There’s no denying that the Internet has penetrated nearly every aspect of our lives. “Google” is now a verb and the first place most people go for anything they need or want to know. Is it very important and affect your business ? To put it simply, creating and promoting content that appears in search results has never been more important.

Digital marketing continues to be one of the most effective ways to reach online customers and followers. Following a thoughtful digital marketing strategy is key to help a small and large business to grow at their bottom line. It is more crucial than ever to cultivate an online presence to engage with today’s consumers.

Below are the five most essential strategies to grow a loyal online following.

1. Establish a strong social media presence 

Social media grows more powerful day by day. It cannot be ignored as a key marketing tool. Many businesses have successfully been able to grow their customer base solely through Facebook and other social networks. 

Social Media also gives you access to valuable customer feedback and opens a direct line of communication with your target audience. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more offer the chance to exchange messages directly with customers and other businesses.

One way to boost visibility and get more value from social media is to leverage influencers. It takes time and effort to build a dedicated audience. If you are just starting out, using influencers is a quick way to increase your number of followers. If you do your research, there’s no need to focus on influencers with millions of followers. Effectively leveraging micro-influencers is a targeted way to reach your ideal customers.

2. Publish a weekly blog that’s worth reading.

A blog is the perfect way to engage your online following. Your blog is the best place to share content related to your products, business and industry. Having an excellent blog will not only entice potential customers, it will also build your brand and reputation. Provide readers with valuable content and they’ll return again and again.

The way of any successful blog is high quality content. As you build your blog, think of ways to add value for your audience. Don’t be afraid to share insider tips. 

It’s important to note that having a blog consists of much more than simply posting content. Be sure to nail down a promotional strategy across your social media networks for each blog post.

3. Leverage the power of Search Engine Optimization

You can take all the time and resources in the world to maintain a functional website but without a strong SEO strategy, potential customers may never see it. Optimizing your content will ensure your website becomes one of the first search results on Google and beyond. Some people mistakenly think SEO is time consuming, too technical or not worth the effort. But SEO is one of the most effective long-term strategies to generate highly-targeted traffic.

SEO is most powerful when you know how to leverage it. Some businesses take shortcuts like using shady link schemes. Even if they work in the short term, the results don’t last and can get businesses into trouble. While it is critical to understand how Google algorithms work, pay more attention to creating unique content for humans that includes a few of the basic SEO principles. Start by researching the most highly-searched keywords in your industry and write several in-depth blog posts that add value to these topics.

4. Create a lead magnet

A lead magnet is a free download, ebook, PDF or other type of incentive that allows you to capture your reader’s email address and/or contact information. This incentive is free and should provide value to your potential customers right away. The more valuable it is to them, the more likely they are to give you their information.

When you offer a lead magnet targeted to your ideal customer or clientele, success is inevitable. The best strategy to build great lead magnets is to identify your target customers’ pain points and provide a simple and appropriate solution. Use your offer as a way to obtain more information about your target customers while channeling them into your marketing funnel.

Your marketing funnel consists of all the steps potential customers take, from discovering your brand for the first time to making the conversion into a paying customer. The basis of a lead magnet is the exchange of information. Before potential buyers download a white paper, ebook, video, checklist, or cheat sheet, be sure to get their contact information. This leads us to the final essential element of a strong digital marketing strategy.

5. Build and nurture an email list

Building an email list offers you direct access to your core audience and potential customers. Even if you have 20,000 followers on Facebook or Twitter, there is no guarantee they will see your posts. Worse still, these platforms are changing their algorithms all the time. Building an email list allows you complete ownership over it. One of the most important elements of an effective sales funnel is email marketing.

Use your list to deepen your relationship with customers. Send them content from the heart that will connect in an authentic way. With so many tools available like MailChimp or Constant Contact, among others, you can send split tests and segment your list according to the interest level of each subscriber. For instance, if someone opens an email, he or she has shown interest in what you offer. If he or she clicks on a link, this indicates higher interest.

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Conclusion

Effective digital marketing is key to growing your business. Executing the above strategies will undoubtedly help you achieve this goal. Remember that digital marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. It’s more important to produce content that is tailored to your customers and that appears on the channels or online platforms where they spend their time. You’ll soon see your sales improve, and your customers will interact more with you and your products.

Digital marketing tools will only help you execute a proper strategy (they won’t do the work for you), the right technology stack can really help you zoom past the competition.

Some tools out there are foundational –  things like email marketing, web forms, analytics, and a CRM. However, other tools are more specialized, including keyword rank trackers, or design tools.

To take your marketing strategy to the next level, we’ve outlined the following 16 digital marketing tools every marketer should have in their tool belt.

Learn how to run more impactful, measurable marketing campaigns

The Top 16 Best Digital Marketing Tools in 2019

1. HubSpot Marketing

Price: Free to $3,200/month for enterprises, depending on your plan

HubSpot has several tools to help you grow your business, no matter what stage you’re at.

Starting out, there are several tools available for free. You can set up web forms, popup forms and live chat software lead capture. Then, you can send email marketing campaigns, pipe all of your data into the free CRM and analyze site visitors’ behavior.

When you expand into the paid tiers, things get really complicated with advanced marketing automation.

From managing your content and social media to tracking emails, HubSpot is an all-in-one solution – although it works well.

Ultimately, the tool allows you to:

• Grow your traffic, convert leads, and prove ROI for your inbound marketing campaigns.
• Shorten deal cycles and increase close rates with the provided sales tools.

2. Yoast

Price: The Yoast plugin for WordPress is free but the paid premium plans range based off the number of sites you need monitored.

Yoast is a very popular plugin that works with both Gutenberg and the Classic editor in WordPress. Yoast is an excellent tool to help you optimize your content for search engines.

Yoast helps you choose cornerstone content, focus keywords to help you rank, individual content URLs, and internal links for an additional boost. The plugin also evaluates your page readability and gives it a Flesch Reading Ease score.

It’s updated to reflect Google’s algorithm every two weeks, so you can always stay up-to-date on your SEO.

3 . Slack

Price: Free for small or medium companies, custom pricing for enterprises

Slack is one of the favored communication services in business today.

It operates in channels designated for certain information, so business conversations don’t get distracted or cut-off by tangents about where everyone wants to go for team lunch. It facilitates, de-silos, and focuses collaboration between employees and teams.

It’s an excellent tool for networking and meeting others in the digital marketing space, and gives you the freedom to join or leave channels as needed.

Because it’s such a popular communication channel, it has wide-ranging integrations with plenty of other tools. You can tack on a seemingly unlimited amount of integrations and Slack applications to make the tool even more powerful — for instance, many teams will pipe in A/B test results, analytics notifications, new customer or transaction notifications, or even sales or customer support bots. While undeniably powerful, Slack is easy to start using immediately.

4. Trello

Price: Paid plans range from free to $20.83 per month for enterprise

Trello is a content management tool that many organizations use for brainstorming and strategizing content — in fact, we use Trello at HubSpot to know when our blog posts are scheduled for publication.

The reason Trello is so appealing is that it’s free for small teams and businesses, and it provides a visual way to brainstorm and schedule content online — even if your team is remote or global. Additionally, it’s easy to assign multiple employees to a card, so you know who’s in charge of writing, editing, or adding CTA offers to a post.

Users can create cards and include notes on the card topic, as well as create deadlines and assign topics to certain teams. Trello facilitates collaboration and provides clarity on projects in the pipeline.

5. Canva Business

Price: Plans start free, $12.95/month for teams, or custom pricing for enterprises

Canva is a drag-and-drop design platform that allows users to create images using custom pictures, icons, shapes, and fonts from the Canva catalog. It offers an aesthetically-pleasing, simple way to design your own logos, presentations, images, or graphs based off your team’s needs.

Additionally, Canva cuts out the need for an experienced designer and enables you to create the exact visual you have in mind using their vast image collection.

6. Google Adwords

Price: AdWords run on a pay-per-click model

Google AdWords is one of the most popular options for advertising your business on Google’s search engine results’ pages. Payment is based on either a pay-per-click or pay-per-call structure.

Google AdWords hosts the Google Keyword Planner, where you can research which keywords you want to include in your ad and your other content. You can set budget caps on how much you want to spend. Ultimately, the tool helps you funnel more prospects to your website.

AdWords is an excellent way to display your products or services on Google’s results pages for very specific queries. For instance, let’s say someone searches for “best CrossFit gym in Austin”. Sure, you could work on your SEO and hope to appear organically — but you can also bid on the keyword and appear at the top of the page, enabling you to capture tons of high intent visitors.

7. Google Analytics

Price: Free

Google Analytics is the gold standard for website analytics. Nowadays, it’s hard to operate as a digital marketer if you don’t have some level of Google Analytics expertise.

At its most basic level, Google Analytics can show you who is coming to your website, from where, and on which pages they’re spending most of their time. Beyond that, you can set up goals to track conversions, build an enhanced ecommerce setup and track events to learn more about user engagement.

Truthfully, barely a day goes by that I don’t use Google Analytics. To learn more, check out The Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics in 2019.

8. MailChimp

Price: Tiered pricing, plans start free and range up to $199

MailChimp is an email marketing and social advertising tool designed to automate and orchestrate campaigns.

You can track the traffic garnered from your campaigns additionally, MailChimp offers multiple integrations with other SaaS companies. The tool is especially powerful for email drip campaigns. Ultimately, it’s a good option for engaging with your audience.

9. Asana

Price: Tiered pricing, free to $19.99/month, with custom enterprise options

Asana is a collaborative workflow management system with a visual emphasis designed to streamline and de-silo information and goals between teams.

Asana allows you to do several things:

• Record and visualize projects to be completed
• Map out deadlines and prioritize tasks
• Assign tasks to certain team members
• Identify points of friction and bottlenecks
• Report on projects quickly and openly
• De-silo data between teams

The Portfolios function also lets you keep track of every project’s status, ensuring that your team members have the support and motivation to get out their digital marketing initiatives on time.

10. BuzzSumo

Price: Paid plans start at $79/month

BuzzSumo is a unique content research tool that identifies top influencers in your industry and helps you connect with them.

You can look up trending topics and define the scope of your search to generate both evergreen content, or trending content aimed at your desired audience.

From there, you can look at your content’s analytics and social mentions, and then measure performance accordingly.

11. Buffer

Price: Starts free and goes up to $199/month

Managing all your social media marketing in one place can be a huge time saver. Buffer certainly fits the bill with its clean and simple interface and intuitive setup flow. Plus, there are plenty of advanced features for the many social media jobs you need to do.

With Buffer, you get a full social media management solution: plan, create, and schedule your social media posts; follow up on post performance with smart analytics; and engage with your followers from a social media inbox. Plus, you can work together with your team to run all your organic social strategy through Buffer.

12. HootSuite

Price: Starts at $29 per month or custom enterprise price

Hootsuite is more of an enterprise social media management solution, but it’s quite powerful and very popular. Hootsuite is able to store your approved content in a cloud that team members can access 24/7 for social media posting needs. It allows multiple posts to be scheduled at once with developed tags and keywords.

Using Hootsuite, you can track the performance of your social media content. Hootsuite can calculate ROI, conversions, and track public conversations about your brand or specific subject matter. Plans have tiered pricing, starting at $29 per month and ranging toward $599 per month for enterprise.

Are you thinking of selling your knowledge  in the online education industry?

Here’s a crash course on how to start selling online courses using the most advanced knowledge commerce platform that integrate your website, email, marketing funnels and content delivery.

Online education is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world but to succeed in this fast-moving industry you’ve got to be really passionate about what you teach and embrace the challenge of a steep learning curve.

The size of the global online education industry is massive. The online education market was a $200 billion dollar market in 2019 and is projected to nearly double in size to $375 billion dollars by 2025, according to research from Global Market Insights.

The Big Opportunity In The Online Education Industry

To upgrade their skills for fast-changing digital economy, people are turning to passionate online teachers, skilled creative professionals and successful entrepreneurs.

There is a new generation of online teachers who are bypassing traditional schools and Universities to better meet today’s student’s needs through experiential learning programs, online coaching and group accountability programs.

Here are the best options for creating an online education business in 2021:

1. Kajabi : The Best All-In-Online Course Marketing Automation Platform

Kajabi are run by highly skilled marketers and solving the problem in the online course industry, which is the marketing and selling of the courses (it’s easy to make an online course, much harder to sell it and scale it).

The drawback to Kajabi is that it is more expensive than the other online course platform options but when you factor in the costs of hosting a website , an email service provider and a marketing funnel builder, you will actually save both money and big technical headaches with Kajabi as your business grows.

Also, it is important to keep in mind that to harness the full power of Kajabi’s marketing automation capabilities,  you will need to use their educational support to gain a strong understanding of digital marketing strategy and tactics to deploy everything so you can easily track and optimize your conversion rate across your sales cycle. 

Pricing:

They don’t offer a free tier but you can try Kajabi out on a 14 day free trial.

Here are their monthly pricing plans (you save 20% with annual billing). 

1. Basic ($149/month): 1 website, 1 admin, 3 products, 3 pipelines, 10,000 contacts, and 1,000 active members.
   2. Growth ($199/month): 1 website, 10 admins, 15 products, 15 pipelines, 25,000 contacts, 10,000 active members.
   3. Pro ($399/month): 3 websites, 25 admins, 100 products, 100 pipelines, 100,000 contacts, and 20,000 active members.

Pros:

• The best designed online course platform.
• A full suite of marketing automation tools
• Can host automated webinars directly on Kajabi.
• Live chat support when you’re building your course.
• Integrated email, sales funnels, assessments and more.

Cons:

• The most expensive option for delivering online courses.
• Marketing automation takes a lot of time to set up properly.

Amount Earned By Kajabi Creators: $1.1 billion
Notable Teachers Using Teachable: Brendon Burchard, James Wedmore, Amy Porterfield

Headquarters: Irvine, California

2. Thinkific : The Best Easy-To-Use Option To Get Started

If you have a limited budget and don’t know anything about digital marketing, marketing funnels or web analytics then Thinkific is probably your best option to get started.

This can give you some breathing room to finish your first online courses without monthly bills piling up. Keep in mind though that you’ll probably have bigger success and waste a lot less time if you invest early in a discounted yearly plan and commit yourself to launch in a short time frame.

Pricing:

You can test-drive Thinkific’s core features for free.

Here are the monthly pricing plans for Thinkific (you save 20% with annual billing). 

• Basic ($49/month): Unlimited courses and students, coupons, scheduled content, affiliate reporting, custom domain, email integrations.
• Pro ($99/month): Basic features, plus memberships and bundles, private courses, certificates, advanced HTML/CSS editing, assignments, live lessons via Zoom, priority support.
• Premier ($499/month): Pro features, plus 50 course admins, onboarding package, unlimited growth package (best for big teams)

When you sign up through my affiliate link and get an extended 30 day free trials of their Pro Plan along with a series of bonus guides that will help you plan and sell your online courses.

Pros:

• Free to sign up and easy to get started.
• Great video player for their courses.
• The most third-party integrations.
• Excellent support team.

Cons:

• More limited marketing automation features.
• Will need to pay extra for an email provider and funnel builder.
• 10% payment processing fee on their free plans.
• Not a huge fan of their sales pages.

Amount Earned By Online Course Creators: $1 billion
Notable Teachers Using Teachable: John Lee Dumas, Lewis Howes

Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia

3. Teachable : Teach And Sell Your Online Course

Teachable is they had a time saving one-click online course importer from Udemy.

Generally, their support to be really bad and this poor reputation for support has lingered but in the last couple years they must have addressed this.

With Teachable, you have much more limited options to design your website or customize their video player for your online courses.

It’s probably best used on a subdomain if you host your main website on a content management system (CMS) like WordPress.

They have good email marketing tools that let you filter and message students based on their actions in your online courses but their marketing automation systems are far behind Kajabi.

Pricing:

They offer a 14 days free trial and here are their monthly plans (save 20% with annual billing)

• Basic ($39/month): 5% transaction fees, 2 admin users, drip content, course builder, members-only community.
• Pro ($119/month): Basic features, plus no transaction fees, 5 admin users, advanced reports, course certificates.
• Business ($299/month): Pro features, plus advanced coding customizations, 20 admins, bulk student enrolments, group coaching calls.

Pros:

• One of the best student management and progress tracking systems.
• An early player with an established track record in online courses.
• Easy to get started and launch your first course.

Cons:

• Their integrated payments have high transaction fees.
• Their sales pages are not all that great.
• Less basic integrations than their competitors.

Amount Earned By Teachable Creators: $1 billion
Notable Teachers Using Teachable: Pat Flynn

Headquarters: New York City, New York

4. Podia : Sell Online Course, Memberships And Downloads

Podia is designed to help you build an online store for all your digital content. The 7-figure level of making online courses using them.

Overall, their branding and website are well-designed so they are probably worth checking it to compare with your other course hosting options.

Pricing:

The offer a 14 days free trial. Here are their monthly plans (save 20% by paying yearly):

• Basic ($39/month): No transaction fees, custom domain, unlimited students, online courses, digital downloads, webinars.
• Pro ($79/month): Additional features of memberships, zoom integration, blog, affiliate marketing, third-party code integration.

Pros:

• No transaction fees (direct accounts on PayPal or Stripe).
• Unlimited users, courses, marketing campaigns.
• Good affiliate marketing system.

Cons:

• Not as well-known as other online course platforms.
• I don’t know any successful course creators using it.

Amount Earned By Online Course Creators: Unknown
Notable Teachers Using Teachable: Unknown

Headquarters: New York City, New York

5. Udemy : The Best Option For Being In An Online Course Marketplace

Over the years, Udemy become an online course discounting platform as they try to maintain the high-growth trajectory demanded by their venture capital investors.

Today, the only way to sell lots of your online courses and rank them in the Udemy marketplace is to carefully choose your niche and allow their discount pricing offers of $10-$20 for your course.

If you want to build a long-term brand you should learn to market and sell yourself.

You should host your online courses on your own domain where you control everything and provide high-value content to your email list (Udemy will constantly email and retarget your students with other course offers).

However, if you’re just getting started Udemy is very easy-to-use and they provide excellent tools for making online courses and their video player is extremely well-thought-out.

Pricing:

Free for selling a paid course. Udemy charges 3% on courses you sell yourself through your own links and 50% revenue share on students who come through organic search on Udemy or search engines.

Additionally, they take 75% on course sales through their paid user acquisition channel (often through retargeting your visitors).

Pros:

• The easiest option for non-technical people.
• An online course marketplace to sell your courses.
• Lots of education and support for new instructors.

Cons:

• Your courses will be sold at a massive discount.
• You are building Udemy’s brand, not your brand.
• They constantly email and retarget your students with other courses.

Amount Earned By Online Course Creators: Unknown
Notable Teachers Using Teachable: John Purcell, Rob Percival, Victor Bastos

Headquarters: San Francisco, California

There has to be over 100 different online learning platforms for hosting online courses and delivering instructional educational content.

These online course platform options provided a good balance between creating your online courses but also being able to efficiently sell them online using marketing automation capabilities such as landing page builders, email sequences and detailed sales tracking and web analytics.

You should focus your time on building your own unique experiential learning framework and making engaging how-to video content that delivers a great online course training experience.