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8 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business

With limited resources, it can be a challenge for many small businesses to hire a marketing team to plan, develop, and implement a campaign. Not only does it require a large investment, but you may also need to focus your hiring efforts or budget on other important matters.

With many entrepreneurs taking their business online, establishing a strong online presence is crucial. However, the process is no easy job. Luckily, there are different digital marketing tools that can help you grow your business and promote your products and services to your target audience.

What Are Digital Marketing Tools? 

Digital marketing tools are apps and software designed to help you strategize, collaborate, and execute your digital marketing campaign. Whether you are planning a marketing campaign, developing a social media asset, or monitoring results, digital marketing tools helps ensure that your efforts are more efficient and convenient. Also, effective use of these tools can help set up and guide your business to success. 

Essential Digital Marketing Tools

We have rounded a list of the most important digital marketing tools that serve as your marketing foundation that will help you manage customer relationships, acquire more qualified leads and uncover more marketing opportunities. 

  1. Google Trends

This tool is designed to show you the most current trends in specific locations. Type your chosen keyword in the search panel, and it will reveal how much online buzz there is about your topic. This information is extremely useful, especially if you are monitoring your brand name or a competitor. 

  1. Ahrefs

Launching a business in a competitive environment is a common concern for many entrepreneurs. Ahrefs has a set of tools designed to help users monitor their competitors. It also provides you with information about your competitors’ traffic details, ranking keywords, content features, backlinks, and other essential data. This information can help you know the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and beat them within your niche market. 

  1. HubSpot

Hubspot comes with a set of marketing tools designed to help users keep their content and data in a single, accessible place. It enables you to manage all your blog and social media posts, focus on your SEO strategy, monitor your digital advertising effort, and more. Also, you can combine HubSpot’s tools with other sales software to help you create strong relationships with your clientele. 

  1. Google Analytics

As the gold standard for website analytics, Google Analytics can provide you with essential information about the people visiting your website, where they are coming from, and the pages they are spending most of their time. Using this information can help you track conversions, enhance your eCommerce setup, and monitor events.

  1. Buzzsumo

This content marketing tool helps you with your content planning and monitoring of content performance to boost your content marketing strategy. Use it to identify the most ideal influencers to partner with and analyze useful metrics to create meaningful relationships with your customers.

  1. Facebook Audience Insights

In addition to being the biggest social network, Facebook is the most effective tool used by many business owners to target their advertising campaigns. It provides users with important information, such as demographic data, habits, interests, devices used, and even household income of Facebook users. 

  1. Mailchimp

Email marketing is another effective approach to reaching and connecting with your target customers. Mailchimp is not only designed to create and send branded emails and newsletters monthly, but also enables you to build landing pages, design digital advertisements, and more!

  1. Hootsuite

Designed as a social media marketing tool, Hootsuite allows users to create, schedule, and track posts. It is also an effective collaboration tool, which enables you to view, manage, and respond to comments and messages from your target audience. Hootsuite also provides you with a comparison of content performance across different social media platforms to help you identify posts that relate the most to your potential customers.

Black Hat SEO Techniques You Must Avoid This 2022

For marketers looking for a shortcut to boost their search engine rankings and increase online visibility, black hat SEO may seem to be the solution. However, if you are planning to use black hat SEO techniques, think twice as it can hurt your SEO campaign more than it can help.

What Is Black Hat SEO and Why You Should Avoid Them

Black Hat SEO is a set of illegal practices used to increase the search engine rankings and visibility of a website. The techniques used work against the search engine guidelines and disregard the user’s intent by attempting to bypass best practices.

While search engines consider the use of black hat SEO unscrupulous, there are still marketers who are still trying to cheat to speed up the organic success of their websites. Although black hat techniques may yield results, they do not last long and often involved damaging effects on your SEO, including:

  • Google Penalty

Violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines can get your website or pages penalized. Penalties can downgrade your search engine rankings or worse, a permanent ban on your website. When your target audience does not see your website on the SERPs, your business will fail as a result.

  • Poor User Experience

If your web pages look spammy, your visitors will likely abandon your website, resulting in a high bounce rate.

  • Malicious Cyber Attacks

While black hat SEO helps improve your search rankings, it can also make your website vulnerable to cyber attacks. Hackers can easily penetrate your databases and spread malware by inserting extra content on random web pages.

Black SEO Practices to AVOID

  • Keyword Stuffing

One of the most common misconceptions in SEO is that inserting too many keywords in your content can make your page relevant to a specific search. However, this black hat SEO technique often results in a poor user experience as it can make the content difficult to read. To avoid the penalties, use your keywords sparingly, but make sure to them relevant.

  • Low-Quality Content

Content is essential for your search engine rankings. While high-quality content is costly and difficult to create, there are still marketers who post low-quality and cheap content to boost SEO. Google loves unique and high-quality content that provides answers and solutions to the user’s queries.

  • Cloaking

Black hat marketers use the cloaking technique to trick search engines into ranking content for a specific keyword, which is not relevant to the web page content. This technique misleads users by showing a piece of content on the website while displaying completely different content on the search engine. This tricks the users into opening your website.

  • Backlink Buying

Building backlinks from high authority sites not only help increase the search engine rankings but also the domain authority and online credibility of your website.

But instead of building high authority inbound links, black hat marketers purchase links to generate as many links to their websites. Buying links that are not relevant to your website can promote spammy content. As a result, backlink buying will hurt your credibility and backlink quality. Instead, earn quality backlinks organically from reputable sources.

  • Spamming

Some black hat SEO marketers use shady practices, such as spamming comments on their competitor’s website with a link back to their website. They leave plenty of comments to attract readers into clicking the links.

  • False Redirects

The act of falsely misleading or redirecting search engines, traffic, and users is another form of black hat SEO technique. It involves setting up a redirect link to lead search engines and users to various pages on their website. Black hat marketers can also redirect a high-quality web page to a low-quality page to boost the search ranking of the latter.

Top Digital Marketing Techniques to Learn in 2022

Every year ushers in technological innovations and new techniques in the digital market. As a company, staying on top of these changes and trends is crucial as it will determine your ability to stay relevant and engaging. With the increasingly competitive industry, quality customer interaction remains your key strategy to stand out.

You can only do so by maximizing traffic, search ranking, and conversion rate through accessible and responsive company communication lines. As search engines impose new regulations, and social media platforms create new options, being updated is vital for your next campaign ads.

So, how can you improve your digital marketing in business? Which trends should you invest in and how can you stay 2 steps ahead of your competitors. Find out the top digital marketing trends this year.

10 Top Digital Marketing Trends

Here is a quick run-through of the top digital marketing trends this 2022:

1. Metaverse

Making a big splash in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg launched this social media platform as a new way for netizens to interact and connect. Mainly using 3D holographic avatars, virtual reality, augmented reality, and video, it provides a unique online experience, where people can socialize, work, and play together from the comforts of their own homes.

And as this medium has been projected to grow for the upcoming decade, it’s best to invest in it now, when ad space is still affordable. This will give you the first-mover advantage, and allow you to offer a new kind of medium for your customers to engage with your company.

2. Accessibility

Inclusivity is key in today’s market. No customer wants to feel neglected and left out. So, even though you’re targeting a specific consumer demographic, you also have to develop products that cater to other people’s needs.

It could be for differently-abled people, pregnant women, kids, and more. For your company to maximize its market reach, you need to innovate and provide product variety.

Doing so will also reflect well on your company’s reputation as it will show your customers that you genuinely care about them. To gain traction for these new products, you can consult with SEO companies for special content development.

3. Gender Sensitivity

With the positive trend towards LGBTQ+ inclusivity growing, as a company, holding on to traditional gender norms should be scrapped. Sticking to it will only project an image of backward thinking and exclusivity that your target customers may not resonate with.

Creating gender-neutral ads and campaigns will prevent alienation, and show the public that you embrace diversity. Using the correct pronouns is also advised to avoid offending your potential customers.

4. Sustainability

With consumers getting more informed about global environmental issues, a demand for better corporate practices has been growing these past years and rightfully so. Conscientious customers are more discerning when it comes to choosing the brands that reflect their eco-conscious values.

However, it is not enough to simply use these values on the surface level for clout, as customers can see through it and view it as disingenuous. So, make sure to commit to concrete decisions that benefit both the planet and your company.

5. Comprehensive Content

Image Credit: Pixabay | Pexels

Content translates best when it’s simple and comprehensive. Using overcomplicated jargon, analogies, and high-end vocabulary will only alienate your audience. With search engines filled with millions of data, being straightforward and clear will make you stand out amidst the digital noise.

Flowery prose will only take away from the point that you want to get across. So, next time, when you’re creating content for complicated topics, make sure to break it down and be comprehensive.

It would also be better if you visualize it through infographics, videos, and graphs. If you’re new to this, you can always contact SEO to help you out.

6. Social Commerce

Never underestimate the power of social media. As the main digital spaces for today’s netizens, these social media platforms will serve as the main channels for discourse and engagement.

For your company to flourish in the digital market, having a business page on major social media channels of Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter are crucial. Registering your company in online shopping apps can also foster greater customer traffic.

It will serve as your company’s establishment proxy in the digital world. Paid ads, sponsorship, live streams, and more are also useful digital PR tools to promote your content and expand your market reach.

7. Buffering Your Supply Chain

Stock capacity, especially during the holidays is a problem for any company. However, if you’re a service-based company, then enough manpower should be prioritized. For the latter, aligning your available stocks with the current demand is a crucial planning pre-requisite, as any delay in delivery can lead to unsatisfied customers, which could lead to damaging the brand’s reputation.

So, to guarantee that you can always provide for replacements, returns, and broken merchandise, have a 30-day stock buffer. This way, when you experience shipment delays, you can still have a longer time window to plan out alternatives.

8. Prioritize Consumer Privacy

As Google has phased out third-party cookies to protect customer privacy, as a company, you have to think of other ways to profile your targeted audience without violating their rights. This means improved methods of data collection that value consent and anonymity. Now, this may sound like a tedious process, but CRM tools like emails, newsletters, and social media surveys can still provide quality engagement.

9. Cryptocurrency

Image Credit: Vadim Taranov | Pixabay

Cryptocurrency has rapidly gained value over the years. As customers are looking for easier ways to transact and pay for their items, this economic medium is something to look out for although its compatibility relies heavily on your company’s target audience. So, before you consider using it, try to do some market analysis first.

10. NFTs

As the mediums for interaction continue to evolve in today’s digital world, making a profit out of your content can be quite challenging. As they cannot be directly converted into cash, the value of these digital assets may seem low. However, with the rise of NFTs or non-fungible tokens, you can now utilize your online content as actual market products.

Digital marketing trends in 2022 are all about the emergence of virtual currencies, communities, and space for netizens. The rise of augmented reality has been fuelled by the recent limited physical interactions that the pandemic has caused in the past years.

With that said, these trends can be quite complex, so proper digital market training is necessary for you to use them efficiently in your campaigns.