Do you want to see your business grow in 2014?
Do you want to gain a greater understanding of what your customers and clients need so you can be the person to give it to them?
Then you need to know about these five must-have tools that will make your marketing efforts produce better results than you’ve ever had before.
Every marketing effort you make needs to be worth it.
What does worth it mean? In terms of marketing it could mean a number of things:
- You gain a new lead (somebody interested in finding out more about what you have to offer).
- You convince somebody to buy your product or service.
- You reach a wider audience and improve your chances of gaining leads.
There are many efforts that you can use to achieve these things but you need a clear picture of what your customers and clients respond to – and what they don’t respond to. The following five business and marketing tools will help you to speak to your audience in a voice that they can hear and more importantly, one that they want to hear.
So…although this is one of the most basic tools and most people know about it, it’s one of the most important.
Tool #1: Google Analytics
Of course we start with Google Analytics. This is probably one of the most well-known analytical tool around and yet people still tend not to make proper use of this incredible tool.
Why I love it : Firstly, it’s free (anything that helps to reduce overhead costs is good!). Secondly, for a free tool, it is amazingly detailed.
What it does: Google analytics helps you to measure just how well your website is doing. You can see:
- How many people come to your site (traffic)
- How long they stay there for
- What pages they like to look at the most
- Where each visitor comes from – especially great if you want to see how your guest blog posts are doing.
Why you need it: All of this information is presented to you in a way that you can see easily. If you see an area that needs help – maybe you’re not getting enough visitors for instance – then you can concentrate your efforts on tweaking your marketing plan.
If you’re not already using this tool now, then you need to start. Yesterday!
Tool #2: Clicktale
What it does: Clicktale goes above and beyond the boundaries of most analytics programs. With Clicktale, you can see what people do when they reach the internal pages of your website – down to where they take their mouse and even keystrokes.
Why you need it: This kind of information lets you find out if that expensive copywriter you hired is taking your readers around your web page as they’re supposed to. Clicktale tells you if your audience actually reads all of your pages or not. It tells you whether you’re providing useful information that they want to read.
Things you should know: It’s completely free if you need to use it for one domain but if you have multiple sites that you want to analyze, you’ll need a subscription.
This is a great tool to find out how effective individual pages and even individual text is on your site.
Tool #3: Visual Optimizer great for A/B testing
What it does: Visual Optimizer tests a number of factors for you so that you can make sure your website is performing the way you want it to. Here are just some of the features included in the program:
- A/B Testing – Are you having second thoughts about your landing page? A/B testing lets you use two different versions of your landing page, or any other page for your site and see which one performs better.
- Heatmap – The heatmap shows you at a glance which parts of your site are hot (most used) and which are cold.
- Multivariate Testing – This is similar to A/B testing but you can see how combinations of changes affect your site. For instance, you can change the headline and images or the headline and the text and see which combination works better.
Why I love it: You don’t need to be a HTML whizz or coding genius to use this analytic tool. It’s a straight-forward tool that shows you what your visitors want to see.
Tool #4: Facebook Ads
Do you need to reach more people? Facebook Ads are a great way to grow your audience and get your message heard by new prospects.
A Facebook Ad isn’t free, it will be an investment for your business. But if you’re able to create a great ad, you can increase your audience in a controlled, targeted way on the biggest social platform that there is.
Of course, the operative word here is “great”. Just because your ad is in front of people, it doesn’t mean that they will look at it. You need to make sure you create an ad that people will be interested in if you’re going to get the traffic. If you’re not sure whether or not you can do that, have a read through my tips to set up a winning Facebook ad for some advice.
Tool #5: Advanced Marketing Institute Headline Analyzer
This last little tool is super easy to use and you can see results immediately.
How it works: You enter a headline or title into the box provided at the top of the page. Next, you select the type of industry the headline is for. Then you simply click the “Submit for Analysis” button and you will get a score for the Emotional Marketing Value of the headline. This score is an indication of how much of an impact your headline will make on your audience on an emotional level.
In addition to the EMV score, the Headline Analyzer will let you know whether your headline resonates more with your customer’s intellectual, empathetic or spiritual side due to the language you use.
Why you need it: Way back in 2008 Problogger told the world that emotion needed to be present in any kind of marketing effort. The same is still true today. This is the reason that so many businesses have brands – because people buy into a brand’s story on an emotional level.
The Headline Analyzer makes sure you start your marketing content off on a highly emotional, persuasive note that will captivate your audience and get them to read on.
What Do You Think? Are you using any of these tools now? I’d love to know what you think about them or maybe you’ve got some more information to share about your must-have tools for the coming year? Use the comments box to share your knowledge.
Blessings,
Florentina
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Nice post. Absolutely, Google analytics is the best free tool around as it gives detailed information about you website visitors, you’ll hardly need anything else. These days a global dashboard with all the facilities included is the latest trend. Such softwares provide an interaction dashboard in addition to the various social and website analytics tool. Like-wise we too have our own dashboard and it really saves us a lot of time.