, improve your social presence and increase brand conversations, increase visitor traffic on your company etc. This would lead to more sales and also improve your ROI. This holistic development is beneficial for the future of the company and helps your company grow in the long run.

Conclusion:

In today's era, the challenges of marketing have increased with the growth of marketing and increasing competition. Everyone is onboard with the latest marketing tricks and methods. In times like this, with the growth of inbound and content marketing, you cannot ignore the importance of inbound marketing in your strategy development process. Inbound marketing is a very organic and efficient way to attract customers who fit your typical buyer personas, without using up too much of your resources. An ROI driven content marketing agency, will not only look at the immediate, small improvements in the online presence of the company, but it will also help to look at the bigger picture, looking into the holistic development of the company. It will do it at all stages and mediums of attracting customers, right from reaching out to strangers and making them aware to converting the interested people into customers. This ensures improvement into the ROI of the campaign and overall sales of the company.

We all must have heard the term Inbound Marketing, but still, we’ll start with the definition of Inbound Marketing. Inbound Marketing is the process using the different forms of pull marketing like blogs, SEO, social media, and others to attract customer’s attention using the relevant and interactive content. Compared to outbound marketing, inbound isn’t about going out and fighting for customer’s attention. It focuses on increasing visibility and structuring a rapport for a brand online.

Inbound Marketing Methodology works in 4 Primary Steps

[caption id="attachment_5647" align="aligncenter" width="792"] Image Source: HubSpot[/caption]

#1. Attract

Every business wants to generate traffic on their sites, but what kind of traffic one wants? There is no benefit of broadcasting the messages and getting irrelevant traffic to your site. We want people who are likely to become leads and happy customers, ultimately. Using Inbound Marketing strategy, we target only the audience that is already searching the web for the relevant information by using engaging and related content in our blogs, social posts, and sites.

#2. Convert

Next step after getting the attention from readers is to turn them into potential leads by gathering their information. Getting their contact information helps companies to connect with them in a better way. To get this information from the website visitors, we need to provide something relevant to them. Providing relevant blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, etc. to customers builds a trust value with them. Different techniques like Call to actions, forms, and landing pages help in converting more visitors into leads.

#3. Close

Once converted into leads, next objective is to turn them into customers. The key here is to make use of the right tools at the right time. There are certain tools like CRM (Customer Relationship Management) that facilitates the sales process by providing the right information to us to engage correctly with customers. Personalized emails hold an important role in the process as it helps in building the direct relationship with the leads and hence, makes leads more likely to purchase your services. Also, choosing the right message is a critical factor in marketing. There are certain marketing automation tools available that lets you send the personalised messages to customers according to their previous responses.

#4. Delight

Inbound marketing is all about providing quality content to our users. Retaining a customer is as important in a business as it generate new customers. Just acquiring a client is not enough, you have to provide quality services which are beyond customer’s expectations. This builds loyalty among the customers and brings credibility to the business. It is important to know what they feel about you and what else they want to improve. A company can capture their customer’s feelings by using surveys, social monitoring, etc. to find out the areas of improvement from their valuable feedback.

By using the above-stated methodology, a company can quickly build its rapport online and attract potential business.

Inbound marketing is beneficial for businesses of every size and field. Especially, the businesses that offer B2B services can benefit immensely from inbound marketing.

Here are some advantages of inbound marketing to B2B technological companies.

• Effectiveness: According to HubSpot inbound innovator, inbound marketing is thrice as efficient as outbound marketing is. Companies are likely to get higher ROI by using inbound marketing strategies as compared to outbound marketing. If used efficiently, inbound marketing generates measurable results for any organisation.
• Pocket-friendly: A well-written blog is worth hundreds of dollars. Inbound marketing strategies use quality content that costs a lot less than the huge outbound marketing campaigns, and these blogs generate better results for companies and have a lasting impact.
• Understanding buyer’s persona: Today’s customers are smart enough to get the complete knowledge of anything they want to buy before making the purchase. Companies need to understand that consumers search for the product online and not them. Therefore, companies have to understand what customers want and then put up their content accordingly to gain the trust and bring credibility to their name. Inbound marketing focuses on creating highly customer-centric content.
• Increases sales efficiency: Inbound Marketing helps companies to automate the sales process and get more work done with minimum resources. Using these automated tools inbound reduces the chances of human error and makes the process smoother and quicker. Doing so, in turn, helps the sales team to get more leads and manage more users effectively. For more insights, click here.
• Higher Return On Investment: Using the right analytics tool, we can tap into the good prospect’s and understand the target audience better. Inbound marketing lets companies enhance their awareness using minimum resources and increase the revenue with minimum investments.

Though it sounds complicated, investing quality time is essential for professionals to understand the strategies. A company can start with researching on the appropriate keywords and analysing the trends and keywords used by people to search for the information related to the enterprise’s services.

Then, planning the content accordingly using the keywords and relevant data will help the companies get more views and readership on the web increasing their authority.

Planning the marketing campaigns according to the trends and by understanding what their customers want will help companies to increase ROI effectively.

With the changing scenarios, all we can predict is that inbound marketing is the future. And, outbound marketing has lost its zest somewhere with the increase in technological aspects of the marketing field and changing buyer behaviour. A lot of companies have already shifted to inbound marketing and started reaping the benefits. So, it’s the right time for any business to start investing their time and efforts in inbound strategies.

So, it’s the right time for any business to start investing their time and efforts in inbound strategies.

Talk to us about your business and we’ll help you uncover the path.

Whenever you have flocked to Google to search for latest marketing trends, you must have come across the term ‘Marketing Automation’. Or, you must have heard your friends and colleagues talking about it. But, what is Marketing Automation? How effective is it? And, why a business must use it or even spend their time and money to read about it? If you are a founder, director, or just a marketing professional, then you would know how hectic work can get. Continuous meetings, double checking your campaigns status, tracking the marketing and sales objective, and so on, the list seems never ending. The task is much more arduous for SME’s who can't ramify the work because of their limited resource strength. This is where marketing automation steps in. Although there is no such definition for marketing automation, we could broadly see it as the use of software to automate marketing processes like customer segmentation, customer data integration, and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes, which are otherwise performed manually, much more efficient. Marketing automation has also become an integral component of customer relationship management. Turning manual processes into digitally automated form, comes with its series of benefits. We’ve summed up the main pain-points that businesses face and explained the respective benefits as follows: [caption id="attachment_5625" align="aligncenter" width="719"] Image Source: business2community[/caption]

1. Automated Reporting

The hardest and most time-consuming part of any marketing campaign is reporting. Marketing automation tools like Marketo and HubSpot make campaign reporting component easy and effortless. To measure the effectiveness of your campaigns by tracking key metrics like content engagement and new leads generated are vital for tracking the ROI from such campaigns.

2. Personalization and customer retention

Customer retention is equally important as going out and generating new leads is. Using these automation tools, helps you get a relevant insight into customer intent and desires. With this information in hand, companies are able to deduce the customers’ needs and decisions and accommodate their behaviour to make relevant actions. Also, by using these tools companies can trigger messages and personalised content according to their audience. Recommended for You: Top 10 Tips to Retain Customers

3. Optimizing Workflows

Any inbound marketing campaign needs forms, CTAs, conversion pages and many other assets to monitor and measure the reach of their campaign. And, tracking all this manually is a tiring and lengthy task with possibilities of human errors. Automation tools automate these activities and also document them in a consumable format, making the process smoother and error free.

4. Revenue Growth

The ultimate goal of any business is to produce sustainable revenue streams and maintaining the streams as well. Though, these automation tools are not cheap, but the benefits and the monetary value they generate easily surpass the investment costs incurred by the company. According to stats, 78% of marketers have stated that automation tools have increased sales and boosted revenues for them. Further insights on the stats can be taken from here

5. Error Elimination

No matter how efficient one is, human beings can still make mistakes and errors in their business documentation. And, there is no room for error in today’s competitive world. Automation tools eliminate the need for human efforts by performing certain tasks thereby bringing efficiency to the system and negating chances of error. Depending on the budget and choice of the software, one can also manage daily tasks like budgeting and planning.

6. Building Awareness

Having an online presence is a necessity for an organisation to build an audience and no brand today wants to take chances with their reputation in the digital world. The amount of effort and time required to recognise, connect and convert the potential audience into leads is too high when done manually. Automation tools come in as a saviour as these tools allow marketers to automate such tasks and to reduce the human efforts, saving up on the time and efforts of the organisations. All these benefits are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the advantages of such marketing tools. With so many automation tools around, choosing one can be a daunting task. So, we have listed the key process for you to choose the right tool for your business.

7. Define your goals

Choosing the right tools entirely depends on what you want to achieve from your business and the growth forecast of your organisation. A company must figure out what exactly their requirements are these tools and how they want to use them.

8. Research about the tools available in the market

Choosing a software just because someone recommended it to you, is the worst business decision you can make. One must do their research before investing their hard-earned money in some tool. The need of a Technology startup may vary from the need of an independent marketer - there are options available in the market to cater different needs for automation by different classes of users. Spend time to understand your need for automation and your business goals and choose wisely accordingly.

9. Go for the free trial

The best thing about these online tools is that most of them come with a free trial. By opting for a free trial, a business manager can test the tool on its productivity and benefits it brings to the business. Usually, these trials are offered for anywhere between 10-14 days, which is a decent time to gauge the capabilities of a tool. Again, it is imperative to analyse the business need and how the automation tool will streamline/add value to the existing processes. >> Know more about Hubspot and Hubspot India Partners. Need help figuring out where to start or have any questions? Comment below!

A report from Forrester Research demonstrates how companies are allocating marketing funds between offline and online campaigns. The report perfectly answers the question of how much of a company’s marketing budget should be allocated to digital channels. In the same breath, it also answers the question as to which online or digital channels will bring the best results for a marketing team.

Some pointers from the report are as follows:

• Companies are expected to allocate 30% of their marketing budget on online campaigns in 2017. Also, that number is expected to grow to 35% in 2018.
• Social media investments hold only about 15% of the total expenditure out of the online budget but are projected to increase by a certain number in few years.

According to the recent CMO Survey, it looks like B2B firms spend somewhere about six to nine percent of their incomes on marketing, with service-oriented businesses marketing being at the lower end and product-oriented businesses at the higher end of the scale. How much a brand can afford to spend on digital marketing depends on some factors like investor funding, current profits and business objectives. However, it can be helpful to consider some marketing budget benchmarks and see how your proposed expenditure compares. Doing this will give you the assessment of whether your budget is in line with your competition and how much more investment you need. It is pivotal to note that the budget represents the total marketing investment, and not just the advertising or media expenditure. The marketing budget includes aspects like marketing teams, customer-relationship management expenses, expenses paid to agencies and other outside teams, advertising expenses, media spend, etc. Firms trying to grow market share will likely be on the high side of the budget size vs. firms planning for modest growth, which can be on the lower side. Moreover, the competitive nature of a certain marketplace will influence where a particular firm falls among the budget sizes.

Which Social Media Channels should B2B companies invest in?

The August 2016 eMarketer report brings a fresh point to this answer. This report forecasted social media penetration through 2020. Some tidbits from the report indicate that Facebook is expected to continue its reign as the supreme leader, with 90% of social media users utilising the platform’s amenities. Instagram is expected to grow, from 32% penetration to 47% by 2020. Pinterest and Twitter will continue to have comparatively low penetration, peaking at around 33% of users by 2020. Digital marketing expenditure, relatively, has consistently grown by double-digit increments year after year. This means businesses are eager to increase their marketing spend. What used to be dedicated to outbound strategies radio, television, and the newspaper is now being dedicated to searching, email, and social. Conclusion - This data indicates that Facebook and Instagram are the best channel investments. However, every company’s target market should be researched thoroughly before formulating general online or digital marketing strategies. Another eMarketer August 2016 report specified that 75% of companies expect to increase their spending on Google Adwords in the next 12 months – that’s more than any other digital channel. Facebook came in second with an expected increase of 69%, hence proving that the leader can always lose the throne. Instagram and Twitter investment increases were 41% and 21%, respectively.

Research

To know how much you need to spend on digital marketing and which social channels you should invest in, you need to understand the landscape of digital marketing in your industry. To fulfil that purpose, you must take out sufficient time to research. Before you do the required research, there are a few things to be kept in mind: Competitor Analysis - To invest in your brand’s digital marketing you need to know your competitors’ marketing budget and the largest portion of their investments. Be it online or offline, an eye on the competitors’ marketing team can help you to build your budget. Analyse which source or medium is bringing them the best results and if doing the same can help you as well. Keyword themes - Identify which keywords are in the pool of your industry and which of them can boost your brand’s organic or paid search. Also, research about their estimated bids. Social communities - Study which social channels and communities your audience frequent and analyse the costs of advertising on such platforms. Social influencers - List out all the social influencers dominant in your industry, their prices and their reputation among the potential consumer base. Costs of content - Your company can do successful digital marketing only if it has a team competent enough to do that. A team with the requisite time and experience to manage the content creation and marketing should be hired if not already. The costs to do that can hence alleviate your marketing budget.

Is your company offline or online?

Businesses who depend more heavily on the digital landscape to generate sales (e.g. an e-commerce business) invest a larger percentage of their marketing budget towards the internet rather that traditional sources of marketing. For more traditional businesses, which rely on digital and offline activity to complete the sales cycle, a healthy mix of marketing strategy is to be expected.

Conclusion

It's not a surprise that digital marketing services are growing, and it's pretty much here to stay. B2B companies are transferring their funds from outbound channels into digital marketing services to optimise results. To determine your perfect budget, assess what type of digital marketing services you want to provide to your customers, understand the complications in your sales process, and ensure you are investing adequate funds in measuring results properly. Don’t ignore the consistent and continual growth of the mobile landscape, and use these B2B budget ranges as a beginning point for the successful provision of your digital marketing service. We need to place ourselves in the shoes of our potential customers and talk in the tone that they will relate to. Platforms like Facebook can boost your business to the next level, which will simply not be the case if you choose to utilise other ineffective measures and/or platforms. So, make sure there’s enough scope in your budget to experiment with various digital marketing services, before you’re left behind by your competition.

  When working on a task, an individual often needs the input of other employees. Team collaboration is the input which can do wonders if used wisely, as it combines the efforts of the team members towards the achievement of a particular goal. Thanks to the dynamic technology which has enabled teams to collaborate in impressive ways. Technology coupled with team collaboration lets you work on a project even if team members are continents apart and gives access to them to make necessary adjustments to it with the help of google documents.

Unity lies in Team collaboration.

When the first Homosapien started doodling inside its cave, he probably had a team, suggesting that he hold the brush in a peculiar way, mix the paints in a different manner, and perhaps add animals to the painting. The majority of people find conversations with peers to be an inestimable way to polish ideas. In today’s digital age, collaboration is achieved via the digital workplace. Collaboration on Digital workplace saves time, energy. Various forms of tools used to communicate are mentioned below:

• Instant messaging
• Blogs
• Forums
• Team workspaces

Let’s understand how collaboration can lead to productivity:

• Brainstorming: when a team sits down to discuss on a topic, they contemplate on a topic and this leads to numerous ideas coming on the table from people having different perspectives.
• Motivates members: equal contribution of ideas encourages and motivates the team members and they feel associated with the company.
• Fosters creativity: team alliance opens gates for imagination, as creative people can effortlessly overcome any hurdle.
• Feeling of belongingness: coherent clusters makes each and every individual feel at home. A company can only achieve its objective if it works together and involves everybody in the decision-making process.
• Solves problem faster: no individual is equipped to handle every situation. This is where groups play their part, different individuals come together and find alternatives to overcome the problem.
• Scale: there is an old saying “two heads are better than one”. The team consists of people from different backgrounds, experiences, talents which can be used to attain company’s goals.
• Documents sharing: with the advanced technology, documents can be easily shared on various platforms available online like google drive, drop box and much more.
• Video conferencing: small and large organizations are using video conferencing for webinars, conferences, board meetings and more.
• Synergy: team collaboration promotes synergy as good synergy makes an effective team.

From the Happy Manager’s standpoint teamwork can hold up vital social networks which promote happiness and performance. Happy team members make happy customers. For instance, Hal Rosenbluth built a small, family-owned travel business into one of the largest retail travel chains in the United States. He described his initial know-how of working in the family business, observing that it seemed to be “full of unhappy people producing unhappy service and deteriorating profitability.” Rosenbluth’s own business attitude evolved from two things. Firstly, his experience of bad management. He joined the family business after leaving college at the age of 22, and “wandered around the company working for one lousy manager after another. Each added to a growing list of negative role models with whom I had come in contact over the years. Fortunately, I learned a lot from these negative role models”. Secondly, the recognition that it was his friends who came to his aid, and stayed with him, during the trying times. Source: http://the-happy-manager.com/articles/why-is-teamwork-important/ Smart Goals needs to be setup in order to accomplish goals and objectives, SMART word was coined by Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives concept. To achieve goals a person should be:

• Specific (simple, sensible, significant).
• Measurable (meaningful, motivating).
• Achievable (agreed, attainable).
• Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based).
• Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive).

SMART is an effective tool that provides the clarity, focus and motivation you need to achieve your goals. It can also improve your ability to reach them by encouraging you to define your objectives and set a completion date. SMART goals are also easy to use by anyone, anywhere, without the need for specialist tools or training. When you use SMART, you can create clear, achievable and significant goals, and develop the motivation, action plan, and support needed to achieve them. Perhaps you've always dreamed of travelling around the world, but it's never happened. Maybe you tell yourself it's because you don't have the time or the money, and you'll think about it next year. Try setting SMART goals to help make your travel plans specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. You might find that the real cause you haven't travelled is because your plans have been too vague. Think about how you can adjust your vision and put another way it as a SMART goal, so that you can make your vision come true. >>Hubspot is one of the Essential tools for SaaS Companies. Know more about Hubspot.

The industry of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) knows no boundaries of growth in today’s marketplace. Companies are leveraging their competitiveness and decision making standards with its help. Even the penurious segments of this industry are expecting a compound annual growth rate of 19.7% by 2019. Not only this, an escalation of more than 25% is expected in SaaS deployment as compared to traditional software deployment rates by 2020. Even the penurious segments of this industry are expecting a compound annual growth rate of 19.7% by 2019. Not only this, an escalation of more than 25% is expected in SaaS deployment as compared to traditional software deployment rates by 2020. Benefitting HRM, CRM, procurement solutions and collaboration softwares, SaaS enhances seamless integration and initiates time and space conservation. But with its usefulness and growth comes the potential risk of market saturation. With the positive aspects, 14% of startup failures was also indicated due to competition and inability to market or trade the products. In order to ensure that you rise above all challenges by the marketing sector, following are seven distinct aspects with respect to Key Performance Indicators, which must be considered while marketing your SaaS product:

The Saas Marketing Metrics That Matter

1. Distinguish Qualified Marketing Traffic from Customers

Any website is designed and maintained solely for the traffic. Be it educational or graphic content, the traffic is whom the website works for. Engaging unique visitors is a challenging yet routine task, but the SaaS industry has to be looked in a different manner. The Problem: Usually, most of the SaaS websites have a portal of ‘Log In or Sign Up’ for a cloud-based mechanism and solution. New visitors are taken in by comforting them to sign up and influenced to revisit by logging in. Boosting app users this way increases the drive of overall traffic but in turn may lead to capturing false data. A boosted website traffic is a result of sheer efforts, but unqualified leads may turn to a bane. The Solution: The visitor database is needed to be filtered to distinguish the qualified and potential visitors from those who’re already your customers. This will build grounds for actionable traffic KPIs and tracking accurate traffic growth.

• Identify visitors is event tracking. It is the frequency with which a visitor reaches the login screen or clicks the navigation links, or
• Segregate leads by using in-app analytics to identify log-ins and usage per month.

2. Sales Cycle Leads

Leads are the potential customers which share the interests the organization aims. They reach you after rigorous research and are more likely to get converted. Classification: Leads are classified into MQLs and SQLs according to their lifecycle stages. While Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are ardent prospects as considered by the marketing team, who’ve utilized your content multiple times or keep returning for more from your website. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are apt for direct follow-ups, as reported by the sales team since they’ve moved ahead with basic research to the evaluation of vendors. Making such distinction helps in nurturing leads according to what they desire. The marketers get direction to the kind of content with the right context. Measure your leads monthly.

3. Business Churn

A business is termed as successful when it keeps the customers content after converting them. Continuing to maintain and nurture them is important not only to serve them but also to empower them as promoters. By providing specific yet influential insights on day-to-day tracks, churning can protect your business from major differences. Usually, SaaS organizations follow annual subscriptions. But while tracking churn quarterly or monthly, identify the buyer personas of not only the customers but also of the industries. Create transparency and boost visibility within the organization with discussions on departmental, sales, marketing and customer success.

4. Lead to Customer Rate

Lead to customer ratio indicates how many leads get converted into paying customers. It reflects your performance as a marketer and helps in strategizing your lead nurturing and sales process methods. Calculation: Divide the total no. of calculated customers with the total no. of leads. Multiplying the remainder by 100 gives the sharp percentage of lead conversion. For instance: 30 customers from 300 leads gives 10% of lead-to-customer rate.

5. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) Ratio

Customer lifetime value, as the name suggests, refers to an average calculation of how much the converted leads invest in your product in their lifetime as your customer. It measures the part of net profit which specific customers contribute to, and also anticipates future relationships. Calculation: Step 1: Lifetime Rate of a Customer can be evaluated by dividing the digit 1 by your business Churn Rate. For instance, if the churn rate is calculated to be 5% (0.05), your CLR is 500 (1/0.05). Step 2: Total Revenue Per Account (TRPA) needs to be calculated by dividing the average revenue earned by the total number of converted customers. Consider your revenue to be ₹5,00,000. Divide it by 500 customers and your Average revenue per account would be ₹1,000 (₹500,000/500 = ₹1,000). Step 3: The customer lifetime value will be found out by multiplying customer lifetime by average revenue per account, here LTV would be ₹1000 * 500 =₹500,000.

6. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

CAC is a metric that computes the amount of money invested in gaining a customer, including investments of approaching as well as converting them. It evaluates the worth a customer holds. Customer acquisition is the most fundamental goal of any enterprise. With the help of CAC, strategic planning and budgeting can be initiated for profitable goal setting. Calculation: Dividing total sales and marketing expenditure with the number of new customers attained in a specified period of time calculates customer acquisition cost of that time duration. Like, spending ₹7,00,000 for getting 700 new customers on board in a month gives the CAC of ₹1,000.

7. CLV to CAC Ratio

Specially beneficial for subscription-based companies, CLV: CAC ratio shows the relationship between the lifetime value of a customer with the amount spent to attain that customer. This metric can innovate your marketing schemes, helping you manage a record of the kind of content and programs that turn successful and more profitable. Calculation: Simply compare the calculated CLV and CAC of your company. An ideal business should have CLV at least three times greater than its CAC.

• Ratio lower than 3:1 (like 1:1) indicates you’re spending more than necessary.
• Ratio higher than the ideal (like 4:1) indicates you’re conserving too low than required.

To conclude, adhering to metrics like these can facilitate improved functioning, pace and strategic marketing techniques since you’ll know your state of finance investments and spaces where you lack. >> Hubspot is one of essential tool that a SaaS company can't afford to miss. Know more about Hubspot.

With internet taking over companies’ operations, Software as a Service (SaaS) companies are witnessing a tremendous demand growth. This requirement has to be fulfilled by quintessential services to the customer’s needs. If you are a SaaS company or a client or here just because your internet wanted you to have an insight on SaaS, then you are at the right place. With startups being the new cool thing, SaaS companies are here to stay. To trail long enough, you have to turn on survival mode through inbound marketing techniques.

Here are smart inbound marketing strategies for SaaS companies

1. Google AdWords

While inbound marketing can significantly decrease your AdWords spend, thousands of people still prefer to click on search engine ads. With ads becoming notable in Google search results, you should continue to invest in PPC or else you might end up on missing out potential leads. AdWords remains pivotal for innumerable reasons. It delivers focused traffic to your website and is highly scalable, i.e you can increase or reduce your budget based on the needs of the business on any given day and time. The best strategy is to run a series of trials and see what investment generates the best ROI for your business. HubSpot has launched the Ads Add-On feature so that the companies can run the inbound and paid campaigns from within the software.

2. Co-marketing

Many SaaS businesses collaborate by running a co-marketing campaign with other firms that either complements the services offered by them or share a similar point of approach to marketing. Typically, the companies involved in co-marketing, create a piece of content, host a webinar, create an eBook or publish some research work. The leads generated and the expenditure incurred are also shared by the companies involved. Both companies have the chance to leverage each other’s followers and potentially reach a different customer base. If both firms are aligned, co-marketing can be very productive. However, it’s pivotal to ensure both firms are in agreement and understand the other's expectations from the start.

3. Build Brand Awareness

Every firm should develop their online personal brand to popularise their existence. By increasing brand awareness, you can expect your company to improve its customer retention and hence get more leads. Some key inbound marketing strategies one should include:

• Collaborating with a group of influencers whom their clients trust
• Monitor keywords of brand and industry to optimise organic results
• Consistently develop content on landing pages optimised for Google search engine

4. Establish Trust with Investors

As a startup founder, to receive funding, it is necessary to find the right investors and please them as well. To do so through inbound marketing strategies, one should -

• Create a buyer’s persona that helps you to identify your ideal customer. Knowledge of your audience will help you with your investors
• Redesign website by making a framework around the buyer’s journey, giving the investor a preview of the firm’s audience and its demands. The company’s ability to understand the same will help the investor to gain trust
• Providing content that answers their buyer persona’s central questions and hence answers the same.

5. Be active on social media

Your industry, target customers and whether you’re B2B or B2C affects your ability to utilise social media in your inbound marketing strategy. For B2C companies, depending on what your customers expand their social space on, you can incorporate any or all of the following into your plan: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. Post engaging content that goes viral, write relatable posts and just go with the trend. Choices are unlimited, and you have to make the right ones. For B2B companies, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are the holy grail. Finding and being a part of relevant discussion threads on LinkedIn, tweeting consistently, following the trend on Twitter and sharing posts on Facebook are likely to connect you with your potential audience. Best channels and practices for your company can only be found after regular analysis and engagement on social media. It is pivotal to create a social media presence, formulate your brand's voice, monitor and develop your engagement levels, conversions and clickthrough rates.

6. Speak your customer's language

Inbound marketing is an excellent tool but must ensure that the customer understands what the company is providing them. Often, marketing content has the potential to become monotonous, complicated and jargon-ridden. To avoid losing customers due to this hindrance, develop a format and language your target consumer will enjoy. Your website must be designed in such a way that the reader is not reading your content but instead is having a conversation with you. The content must be simple enough for a layperson to understand but also advanced enough to reach your target customer’s needs. Jargon-ridden content can be left out entirely, or your website must define it and tell the consumer what it means. The key is to develop the content in a way so that it addresses the demand of the customer. If he spends time on your website, make it worth it. Your customer base might be an amalgamation of marketing people, sales department, techies and the CEOs. The tone and format you use for your targeted content should focus on who you are writing it for. Their tone, manner, conversations, the publications they read and the influencers they follow on LinkedIn and Twitter; keep track of all these sources and formulate your content accordingly.

7. Nurture Qualified Leads

Website traffic and leads can be generated by sign ups, promotional offers, blog subscribers. But marketing efforts can turn futile if the leads aren’t converted. An inbound marketing software can come to your rescue if all marketing techniques do not convert your audience. Website traffic and leads can be drastically increased, integrating sales and marketing, if inbound marketing techniques are implemented according to the following methods -

• Design a plan of action after analysing the interaction of leads with website content, blog posts and email
• Integrate inbound marketing software data to provide sales departments with crisp information as to how to increase leads.

Charles Darwin might have said ‘survival of the fittest’, but in this race, it is survival of the smartest. Inbound marketing software are as smart as they come with a packaged deal for your SaaS company to give your customer the perfect master plan.

Marketing Automation in today’s business sphere is the new potential streamlining strategy in the marketplace. Be it automating complex actions, aligning workforce, increasing transparency or reducing duplication costs, marketing automation tools step ahead to streamline progress. Wise decisions are made with detailed research, brainstormed opinions and complete knowledge. Before making this impactful investment, here is a guide to five systematic approaches to be considered before adopting this marketing automation software solution.

1. Specify goals for enhanced vision

Organizational objectives are set by all companies, but setting sharp measurable goals will give you a clear direction with vision. The workforce will, therefore, align with specific targets to ensure justice to all automation practices. It will be vague to tell the employees that the tool should be used to nurture potential leads or boost return on investments. But it will be reasonable and strategically pacifying when you state the numeric targets with logical calculations; they will understand its essence and the plan. Consider the following types of programs for efficiency in performance:

• Lead Attainment: SEO, Email and Social Media Marketing
• Nurturing and Advancement: Behaviour Tracking, Lead Flow, Blogs and Landing Pages
• Smarketing: CRM integration, Tracking size of deal, Position of lead in Buyer’s Journey and Customization of MQLs and SQLs
• Marketing Cost: CTAs, Result Oriented Email Templates, Design Creatives and Content Creation for Blogs

2. Focus on Lead Management Process

• After ascertaining the kind of programs you can achieve the greatest productivity from, research for the resources that will make those programs function.
• On framing a program chart with defined steps to be followed by a lead, you can organize and standardize your flow of work. This will save time, create effective communication and offer advanced tracking.
• Next, form the right type of content for every step to orderly attract the lead. For instance: if a lead opens your website blogs and subscribes or downloads an ebook, the content can be easily framed according to the context by knowing the journey: Blogs, CTAs, Landing pages and form, eBooks, thank you page.

3. Assess your workforce

Having the right people to do the right job makes open source marketing automation more productive and less challenging. You need to evaluate your team beforehand to ensure secure and optimum utilization of the marketing automation tool.

• Analyse the requirements for staffing, training and incentive allocation.
• Get the workforce educated about buyer personas and buyer journeys.
• Ensure they’re focussing on revenues and skilled with technology.
• Sales and marketing teams must comply with each other for Smarketing.

Hold meetings and personal sessions with your workforce, enable them to know under which type of work their strengths can be nurtured and allocate responsibilities accordingly.

4. Engage in minor calculated tasks initially

A marketing automation software is diverse and takes a multitude of automation practices in the account. From reporting clicks to managing email tracking, it is designed to establish a major growth rate with small strategic steps.

• Set your team’s mind to first establish a routine with regular tasks like tracking journey and reports.
• Once it gets handy and acquainted with the software, assign major tasks like email tracking and lead nurturing.
• Marketing channels shall be incorporated once the team has begun to engage with the system and its understanding.

5. Know your audience

Your audience is a vast pool of consumers who are educated and have researched well to reach you. If you are successful in gathering their attention and give answers to their queries, they will turn from visitors to leads. Hence, your target audience needs a direction with education to build trust and loyalty in service. Analyze the type of audience you currently gather and aim at attracting the audience you need to gather. Keep researched statistics in hand and make the best use of the marketing automation software. >> Know more about Hubspot and Hubspot India Partners.

Wondering whether the money you put into the content marketing is helping the company? Is the strategy achieving what you thought it will? Are you a part of the group of people who believe you can’t gauge the results from content marketing? This article will help you understand better the methods of assessing the content marketing strategy you put into place. Analysing the content marketing strategies, by going through the individual aspects of what it entails, will help you to understand better about the content strategies and how they can be gauged.

Problems faced while following a content marketing strategy

[caption id="attachment_5372" align="aligncenter" width="719"] Image Source: Wordstream[/caption] The issue faced by many business owners/decision makers is that there is no direct measure for how efficiently their content strategy is serving the various purposes they might be using it for. It seems like a problem with no head or tail as there are many factors that affects brand awareness and engagement, lead generation and sales. These problems if not identified and rectified can lead to fall in ROI as the costs of applying content marketing strategies to business practices isn’t cheap. It requires a planner, a content creator, and then people to analyse the data for every goal you want to achieve. For such problems, we have tools like Google Analytics which helps us to understand what factor affected the company in what way and when. After getting this data from these tools, it is a step-by-step process of analysing the individual factors. And then we can figure out what’s working in favour of company’s growth and what requires modification. This forms the basis on which we measure the effectiveness of any content marketing strategy.

Major benefits of Content Marketing

[caption id="attachment_5374" align="aligncenter" width="719"] Image Source: Contentmart[/caption] Content marketing has several benefits and is certainly evolved as bigger reckoning force than what meets the eye. A good content marketing strategy not only helps you to build better brand awareness and affinity, but it also helps bridge the gaps between you and the relevant stakeholders for your brand. A unique proposition that content marketing provides is the fact that you can devise content in various formats, which can be further targeted to different audiences over the several mediums available today. By doing so, a brand can make sure that its content gets read, shared or liked by unique set of customers time to time. Another benefit that content marketing provides is the longevity aspect. Brands can produce timeless content to get repetitive customers over time by following the best SEO practices. This increases the readership of your content which in turn helps in generating leads. [caption id="attachment_5377" align="aligncenter" width="719"] Image Source: Contentmart[/caption] Another benefit that content marketing brings to the table is of establishing authority. They say content is king, and good content is shared. However, if everyone is looking up to your piece of content, then it consolidates your position as the ultimate authority on that niche/product category. Another aspect to note here is the social measurement, which helps you to gauge the readership of your content. Social engagement is derived from accumulating the total number of engagement (likes, shares, video views, comments etc.), which further indicates the number of people talking about your content. The more people talking about your content, the more it trends and spreads in viewership. Content marketing is also successful in rolling out a specific call-to-action act. If your content is relatable and relevant, it would successfully entice consumers to share valuable data points like their contact number, or email ids. This, in turn, can help your sales team to follow up with the interested audience over a call/email and dole out interesting offers. Alternatively, this helps to build up website hits and duration of stay on the website. This is the lead generation measurement, i.e. how many viewers were converted into leads. Lastly, great content also helps in customer retention. As these are the people who will get the new viewers to see the content and go through the entire process. This can only happen if the existing customers are happy and are willing to consider a repurchase. For further information on collecting the data refer to this article

The main takeaways from the content strategy

[caption id="attachment_5375" align="aligncenter" width="719"] Image Source: Licdn[/caption] If you had set up your content marketing strategy to get more brand awareness, then the main things you will have to look at is the consumption measurement and the shares measurement to get people talking about your brand or company. This will get the conversation going for whatever you had planned for the future after the execution of your content strategy. If the goal set was to increase brand engagement, the shares measurement will form an important part of your evaluation as brand engagement would entail comments, likes, shares, mentions and inbound links from other blogs/websites. With lead generation as your main goal, the lead generation measurement is what will give you an idea about how successful the strategy was. This will take into consideration the forms filled, the number of visitors on the website, the sections visited by the visitors. More the traffic more is the number of leads generated for your company to target. With a sales-oriented strategy, a lot more factors like ROI are taken into account to see if there is any profit from the strategy. If not, you will know at which stage the campaign fails and will be able to tweak your strategy to get a positive ROI and be successful with your content marketing strategy. For a goal of customer retention, you can check the sales for the number of renewal rates by existing customers to see what size of your existing customer base is loyal to your brand and you can target them to become advocates of your company.

Conclusion:

Through this process, we saw that, though a daunting task, the analysis process of breaking down the multiple factors that affect a company and its online presence, into simple cause and effect relations helps you understand the online presence of your company and its ups and downs. Through the knowledge gained by understanding the causes and effects, we can design content marketing campaigns based around what is desired for the company - be it creating awareness, engaging with the target audience, attracting leads, selling the product or retaining the customer base. These strategies can be reapplied to tweak these offers over time to get the positive results desired. With the plethora of social media outlets where the audiences lie, this analysis is an important part of understanding what content is best suited for what audience on the various different media outlets. Are you interested in engaging and converting new customers for your business? let’s talk about how we can help.