Posted by Every business tries to achieve better customer service, more exposure, and more sales. However, that’s not always possible with manpower alone. Thanks to the rapid development of technology we now have access to cutting-edge data analytics tools for a decent price.
Here are the technologies you can use to make your sales skyrocket.
Social media automation
Social media has become a very important platform for marketing because they’re so overwhelmingly popular. Over 2.6 billion people use Facebook and combined with platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, and Pinterest, social media covers a huge chunk of the consumer base.
In the US, 90% of people use some social media daily, according to the most recent data from the Pew Research Center.
Source: Pew Research Center
People between 18 and 29 years of age by far the most frequent users of social media.
Source: Pew Research Center
Given these usage numbers, it’s no wonder that over 90% of businesses in the US do social media marketing. But for many businesses, SMM becomes a money dump that doesn’t produce any results.
Why? They try to do everything manually get overwhelmed by needing to create quality content and post it and end up forgetting about the strategy. The result is a page like this.
Source: Kevin’s Car Repair/ Facebook
This small business is probably doing great and their content is actually useful, but because they didn’t have the time to think strategically, all they do is post content that doesn’t reach audiences.
If you don’t want to become one of those thousands of businesses that have lonely Facebook pages, you need to manage resources. Cut down on operation costs and focus on strategy. The best way you can do this is by implementing Social media automation.
Schedule posts in bulk and they will be posted automatically on all social media. Monitor all the social media activity in one app, and answer to comments to boost engagement from the dashboard. Your marketing team can create content for the whole month and get down to strategic tasks.
Chatbots
One of the most important marketing automation tools in your arsenal is a chatbot. Set one up on your website or on the website, and you’ll free up endless hours that it takes your support to answer all those simple questions they get asked.
Having a chatbot in your Facebook account means you that if a person wants to talk to your business on social media, they can do so instantly. One-third of people who follow you would rather contact you via social media than via phone or email exactly because they expect a fast response.
This is why having a Facebook badge that says you respond fast is crucial. How do you get it? You need to respond to over 90% of messages and do so in less than 15 minutes. If you don’t have the budget to have multiple social media managers on staff, a chatbot is probably the only way you can achieve that.
But chatbots are not just useful for customer care. You can use them to move people down the sales funnel. Here’s how HubSpot does that just by offering visitors to strike a conversation.
Set up a sales script that helps visitors understand your services and qualifies them as a lead. Here’s how HubSpot does it.
When they’re ready to buy, let a sales representative take over the chat.
SEO tools
Even if you’re following all the latest trends in content marketing, this means very little if you’re not doing the basics. Having a set of SEO tools is crucial for making your content rank, traffic grow, and conversion rate rise.
First off, you need to master Google Analytics because it’s a free tool that lets you analyze a ton of data from your website. If you’re doing content marketing, use UTM tags to rate which links perform best.
Use Google Trends and Google Keywords to find keywords to rank for. Add Answer the Public to get free long-tail keyword ideas, and use Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest to get content ideas.
Then, you’ll need Beam Us Up or Screaming Frog to crawl your website for technical SEO mistakes. Both apps show you ways to solve those mistakes as well.
If your budget allows it, get a basic subscription to Ahrefs. This is the main tool of any SEO expert as it allows to crawl backlinks to your website and to competitors’ websites, among other things. You can both monitor how well you perform and hijack link-building strategies that work.
CDN
Are you working with leads all over the world? In this case, you may need to change your hosting plan to include a CDN.
What’s a CDN? It’s a web of servers located all around the world that help data travel to your overseas leads’ browsers faster. If you’re hosting your website on a server located in the US and a customer from Japan opens it, it takes more time to deliver the content on the website than if the server was, say, in Taiwan.
That’s why it’s called content delivery network, CDN. The total slowdown may be insignificant, but every second count. The more a visitor has to wait, the more likely they are to close your website and head over to the competition.
Source: Kissmetrics
To check whether you need to upgrade to a CDN, grab a Firefox VPN, set the country to where a chunk of your clients is from, and compare the loading time to what you’re getting locally.
Lead scoring
Now, we’re off to more complex technologies. Lead scoring will help your sales team know exactly what lead is likely to close, and big that probability is.
How does that work? It takes anywhere from 6 to 8 touchpoints before you can close a deal with a lead. Those touchpoints may be subscribing to your blog, giving an email to receive a free ebook, attending a webinar, or visiting the pricing page.
Create scenarios in the lead scoring software and give weights to events that correspond to an increased probability of closing a deal. The software will monitor leads on your website and give them a score based on those criteria.
You can even set up automated actions or alerts when a lead reaches a high probability of closing.
Source: HubSpot
Now, this is advanced marketing tech, and you may start implementing it later on as it tends to be pricy. If you want to implement it in your business, check HubSpot’s lead scoring software as well as MadKudu, and Leadspace to get a start.
Big Data analytics
The biggest thing that determines your business’s conversion rates is the course you take. Depending on what strategy you choose and how you implement it, you may be excelling or failing miserably to meet your goals.
The best way to make sure you’re staying on the right track is big data analytics. A cloud computing platform will be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together much better than a team of experts would. Incorporate analytics software into your marketing decisions, and you’ll be far ahead of the competition.
Platforms like MS Azure and AWS provide comparatively cheap big data analytics services that can help you make predictions about your strategy, product launches, and general market trends. You will need a tech team to make the most of it, though.
Conclusion
Modern technology is so advanced it can be rather cheap. For the relatively low price you pay, you receive a huge edge over the competition. The six technologies covered in the article are the basis that will cover most of your business’ needs.
Invest in them to keep your customer experience, sales, and conversions up to date. Don’t stop there, and discover the software peculiar to your industry to be the best on the market.
Connie a chief content writer, and Marketing advisor at WhenIPost Agency and enthusiastic blogger who helps B2B companies reach their audiences more effectively. With an emphasis on organic traffic and conversion, she takes big ideas and turns them into highly practical content that keeps readers hooked.
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