Let’s face it — the marketing world today is one filled with ample resources and tools to help make your job as efficient and effective as possible. The rise of the internet and accompanying technologies has contributed to highly competitive marketing strategies that require any brand to be as sharp as possible in the face of the competition.
A marketing strategy is the overall game plan for how a business will reach prospective consumers and turn them into customers. Thus, it is integral to ensuring your business is successful.
Here are the facts: 75% of marketers say they currently use at least one type of marketing automation tool. This means that if you’re not part of that percentage, you are seriously doing your brand a disservice.
Read on to find out the most cutting-edge technologies available today that are guaranteed to help boost your marketing strategy and make your brand stand out among the rest.
Brand Management Software
A strong brand management system is at the core of a powerful marketing strategy. Brand management is the process of setting standards and providing guidance for anyone developing branded marketing collateral, both internally and externally.
For example, your brand strategy could include everything from your company’s mission, to key messaging, logo, brand colors, voice, etc. It paints a complete picture of your brand and how it will interact with the public and build relationships with customers.
The main objective of a brand management software is to build and protect your brand across all the channels used to reach and engage with customers, prospects, and partners. Here are some key functions:
- Protection for brand identity and integrity: Ensures your brand messaging is consistent
- Strong sales strategy development: Bring in customers with a strong sales strategy buffered by brand management software.
- One-stop-shop for all brand marketing materials: Your entire team can access brand assets and information in one place.
Digital Asset Management Software
As your business grows you will find that the amount of content that your marketing team employs will also grow, and digital asset management (DAM) software makes this job a lot easier. DAM provides a centralized location for all of your photos, videos, graphics, PDFs, and templates that can be easily shared, analyzed and repurposed by everyone on the whole team.
When utilizing digital asset management with Widen you will save employee’s time, as users can find all of the most current versions of all your company’s marketing materials in one place, without the hassle of a constant back and forth of email requests. Not only will you save time, but your company will also improve their ROI as the analytics DAM provides will let you know which of your assets are performing best.
Value Stream Technology
Value stream mapping refers to contributing to the structure of a company by visualizing the steps and real-time data to help make informed decisions. Value stream mapping can be enhanced by using powerful tools. This is important to ensure your brand is coherent and executed correctly.
Every marketing effort should have a plan. There are several value stream technologies available today that are aimed and visually guiding your brand development process from conception to execution, so you can ensure nothing falls through the cracks. This is especially useful within large companies and organizations.
Here are some important features that you should consider when choosing a value stream tool:
- Overview of information flow, including the transitional stages of request between the client and supply.
- Product flow, including stages of design, product development, test, and building.
- Time ladder which punctuates the production lead time and processing time.
- Visualizer that helps conceptualize each stage in a concrete manner that is easy to follow.
Email Automation Programs
Email marketing is integral to any marketing strategy. Studies suggest that businesses using automation software generate twice the number of leads than those using just broadcast emails.
So, what makes up the perfect email automation program? With so many different tools out there, it is important you have a strong criterion to base your search on. Here’s what you should consider:
- Advanced communication sequences
- The ability for different communication paths
- Advanced statistics, analytics, reporting metrics
- Subscriber personas
- Integration with e-commerce
Some of the best and most popular email automation programs out there include:
- Mailchimp
- Sendgrid
- Sendinblue
- Mailjet
- Drip
- ConvertKit
- Infusionsoft
Analytics Tools
When it comes time to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, there are several analytics tools available to help crunch the numbers. Reporting is integral to any marketing strategy as it helps rate the effectiveness of your efforts and you can adjust accordingly based on what works and what doesn’t.
These analytics tools should be integrated to track traffic on your website, engagements on social media, sales via online or in-store, and more. You should be able to track user behavior and get as granular as possible with who did what and when during the time they interacted with your brand. The more data mining you do, the better the picture you’ll have of your target audience, customer base, and vision for the direction of your brand.