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Marketing Tools of the Trade

As marketers who focus on helping SMBs to make smarter marketing decisions, our team relies on a lot of tools to improve our insight, enhance our productivity, and most importantly, drive more response for our clients.

So what are our “must have” marketing tools?

Tools for Gathering Intelligence

Google Analytics

We regularly monitor analytics on more than 500 websites to help us evaluate what’s working…and what isn’t in the websites we build. Using analytics, we will evaluate traffic sources, entry pages, bounce rates, exit pages, time on site, top performing content, and conversions. We’ll also look at trends over time and compare month over month and year over year data to see how the updates we are making (and the content we are writing) is impacting site performance.

Google Search Console

Search console allows us to look closely at the health, speed, indexation and visibility of a website in Google search. Using search console we are able to identify what pages display for search queries and then adjust our content strategies to increase search visibility and ultimately traffic and leads. Search console also highlights any potential indexing issues or site errors so they can be updated immediately.

SEMRush

This is one of our more advanced tools for evaluating websites for SEO and PPC campaigns. We use SEMRush to conduct keyword research – identify search terms that have strong search volume, lower competition and the chance to earn valuable traffic. We also use this to conduct competitive research and identify key opportunities to outpace the competition.

Ahrefs

This is another one of our more advanced SEO and PPC tools. Using Ahrefs we can identify what terms a competing website is ranking well for and develop a content strategy to outpace the competition. We also use this tool to identify backlink opportunities and monitor when and where someone shares a link back to our website.

Tools for Improving our Efficiency 

Buffer

At BARQAR, we manage social media for many clients. And that means we need to regularly share the right content at the right times for each company. With Buffer (awesome plan), we can a schedule the content we want to share, to the appropriate social channels, exactly when we want to share it. We can also manage sharing on behalf of multiple people to multiple places all from one Buffer account. Buffer then provides analytics to show us the effectiveness of our sharing.

Google Tag Manager

Measurement and analytics are the key to effective marketing programs. Google Tag Manager allows us to more easily adjust and update the tracking tags and coding snippets on the website so that we can track individual marketing campaigns and tactics. Instead of having to manually code each site and page, Google Tag Manager helps saves time and streamlines the process.

BuzzSumo

This great tool allows you to easily search for any topic (or competitor) and find out what content performs the best. It shows you what content received the most engagement and shares and helps to craft a stronger content strategy.

QuickBooks

Intuit QuickBooks offers a full suite of services to make bookkeeping, cash flow, inventory, and payroll even more manageable and efficient. This software holds the ability to let customers pay online automatically, while also keeping your personal invoices organized.

Tools for Driving ROI

Google Analytics – Goal Tracking

At BARQAR, we pride ourselves on “Smart Marketing.” Simply put, we use data to make better marketing decisions. Google Analytics Goal Tracking is one of the important tools we use to measure and monitor our marketing funnels, so we can see which campaigns are driving web traffic, and then what happens to that traffic so we can see exactly where we are may be losing people in the conversion process…and then make adjustments to improve response.

Unbounce Landing Page Manager

Whenever we are doing digital marketing, we want to know how well each campaign is performing. Unbounce is a tool we have used to create landing pages. While our web designers can design landing pages without Unbounce, they love how easy it is to A/B test design and content ideas, and they love the analytics Unbounce offers.

ORBTR

This simple and cost-effective marketing automation tool and lead tracking tool integrates seamlessly with our WordPress websites. This allows us to tag and track visitors to the website, get real time notifications when a lead returns to the site and create “Orbits” that score leads/visits based on past site behavior. The sales team can then use this data to spend their time with A prospects instead of cold calling.

HaleyMail – Email Marketing

HaleyMail is an email marketing tool developed by our sister company, Haley Marketing. Like other email service providers, HaleyMail allows us to design, schedule, mail and track our email newsletters and promotions. One unique aspect of HaleyMail is a landing page builder that allows us to share PDF documents and automatically generate related landing pages for lead capture. For our larger clients with multiple offices, HaleyMail allows us to centrally manage content, then load it into multiple email accounts, so that each office can manage its own local email marketing. HaleyMail dynamically generates a website for displaying content that is branded to the local office, so any responses received go directly to the appropriate local office.

WordPress Call-to-Action Manager

This is actually a tool we wrote ourselves. It is a proprietary plug-in we created that makes it easy to add visual calls to action to any blog post, and then link those visuals to the appropriate landing page. With our CTA Manager, any writer can easily add compelling calls-to-action to any blog post, and we can centrally manage a library of approved CTAs.

Smart marketing starts with the right tools.

These are just a few of the many tools our team relies on each day to do their jobs. We hope you find the list helpful. And if you have tools you love to make smart marketing decisions, we’d love to hear about them! Please leave a comment below and we can update this list. And, if you would like any help in implementing any of these or developing a smart marketing plan contact us today. 

 

 

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