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5 Cutting-Edge Tools for the Modern Marketer

A 2014 survey from the Economist revealed that CMO’s regard data analysis, technology, and marketing operations to be critical areas of focus that are lacking expertise. This means that in order to succeed as a marketer today, one must have the right technological tools and know-how to push efforts forth in a positive direction.

Fortunately, there is now an array of powerful and easy-to-use tools available online; many of which are free. There are tools for everything from analytics, to email automation, to content distribution; if there is an aspect of marketing that you need help with, there is an instrument to put your stress to rest.

Here are some of the most powerful and effective tools in marketing today:

SOASTA

Soasta is the premier analytics platform for online retailers. The platform is so powerful and efficient that all of the top ten online retailers in the US utilize the company’s offerings. With SOASTA, it is all about performance analytics and providing incredibly deep insights into user experiences.

The SOASTA CMO DOC (Digital Operations Center) provides businesses with total coverage in monitoring solutions through mapping the user experience to business metrics in real time. This gives organizations a better understanding of overall performance. Marketers can easily isolate issues to gain a precise picture of where and why the problem is occurring.

Because of the way that the SOASTA CMO DOC ties and delivers metrics for both technical and business users together, organizations can uncover minute-to-minute trends and really get to the heart of the analytics process.

StatSocial

Social media has become a domineering force in the marketing world and Twitter continues to vie for the top spot. StatSocial is the definitive tool for getting to the core of your audience on Twitter. StatSocial identifies custom-defined groups of Twitter users through analyzing more than 60 social networks and major blogging channels to provide businesses with intimate demographic research information.

StatSocial reports dive deep into user information by identifying age, gender, education, income, and will even provide insights into the user’s favorite brands, celebrities, television shows, and more so that marketers can develop truly meaningful campaigns for their audience.

But StatSocial doesn’t stop there; Tweet reports delve into the information surrounding tweets about content, keywords, hashtags, mentions and tons of other useful data. If you are looking to obtain serious insights about your Twitter following, StatSocial is the answer.

Unbounce

When it comes to creating and testing landing pages, Unbounce removes the need for developers and puts the power in the marketer’s hands. The system delivers a flexible and robust drag-and-drop interface, various templates to choose from, and a straightforward design that makes the platform incredibly user-friendly.

Unbounce was “designed with conversions in mind” so marketers have the ability to A/B test pages and track metrics in real-time. The program is also capable of integration with more than 60 commonly used tools like Zoho, Salesforce, and Google Analytics for an even more comprehensive experience. With affordable pricing, Unbounce is a powerful tool for a myriad of marketing campaigns.

Infusionsoft

Aimed at small businesses, the sales and marketing CRM tool Infusionsoft was developed to get users organized, save time, and grow sales. The unified platform helps to align the business goals of sales and marketing teams by defining work flow processes.

Employed by more than 20,000 small businesses, some of the key features of Infusionsoft include contact management, lead scoring, online sales, advanced email marketing, and marketing campaign automation.

Through the automation process, businesses are able to cultivate consistent brand messaging and provide personalized customer experiences throughout a campaign. The application itself was designed to free business owners from tasks that are less than ideal to manage so that more time and energy can be focused on the projects they actually enjoy.

Canva

Images are a massive force in the success of social media posts. Today, 63 percent of all social media posts are made up of images. Without a captivating image, your post is dead in the water. This is where the visual content creation platform Canva becomes a marketer’s best friend.

Canva is a graphic-design tool for people who don’t know the first thing about graphic-design. The platform provides users with an extensive collection of templates that can be altered to meet the user’s needs. The simple and intuitive drag-and-drop feature makes producing visual imagery not only extremely simple, but fun to do as well. While the tool is robust in capabilities, the streamlined layout makes for a remarkably smooth UX.

The average marketer now has a barrage of tools at their disposal. With these platforms and the endless number of others online, any temporary walls you may face can be overcome quickly thanks to the powerful tools that technology provides.

What are some of your favorite go-to tools for marketing? How do you think that technology is poised to change the face of marketing yet again in the years to come?

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By Tina Courtney-Brown