Students of inbound marketing understand the importance of creating a pipeline of compelling content that delights customers and moves leads through the purchasing funnel. Reality, however, can be a little more complicated.
Marketing teams often find themselves overwhelmed by a seemingly infinite amount of content at their fingertips. They're too busy talking to leads and don't have time to become "experts" in things like Twitter marketing. And while they realize that there are tools out there to make their lives easier, they don't know which ones to choose.
Therefore, we'd like to look at the five best tools to grow the fundamental components of your inbound marketing strategy: content generation (Feedly and Swayy), intelligent hashtagging (Hastagify.me), graphic design (Canva), and an integrated platform that ties disparate elements together (HubSpot.)
Let's begin!
Feedly. Blogs, YouTube channels, news sites, RSS feeds — who has time to sift through them all? Feedly does. It improves upon aggregation sites like Google News by intelligently categorizing content so you don't have to. Feedly integrates seamlessly with Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Buffer, OneNote, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others so that you can easily share the content you read in your "Feedly" with your friends and colleagues.
Swayy. Swayy is another powerful content curation tool that gives users an analytics dashboard that tracks how other users respond to your posts and shares. This is important because, after all, inbound marketing should delight users. And when you see what content resonates with followers, you can calibrate your approach accordingly. If something's working, run with it.
Hastagify.me. In a Twitterverse of a billion hashtags, what hashtags should you select to maximize the reach of your Tweet? For an answer, we turn to hashtagify.me. It's a tool that allows you to search among 39,266,917 Twitter hashtags (but who's counting?) and quickly find the best ones for your need based on their popularity, relationships, languages, influencers and other metrics. It's a must-have for your Twitter marketing effort. (Thanks, guys!)
Canva
Canva has the goods to transform the average Joe into a honest-to-goodness graphics designer. Canva's intuitive interface lets you drag-and-drop pieces of content to create your mini-work of art. Start with a blank page, access their library of free graphics, photos, and fonts, and off you go. You can also easily edit photos using their editor while applying cool techniques like tints, blurs, and saturation options. Click here for more awesomely free graphic design tools.
HubSpot. While the aforementioned tools address content curation, creation, and marketing, HubSpot's all-in-one solution ties together the critical back- and front-end components of your inbound marketing strategy. We're taking about things like lead management, landing pages, calls-to-action, marketing automation, email, analytics, plus daily to-dos like blogging, SEO, and social media. Is it a lot of stuff? You bet. And is it better to run these tasks "under one roof" to optimize reporting, minimize redundant work, and enjoy economics of scale? You bet. Rather than explore each product offering, we'll drill down on one discreet element — lead management — to illustrate our point. Lead management efforts often fail because marketers access disparate databases, adopt various lead scoring techniques, or simply refuse to keep their opportunities up to date. HubSpot's lead management solution addresses these problems by allowing users to easily segment and score leads based on characteristics or behavior. The result? A more targeted approach towards content creation and dissemination.
What other tools have you used to grow your inbound marketing? Have these tools generated a return on investment? What element of inbound marketing is the most challenging for your team?
Considering a partnership with an inbound agency? Do your due diligence and download our Hiring an Inbound Marketing Agency eBook.
