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Three Types of Must-Have Marketing Tools

Marketing Technology, Product Reviews, SEO Tools

Guest post by Kas Andz.

In today’s hyper-competitive world, effective digital marketing practices are essential. Some marketing tasks can be repetitive and tedious. But with the help of the right marketing tools, you can automate and improve on those to generate leads and conversions more productively.

The most successful and fast-growing companies employ marketing tools that help them reach the right businesses, at the right time, and effectively sell to them.

It is a stand-out or stand-down world. If your team doesn’t have the right software to help optimize your digital marketing practices, it will difficult to get noticed online.

There are thousands of tools available across the digital marketing technology landscape. The key is to pick the right set of tools for your type of business and your marketing objectives.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools

Solid SEO practices improve the user experience and web site usability as well as your organic search rankings. People trust search engines and when your site sits at the top positions for the keywords they are searching, your site’s credibility increases. Organic search is one of the top two traffic drivers for most websites, and effective SEO provides long-term benefits.

Google Search Console

Google accounts for 87% of all searches worldwide, so it’s the logical focus for your SEO efforts. Google Search Console (GSC) tools and reports help you quantify and assess your site’s search traffic and performance, fix issues, and improve your site’s visibility in Google search results. It helps you optimize your content with search analytics, allowing you to see which queries bring people to your website. It analyses your site’s impressions, clicks, and position.

GSC uses a URL Inspection tool to help you understand how Google search sees your pages. It delivers thorough crawl, index, and serving data about your pages, directly from the Google index.

SEMrush

SEMrush is recognized as the best SEO suite according to US Search Awards 2019, MENA Search Awards 2019, and SEMY Awards 2019. It is also the best digital tool according to Interactive Marketing Awards 2019.

SEMrush is an SEO tool that assists with keyword research, tracks the keyword strategy used by your competition, and runs an SEO audit of your site, looks for backlinking opportunities.

It helps you identify the keyword phrases that are likely to get you the most search traffic and identifies different keyword variations related to a particular root term. This gives you a much better understanding of how people actually search online.

SEMrush shows how your site ranks compared to top competitors along with their top keyword phrases, helping you stand out in search results. Furthermore, it performs detailed SEO audits to help you stay current with Google algorithm changes and improve your link building approach.

BuzzStream

BuzzStream offers a set of tools to help with domain research, email marketing, and project management. It’s a comprehensive all-in-one type platform, and the sheer number of capabilities it offers can be intimidating but useful.

It helps you collate lists of results for your target keywords. Then it delivers data about each result, including overall rankings, related social media accounts, domain age and authority, and more.

BuzzStream allows you to study your competitors based on any keywords you are targeting. It displays important data about domain age and authority for specific websites. It shows your competitors’ rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and finds the social media accounts for their sites. It can also let you see what authors who write for competing websites are doing.

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing is one of the most widely used and cost-effective channels for promoting your business. Email marketing tools automate your message sequences to welcome new opt-in subscribers and nurture leads. The best tools in this category are those keep your messages out of the spam folder and drive clicks or purchases.

Constant Contact

With Constant Contact, you can easily generate mobile-responsive emails that display properly on any device, and trigger a sequence of emails based on client behavior. It allows you to automatically resend emails to those who do not open your messages; and its powerful email list building tools help you grow your opt-in list through social media, your website, and other networks. Constant Contact is one of the most modern, mobile-responsive, and effective email marketing tools.

Mailchimp

One of the easiest email marketing platforms to use is Mailchimp. It makes it simple to create branded emails that look professionally designed. The attractive appearance of messages generated through Mailchimp help improve your brand image and conversion rate.

Mailchimp features a very user-friendly email design tool that lets you generate professional-looking emails in minutes. With the help of Mailchimp’s email automation, you can produce more output with less effort; and it has a mobile app that allows you to create and send emails from anywhere.

AdBase

More than just an email service, AdBase is a predictive marketing system that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you determine what email, text, or sms message to send, when to send, and whom to send it to. It combines tools for email (templates and delivery automation), text messaging, and pop-ups to help grow you opt-in email subscriber list into one integrated offering.

Each AdBase “product” shares valuable metrics with the others, which allows the platform to learn about your customers in detail. These metrics are then used to automatically tune your other customer acquisitions through Google Ads, Instagram, remarketing, Facebook, and other channels.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Tools

PPC Protect

PPC Protect helps you get the most out of your PPC budget. It stops bots from clicking your ads and spending your precious PPC budget, by monitoring every click on your ads and blocking any suspected bot.

With PPC Protect’s huge database of VPN, proxy, and malicious IP addresses, you can run online ad campaigns confident that your budget won’t go to waste.

SpyFu

SpyFu is one of the best PPC tools for competitive research, enabling you to download your competitor’s most profitable search keywords.

With SpyFu’s Adwords Keyword Grouping Tool, you can determine which keyword groups are generating the best results for your competitors. This tool lets you view and download your competitor’s entire Google Ads history.

This detailed research helps you identify keywords that didn’t work well for your competitors, and avoid making the same mistakes. SpyFu also has a PPC Ad Rank Tracker which gives you information about your ad rank across important keyword groups.

Gear Up

It’s essential to have your marketing strategy established before investing in marketing technology tools. With a solid understanding of your target buyers, your product or service differentiators, and your optimal marketing channels, you are set and positioned to choose the most effective marketing tools for your business.

If you’re new to digital marketing and not sure where to start, there are affordable local SEO services that can help you navigate the digital tool jungle.

Kasandz.com is an award winning, full scale marketing and automation growth agency custom tailored to your businesses. Kasandz.com offers Pay Per Result SEO packages for small business and e-commerce email services. Kas Andz Marketing Group will do all the technical work for you and get your business selling.

May 13, 2020/by Tom Pick

SEO Tool Bake-Off: Serpstat vs. SEMrush

SEO Tools, Product Reviews

Sponsored post.

There lots of SEO tool suites available to help marketing and SEO pros more effectively manage their search optimization efforts and analyze competitors.

But two of the most popular SEO tools are Serpstat and SEMRush. Although at first glance the tools offer similar features, on closer inspection it’s clear there are crucial differences which could impact both your search campaign and your wallet.

Here’s a comparison and analysis of the important features of both Serpstat and SEMrush.

Keyword research

Starting with the main feature of each tool, both Serpstat and SEMrush allow for easy-to-use and in-depth keyword research of both your own domain and those of competitors.

Each tool offers a variety of data from rank based on geographic region to keyword information on both SEO and PPC campaigns.

Serpstat provides information on over 180 million domains, compared to SEMrush’s 87 million. Serpstat also retains information on over 168 million ads.

Evaluate Keyword by Difficulty

Both tools offer visual representations of organic keyword ranking difficulty, with colors and numbers detailing the metrics for each individual keyword.

Each tool also highlights competing sites that are currently ranking for the keywords; enabling you to work out which keywords are actually worth chasing.

It’s worth noting that Serpstat offers an interesting feature called “Missing Keywords”. This highlights competitor pages ranking in the top 10 ranking positions for keywords you’re missing, enabling to potentially get an easy advantage when you need it.

Sort Keywords by Topic

Again, both tools include this feature, though under different names.

In SEMrush, you’ll find this under “keyword magic tool”; in Serpstat, this is simply named “keyword clustering tool.”

Both tool features allow users to easily divide and filter keywords by topic, intention, and implication.

Serpstat arguably has the edge in this area as it also analyses meaningful connections between keywords, which are then split into intelligent hierarchies.

It also has a text analytics function which allows for a content analysis of your site alongside competitor websites.

Comparing APIs

Both Serpstat and SEMrush offer incredibly powerful APIs that allow for nearly infinite data analysis.

By subscribing to Serpstat’s Plan B at $69 per month, you get full access to its API with no extra costs (though account limits may apply).

You can get similar features with SEMrush, but must subscribe to its business plan, which currently runs $399.95 per month.

Serpstat also sets itself apart in terms of databases, as it has one for every country and state in the world (230) and has a Google keyword database of 2.4 billion for the US alone.

Domain visibility and tracking

The ability to effectively review the visibility of your website across time is essential for webmasters and SEO pros.

Domain visibility and tracking is a core feature in both tools, enabling webmasters to get a clear, detailed understanding of how their sites rank for their most important keywords.

Serpstat’s domain visibility feature is easy to understand and the tool combines several factors together when calculating performance.

SEMrush’s visibility score is very similar, although presented in a slightly different way, as it uses percentages, rather than a given number.

Both tools are very transparent in how they calculate a site’s visibility, and you can read information on Serpstat’s techniques, here.

Rank Tracking Comparison

Both tools use an array of features to illustrate site performance at a granular level.

For example, SEMrush has a “Sensor” feature that enables webmasters to track how volatile certain SERPs might be, enabling you to analyze changes happening on a macro level.

On the other hand, Serpstat has a neat feature named “Tree View”, which enables you to check which pages are ranking on the second Google page, so you can find which of your own pages have the best potential to get pushed to the top.

Bulk Analysis

Having the ability to perform the bulk analysis is vitally important to help you fully understand what your competitors are doing throughout the year.

Both Serpstat and SEMrush include features that allow you to perform bulk audits of your own sites and those of competitors so that you have a full understanding of your vertical market.

With Serpstat, for example, you can use a batch analysis of up to 200 domains and compare across a wealth of parameters, including visibility, traffic, and keywords.

SEMrush also has a bulk analysis feature for backlinks that lets you enter up to 200 URLs for inspection, which is a great feature for researching potential link building opportunities.

Taking a look at traffic

It’s essential to understand your website traffic sources and trends..

So, both tools supply a variety of metrics for traffic analysis. And with easy-to-understand and digestible overviews, you can detail trends throughout the year.

Each tool also shows you how competitors are getting their traffic, to help you optimize your organic search efforts.

Interestingly, Serpstat also offers data showing how your site could potentially gain traffic on a page-by-page basis, which can be incredibly useful for product and landing pages.

Backlink analysis

In terms of backlink analysis, those familiar with Majestic SEO, may be glad to know that Serpstat’s backlink analysis feature is remarkably similar.

In addition to investigating competitors’ backlinks, you can measure your own backlinks and can investigate new and lost links, alongside a nifty backlink index— a feature some SEO professionals regard as superior to that of SEMrush.

Depending on which plan you’re on, however, you could be limited on the number of backlinks you can evaluate. On the smallest Serpstat business plan, you can investigate 2,400 queries per day and 50,000 results per report.

Both tools allow you to export your backlinks to Excel for deeper analysis.

Conclusion

Compared to other tools on the market, both Serpstat and SEMrush are the premier website analysis and growth hacking tools.

Each is incredibly powerful and allows for in-depth analysis and campaign planning for both organic and paid search.

Although SEMrush is favored by many, it’s slightly outpaced by Serpstat, which offers a more flexible variety of pricing plans; based on both personal and business use.

The clincher here is that Serpstat has a great multi-user functionality, which means you can have up to five users from just $299 per month; making it the better option for agencies or large companies with in-house SEO teams.

In comparison, SEMrush can charge up to $140 per extra user per month and maxes out at nine users, even for companies paying $399 per month for the subscription alone.

May 8, 2019/by Tom Pick

Review: SalesHandy as a B2B Lead Generation Tool

Product Reviews

Lead generation is always challenging, so it’s great to have a helping hand. When you contact and nurture a potential lead pool, it’s important to identify the most engaged prospects from that pool. This helps you focus your efforts to achieve better results.

SalesHandy is an email tool that helps you understand which prospects from your lead pool are highly engaged and most likely to convert into a lead when you contact them.

In the initial stages of lead generation, you need to find the prospects from your industry and qualify those prospects to determine if they have the potential to become qualified leads. Segmentation is also important once you qualify these prospects; you need to categorize your prospects based on relevant criteria, such as title, company size, and product interest.

Once you qualify your prospects, the next step is to nurture them, moving them through the sales funnel using compelling content and calls to action such as webinar invitations. This is where you identify your potential leads by monitoring the response to your outreach. This is when SalesHandy comes into the picture.

SalesHandy’s mail merge feature allows you to send personalized mass emails. You can nurture your leads effectively by viewing real-time engagement data of all individual recipients in your email campaigns. You can then focus on the most engaged prospects and take necessary actions to convert those leads.

To get started using Saleshandy, you just need to upload a CSV file containing your prospects’ data to the web app.

To improve your lead generation campaign’s response rate, you can set up multi-stage automatic follow-up emails to your email campaign (or even individual emails), based on conditions like not opened/not replied/been sent:

Not opened – Follow-up emails will be sent to the recipients who have not opened your previous email.
Not replied – Follow-up emails will be sent to the recipients who have not replied to your previous email.
Been sent – Follow-up emails will be sent to all the recipients irrespective of above conditions.

This flowchart explains the effective use of “not replied” condition. You can send multi-stage follow-ups this illustration shows a simple two-stage campaign.

In addition to helping you generate more engagement and responses from your potential leads, SalesHandy provides detailed engagement metrics for your email campaign by tracking recipient behavior of each email of your campaign/individual email. Along with the email, you can also track links that you include in the email and documents attached to your email campaign/email.

There are several other benefits of using SalesHandy. Its email scheduling feature enables you to contact your potential prospects when they are most likely to open your messages. This increases your email response rate and ultimately helps generate more leads.

Save time when sending the same email repeatedly by creating an email template. SalesHandy reports the success rate of each template used so you can share the most effective messages with team members.

After effectively contacting your prospects, the last step is to convert them into leads. Whether you want to generate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) or Sales Qualifed Leads (SQLs), SalesHandy can help. It provides rich analytics and reports on its dashboard so you get in-depth engagement data analytics. It enables you to identify warm leads in real time.

SalesHandy displays recipient engagement analytics such as:

email open rates,
reply rate and
link tracking

These help you understand the interest level of your prospects, which will help you identify warm contacts that qualify as MQL’s.

To assist with the next step of converting MQLs into SQL’s, you can share documents related to your product/services with contacts to convert them into SQL’s using SalesHandy’s document tracking feature.

SalesHandy document tracking enables you to share collateral and generate detailed, real-time reader engagement data including:

the number of times the attached document was opened
the total time spent on the document
time spent on each page and
the average percentage viewed of the document.

These insights help you idenrify which MQLs will most likely to convert to SQLs, and make informed decisions.

For lead generation professionals, SalesHandy helps not only to save time on outreach and automate follow-up, but also provides insights that helps to identify and focus on the most engaged contacts, improving conversion rates.

There are few tools that provide email campaign management with automated follow-up, email tracking, email templates, and document tracking combined in a single easy-to-use solution.

Pricing:

SalesHandy has competitive pricing options ranging from free to $40 per user per month, based on particular requirements. Visit SalesHandy.com and click “Pricing” to see all of their pricing options. All paid plans include 24-7 priority support for any product questions or issues.

The individual plan is free forever, and all paid plans offer a 14-day free trial period. So there’s no risk in taking SalesHandy for a test drive.

January 9, 2019/by Tom Pick

FreshBooks Announces New Proposals Feature

Product Reviews

FreshBooks, one of the best accounting tools for small business, recently announced an exciting and useful new feature: Proposals. Agencies and independent professional services providers have long been able to create estimates inside FreshBooks, but the new proposals functionality takes that a crucial step further.

The new proposals feature can potentially help FreshBooks users win more business. The estimates functionality alone enabled you to list the tasks you’d be completing or services you provide along with associated costs. Those are certainly important elements for a prospective new client to understand, but proposals offer deeper functionality to help you stand out.

With proposals, you can add information like:

Objective: What is the client’s current situation? What are they trying to achieve (that you will help them with)?
Approach: How are you thinking about their situation? How will you solve it? This shows you aren’t just listening to their problems, but also diagnosing solutions. It enables you to explain the “why” for your service estimates.
Timeline: How long is the engagement? Are there phases? What type of results can be measured at each stage? This gives the prospective client confidence they are signing up for more than just a laundry list of services, and helps set expectations.

How to Create a Proposal in FreshBooks

From the main screen, click Estimates. Click the Create New button and select Proposals.

This will open a New Proposal screen as shown below.

Note the sections include the ability to add the information noted above (objective / overview, work scope / approach, and timeline) as well as additional notes about the project or engagement and important terms.

Once you’ve added your information, you can customize the appearance of your proposal by selecting between different templates (Simple or Modern), fonts, and customizing the color scheme to reflect your branding.

When you’re done, just save it, preview it, and send your FreshBooks Proposal to your client for approval! Clients can accept with a single click.

Agencies, contractors, and independent consultants often create proposals using Microsoft Word, Excel, or other tools. Creating them inside FreshBooks instead keeps all of your proposals in one place, along with your other business financial documents.

You can easily convert proposals to invoices, and duplicate existing proposals as the basis for creating new ones.

Set your service offerings apart and win more business! FreshBooks Proposals are available now to users at the Plus ($25 per month) or Premium ($50 per month) plan levels.

February 7, 2018/by Tom Pick

Three Types of Must-Have Marketing Tools