We tend to focus a lot of our time on this blog talking about the technologies that businesses can (and usually should) use as a part of their operations. However, without clients or customers coming in, there’s only so much good that these technologies can do. That’s why we wanted to briefly touch on a few technologies that can help you attract more people to your business so that all the other IT solutions we recommend can live up to their potential.

What Tools Can Benefit My Business’ Marketing Efforts?

The real key to your marketing success, regardless of your industry, is data. Data is critical if you want to accurately and efficiently answer some of the most important questions that will help guide your business’ marketing efforts. These questions include things like:

• What challenges or problems does my business solve for my clientele?
• Who should my marketing efforts be targeting, or in other words, who am I talking to?
• How can I most effectively communicate the reasons my business is the best choice for my prospective clients to choose—what is it that they find important?
• Where can I most effectively reach the people I should be talking to?

Fortunately, there are IT tools available today to help you organize your data and better answer these questions.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platforms Help You Understand and Meet Your Customers’ Expectations

With a CRM platform at your disposal, you’re able to much more efficiently track various data points about your clientele that can be used to generate valuable conclusions about all sorts of things, helping you attract, onboard, and retain loyal customers over time. From helping associate common purchases to identifying spikes in certain customer behaviors to providing insight into far too many correlating factors to list here, your CRM effectively takes your data and identifies ways that you can optimize your marketing to suit your customers’ needs and priorities.

Various Platforms Help You Automate Your Marketing Efforts

Have you ever been browsing a website for some product, and suddenly you find yourself receiving emails offering you deals on similar or related goods? This is made possible through the combined use of a CRM and an email marketing tool. By taking the insights compiled by your CRM, you can use the data generated and apply it to your marketing efforts through email. Let’s say you wanted to sell more doodads… by taking a list of interested prospects from your CRM, you could use email marketing software to create an automated campaign to help push these doodads to a list of interested contacts, with other lists created to help you sell widgets, thingamajigs, and whatever else you wish.

In addition to helping you with your more targeted efforts, other platforms simply make your marketing less time-consuming. Options exist that allow you to schedule social media posts in advance, saving you from having to commit time each and every day to coming up with and posting new content on your various social channels. Many of these platforms also offer features that give you (what else?) additional data points to help you make these efforts more effective over time, as well.

Analytics Platforms Add to the Data at Your Disposal

Finally, if you want to market your business as effectively as possible, it will be important to go back and reexamine how effective your assorted efforts were. Different analytics platforms exist to help you in this regard, condensing the data into a digestible form to better communicate your ultimate return on investment. From there, you can take advantage of this data to make improvements and try it all again.

Of Course, Your Operations Need to Live Up to Your Marketing Promises

That’s where we really come in. We’ll be there to ensure that your business’ essential technology is firing on all cylinders and you’re functionally capable of delivering on the promises your marketing makes. Give us a call at (415) 295-4898 to learn more about our managed IT services.