Latest Archives - RazorSocial https://www.razorsocial.com/category/latest/ Independent Digital Marketing Auditing, Training and Project Management Mon, 27 Feb 2023 11:12:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 https://www.razorsocial.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/favicon.png Latest Archives - RazorSocial https://www.razorsocial.com/category/latest/ 32 32 17 Practical Uses of ChatGPT for Marketing https://www.razorsocial.com/chatgpt-for-marketing/ Mon, 27 Feb 2023 11:12:29 +0000 https://www.razorsocial.com/?p=25596 Looking for some very practical and easy to follow ways to use ChatGPT to help with your Marketing? Unless you’ve been living under a stone for a while you must have heard of ChatGPT…. When you type in something into Google you get a list of links which has information that will help with what […]

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Looking for some very practical and easy to follow ways to use ChatGPT to help with your Marketing?

Practical uses of ChatGPT

Unless you’ve been living under a stone for a while you must have heard of ChatGPT….

When you type in something into Google you get a list of links which has information that will help with what you are looking for.

With ChatGPT you can ask a question and get the answer or ask it to do something (e.g. write a poem).

This is really smart use of Artificial Intelligence and this is going to stimulate huge demand for AI.

If you look at Google trends this shows the searches for ‘AI’ over the last 5 years. You can see that for a few years there was not much increase in searches but over the last year it’s started to grow. The big spike is when ChatGPT was released.

You will see these searches dramatically increase over the next few years.

Yes we’re on to something that is going to be huge!!!!

But don’t get too carried away…

ChatGPT has a lot of limitations…

  • It’s not always accurate
  • It’s not the most up to date
  • It helps more than replaces

But it is extremely useful and very exciting to watch it’s development and many other similar tools that will be publicly available.

Practical uses of the ChatGPT tool for Marketing

So lets going through some practical uses of ChatGPT for Marketing:

1. Help create content

If you think that this tool is going to magically create great content for you without any intervention then you are setting your standards low and your content will be average at best.

There will be many issues including the quality of content, lack of original thoughts and it not representing your voice.

But it is a very useful to support your content creation.

For example, if I was writing a post about image optimisation I’d ask the tool to give me some information and this gives me a head start with some ideas. Here’s part of the result:

There’s one thing for sure….. there’s going to be very little new content on the web in the future that did not have some AI tool helping.

Note: The following was shared by Kieran Flanagan (CMO of Zapier).

2. Improve Customer Service

There’s a lot of Chatbots out there that get stuck with basic questions.

ChatGPT is going to provide a more helpful customer service tool that will provide better answers to customers and thus…

  • Reduce the number of people required to deal with customer service issues
  • Reduce time to respond to customer requests
  • Get better as it learns

3. Creating Ad copy

It’s ok creating a couple of ads but what about when you need to create hundreds of variations of ads…

…yawn…….

…yes ChatGPT can take the yawn out of this.

Here’s original ad copy:

And here’s some suggested alternatives that would be worth split testing:

4. Find issues in code

Maybe there’s not that many Marketers that code out there.

But…there are more and more tools that can produce code (including ChatGPT).

The challenge is finding issues in the code and ChatGPT can do this.

Here’s an example of some text I have in this article. The replacement text probably reads better but doesn’t read like I wrote it so I wouldn’t use it. I’m not the best at producing gramatically perfect content but that’s not why people read my posts!

5. A research tool

It’s a fantastic research tool where you can quickly research lots of different areas.

If you’re writing a post about podcasting you could ask questions such as:

  • What are the best tools for podcasting
  • Who are the top influencers in podcasting
  • What are the most important things to know about podcasting

6. Support PR campaigns

There are many potential uses in this area, for example:

  • Find relevant Journalists to pitch to
  • Create copy relevant to the Journalist for outreach
  • Analyze Journalist content to find out what interests them

7. Generating email copy

Creating email copy can be very time consuming. It would be great to get help!

  • Onboarding sequences
  • Email outreach campaigns
  • Email funnel sequences
  • Automated responses which is based on the email from clients

Lots of potential uses.

8. Improve existing content

You can paste in an existing piece of content into ChatGPT and ask it to improve it.

And it’s pretty good!!!

9. Transcription and Summarising

Paul Roetzer (founder of Marketing AI institute) shared this idea on Linkedin and I thought it was a good one!

Someone on LinkedIn said that their updates were too long on LinkedIn.

Paul suggested to record a video, get ChatGPT to transcribe and then summarise the transcription.

You could then ask ChatGPT to create Tweets, Facebook updates etc for the transcription.

Very handy!

10. Generating Social Media copy

What percentage of people see the tweet you share?

The engagement rate is the percentage of people that see your tweet compared to engaging with it:

Here’s how you could rate your engagement rates:

So you have to share a lot of tweets multiple times and it’s a pain coming up with different variations of the same Tweet so you can use ChatGPT to come up with those variations.

Of course this can apply to other platforms also.

11. Helping with your SEO

Building your website/page authority to drive more traffic is time consuming. ChatGPT won’t replace the SEO person but it will help speed up the process.

A). Here’s 3 examples Pete O’Connor from Bullet Accounting (great Accounting package) shared with me this video of a Chrome extension which uses ChatGPT for SEO. It’s pretty good….

ChatGPT Chrome Extension

This can help with:

  • Find best place to add links to an article
  • Help identify keywords to target
  • Compare with other top ranking articles and find suggestions for improving ranking of yours
  • Generate meta title and descriptions for pages
  • Generate a list of popular/relevant websites to reach out to (e.g. link building)

Check out the ultimate FAQ for SEO Marketers for ChatGPT

12. Analyse and extract relevant information from reviews

If your business (or your clients business) gets regular reviews online you can paste all of the reviews into the tool and get it to analyse. You can also get it to create a word cloud where it picks out what people are typically saving about the business.

I copied in reviews for a lively Hotel in the City Centre of Dublin in a location suitable for young people. It figured this out based on the reviews!!

“Overall, it seems like a solid choice for younger guests or those looking for a fun, vibrant location in the city”

13. Creating Powerpoint presentations!

I’m speaking at an awesome travel conference called TBEX in Greece. I know…it’s a tough life!!!

My topic is about getting more from your website. I asked ChatGPT to list out the slides/content for the slides and it certainly gives you some good ideas for structure and content. When you have brain freeze this kicks things off for you again. Here’s an example:

14. Getting a useful opinion

I’m thinking of changing our company name ‘RazorSocial’ and wanted an opinion on the names that I came up with. This was really useful and gave me some great ideas.

So just bouncing some marketing ideas off ChatGPT is definitely useful.

15. Steps required to build a Digital Marketing strategy

Imagine you wanted a digital marketing strategy for a company that provides adventure activities in Ireland. The company focusses on corporates, young people looking for activities and families. When you type this into ChatGPT you’ll get a structure you can follow which is really useful.

16. Help with Marketing Hires

Creating job specifications is time consuming. You’ll save about 80% of your time using ChatGPT. Here’s a job spec created for an experience Account Manager.

ChatGPT for Marketing job specifications

17. Find out what you’re doing wrong

Tell ChatGPT all you are doing and ask them for feedback.

For example, you are running an event and you’re promoting across social media, email your website etc. ChatGPT will help you identify your gaps.

Summary

There is nothing in this post that ChatGPT does perfectly.

It’s a very useful assistant but doesn’t replace your level of skill and knowledge.

And it will definitely save you a lot of time!

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Looking to Bridge the Gap Between Marketing and Technology? https://www.razorsocial.com/looking-to-bridge-the-gap-between-marketing-and-technology/ Tue, 05 Mar 2019 16:59:11 +0000 https://www.razorsocial.com/?p=22225 Marketing has become an increasingly technology-powered discipline and with the ever-increasing demands for technical knowledge, there’s often a knowledge gap between marketing and technology. We want to help bridge that gap. We have just relaunched our website, services and branding to reflect our new focus! Same direction -> New Route! There is big demand on […]

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Marketing has become an increasingly technology-powered discipline and with the ever-increasing demands for technical knowledge, there’s often a knowledge gap between marketing and technology.

We want to help bridge that gap.

We have just relaunched our website, services and branding to reflect our new focus!

Same direction -> New Route!

There is big demand on Marketers on having such a broad range of skills for digital marketing and this is challenging.

Especially as marketers don’t come from a technical background!

Look:

The amount of money spent on marketing tech in the US is going up every year.

As you can see from the following table it shows that the spend on technologies such as marketing automation, advertising tech, and data & analytics is going up year on year, and that trend is set to continue.

According to Scott Brinkers annual marketing tools report there are nearly 7,000 marketing tools alone!

So, it’s reasonable to think that the level of technical skills required to implement and use the technology is growing too.

However, this is a challenge for many marketers because it’s very hard to be really skilled at both ends of the spectrum, for example:

  • Building a creative campaign
  • Going deep with analytics

“The marketing skills gap is widening. Not because there aren’t amazingly talented marketers out there but rather because the landscape of marketing technology is shifting that fast”

Michael Brenner – Marketing Insider Group

RazorSocial helps bridge that gap

We initially launched RazorSocial as a blog focused on social media tools.  
Due to the quality of our content and our technical knowledge around content optimization, SEO and effective content distribution, our site grew quite quickly.

But after a while I got a bit bored only talking about social media tools, and since content marketing was always an area I was passionate about we started shifting our focus and our articles in this direction.

Now we’ve decided to broaden out the content we cover on RazorSocial and focus on all areas of digital marketing where there is a technical gap for marketers.

Here’s the type of topics you’ll see from us going forward:

  • Tool reviews – We can’t forget out roots and since tools are such an effective and essential part to any marketers arsenal we will continue to review tools that we believe will save you time, streamline your processes and generate you more revenue!
  • Managing technical projects – we are all faced with managing challenging technical projects at one time or another. Whether it’s rolling out a new website, building a chatbot or integrating your tools to make your business run more effectively, we’ll identify all the areas you need to be concerned with.
  • Future technologies – we all want to stay ahead of the curve so we have to keep our eyes on technologies that may not be having an impact on us yet, but that may do in the near future. For example, the use of artificial intelligence in marketing is a big area with huge potential.
  • Optimizing digital marketing –  Content marketing has a strong creative element but it also has a very strong technical side to it.  You need to understand SEO, email nurture sequences, link building, outbound marketing, and more. This is just one area of digital marketing where technology plays a vital role but we will also talk about any other areas of digital marketing where we can use technical skills or technology to improve our results.

Our new website and services

We’ve decided to launch a new website, an updated content strategy and a new set of services!

Here’s our services:

Marketing Tech Support

Need help managing the implementation of new marketing applications, evaluating new tools or supporting your team with tech skills? Boost the efficiency of your marketing team with marketing technology!  

Content & Conversion

The technical side to content marketing is just as important as the creative side. Drive more traffic and conversion from your existing and new content. Get a content audit, full content strategy, or outsource your content marketing to us and achieve better results.

Management & Analytics

Too much data, too little insight? We’ll set up, manage, and report on key data for your business – social media monitoring, web analytics, and lead generation funnels. Improve the results of all your digital marketing activities with the right data and insights.

Thank you for your continued support and I hope that you will join us on our journey.

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44 Marketing Tools to Consider for 2019 https://www.razorsocial.com/marketing-tools-toolbox/ https://www.razorsocial.com/marketing-tools-toolbox/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2018 09:00:39 +0000 https://razorsocial.com/?p=16537 What are the hottest digital marketing tools you should be using in 2019? As we test out a lot of online marketing tools, we are going to share the ones we use on a regular basis. This may not be the definitive list of all the best digital marketing tools out there, but it is […]

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Digital Marketing ToolsWhat are the hottest digital marketing tools you should be using in 2019?

As we test out a lot of online marketing tools, we are going to share the ones we use on a regular basis. This may not be the definitive list of all the best digital marketing tools out there, but it is the contents of our well-equipped toolbox, and it’s definitely worth your consideration.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a big growth area and if you haven’t invested in a tool now is the time to do so. Let’s look at some numbers.

By 2025 the market for marketing automation software is predicted to reach 7.63 billion. It can streamline a lot of key marketing functions, and it’s proving itself as a great revenue driver for companies large and small

Many marketers choose to invest in MA because it gives them the ability to generate more and better quality leads. Research shows that companies that use these tools generate leads have a 53% higher conversion rate on average. And this is just one of the many areas where marketing automation can super-charge your results.  MA impacts everything from social media advertising to how companies promote discount offers

We use Ontraport for most of our marketing automation needs. We also like to use Zapier which links hundreds of apps and helps us automate repetitive tasks.

Ontraport

Ontraport is a powerful email marketing automation platform.  It’s not cheap so it’s only really useful if you have the potential of generating revenue online.  You can build quite advanced marketing automation email sequences that can be very beneficial to generate more sales for your business.

When you want to build up campaigns for sending emails, triggering events etc you can use their campaign builder tool which is easy to use.

Campaign Builder
Build all your campaigns through this graphical interface

As well as building all the emails and automating the sequences you can also set up the sales pages and collect the money!  It integrates with platforms such as Stripe for payments.

The user interface is not perfect and the product is slow to use but it does have some great functionality and it’s been really reliable for us.

Getresponse

Getresponse is an email marketing tool but also includes support for landing pages and webinars.  It’s great to get the webinar functionality included as part of the standard pricing.

Ontraport provides a more expensive solution and can cater for really advanced marketing automation but if you want something that is still powerful, simple to use and less expensive Getresponse is a great alternative.

Their Autofunnel feature is awesome.

autofunnel

You can set up everything you need for all stages of a sales funnel with this feature.  This includes setting up:

  • Optin page (using templates) to build email subscribers
  • Creating email sequences
  • Sales page (using templates)
  • Checkout page – It automatically integrates with payment providers such as Stripe and Paypal.
  • Split testing all of the above!
  • Running webinars if required

This is really powerful functionality, so worth checking out Getresponse.

Zapier

Zapier is a useful tool for automating your marketing tasks. It connects different online services and lets you automate the tasks between them by using Triggers and Actions.

An example of zap can be – When I receive a new email (the trigger) in Gmail, send me an SMS message (the action).

You can connect up to 9 social networks and other online services (called ‘apps’) to your account. Currently, there are 500+ apps and services you can choose from.

dashboard-zapier-add-apps-2

You can use pre-made zaps and personalize how they work for you, or you can set up a new zap from scratch.

They recently added multi-step zaps where you can set up a chain of automation. For example, automatically send a tweet based on a trigger, and then automatically store that tweet in a Word document.

If you’re interested in account-based marketing there are some useful integrations also (e.g. Adroll).

Analytics and Testing

The best thing about online marketing is that you can have a complete understanding of which marketing tactics are bringing results and which are a waste of your time and resources.

Testing, analytics, and optimization of your marketing activities are critical to success. Thankfully, there are some great marketing tools out there to help you with that.

Google Analytics

If we had to suggest only one tool to help you track the effectiveness of your campaigns, as well as the performance of your website, it would be Google Analytics.

This tool is completely free to use and it gives you insights into everything that happens on your website – from visitor behavior and characteristics, traffic sources, page views and bounce rates, to conversions and referrals.

Google Analytics also integrates with AdWords allowing you to measure and optimize your campaigns. Other useful features include sentiment monitoring and trending topics analytics, mobile app analytics, event tracking, and much more.

Don’t leave home without Google Analytics! It’s an essential tool to measure and optimize the performance of your digital marketing.

Visual Website Optimizer

Visual Website Optimizer is a tool for performing A/B and multivariate testing. Unlike some other tools that entail a steep learning curve, it is quite easy to use – you can set up and run tests in minutes with little or no help from IT. This means you can run tests without having to make changes to the underlying code of the page.

To use the tool for A/B testing, you just copy-paste a code snippet in your website once and you can create unlimited tests anywhere on your website. VWO has a drag and drop interface allowing you to easily change and update any element of the page.

VWO lets you track revenue, signups, clicks, engagement, or any other conversion goal.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a tool that offers some interesting metrics that you cannot get from Google Analytics. It shows the behavior of your website visitors via heatmaps, click maps, scroll maps, and visitor recordings.

Visitor recordings is a very useful feature. It lets you see how visitors behave on your website, capturing their clicks, taps and mouse movements.

Hotjar also lets you analyze your funnel to find opportunities for improvement. Other useful features include Form Analysis for improving form completion rates, Feedback Polls to help you better understand the needs and wants of your website visitors, and Surveys to help you collect feedback from your visitors via web links or emails.

hotjar-heatmaps

Brand24

Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that allows you to track mentions about your brand, or your competition, across social media platforms, blogs, forums, photo sites, etc.

To start using the tool you need to set up the keywords you want to monitor. You can also add negative keywords and limit the sites you want to monitor. Then you can track mentions through Brand24 apps for iPhone and Android, or through email alerts.

brand24
Great user interface and easy to use

The tool also allows you to create a colorful status report, export your report to Excel, or automatically produce an infographic-style report. Sentiment analysis is also available, so you can filter by positive, negative or neutral mentions.

Content Marketing

Here’s a list of content marketing tools that we use and that can help you get started creating a great content marketing program.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a tool for analyzing what content performs best for any topic related to your business or niche. You can enter a keyword and find the most shared content related to that keyword. It shows not only the number of shares but also a list of the most influential people that shared the content.

BuzzSumo is great for discovering the most popular/shareable content for your website or your competitors’ websites. It has a nice set of filters so you can choose to see results based on date, type of content, or by language or country.

buzzsumo-search

Another useful capability of BuzzSumo is that it lets you see backlinks on any piece of content with additional information about the sites that linked to it, such as Domain Authority, the number of followers, etc.

Identifying popular content on your site and your competitors’ sites is really useful because it shows you what type of content you should be producing and sharing more of.

Hawkeye

Hawkeye is a content intelligence tool that can help you research content ideas and topics so you can identify opportunities for creating content that truly resonates with your audience.

Here’s how it works. You just enter your keyword into Hawkeye and it will show you a breakdown of word count versus shares. This gives you an idea of the length of articles that get the most shares for your particular keyword.

Hawkeye word count vs. shares

Another incredibly useful option is looking at the breakdown of the topics related to your keyword which drive the most engagement. This tool also provides a list of authors so you can see who is getting the most shares in relation to the topics you are interested in.

Feedly

Feedly is an excellent tool that allows you to collect and read content from all your favorite industry blogs or news sites in one place. You can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as you like, and you can organize the content into relevant categories.

Feedly is the easiest way to curate content from your favorite publications for social sharing. You can choose to save posts or share them on your social accounts directly from the Feedly interface.

It is available both as Web and mobile application (Android and iOS).

SEMRush

SEMrush is a super tool for driving more traffic to your website. It analyzes Google organic and paid search results and produces a detailed analysis to help you evaluate your site and the sites of your competition.

For example, you can analyze the keywords your competitor is ranking for, pull their backlinks, view estimated organic traffic they are getting, and conduct a complete competitive analysis.

Overall, this is great for competitor research and we use it on a regular basis. You can start with a free version which offers some limited but useful analytics features, and later decide if you want to upgrade to a paid version.

Answer the Public

If you struggle coming up with content ideas, then you will love this simple tool. Answer the Public is basically a visual keyword research tool that shows you what people are searching for on Google related to your keyword(s).  It is also a free tool.

It works on the same principle as Google’s autocomplete, showing the most frequently asked search phrases and questions related to your query. It also separates the questions into “what”, “when,” “how,” etc. buckets.

The tool also shows the comparisons people often type into search, for example, content marketing vs. PR. This is very useful for generating new content ideas since you get a visual report of all the things that your target audience is already searching for.

Social Warfare

Social Warfare is a very popular social sharing WordPress plugin. You can customize the look of your social share buttons with over 5,000 potential style combinations to fit your website.

There is a Custom Tweets feature that lets you specify a unique message to share on Twitter. You can also upload a Pinterest-specific image and description, ­add Click­To­Tweet messages, and choose if, and when, you display share counts on the button.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a free keyword research tool accessible through a Google AdWords account only. It can help you find a wide range of keywords and related data that you can use for content marketing and SEO, or for your AdWords campaigns.

The tool has some limitations – It enables you to only view exact matches on keywords you are researching (‘broad match’ is not available), plus you can view average searches for keywords but you can’t distinguish between devices.

Main capabilities are:

  • Search for keyword ideas
  • Enter or upload keywords to see how they perform
  • Create multiple keyword lists

The Google keyword planner provides some good keyword research options. You do need a Google AdWords account but that doesn’t force you to advertise.

UberSuggest

Ubersuggest is a free keyword research tool that will give you some useful keyword ideas based on the seed keyword you enter. What I like about this tool is that it also gives you a snapshot overview of the most important SEO metrics related to the keyword you entered, including search volume, SEO difficulty, CPC and Paid Difficulty (estimated competition in paid search).

uber suggest

Now, when I click on any of the suggested keywords, the tool will show me the top ranking articles for that particular keyword along with my chances for ranking in the top 20! This is incredibly important for informing your content marketing decisions.

For the main keyword you enter in Ubersuggest you’ll also get SERP results with some valuable metrics for each of the URL’s, including it’s ranking position, estimated traffic they get for that specific keyword, the number of social shares on the article, as well as the Domain Score.

Here’s the list of keyword ideas Ubersuggest returned for my seed keyword ‘content marketing tools:’

Pocket

Pocket is the best way to save articles, videos, and links from the web or mobile apps to view at any time. You can open the Pocket app (iOS, Android, Mac and Windows apps available) and view something you’ve already saved even if you’re offline.

The nice thing about Pocket is that you can read articles right within the app, without having to go back to the original website. You can also sync the content with your Kobo eReader.

The app keeps your favorite resources neatly organized by using tags. It also allows you to share links via Buffer, Facebook, Twitter, and Email.

[box_yellow]Bonus: Download a PDF list of all the tools in the article. Get the guide now![/box_yellow]

Scoopit

Scoop.it is an incredible content curation platform that allows you to easily find and share unique, relevant content to your social networks, website or blog.

scoopit

Scoop.it allows you to find content based on the keywords you specify. You can then curate the content, include your commentary and publish to your own topic page.

The platform is quite useful if you don’t have time to write content for your website or blog, as it allows you to embed content in your website.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a tool that lets you perform competitive backlinks analysis and keyword research. It is really useful for finding out the quality links your competition is getting, but also for analyzing your own links. You can identify which pages on your website or blog are the most popular e.g. have the best links.

ahrefs-link-report

The keyword research section of the tools is really useful and provides a large database of keywords including a keyword difficulty score.

This tool also makes it very easy to find most popular content on the web for any topic related to your business. The popularity of content is measured by backlinks, organic traffic, and social shares.

Ahrefs provides great functionality to help you focus your link building efforts.

Yoast SEO

YoastSEO is a WordPress SEO plugin that helps you easily optimize your website to perform better in search results. It helps you keep your content in line with SEO best practices by providing built-in content analysis, management of Meta tags and keywords, rich snippets, social features, and more.

YoastSEO lets you choose a focus keyword and then analyzes the content of your post against that keyword, and gives it an SEO score along with recommendations for improvement.

If you’re on WordPress, this is probably the best plugin for optimizing your content for Google.

Influencer Marketing

There are many tools that can help you identify, connect and build relationships with relevant influencers. Following are the tools we use to get the most out of our influencer marketing campaigns.

GroupHigh

GroupHigh is a blogger outreach tool with a database of over 13 million categorized blogs you can search through. The information returned for each blog is very comprehensive – it includes 40 metrics which gives you a ton of valuable information to help you create your shortlist of blogs.

It allows you to track your outreach campaigns and report on the results. The tool also records outreach activity history for any particular blog.

GroupHigh is a really useful blogger research tool and recently they announced a very attractive low entry price.

Traackr

Traackr is a complete influencer management platform that lets you find influencers and manage all communication with them.

 traackr

It shows the social media profiles of the influencer, blog posts, conversations, connections, footprint or the size of the profile across multiple sites, and more.

Traackr is great for monitoring the relationship status so you know what stage you are at with each influencer.

Klear

Klear is a social intelligence platform that analyzes and reports on the social followings of users broken down into over 60,000 categories with over 500 million profiles and 5 years of historical data. This is also a good tool for identifying influencers.

klear-influencer-marketing

Social Media

Managing social media can be very time-consuming, so we’re going to give you a list of tools to take your social media marketing, monitoring, publishing, and analytics to another level.

AdEspresso

AdEspresso is a tool for creating Facebook, Instagram and Google ads.

The tool lets you create campaigns quickly by specifying the campaign name and targeting details. When creating your ads with AdEspresso, you can easily set up and test different variations of your ad. The tool can automatically test different images, headlines, ad copy, etc.

AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is a social media management tool which supports all the major social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and LinkedIn. It allows you to manage social media messages, schedule and share posts, and measure all your activities.

agorapulse

AgoraPulse also includes a suite of apps for building engagement with your followers and fans. You can use them to run competitions, quizzes, sweepstakes, etc.

Detailed performance analytics report is also available for you to download and customize.

Rival IQ

Rival IQ is a competitive landscape tool. You set up all the competitors you want to track, and then monitor analytics to see how your marketing compares to the competition.

You can compare your performance against your peers across social media, SEO keywords, and website content. Rival IQ lets you monitor things like your competitors’ follower growth, their best content, the volume of mentions, the organic traffic they get, etc.

Rival IQ is useful if you want to track multiple competitors to find out their strengths and weaknesses, their position online, and more.

TweetChat

TweetChat provides some useful functionality to help you manage your Twitter chats. It allows you to monitor and interact with a conversation filtered by a hashtag.

TweetChat allows you to pause a conversation to give you a chance to respond, block or highlight people in a stream, and remove retweets within a stream.

There is also a neat functionality called FavePages that displays all your favorite tweets and categorizes them by date and hashtag.

We use this tool for Twitter chats because it contains the necessary functionality and is easy to use.

TweetBinder

TweetBinder is a really useful application for researching hashtags on Twitter and Instagram.

When you search for a hashtag, the tool will return some general stats of the hashtag such as its reach, interaction in terms of likes and comments, users rankings or the people who shared content (most active, popular), and more.

tweetbinder

If you want to see how often people are using a hashtag, the influencers sharing it, when it’s used etc. this is a useful app.

Audiense

Audiense is a tool for getting more value from Twitter – it provides deep insight into your audiences to help you increase your following and engagement on your Twitter account.

It lets you target new followers based on a number of filters you define. It also analyzes your existing followers to suggest best times to tweet for increased reach and engagement.

audiense-1

Audiense includes a tool for creating highly targeted Twitter ad campaigns. It gives you a detailed overview of your audience’s interests through a feature called Community Insights. There is also a benchmarking feature that lets you compare the performance of your account with similar accounts in your industry.

Landing Page Tools

LeadPages

LeadPages is a very popular landing page builder that is also simple to use, so you can create high converting landing pages in minutes.

You can choose from a suite of 65 mobile-optimized templates that are proven to convert well. These templates cover a variety of scenarios, including pages for downloading an eBook, signing up for a webinar, etc.

leadpages-templates-choose

You can easily set up split testing and measure conversion on each page.

It provides integration with a variety of email marketing and marketing automation providers, including Aweber, Mailchimp, ConstantContact, Ontraport, Infusionsoft, GetResponse, and many others.

Payment Collection

Thrivecart

Thrivecart is a popular shopping cart platform that you can use to quickly create cart pages with professionally designed templates.

It allows you to create 1-click upsells, build funnels, perform A/B tests, and much more.

Stripe

Stripe is one of the simplest payment processors to set up.  We use Thrivecart for creating our checkout pages and Stripe for collecting the fees.

Email Marketing

Our marketing automation tool handles all our email communications, but we love to use OptinMonster to generate our subscribers.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a lead generation tool for capturing email addressed and growing your subscriber list. There is a wide range of templates available and the setup is very simple. Split testing is available on all op-tins and it’s easy to test out.

If you’re looking to grow your email subscribers, we highly recommend trying out this tool.

Visual Marketing

Having the right visual marketing tools at your disposal will help you create compelling visuals on a consistent basis – even if you are a non-designer. Strong visual content is necessary if you want to better tell stories and keep your audiences engaged in a more impressionable way. It is also one of the best ways to stand out from your competition.

Canva

Canva is a web-based tool that lets you create stunning visuals for your blogs and social media. Canva offers pre-sized social media images for various platforms, and it is also a good tool for creating images for marketing materials, presentations, ads, infographics, etc.

There’s no need to worry if design is not your strong suit – drag and drop editing makes image creation very easy. You can create your image from scratch or choose from a wide variety of background images, stock photos, and designs that Canva provides.

canva-image-design

If you choose to use your own photos, you can upload them from your computer, Facebook, or Google Drive.

Canva simplifies the design process and is perfect for marketers who have the need to consistently create visuals to accompany their social media updates and blog post.

Adobe Spark

Spark is a free graphic design app that lets you create social graphics, web stories, and animated videos.

It consists of three main tools — Post, Page, and Video.

Spark Post lets you create images with text overlays. It’s easy to use and you can change font style, colors, layouts and image size.

Spark Page generates Web page stories from your images, text, and video and allows you to choose from a variety of curated designs. You can use a feature called GlideShow to add motion effect to text and images on your page.

Spark Video lets you pick a template for your story and then combine text, icons, images, animations, effects, and audio to create your video.

Easil

Easil is another great image design tool that comes with a broad selection of fully customizable templates, free-to-use stock images, and drag-and-drop editor. It also features a very cool color palette generator that provides color scheme suggestions. You can use this tool to easily create print marketing materials, social media visuals, infographics, and more.

There is a somewhat limited free plan available (no design resizing tool, you can’t upload your own fonts, etc.) and two paid plans that unlock all the features starting at $7.50/month.

WordSwag

WordSwag lets you create beautiful graphics for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and your blog.

word-swag-app-samples

It has an amazing set of image and typography templates and it lets you create great looking images with text overlay. You can upload photos from your camera roll, take photos from within the app, or choose from a gallery of available images and backgrounds.

Affiliate tools

OSI Affiliate

OSI affiliate is easy to use affiliate software that makes it easy to recruit and empower your affiliates and influencers to promote your brand.   Working with affiliates is like having a sales force that is commission only.  It’s often an overlooked tactic that can really help with your sales.

OSI affiliate is the perfect solution for managing all your affiliates and it’s quite reasonable in price for what you get!

Video Marketing and Live Streaming

There’s no better way to bring your digital stories to life than video – both recorded and live! There are many tools out there that you can use to manage your YouTube channel, create animated videos or videos for social media, or to host a live show. The ones we recommend here are either low cost or free and also quite easy to use.

TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy is a browser extension aimed at helping YouTube creators optimize and grow their channels. It’s packed with some amazing functionality that will help you save time, optimize your videos, and keep your audience engaged.

TubeBuddy offers a set of tools that you can use straight from the YouTube’s website. You can use the Bulk Processing tools to automate processes such as adding annotations, cards, or descriptions to multiple videos. This can save you A LOT of time!

tubebuddy

It also offers a number of productivity tools, such as direct Facebook uploads and custom thumbnail generator. TubeBuddy also comes with a set of very useful SEO tools that can help you improve your video rankings in YouTube search.

In addition, if you want to benchmark your channel’s performance against the competition, perform subscriber outreach, or discover the best time to publish videos for your audience – they’ve got you covered!

You can start using TubeBuddy for free or go with one of their premium plans for a more feature-rich experience.

GoAnimiate

GoAnimate is an online, DIY video animation tool. It lets you create your own animated videos using templates, characters, voice recordings etc.

GoAnimate allows you to pick from a library of characters, props, and scenes and then build your video up scene by scene with a drag and drop editor. You can also choose a voice you want to add to your animation or record your own voice.

There’s an option to add background music to your scenes. This can be your own music or you can choose it from a library.

When you’re finished, you can export high-definition videos that you can then embed on your blog or upload to YouTube.

goanimate-templates

GoAnimate is a cost-effective, easy-to-use tool and it’s also a lot of fun to play with.

Wave.Video

Wave.video is an easy to use online tool for creating social media videos. It encompasses all the features you may need to create professional quality videos that people will love to watch and share on social.

In Wave.video you can browse through a huge library of stock video clips which are neatly organized in categories, such as Business, Technology, Travel, etc., to find just the right clips for your video. This makes video creation for social media so much faster and easier. You can then preview each of the clips before choosing to add them to your video.

Blog Promotion templates in Wave.video

Wave.video also lets you upload your own content (photos, video, audio files) and then combine it with Wave.video clips to create unique branded videos.

The drag-and-drop style editor lets you trim the video, zoom in and out, and add text to your video. When adding text you can choose from a variety of available fonts, colors, and effects. Wave.video also features some advanced audio editing options – you can cut your audio, add multiple tracks or your own audio content, or even record your voice and add it to the video.

What’s also important for every marketer is that this tool allows you to include a Call to Action at the end of the video together with your company logo.

The pricing starts at $39/month. Use a promo code WXA_IanCleary by March 31, 2019 to get 30% off any Wave.video annual plan (as an Ambassador for Wave.video they have offered me this exclusive discount for the RazorSocial audience)

Wirecast

Wirecast is a tool for live streaming to Facebook and other platforms. It has more functionality that OBS but it’s a paid for tool.

Live Streaming Equipment

Read this post on live streaming to find out about the tools to use (e.g. microphones, mixers, etc.) – Live streaming tools.

ScreenFlow

ScreenFlow is a great tool for creating, editing and producing videos on your MAC. If you’re on a PC – use Camtasia.

You can do basic editing very easily and pick up the advanced stuff over time

RIPL

Ripl allows you to create animated social media posts from a series of images using one of their templates. You can also add sound to the video – upload your own music or choose from the Ripl music library.

ripl-animated-posts

Website tools

Drift

Drift is a ‘conversational marketing’ platform that helps you capture and convert leads on your website and mobile app. It offers a Messaging application that enables you to talk to and interact with visitors and customers in real-time.

You can use it for live chat on your website, in-app messages, or email support. The way it works is that it lets you send targeted messages to visitors based on the criteria you specify, for example, if a user visited your Demo page more than once.

What’s really great about Drift is that they also provide LeadBot – a chatbot that will automatically engage visitors to qualify leads or book meetings with your sales reps.

Drift does provide a free plan (suitable for individual website owners) but it provides very limited functionality giving you only a glimpse into the possibilities of this tool. For more advanced features, like chatbots and CRM integration, you’d have to go for the Pro plan or up, with prices starting at $500/month.

GTmetrix Speed Test

GTmetrix is a free tool that analyzes your website’s speed by checking both PageSpeed and YSlow metrics. It also suggests dozens of different ways to improve your website speed performance.

The basic functionality of GTMetrix is free and you can analyze the speed of your website right from the service’s homepage.

The results overview shows you the browser and location used for testing, PageSpeed and YSlow scores, page load time, the number of requests and total page size.

[box_yellow]Bonus: Download a PDF list of all the tools in the article. Get the guide now![/box_yellow]

Summary

There you have it — a pretty exhaustive list of all the digital marketing tools we’re using. We’re seeing great results with these tools but I have to say that they wouldn’t mean much if we didn’t have a rock solid marketing strategy. So make sure to have your strategy all sorted first and then support it with the best marketing tools you can find.

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6 Outbound Marketing Tactics to Drive More Valuable Traffic to Your Website https://www.razorsocial.com/outbound-marketing-tactics/ Tue, 13 Nov 2018 16:30:09 +0000 https://razorsocial.com/?p=18689 Inbound or outbound marketing… What is your poison? The reality is that you need both. You need to do outbound promotion to drive inbound traffic. And when you attract lots of people to your website using inbound, you build up your brand so it gets easier to do outbound! In this article, we’re going to […]

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Inbound or outbound marketing…

What is your poison?

The reality is that you need both.

You need to do outbound promotion to drive inbound traffic. And when you attract lots of people to your website using inbound, you build up your brand so it gets easier to do outbound!

In this article, we’re going to talk about how you can drive more valuable traffic to your website using outbound marketing.

So let’s get started.

1. Influencer outreach

Reaching out to influencers and building relationships with them is one of the most effective outbound marketing tactics.

When you work with influencers relevant to your niche you are increasing your brand visibility and exposure among your target audiences and consequently driving more quality traffic to your website.

But how does this actually happen?

Well, it all starts with finding the right influencers, making a list, and then reaching out to them.

And this is where an influencer marketing tool, such as GroupHigh, can be of huge help.

Grouphigh has a database of over 10 million media outlets/blogs and influencers extracted from the web, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

And what’s great about Grouphigh is that you can get access this information for a low cost monthly subscription.  A lot of tools are $1000 + per month but with Grouphigh it starts at $99. Check out their product video

Let’s say you want to find influencers who write about content marketing. You’d use the keyword ‘content marketing’ to perform a search and the tool would return results that looked something like this:

Search for influencers

Immediately I see some key influencers I know in the content marketing space.

But look at all the details that are provided for every influencer/influential site:

  • Location
  • Email address
  • Recent posts
  • Audience size
  • Demographics
  • Social following

And look at the filters on the left

  • Channel
  • Location
  • Type of website
  • Audience Demographics

…And much more.

Reaching out to influencers is not about finding thousands and sending a generic outreach email.

Once you have your final list of influencers, you’ll do your research to learn more about them and then start reaching out with personalized messages. Here’s a detailed article about how you can engage with influencers using GroupHigh.

There are so many different ways you can work with influencers – you can ask them to contribute to your content, get them to participate in an influencer roundup post or an expert post, mention them in your content and see if they’d be interested in sharing, etc.

Roundup posts worked extremely well for me, and I’m sure you’ve seen numerous examples of successful expert posts all over the Web. Here’s one from Search Engine Journal:

Roundup posts

This article was shared 8.5K times and has 35K reads! I’d bet that most if not all of the 47 experts shared this piece with their network which caused a ripple effect and contributed to this article’s success.

2. Guest Posting

Guest posting on authoritative sites in your industry is a great way of establishing yourself as an expert in the topic you’re writing about.

But another equally important benefit of this outbound marketing approach is that it drives traffic back to your website.

To start the process, you’ll first need to find the best websites for guest blogging. Naturally, you’ll want to target only authoritative websites that are highly relevant to your industry and the topics that you cover on your website/blog.

To find authority sites you can use Grouphigh or similar tools that allow you to filter based on authority.

In Grouphigh’s filter, you can look for sites with a certain amount of visitors, links, and authority etc.

traffic filters

The ‘DA’ stands for domain authority.  This is a number out of 100 which is calculated by a company called Moz and the higher the number the more authority the website has.

Watch my video on domain authority:

Now, If you don’t have the budget for tools you can use Google but it take you a long time to find the best results!!

For example, go to Google and type…

‘Submit guest post + ‘your keyword’’

Let’s look at one example:

Submit Guest Post

That gives you a list of websites that probably accept guest posts but they may not be the exact websites I need, may not have a good authority etc.

3. Broken link building

No one likes having broken links on their website. It’s bad for SEO but it also creates a poor user experience for the people who click on those links.

However, broken links can creep into the best of websites simply because services/products shut down, people take down resources and entire sites, and this rarely comes announced.

So how can you benefit from broken links on relevant, authority sites from your industry?

Well, you can scan them for broken links using a tool like Ahrefs Broken Link Checker, reach out, and offer a similar resource on your site as a replacement. This tactic works well because most people will be interested in fixing broken links on their website and linking to a new, credible resource.

Also, if there’s a broken link that you have a perfect replacement for, run it with Ahrefs site explorer to see who else is pointing to this broken page. This is an easy way to find more link prospects!

4. Building links to relevant resources

I’m sure that you’ve come across many sites that have pages dedicated solely for linking out to relevant resources.

A resource can be anything from a case study to a free tool, checklist, or guide. You probably have at least one of these valuable resources created for marketing purposes and now you can use it for building links and driving new traffic.

Now, decide on a popular keyword relevant to your domain and the resources you have (or plan to create) and do a search on Google to find resource link opportunities.

Here are some formulas you can use:

    • keyword inurl:resources
    • keyword inurl:links
  • keyword intitle:resources

When I Google “content marketing intitle:resources” you see that I get a lot of results from relevant sources. The next step is creating the prospect list and reaching out to them.

But before you do, make sure that you have a valuable, useful piece of content that will blend in well with the rest of the resources on that page.

5. Building a community

Creating your own community within social media platforms is a great way to expand your audience, build engagement and trust, and ultimately drive traffic to your website.

You’re probably very passionate about your business. And you are most likely an expert in your niche. There are thousands of people who share your interests, so why not create a community specifically for them?

For example, you can create a Facebook group focused on an industry topic or your area of expertise. By interacting with a community of people who share the same interests, engaging actively, and sharing useful content and advice, you can form strong relationships and encourage them to learn more about your business and maybe even become a customer down the road.

6. Reach out to relevant media

Mentions on relevant, high authority media sites can truly move the needle for your business.

Why? Because you’ll get the exposure and visibility that will bring more traffic and more potential leads to your business.

But to get media mentions you need to give them something to write about.

For example:

A research report provides unique data.

Journalists love unique data.

Find Journalists that write about similar topics and reach out to them.

Give them a good story about your data. The more research you do with the Journalists the better.  Most Journalists get irrelevant content so you don’t want to fall into this bracket!

Bonus Tip: Get links to better content

There’s a lot of poor content out there.

If you are creating a piece of content on your blog create something that is better than any other content out there.

Then….

Find who links to existing content and reach out to them to tell them about the new content.

You will get some good links…..if your content is good enough.

You can use a tool such as Grouphigh, SEMRush or Ahrefs to find who is linking to existing content.

Use an outreach tool to help you automate the outreach process.

Summary

Focusing on inbound marketing as the main strategy to drive traffic to a website is commonplace for today’s marketers. Outbound is often considered as an old school, interruption marketing strategy that doesn’t work.

However, a modern approach to outbound is everything but ineffective – if planned and executed the right way, outbound marketing tactics like the 6 we discussed above can drive quality traffic to your website and bring new leads to your business.

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