Top Digital Marketing tools your Small Business

With all this in mind, we’ve highlighted some of the top digital marketing tools your small business should employ to find success in the online sphere.

Email marketing tools

In our post ‘Best Email Newsletter Practices for Small Businesses’, we discussed how email remains a key element in monetization strategies, due to the fact that it can target a wide range of customer personas and purchasing demands. In this regard, you should use email marketing tools to improve your business deliverability and create engaging offer campaigns. Such tools include Lemlist and Sendgrid, which offer various email marketing services such as flexible design options, in-depth deliverability, performance analytics, and personalization features.

Social media marketing tools

Social media has evolved into a key marketing channel for every business today. Aside from enabling businesses to easily connect with their customers, social media also helps with nurturing leads, building business relationships, and gathering valuable customer data. Given all of this, you should strongly consider using social media marketing tools such as Sprout Social and Hootsuite. These platforms can help you with managing your small business’s social media accounts by helping you to organize your assets and content calendar. This, in turn, makes it easier to publish and schedule your content across your social media accounts. Furthermore, these tools also generate social analytics, which you can use to focus on improving KPIs and secure ROI for your business.

Search engine optimization tools

Reports show that more than half of website traffic comes from queries on search engines. Because of this, you should aim to make your business’s website more visible on search engines. The best way to do this is by leveraging search engine optimization, or SEO. A post at the reliable finance website AskMoney.com has described SEO as a set of techniques that allow your website to rank high on search engine results. By extension, it’s a practice that you can use to increase brand awareness and visibility, which translates to higher revenue.

Admittedly, learning SEO can be difficult, and might seem complicated –– especially if you’re not used to very technical concepts. Thankfully, there are SEO tools that make it easier to optimize your business website. These included Ahrefs, which helps with generating keywords for your website’s content. Another tool that you should use to improve your website’s SEO is SEMrush, which helps you track the position of your priority keywords, as well as break down keyword ideas, variations, and difficulties to help generate useful content ideas.

Graphic creation tools

Digital marketing relies on engagement. With that said, you should be able to create graphics that are visually stimulating for your target audience and properly convey your message and branding. With that in mind, be sure to use graphic creation tools that help you produce eye-catching visuals. Trusted creative resource CreativeBloq.com lists some of the best tools for creating social media graphics. These include the ever-popular Canva and the infographics creation software Piktochart.

Final Thoughts

Through the practices and tools discussed above, you can ensure that your business won’t fall behind in modern digital marketing. To learn more about content monetization and other tools that can help your small business succeed in the digital space, be sure to check out what we offer here at Publir.

Featured Image credit: https://weedit.network/

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What is a VAST tag

In simple words, VAST is a script that allows video players and ad servers to interact successfully, guaranteeing that a video ad plays as intended and provides a consistent experience for the customer. A Video Ad Serving Template tells video players how to get an ad, when to render it, what ad-media to use, as well as the length, format, duration, tracking information, and price.

Publishers who use VAST have witnessed a substantial increase in video ad revenue over the years. In fact, video advertising expenditure is predicted to increase to $35 billion by 2024, up from $26 billion now. Many publishers are increasing their earnings by utilizing programmatic video advertising.

The details of each VAST tag vary depending on the information that an advertiser wishes to transmit to the video players of the audience. In general, though, you’ll see something that looks like HTML, with property items represented in each tag by straightforward assignments. A link to the media file that makes up the ad content is present in every set of VAST tags.

VAST tags are also used by advertisers to specify the format of an ad video file. The tag in this example informs the video player that the file is in mp4 format. Later versions of VAST extended support for various file types, such as Flash and Javascript, which aren’t always single media.

A VAST tag also identifies the type of advertisement that will be shown. This provides the advertiser some control over how the ad appears in relation to the content, such as pre-roll ads that appear before the content or overlays that appear over the content. Later versions of VAST enhanced its ad type support to provide advertisers more complex alternatives including ad pods, which are a series of ads presented in order to fill an ad break.

Who created VAST tags

VAST was created by IAB and has been updated to fit the evolving demands of the ecosystem since its debut. VAST 1.0 was released in 2008, and we are now on VAST 4.1 (June 2018 release). However, adoption is gradual, and efforts to enhance it are ongoing.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) uses tags to format directives. VAST provides marketers with an XML-based standard for connecting ad servers and various types of video players. Tags, i.e., pieces of code, are used in this language to allow marketers to specify specific features or controls for the video player to read and execute. 

How to create VAST tags

For digital publishers and developers, creating a VAST tag is a pretty easy technique. There are three methods for creating a VAST Tag, and it is up to publishers to choose the one that best matches their ad type:

Manual technique: Manually developing a VAST tag should be a pretty simple procedure for publishers who are already familiar with XML and the idea of pre-defined parameters. While publishers may choose to build VAST tags manually, AdOps engineers will utilize the parameters to validate the VAST ad tag, therefore there is a minimal advantage to doing so.

Through the ad Server of an advertiser (such as Google Ad Manager): The process of creating a VAST tag in Google Ad Manager (Google DFP) is rather simple.

1. Open Google Ad Manager and log in.
2. Select Inventory and then Ad Units from the drop-down menu.
3. Find your video ad unit and click it.
4. Select Generate tags from the drop-down menu.
5. Follow the three-step process, clicking Continue after each step (Tag type, Tag Options, and Tag Results)
6. When you’re finished, click Done.

Using third-party tools: VAST tags may be created using a variety of third-party tools available on the market, in addition to Google. Publishers, on the other hand, must ensure that their video players satisfy all of the needed criteria. This will eliminate any unwanted ad display issues.

What is VAST in Digital Marketing

The percentage of ad revenue spent on digital video is increasing, and with it, the need for regulations to control it. As a result, ad tech jargon like VAST, VPAID, and MRAID has become an alphabet soup. They may appear perplexing, but they don’t have to be. VAST is a script that tells video players which advertisement to play, how it should appear, how long it should stay, and whether or not people may skip it. 

It’s crucial because it allows video players and ad servers to communicate in the same language. Standards imply scalability, which implies greater volume to sell and more cash for publishers. When a video player requests a VAST ad server to play a video ad, the video player makes a request to the VAST ad server. 

It’s a basic HTTP-based URL that looks like this: 

http://www.example.com/?LR_PUBLISHER_ID=1331&LR_CAMPAIGN_ID=229&LR_SCHEMA=vast2-vpaid

Conclusion 

According to a Zenith press release prediction, the average individual would spend around 100 minutes each day watching internet videos by 2021. With a growing number of publishers actively pursuing programmatic video advertising, this rate is only projected to rise. Using VAST tags to implement video advertisements will improve video ad performance across all web pages. 

Video commercials are now on the rise, and they are developing at a breakneck pace. If you’re a publisher, your website monetization plan is probably inadequate if you haven’t yet prepared for video advertisements. Publishers, on the other hand, now have more power, scope, and bandwidth to monetize a video as a medium thanks to advancements like VAST. For more such articles, head to Publir Blog!

The post What are the VAST Tags and Steps to Create Them? first appeared on Publir.

Marketing using online platforms is becoming the preferred marketing method to promote your products and services in the technology-driven world of today. Hence, the present digital environment demands our knowledge of various digital marketing tools to promote our companies and services in the right way. 

Have you ever thought about improving your business on the digital platform but found out that you have limited knowledge about digital marketing tools? It’s not easy to find out the best tools because there are so many options available. Choosing the wrong one may affect your business and changing tools is inconvenient and cumbersome. 

Why do we need Digital Marketing Tools?

No two companies are the same, so it’s important to do your research so you can choose the most appropriate tool for the way you do business. Thousands of tools are available to organizations and their digital marketers. And there’s a lot to consider when evaluating the tools you’ll use, including ease of use, budget, performance, depth of delivery, reach, recommendations, and others.

Social networking may be the most common digital outlet for digital marketing strategy, but that doesn’t mean it’s the most effective. You need to choose the right approach for your own needs–and the tools you need to carry out that strategy. And then you’ll want to measure those results to ensure you’re on the right path.

Top Digital Marketing Tools in 2021

Let’s look at some of the most valuable digital marketing tools for businesses today, based on the type of services they support. The tools mentioned below will give you a heads-up on what the winning teams are using.

Data & Analytics

Google Analytics

For any digital marketer who seeks to scale his company, Google Analytics is a must. This free tool shows you all the relevant website output statistics, including where your website traffic is coming from, what they’re doing on your website, what pages they love, and more.

Pros

• Google Analytics can measure traffic from various multimedia formats such as blogs, smartphone apps, posters, or anything that is connected to the internet. 
• You can add a Google Analytics account through the Google Ads account, making your digital ads more effective. 
• Data can be collected from various networks and databases, such as trade links, market benchmarks, etc. 
• You can create custom objectives and track e-commerce sites through this tool.

Cons

• You must “learn the language” to understand the complexities of Google Analytics, and it can feel complicated. 
• The right resource is, unfortunately, frequently difficult to find online, and directions for those without an interim analysis experience can be frustrating, time-consuming, or daunting.
• Overwhelming feeling with many dashboards, user views, and analytics.
• If you experience heavy page traffic may, you may need to switch to a paid version that is quite costly (though most small and growing businesses can do quite a lot with the free version). 

Pricing

There are two pricing tiers for Google Analytics:

• Freemium: Free
• Premium: $150,000 per year

Sumo

Sumo, formerly known as SumoMe, provides a range of website enhancement software. You can see if users are reading your blog with its heat maps tool, and check out precisely where people are clicking so you can adjust the call-to-action buttons, news, pictures, etc. for an even better ROI. It’s easy to find information through Sumo’s content analysis application.

Pros

• A large range of software to replace some individual plugins of WordPress.
• The intuitive user interface is incredibly convenient.
• Setup and monitor info to assist you in obtaining the best results.
• The premium version includes the latest software and resources from third parties.

Cons

• The visitor’s brand contains the free edition.
• Premium versions are fairly costly.

Pricing

There are five pricing for Sumo:

• Basic: Free
• Small: $29 per month
• Medium: $59 per month
• Large: $119 per month
• Sumo: Unlimited (find out more on the Sumo website)

Blog Content and SEO

UberSuggest

UberSuggest can help you come up with new content topics and keywords with a simple “suggest” option. Simply type in an idea or keyword to see a list of similar outcomes. You can then pick either of the results to broaden the scope, check Google trends, or search Google’s keyword.

Pros

• A free app having no restrictions like most software with the keyword. 
• Open to everyone on the Internet.
• Offers a lot of new ideas about keywords and content topics.
• It uses location-based data that is easy to scan for through SEO.
• It gives you fast results and simplified metrics.

Cons

• You may find that you’re restricted in identifying specific target audiences. Results linked to particular niche markets can be difficult to identify.
• There is no dedicated mobile app for Ubersuggest.

Pricing

There are two pricing for Ubersuggest:

• Monthly: $2.5 per month
• Yearly: $45 per year

Google Keyword Planner

This free tool will help you find keyword and ad ideas, look at the performance of a list of keywords, generate new key phrases by multiplying several keyword lists together and select competitive bids and budgets for your promotions. 

Pros

• It is easy to use with a simple step-by-step process.
• It lets you export data easily and quickly.
• It has a unique feature allowing you to multiply two or more keyword lists to generate a list of new, special keyword combinations.
• It has hundreds of possible alternatives to the keywords entered by the user.
• This tool helps you to apply filters based on area, right down to the city, as well as language.

Cons

• Google Keyword Planner would not propose long-term keywords for most types.
• This tool does not seem to have a negative keyword list for those that use one.

Pricing

This is a free tool where the only requirement is your Google account or Gmail account credentials.

SEMrush

SEMrush comes with a slew of digital marketing resources that will assist all paying search experts and SEOs in tracking and improving their search rankings. One of the most useful features of SEMrush is the ability to watch your rivals. You will use the tools to pull backlinks from your competitors, monitor their ranking fluctuations, and do a complete comparative analysis.

Pros

• It will show you how your website is doing in the search engine results with your chosen keywords.
• It even gives you details about your competitors’ websites. You can take advantage of the information by applying it to your own website.
• You can fully schedule, organize, and launch PPC campaigns with SEMrush at your disposal.
• It gives you all the information you need about each keyword in your niche. This covers the term’s search rate, patterns, and ad copy.

Cons

• Its backlink and keyword index are not the best in the market.
• Its PPC keyword research tool is not user-friendly.
• Most of the information present is in industry jargon rather than in plain language.
• SEMRush’s recommendations can give you a false sense of confidence and precision if you don’t have a professional marketer to translate your results.

Pricing

There are three pricing for SEMrush:

• Pro: $99.95 per month
• Guru: $199.95 per month
• Business: $399.95 per month

Email Automation

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a comprehensive marketing tool that allows you to communicate with your subscribers and customers seamlessly and automatically. You can set up subscription forms and send email newsletters and automated email sequences to stay in front of your audience regularly–right in their inboxes. Some pricing tiers offer a full customer relationship management system, landing pages, lead scoring, and more. 

Pros

• Integration with over 800 other tools you may already be using
• Over 500 automation recipes so you can literally get your automation going in minutes
• It’s incredibly easy to upgrade or downgrade your services to meet your current needs
• Predictive sending is available for some tiers, so you can send your emails when your audience is in their inbox–rather than in the middle of the night

Cons

• New users have found it to be difficult to navigate
• There’s no free option
• The price can get expensive if you have a large list

Pricing

• Lite: $9 a month, paid yearly, for 500 contacts
• Plus: $49 a month, paid yearly, for 500 contacts
• Professional: $129 a month, paid yearly, for 500 contacts
• Enterprise: $229 a month, paid yearly, for 500 contacts

HubSpot

HubSpot, a well-known provider of CRM and inbound marketing tools, recently introduced an email marketing service. HubSpot Email Marketing is simple to use, has high deliverability, and is fully compatible with all other HubSpot goods, including the free-forever CRM and hundreds of other common marketing resources.

Pros

• HubSpot offers multi-blog hosting, which can all be handled from a single location.
• The HubSpot CMS has a WordPress “blog importer.” This platform makes it easy to convert your WordPress blog to HubSpot.
• There is an SEO checklist when you build a blog using HubSpot’s in-line editor. This checklist outlines what needs to be streamlined in order for the blog to score as high as possible.
• The blog comments dashboard allows advertisers more leverage of their comments by allowing them to be filtered and moderated before they are uploaded.

Cons

• You cannot update your blog using the staging tool; instead, you must replace the blog templates in your settings.
• While HubSpot allows you to convert content into another language, this option is only available for limited website pages and landing pages.
• The tags will be applied to all blogs. This is fine if you only have one blog in a single language, but if you have two, three, or even four blogs, the tags would not translate well.

Pricing

HubSpot has four pricings:

• Free
• Starter: $45 per month
• Professional: $800 per month
• Enterprise: $3,200 per month

Social Media Marketing

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is used by many social media marketing agencies to plan and analyze social media behavior and results across various platforms–and it works great for organizations that are managing their own social media too. Marketing teams can quickly produce and schedule quality social media content to attract their target audiences. Users can respond to comments right in the tool, research new trends, and watch social conversations and brand mentions.

Pros

• It helps in monitoring multiple social media streams all in one place.
• You can schedule posts weeks in advance, so you can set it and forget it.
• It has a dashboard for social analytics that provides customized insights.
• It has a one-of-a-kind app directory with over 100 applications, including YouTube, Salesforce, Google Drive, and SoundCloud.

Cons

• Given the amount of interaction taking place within any one tab, seeing too many social networks and accounts shown in the interface can be overwhelming.
• It’s not as intuitive and simple as other social media marketing tools.

Pricing

There are four pricing for Hootsuite:

• Professional: $29 per month
• Team: $129 per month
• Business: $599 per month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing according to services 

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another social media scheduling tool that allows you to schedule posts well in advance. It offers analytics that inform you about your content distribution rates, level of interest per message, use, and other considerations so you can figure out how often you should share. 

Pros

• The dashboard is well-organized, with a menu of six different items that will assist you with any current social media campaign that you might be undertaking.
• Sprout Social allows you to track posts from all of your social media pages in one convenient location.
• The Listening feature shows you audience trends in a unique format.
• It is simple and easy to publish posts on a regular basis with this tool.

Cons

• Sprout Social’s analytics don’t track the same way the social media platforms track, making it difficult to rely solely on its reports.
• In the scheduling tool, links don’t always format well.
• It has a limited number of social media networks including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. 

Pricing

It has three pricing:

• Standard: $99 per month
• Professional: $149 per month
• Advanced: $249 per month

Visual Design

Klipfolio

Klipfolio is a fantastic platform for data visualization and automation. It offers dashboards to help consumers monitor the success of their marketing strategies. Klipfolio connects to a wide variety of data sources through integrated APIs – and if there isn’t an API for a data source, it’s simple to create one within the platform. It also has a useful feature that allows you to send data as an attachment via email.

Pros

• It integrates with numerous data sources and has great documentation.
• Dashboards with shared/permalink URLs are ideal for allowing private access without needing a password.
• Klipfolio strikes a good balance between ease of use and efficient data crunching and visualization capabilities.
• You will have complete control over who can access which data with the help of its team permissions.
• It has a responsive support staff to resolve the issues immediately.

Cons

• Klipfolio is a true dashboard solution for displaying key performance indicators (KPIs). It is not for you if you need a monitoring solution to investigate and drill further into datasets.
• Setting up a new client for a dashboard can be a time-consuming task.
• For people who are new to Excel, SQL, and database design, there is a slightly steep learning curve.

Pricing

Klipfolio has the following pricing plans:

• Free Trial
• Starter: $29 per month
• Publish: $49 per month
• Grow: $99 per month
• Team: $199 per month

Landing Pages

LeadPages

LeadPages makes it easy to build mobile-friendly landing pages, offer lead magnets, gather email addresses, and link your landing page to your email marketing program. Leadpages is one of the most competent landing page builders on the market, allowing you to quickly build a professional-looking landing page that’s easy to update to find the perfect formula for conversions. 

Pros

• It is easy to create landing pages by using a basic drag and drop builder.
• Using the same tool, you can even create popups and caution bars.
• Facilitation is provided at no cost. Leadpages will ensure that the position landing page loads quickly and switches over more effectively.

Cons

• It can be difficult to switch widgets around and position them exactly where you like them while customizing them.
• You’ll need to upgrade to a higher plan to get all the features you might need.
• Standard models are not editable. You are unable to add new content or rearrange existing content.

Pricing

After a 14-days free trial of the tool, Leadpages offers three pricing plans divided into two categories, i.e., monthly and annually:

Monthly:-

• Standard: $37 per month
• Pro: $79 per month
• Advanced: $321 per month

Annually:-

• Standard: $300 per year ($25 per month)
• Pro: $576 per year ($48 per month)
• Advanced: $2388 per year ($199 per month)

Content Curation 

Feedly

Feedly helps you to collect content from all over the web (not just RSS feeds) and organize it into a management dashboard. One of Feedly’s many features is the ability to browse for websites, podcasts, and even keyword search results, then follow these news outlets, which will appear in Feedly any time new content is written. Essentially it becomes your “read later” list based on your preferences.

Pros

• Blogs can be categorized into folders.
• Your sources can be divided into various “feeds.”
• You can easily customize the layout as per your requirement with lots of options.
• When you’re in full articles mode, you can scroll down and it’ll mark the post as read for you. It’s also simple to mark the article as “keep unread.”

Cons

• If you have a lot of interests, your feed can quickly get cluttered.
• Email updates aren’t a free service so you’ll have to upgrade if you want your updates delivered to your inbox. 
• Many features are only available to paying users.

Pricing

All prices are based on annual billing.

• Pro – $6 a month
• Pro+ – $8.25 a month
• Business – $18 a month
• Enterprise (check the website)

Project Management

Trello

Trello is a wildly popular project management tool that can be quickly managed on your computer or mobile device. You can build new assignments, add collaborators, delegate tasks, and set work deadlines in this easy-to-use framework. Trello is free to use, but it also has premium versions for more features.

Pros

• The update system is instantaneous; upgrades will not be delayed if several participants are operating on tasks at the same time.
• Trello is very easy to use, and the whole process of creating cards and boards is extremely user-friendly.
• It is mobile-friendly and keeps you updated on the go with its push notifications.

Cons

• While Trello may carry a large number of attachments, if you are a gold member, you are restricted to 250MB per upload and if you are a basic member, you are only allowed to upload 10MB per upload.
• When you’ve written and saved a comment, you’ll only be able to write a new one rather than edit the old one.

Pricing

Trello has three pricing plans:

• Free
• Business Class: $12.50 per month
• Enterprise: $17.59 per month

It’s time to bring the right digital marketing solutions for 2021 to work for your company and your customers, now that you know what they are.

The future of business growth is in digital marketing. It’s one of the best ways to get in front of new audiences and stay there when done right. And to do it right, you truly need the best tools.  Do your research to find the tools that provide the right solutions for your business. And when in doubt, hire a professional to help you make that decision. For more such insightful content, explore our blog here!

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