Marketing is transforming into an increasingly technical discipline. Especially since the advent of digital, having the ability to take a look under the proverbial hood has gone from a nice extra to a bare necessity for most marketers. Thankfully, a lot of great tools exist that help us do just this. But out of a rapidly growing number of tools, which one(s) do we choose? And is there something like a “best” tool? Let’s find out.
The answer to the second question is a simple no. There is no best tool. Only tools that work for you, and tools that don’t. So how do we figure out what tools will work for us? Well, first we establish what it is exactly that we’re trying to do. So for example, we might want to improve awareness of our products or services by doing content marketing. Next step, selecting the right content type(s) and channel(s) for our target audience.
Say we’re a a B2C lifestyle brand that sells fashionable apparel. We might want to take advantage of Instagram’s strong visual focus by posting beautiful photographs or videos that display our products in a favourable and aesthetically pleasing way. Additionally, we can drive engagement and create social proof by inviting our customers to share pictures of outfits they’ve created with our products. And at the start of each week we will repost the previous week’s best user-generated content (UGC).
To do this, we will clearly need a tool that is particularly strong at managing Instagram. But what features are we looking at? We’ll certainly need some monitoring and analytics functionality to track the UGC and to determine which pieces did best each week. We’ll also need scheduling functionality, preferably the kind that can help us determine the best posting times. It would be nice to have some built-in A/B testing tools to determine which of our own photos convert best, but we can hold off on that optimization until we’ve verified that our marketing strategy works. We also need a quick and secure way to transfer media from the freelance photographers and influencers we work with to our marketing team.
The meta toolbox
So what do we do now? We can use a search engine to try and match our functionality keywords to features, but this doesn’t always yield the desired results. What if I told you that tools exist that help you pick tools? Very meta, but true nonetheless and rather useful too.
G2Crowd is a service that provides high quality data and reviews of different software tools. It achieves this by crowdsourcing the reviews from LinkedIn-verified users, and by having a very structured format for the reviews. Users can search for tools by category, keywords, and a large number of filters can be applied to the results. The different tools that share a category can be compared using G2 Crowd’s Grid as seen below.
Growthverse provides a categoric visualisation of available tools as well as a powerful search function, which makes it easy to find and compare tools. It also provides information that is not relevant to the specifics of the tool, but that is very useful to your decision making process. For example: company headquarters, amount of social followers, founding date, number of employees, investors and amount invested, top customers, monthly unique views, and so forth.
Siftery provides an overview of which companies use which tools. You can browse by company or by tool. Each tool has a dedicated page with key stats like market share, customer numbers, Net Promotor Score (NPS), “Commonly used with, Best-In-Class awards, and category labels, as well as a succinct yet clear description of what the tool is and does. It also includes a powerful comparison tool as well as staff picks for each category.
Between these three powerful websites and their user communities, you should have the means to discover which tools will help you achieve a greater return on investment with your marketing budget and activities. When you’ve finished up with this part of the research, pick a few tools you really like and set up an appointment for a demo through their website. Be sure to prepare some scenarios relevant to your (day-to-day activities), so that you can see exactly how a certain tool would (help you) handle them. This will aid you in making the final decision.
Can’t see the forest through the trees? Get in touch with the experts at Pyramidion to discuss how we can help you take your business to the next level.
