If you’re not tackling your online marketing strategy with the right integrated approach, you’re leaving prospects and revenue on the table. In this article, we will dive into nine ways that integrated digital marketing software can help you improve the quality of your marketing and, ultimately, help you generate the right leads that allow you to grow the business profitably.
What is digital marketing software?
Essentially, digital marketing software is a tool designed to help improve marketing performance. Advancements in automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning mean these tools can complete repetitive, routine marketing tasks much more efficiently than humans.
Email, social media, content publishing, advertising, website, reputation management, business listings, voice search, etc – all of them are managed via digital marketing software these days. By using digital marketing tools, you can more easily create, test, launch, and measure the performance of your marketing campaigns.
There are countless tools available to help you address specific marketing functions, such as a single tool to schedule social media updates or another one for managing online business listings. Indeed, according to Scott Brinker’s 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, there are currently over 8,000 marketing tools available for consideration.
Generally, the function of these tools can be into six categories:
- Social media tools
- Design tools
- Data collection & analytics tools
- Content marketing tools
- Email marketing tools
- PPC advertising tools
Why integrating digital marketing platforms is vital to your business
What a digital marketing platform does is span several marketing functions in one solution. Via APIs, software integrations, and partnerships with major data sources, a marketing platform provides a centralized place to manage your marketing strategy instead of having to open/log-in a dozen different tools. As such, using a platform allows you and your team to get a more integrated, holistic view of your campaigns and provides numerous benefits, such as:
1. Brand and message consistency
Clear brand and message consistency lie at the heart of a successful omnichannel marketing strategy. The messaging conveyed in your digital assets should be aligned with your core business values and repeat the same visual elements (logo, colors, etc). This consistency ensures that your business is easily recognizable across marketing channels and touchpoints. Over time, your branding will become ingrained in the minds of your customers, where you become a familiar presence in their lives.
Integrated marketing platforms can help you manage your digital assets (such as photos, logo images, video clips, etc) more efficiently. By bringing everything together in one spot you can easily create consistent branding across your online presence.
2. Greater Visibility
A critical part of running a successful business, especially on the local level, is establishing an ongoing relationship with your audience. But you can’t begin to form a relationship with potential customers until they take note of your business. This means ensuring that your brand is visible where they’re searching, when they need you. However, this means keeping track of dozens of different profiles and listings. Integrated marketing platforms help you to easily implement your marketing strategy across different channels. From a single place, you can manage your SEO activities, website, Google My Business profile, social media presence, and online business listings to maximize visibility.
3. Improved Transparency
Often when you outsource your marketing to an agency they’ll try to set you up with a client dashboard that only provides a performance summary without diving into the details. But as a business owner, you need full access to your marketing information so that you can make informed decisions. Without this transparency, how are you supposed to address challenges, measure the effectiveness of different strategies and tactics, and determine if you’re getting a good return on your marketing investment? By having your own integrated marketing platform, you can ensure that you retain control of your online presence, even if you choose when to invite a trusted local marketing partner to manage things on your behalf.
4. More personalization with stronger calls-to-action
Consumers are constantly bombarded by marketing throughout their day, so it’s only natural that they tune out messages that aren’t personally relevant to them. Generic content isn’t enough to engage audiences in today’s increasingly competitive attention economy.
Instead, talking to your prospects directly with tailored messaging and personalized call-to-actions is your best bet to win them over. Creating this type of hyper-personalized marketing at scale is only possible with an integrated marketing platform. It provides the tools and data-driven insights for you to be able to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
5. Save time and become more productive with daily/routine activities
One of the greatest benefits of using digital marketing software to build your online presence is that it saves you time. Rather than wasting hours each week manually completing routine marketing tasks, marketing tools can do it for you. For example, you can automate things like drip email marketing, lead qualification, and other workflows. This is huge for productivity and frees up time for you to focus on other areas of your business. Indeed, Nucleus Research found that marketing automation boosts productivity by around 20% on average. And by using an integrated platform, you save even more time by not having to log in and out of dozens of tools.
6. Data collection
Businesses today have access to more data than ever to be able to enhance their marketing efforts. But to leverage the power of big data, they must first be able to collect, clean, and organize this information effectively. Without integrated data collection, brands struggle with information silos which prevents them from forming a complete, 360-degree view of their customers. Does that sound familiar to you?
An integrated marketing platform can collect massive amounts of information about your target audience and strategy performance. It utilizes all of your available data sources – such as your CRM, social channels, website behavior, etc. Doing so gives you access to detailed audience information, such as demographics, education, interests, lifestyle, and professional experience. You both gain a better understanding of your current customers and can identify new opportunities more effectively.
7. Data-driven insights
Consumer demands are constantly evolving and going on gut instinct is not enough to run a successful digital marketing strategy. Rather, your marketing strategy needs to be built on insights derived from timely, representative data. Without solid data and analytics, you end up wasting a lot of time and resources on trial and error.
Fortunately, with an integrated digital marketing platform, you’re able to access all the information you need to implement data-driven marketing strategies and differentiate your brand against the competition. By analyzing your consumer interactions and engagements, you can pull out data-driven insights and form predictions about future behaviors. Doing so helps you to create personalized content at scale, fine-tune audience targeting, and more effectively automate your purchase journey to provide a seamless customer experience.
8. Measure marketing channels and reallocate budget to the highest performers to improve marketing ROI
Many business owners struggle with determining which marketing channels are driving the most value so that they can allocate resources effectively. After all, when each tool offers its own report template, containing different information or using different measurement methods, it’s hard to compare apples with oranges. However, with an integrated digital marketing platform, everything is pulled into the same spot, using the same templates, so you can easily access cross-channel performance measurements. With this information, you can gain a better understanding of what channels and types of content resonate with your customers, and therefore what you should invest in to maximize ROI.
9. Grow your business profitably
An integrated platform helps you more effectively implement and run your marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow your business profitably. It helps you understand what you’re spending money on and whether or not you’re getting a good ROI. You can monitor performance to more quickly ascertain if strategies are working as intended so that you can improve them. You can use audience data from multiple sources to create highly relevant campaigns focused on your ideal customers rather than sweeping campaigns that include a lot of bad leads. You can optimize different tactics across multiple channels to get the most bang for your buck.
Experience the Surefire difference for yourself
We are a software company first and foremost and not the traditional agency you’re likely familiar with. We provide you with a next-generation software with a user-friendly platform that is available everywhere you need it, across devices and browsers. This platform integrates with all of the digital marketing functions your business needs to succeed. Our platform leverages technology and marketing artificial intelligence to make improvements to your online presence that a person just can’t possibly keep up with on their own, ultimately helping you to save time, money, and effort as you work to grow your business profitably. Request your free demo of the Surefire Local Marketing Platform today!