- 6 Powerful tools for digital sales of your business
Section 2: Summary of the Article
- Your competitor exists not only offline but also online. So, you should use consider various digital sales tools to track your competition.
- There are 6 most popular tools that are used to track competition online that include social media KPS, online reputation management, email marketing, email funneling and flip your marketing budget.
- You can track online competition with the help of Google alert, Sprout social, Facebook and Instagram.
- You should manage your online reputation with the help of your team or you can outsource it.
- If any customer is giving negative reviews online, you should resolve the matter offline.
- Inbound marketing is about getting found where people search for you. So, you should create good content, blogging and SEO.
Section 3: Main Content of the Article
You should follow these 6 digital sales tools to track your online competition:
- Track competition online
- Social media KPS
- Online reputation management
- Email marketing
- Email funneling
- Flip your marketing budget
Key Note #1: Track competition online
Your competitor exists not only offline but also online. You can use the following tools to know the competitor’s online performance.
- Google alert:
- You can use Google alert to know about the activity of a specific competitor.
- You can know about his industry.
- Also, you get to know about online terms that he is mentioning.
- You can consider some important points for Google alert.
- For example, you should check if any competitor is using your name, your company’s name, your business address, your tagline, your brand name.
- Also, he might be focusing on same companies that you are going to focus.
- Sprout Social:
- You can also use sprout social.
- It will help you in tracking the social media performance of your competitor.
- Facebook and Instagram:
- You can also use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
- You can compare your performance with the competitor.
- BuzzSumo:
- You can use BuzzSumo.
- It will provide you information about the hot topic of industry content.
- SEMrush:
- It is a tool that you can use for competitor analysis.
- You can use SEO, PPC, keyword research, social media and PR content.
- There are 30 tools through which it can track 3.7 billion keywords with 4 trillion backlinks.
You should know about SEO audit, positioning tracking and competitor’s intelligence.
For competitor analysis, you should understand the competitor’s keywords. Also, identify your new organic competitors because today is the era of online competition.
Key Note#2: Social media KPI’s
You should track the following indicators on your social media:
- Response rate:
- You need to improve your reaction time towards customers.
- Reduce reaction time and respond faster to customers.
- Positive vs. negative mention ratio:
- You should track that out of overall social media:
- How many % of people are writing positive content about you?
- How many % of people are writing negative content about you?
- Churn rate:
- You can check if your team is successful in holding the frustrated customer from leaving your business.
- You can find your churn rate.
For example:
- Bada Business tracks the following 4 things on the Facebook page:
- Number of posts
- Total reach
- Number of leads
- Conversion
- Today there are about 38 lakhs followers of Bada Business on Facebook and 40 crore per month viewership.
Social media is not only technology, rather it’s a conversion. Social media is about psychology, sociology and not technology.
Successful social media marketing is built on relations, not impressions.
Key Note#3: Online reputation management
- Online reputation is important to maintain sales in a growing organisation.
- Everyone lives online including your brand.
- You should consider the following points in this regard:
- Online rumor spreads very fast.
- The potential buyer checks the information online before purchase.
- Misinformation and negative reviews can be very dangerous.
- Brand’s negative image impact selling.
- So, you should manage your online reputation with the help of your team or you can outsource it.
- You should do following things to build online reputation:
- If any customer is giving negative reviews online, you should resolve the matter offline
- Collaborate with influencers to write positive reviews about you
- Maintain your promise towards customers
- Monitor your online reputation through audit
- Accept your mistakes in a graceful manner
- Improve your response rate
- Follow up with your customer to reduce the negative response rate
- Give incentives to agency when they improve your ratings
- Replace negative response with positive response
- Promote your positive content through articles
- User generated content
- Ask your customer to write content about you
Golden statement
It is difficult to make a reputation, but it is more difficult to maintain a reputation.
Your reputation is not what you speak about yourself rather your reputation is what Google speaks about you.
It might take 20 years to build a reputation but it takes 5 minutes to damage reputation.
Key Note#4: Email marketing
- Emails help in building long term relationships.
- You can convert your interested customer into paying customers if you start writing personalised emails.
- So you should mention their names in the emails.
- Also, track how many customers have opened your email. Use a creative subject line.
- Don’t ignore your invisible customers they can be visible again.
- Your growth will be exponential if you can convert an invisible customer into a loyal customer.
- You can remarket with the help of a mobile number and email address.
- You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything.
Today, content is not the king rather it is a kingdom.
Key Note#5: Email funneling
Email funneling is different from email marketing. It helps in tracking through the following 5 steps:
1. Send email to the people
2. Check how many people have received an email
3. Check how many people opened e-mails
4. Check how many of them clicked on the landing page
5. Check how many people did conversion
You can make your content strategy according to the step where the person is for now.
You can also hire an agency for this which is a cheaper.
You will get to know the bounce rate, unsubscribed list, and conversion rate.
You should create consumer-oriented content.
Also, you can provide them private instructional videos to solve their problems and gain traffic.
Give a call to action as well.
Key Note#6: Flip your marketing budget
- Don’t go for outbound marketing rather than be inbound for marketing.
- You should do something that customer comes to you because it takes lesser efforts when a customer comes to you in comparison to when you approach them.
- You should spend 90% of the amount on inbound and 10% amount on outbound marketing.
- Outbound marketing involves traditional methods such as seminars, trade shows, cold calling, telemarketing, email blast, door to door, etc.
- It does not create ROI.
- These methods are quite difficult just like searching a needle in a large field.
- Inbound is about get found where people search for you.
- This will happen when you create good content, blogging and SEO.
The following are the benefits of inbound marketing:
- Customers get exactly what they are looking for
- Customer’s get product at their price point
- Customer gets product at the time of need
When you do outbound you might be selling a product that they don’t require or the amount that they don’t require while inbound you are selling products at the price required by the customers.
In case of the inbound marketing, customer will approach you and find the product according to his requirement.
Section 4: Key Outcomes of the Article
- Ensure to track your online competition
- Implement social media strategies to build your online reputation