5 Essential Tools for Taking Charge of Inbound Marketing Campaign and Making it Work

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If you are using inbound marketing for marketing your business, you are on the right track. According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing Report nearly 60% of marketers adopted inbound marketing strategies to move potential buyers through their sales funnel.

Rather than using painfully prohibitive outbound strategies to generate leads, why not transform your marketing to ensure your business gets found by people who either are already buying products/services related to your business domain or planning to buy them.

Inbound marketing is definitely a great idea. It costs less than outbound and can help your business improve sales without jacking up the overheads. If done right, inbound is a winner all the way, but if you get it wrong, you might lose more than just your customers; you can lose your reputation, authority and credibility.

What this means is you need a handle on your inbound marketing campaign at all times; you must know what you are doing right, your missteps and make sure you are making all its subsets like social media marketing, content marketing etc. work for your brand.
This can only happen if you use the right tools.

Here are five of my favorite tools that I believe will help you manage your inbound marketing campaign and ensure it’s headed in the right direction.

Hootsuite1

According to a Social Media Examiner Marketing Industry Report, a mammoth 97% of the marketers who were surveyed said they were using social media marketing. If you’re one of them, it’s imperative that you are able to optimize the use of social media.

Sometimes, even the biggest businesses get their social media campaigns wrong. An inability to manage and measure their performance on various social networks is one of the important reasons why businesses fail to capitalize on social media.

This is where a tool like Hootsuite enters the picture.

Hootsuite helps you handle one of the biggest challenges of inbound marketing – Leveraging the potential of your social media presence to the fullest. Businesses today have a presence on multiple networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ etc. and it’s difficult to keep track of everything that is happening on them, much less measure your performance on them.

Hootsuite is a social media dashboard that makes life really very simple for social media marketers. You can monitor multiple social media accounts across diverse networks from the Hootsuite dashboard. You can track specific campaigns, manage daily community building, pre-schedule messages that can be shared with your community at specific times, and measure the success of social media campaigns with built in social media analytics.

If you are serious about using social media as a part of your inbound marketing strategy, Hootsuite is definitely a tool you must use.

Buffer2

61% of marketers (North American marketing professionals) are using social media tools; this means these tools are doing something right. One such comprehensive tool is Buffer.

It helps you manage and organize your social media sharing. It’s just updated ‘Buffer for Business’, its paid product aimed specifically at small, medium and large businesses who want to make the most of their social media presence.

So what does Buffer do?

All you need to do is fill the Buffer app with all the content you need to share in a day and Buffer will automatically post it for you at the pre-designated intervals. So you don’t really have to worry about missing out on sharing a post at a particular time of the day. You also get the benefit of knowing how well your individual posts are doing and can track follower growth.

The question is – should you pick Hootsuite or Buffer? While some may think these are tools with similar features, with Hootsuite beating Buffer on the ‘comprehensiveness’ scale, the truth is you’ll do well to use both. While Buffer is a great scheduling tool, Hootsuite is a management tool. So it makes sense to have both in your armory.

Cyfe3

While Hootsuite and Buffer are social media tools, think of Cyfe as your definitive inbound marketing tool that help you keep track of your inbound activities from a single dashboard. As an inbound marketer you will soon realize how difficult it is to keep track of all the data that is scattered across diverse online services. So, how do you keep track of your data from Google Analytics, AdSense, Facebook, Pinterest, SalesForce etc. conveniently and in a manner that helps you make sense of all this data?

The answer lies in Cyfe.

What’s more, you can keep track of multiple Google Analytics accounts with this dashboard tool. How cool is that? It offers you 80 different widgets reporting on all the metrics that are important for your business. What it also helps you do is pull up your different services data and compare them side by side. So you can compare your Google AdWords data with your AdSense data, or compare the stats of two of your blogs, one on WordPress and the other on Blogger, and this can happen in real time.

And finally, you can create reports based on the widgets you choose; these reports are available in PDF format, which means they are convenient to read and understand. Why not sign-up for Cyfe (it’s free) and evaluate what it bring to the table. If you think it’s worth it, you can sign up for its premium plan.

Google AdWords-Keyword Planner4

All search engine marketers are familiar with Google Keywords Planner, but it also plays a critical role in content marketing. Use it as an ideation tool for your content. The idea is to use this tool to identify the popular keywords relevant to your brand and creating content around these keywords. This will not only bring more traffic to your site but also ensure your content delivers more value to your audience.

According to a B2B Content Marketing 2014 Report, 93% use content marketing; according to a B2B Small Business Content Marketing Report, 64% B2B content marketers say developing interesting and engaging content is a big hurdle. The use of the Keyword Planner tool will help get rid of this hurdle in part by helping your identify the topics that your audience will be interested in going through.

By entering the most common word associated with your brand purpose, you will get a list of related keywords. You can sift through these keywords, and choose to create content around the ones that are relevant to your brand. The fact that people are searching with these keywords means there is more chance of this content being read. This essentially improves the effectiveness of your content strategy.

comScore5

comScore offers a list of products that offer deeper insights into the kind of content that will engage your target audience most. You need to pick a tool that will suit your needs and requirements. For e.g. qSearch helps you capture search behavior that happens all across the web. This data is not limited to search engines but includes sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and eBay. You can also track the search behavior of your customers across channels like maps, video searches, image searches; this will help you zero in on the right content and the right channels (social or otherwise) that will help you engage better with your customers.

The tools offered by comScore are aimed at creating a more results driven inbound marketing campaign by getting access to better consumer insights.

To Conclude

Tools are a great way of simplifying your inbound efforts. They also help maximize returns. Also, your inbound ROI doesn’t remain ambiguous if you are able to track the performance of all your activities. All in all it’s a win-win situation for you if your inbound marketing is backed by the right tools.

Lori Wagoner
Lori Wagoner is a marketing researcher and strategist who works with small businesses and organizations to help them gain online visibility. Feel free to strike up a conversation on Twitter @loridwagoner.

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