Content creation is a great way for large and small businesses alike to share great content with their target audience. But it’s not the only way to put forth quality content! Social media marketing is a key strategy for content curation.
You may already utilize a content curation strategy, but are you doing it effectively? Strap in, and discover tips for sharing content like all the trendy influencers out there.
Customer data is crucial to many digital marketing strategies – but the collection and use of data needs to be done with care. It’s important to have a thorough understanding of data privacy and ethics when you’re collecting all this sensitive information.
Ethical data management helps you establish a good reputation in the digital age by protecting your customers’ sensitive data, but how do you develop ethical practices and appropriate safeguards?
If you’re worried about the ethical considerations of data collection or how to protect your data sets, look no further. Learn more about major ethical issues and best practices to follow when using data collection as a part of your marketing strategy.
Whether you’re a small business or a larger company, there just never seems to be enough time in the day. That doesn’t mean you should let your business’s marketing strategies fall by the wayside. Look to automation platforms instead.
Marketing automation platforms have become one of the most important tools for digital marketers, especially with the rise of AI-powered marketing tools. They allow you to create automated messages, schedule emails, and much more.
There’s a lot of repetition in marketing tasks; finding the best marketing automation software is a great, or possibly even essential, move for your business.
Marketing automation tools are perfect for saving your marketing team time. You can also keep customer data, lead management, and follow-up correspondence in one place — you can even utilize these tools for email marketing campaigns and automatically send out emails.
On top of saving yourself from repetitive tasks, marketing automation software helps you effectively leverage data and metrics, giving you a competitive advantage.
Owned by Adobe, Marketo – a multi-channel example – is the world’s largest marketing automation tool that helps marketers create, manage, and optimize campaigns, especially for businesses marketing to other businesses.
Marketo is built on the Google Cloud and pricing depends on your database. You have to talk with their sales team to find out the cost.
Salesforce (formerly Pardot) is a comprehensive marketing automation platform for both B2B and B2C businesses. Salesforce is a Cloud-based CRM tool that offers many features, including email marketing, landing pages, and social media marketing.
The platform integrates with other Salesforce products so that all your data is in one place. This American-based software also has AI capabilities to help you manage leads, opportunities, and contacts.
There are different services that Salesforce offers:
There are various pricing plans depending on what you need from your system. Customer support can be difficult, along with purchasing add-ons and a confusing interface.
Geared toward B2B marketing, Eloqua is a jam-packed marketing automation platform that helps you build, automate, and measure campaigns across all your marketing channels. It also has integrations with many apps and services.
Great for large enterprises, other features include:
A free version can be used to create campaigns using email templates in a drag-and-drop editor or by using the APIs. Packages begin at a high price point, making this tool only a viable option for larger businesses.
HubSpot is a marketing automation platform that allows you to create and send emails, set up landing pages, and track your leads. The free trial lasts 30 days, but there’s no limit on how many contacts can be added during the trial period. Whether you’re a conglomerate or a smaller business, Hubspot can accommodate your needs.
HubSpot also has free virtual classes on different aspects of marketing, like lead generation, customer behavior, social media management, and other marketing efforts.
The free plan includes all of the features of their paid plans except contact management (a maximum of 1,000 contacts) and social media monitoring. Pricing is a pain point for smaller businesses, and there are limited designs for email marketing.
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a French omnichannel email marketing platform. It offers both free and paid plans. The free plan is limited to 2,000 subscribers and 300 emails a day but comes with unlimited contacts.
Along with email marketing tools, this SaaS can also manage SMS messages and conduct A/B testing while getting real-time reporting. Some users have listed contact management as a frustration with this platform.
While they offer a free trial and plans start at $25, you can also customize your plan to fit your needs.
You can streamline your marketing, sales, and customer engagement with EngageBay CRM. It’s a marketing automation software that allows you to send personalized emails, automated emails, templates, and more. Segmentation options and drip campaigns are also available.
Integration with Xero and Zapier allows for easy third-party app usage. You can also use it on Apple, Android, and Windows devices.
Try a free demo before scouting out their packages, starting at $15 a month. While this is relatively inexpensive, you may also have to purchase other instruments, leading to additional costs.
Customer.io is a customer data and marketing automation tool that helps companies manage their customer lists. Their platform allows you to create detailed customer profiles, conduct lead scoring and A/B testing, and much more (like real-time behavior data). You can even send push notifications.
It also has a large user base with over 5,000 companies ranging from small to large businesses. Integrations include, but aren’t limited to, Slack, PayPal, Google Analytics, and Shopify.
Functionality on the mobile app and CRM integration can be challenging, taking away from the customer experience. There’s also no AI option within the software to help create content, nor a spam blocker. While there’s no free version, Customer.io has a free trial. Subscription pricing starts at $100 per month.
Constant Contact is one of the most popular marketing automation platforms for small businesses, thanks to its simple and easy-to-use features.
It has a wide range of integrations with other services, like Salesforce and Hubspot (and even social media), as well as its own CRM system. There are also email templates for each stage of the customer journey. Keep your customer lists organized by tagging them, and uploading them from Microsoft Excel, Outlook, or Salesforce.
It is important to note that if you need extensive and advanced automation, their features may not fulfill your business needs. For example, A/B testing is limited to email subject lines.
There’s no free plan, but pricing begins at $10 a month for folks just getting started and increases on services you need.
Omnisend is a marketing automation platform that helps you manage email campaigns, landing pages, and social media marketing. It’s a popular inbound marketing option for ecommerce, with integration into apps such as Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce.
The dominant traits of Omnisend are workflow automation, email marketing, and SMS marketing, and they have great customer support.
While there’s a free plan for email and SMS marketing, pay plans begin at $16 a month. If you want unlimited user accounts and emails, those are offered in the Enterprise-level planning. Templates are also limited.
ActiveCampaign is a great all-in-one marketing automation solution. Offering email marketing automation, CRM, data tracking & reporting, etc., ActiveCampaign satisfies a vast array of marketing needs.
While the price can be a dealbreaker for some, as even the lowest tier costs $29 per month, for many it is justified by the sheer scope of marketing automation features offered.
While HubSpot offers many different tools, ActiveCampaign has a lot of the same features, but at a lower price. These tools combined with an ease-of-use interface can make ActiveCampaign a favorable alternative.
MailChimp is excellent for sending newsletters and emails. It allows for audience segmentation by various criteria, offers campaign management, and you can optimize with AI. Many of its users say MailChimp is user-friendly, has great analytic capabilities, and favorable email templates.
MailChimp is good for both large and small businesses, and a free version is offered. Plans start at $13 a month after a free month.
As you can see, there are a ton of marketing automation platforms out there. Which one is the best for your business? Well, choosing your automated marketing software depends on your marketing strategy needs and goals.
If you still need help managing your marketing strategies, give us a call.
While AI was once a dream for the future, it’s now weaved into our everyday lives.
Siri is a great example of it, along with Google Assistant. You can use it for day-to-day operations like asking about the weather, but it’s also a huge asset as a marketing platform.
If you’re a marketer, you know how hard it can be to keep up with the latest trends. Nowadays, plenty of new AI marketing tools come out every day. Luckily, you have us to give you a list of the best AI marketing tools.
In today’s ever-evolving digital landscape, staying ahead of the curve means having a firm grasp on artificial intelligence (AI). What about AI in marketing? Marketing teams leverage AI by using it to run effective campaigns, gain powerful insights into customer behavior, personalize campaigns based on spending habits, and improve results.
Generative AI can even be integrated into content marketing efforts to get you a competitive advantage in an overcrowded market. Take a deep dive into different use cases for AI in marketing initiatives.
User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most influential types of content to come out of the rise of social media. Open up any social media platform, and it won’t take long for you to find examples of user-generated content in your feed. Whether it’s made by big influencers or regular people like you and me, UGC has become a huge part of social media marketing (that’s right, social media marketing is more than having a catchy hashtag).
But does that mean UGC is the right move for your business? While no one can deny UGC’s impact, that doesn’t mean it’s the best course of action for every business to build brand awareness. First, you need to understand the different forms of UGC you may find on social media.
There are a few big differences between B2C and B2B advertising strategies. For one, B2B sales cycles tend to be much longer than an average B2C purchase, and companies invested in B2B strategies tend to spend more to acquire a client because accounts often have six figures or more attached. Read more
Here at iSynergy, we’re a full-service digital marketing agency. We do SEO, creative design, ad placements, website design and hosting, among other things. In this blog, we’ll discuss a variety of industry essentials related to formulating an effective message to serve to your target audience. Read more
Online marketing typically scales up quickly with businesses making fast moves to capture audiences on every device. Marketing managers are now monitoring several campaigns at once, using a variety of tools to oversee bids and test creatives. So, on the topic of testing creative, which option works best: video or image ads? Read more
We think Pinterest is probably one of the best ways to diversify your digital marketing strategy, but knowing your audience is key to getting ahead with this visual social platform. Pinterest is home to over 150 million active accounts and over 10,000 pins. It’s one of the largest social networks, and the predominant base conducts tons of product research using images and links.
Most online stores have Pinterest as part of their social management strategy, but there are so many other possible ways to use this platform to bring in sales and traffic.
If you don’t think the lifestyle social network is worth it, Pinterest generated $300 million in revenue and continues to grow its position each year. Pinterest has also updated its ads platform so now ads now stream beside regular posts, making it difficult for users to tell what is sponsored and what is organic. This has given advertisers a bigger boost in clicks and CTR.
Did you know that 87 percent of Pinterest users have purchased a product they found on Pinterest? Most marketers set up social media ads to build awareness and acquire customers, but it takes a lot to set up product pages, landing pages, conversion tracking and so forth. Pinterest Ads work a bit differently.
You can use Pinterest advertising throughout your entire marketing funnel, whether you want to create awareness or make a sale. This is because Pinterest caters to people searching for lifestyle products, fashion, beauty, furniture, and just about every other product category.
People use Pinterest to shop and plan, so they are already looking for solutions and products that will help them. One case study on Living Royal, a socks company, showed how using promoted pins can building upon awareness. After one month of investing in promoted pins, which is Pinterest’s most basic ad format, Living Royal tracked six times the amount of referral traffic. The conversion rate for promoted pins was also 40 percent higher in comparison to other advertising channels.
Pinterest also created a visual search tool that allowed users to look for products just with photos snapped on their mobile phones. This meant that if your products matched a photo, Pinterest would suggest them to the user, and they could click on the photo and the link, as long as your business had set up a page with products and photos.
Whether you want to increase brand awareness, sell more products, launch a new line, or simply reach a new market, there are a ton of ways to use Pinterest and achieve these goals.
The main audience on Pinterest includes affluent young women of adult age who typically make more than $75,000 a year. In addition, 10 percent of the social platform’s users make more than $125,000 per year. Active pinners were also noted to have 9 percent high incomes than others.
Pinterest has been working on expanding to male interests, but the best way to see if your audience is available is by using the Pinterest for Business platform and setting up an ad to build an audience.
Most of the Pinners on the platform are under 40 years of age. About 33 percent of users are over 40 years old.
With all that said, you can still target just about any demographic or interest on Pinterest’s advertising platform. Their targeting is almost as sophisticated as Facebook – you have the capability of targeting based on location, gender, age, search terms and more. There’s a lot of flexibility when it comes to the Pinterest Ads platform.
You can also upload audience lists with phone numbers and emails. Marketers typically pull this information from your CRM and upload it to the Pinterest Ads manager as a CSV. Pinterest will match any profiles with the same email or phone number.
With the Pinterest tag, you can also track all those who clicked and abandoned a sale, which allows you to build remarketing and loyalty campaigns. The Pinterest tag allows you to track the following:
Pinterest supports custom conversion reporting, so you can see a breakdown of campaigns and how well they perform according to your conversion tracking. This is beneficial if you want to understand how different audiences respond to your campaigns, as well as what images and ad formats work best.
Want to boost your conversion rate? The experts say that images increase your conversion rates. That works well for Pinterest, where businesses and users pin, collect and share new products and ideas almost exclusively through images and links.
Pinterest released figures that showed their users spend 50 percent more on average in comparison to shopping through other social channels. They also spend 20 percent more than the users referred from non-social platforms, such as search engines. Other studies show that most Pinterest users go on the platform to research products that they plan to buy.
Based on this data, it’s safe to assume that Pinterest is a starting point for purchases online. In one case study from Ezra Firestone, the famous marketer generated almost $22,000 in revenue from just 520 sales and spending only $775.50 on Pinterest advertising.
Since Promoted Pins are shown right next to the organic content, many users click on the ads simply because of their appeal. In another study on Pinterest, it was found that 70 percent of sales from Promoted Pins were also new customers.
All of this boils down to the fact that online stores can get a lot of exposure and new business from simply promoting some of their pins. While you need to set up your pins to include high-quality images with links to the product pages, you can create endless boards and pins that connect to your site. As proven by Ezra Firestone, you also do not need that big of a budget to get a return.
Pinterest can be a very effective way to advertise certain products that would appeal to the social platform’s main userbase. Pinterest was built upon the idea that you can perform all kinds of research for products ranging from beauty and makeup to hairstyles to fashion to bohemian furniture and then some. In fact, Pinterest users are 47 percent more likely to be introduced to brand new products than users on any other social platform.
There are also a variety of formats and ways for users to interact with your pins, including:
Most companies report that they see an increase in web traffic, conversions, transactions and revenue by using Pinterest to sell products that appeal to women.
Why not conduct a small advertising test? It may even help to simply set up your Pinterest for Business account and add your products as images. If you’d like additional help or set up a consultation to see if Pinterest Ads are right for your business, contact us.