Are your marketing resources being utilized as efficiently as possible? Maybe your marketing messages are reaching a relevant audience, but are they reaching irrelevant consumers as well? This means you’re wasting your advertising budget on clicks that don’t turn into conversions. Or maybe your emails are getting sent out to inactive email accounts. So you’re using up all the monthly email allotment your email marketing tool allows.
It could even be that you’re paying for your content to be seen by non-humans such as bots. That means you’ll end up spending a large chunk of your advertising money on unconvertible clicks made by these bots. Whatever the case may be, you could be losing a lot of time and money, which could ultimately affect your ability to fully reach your potential.
Here are some tools that will help you reduce wasted marketing resources:
1. Userforge
Many marketers spend so much of their time and effort trying to create content and marketing messages that would appeal to everyone. While you’re wasting time and resources publishing content that’s for everyone, you could end up with a message that’s too vague for anyone to take seriously.
Using tools like UserForge, you can gain a better understanding of who your audience is and what their pain points are. This information will help you to create content that will cater specifically to your target audience. So you’ll end up spending less time and resources in creating content that delivers results.
2. Clickcease
If you’ve ever run a pay-per-click campaign, you may have experienced instances in which you get a lot of clicks yet only a handful of those turn out to be valuable. So you end up wasting a lot of precious marketing dollars on those wasted clicks. In some cases, many of those clicks didn’t convert because they were fraudulent or invalid.
Click fraud is an issue that marketers have been trying to tackle for several years. Unfortunately, the problem still doesn’t seem to be subsiding according to a study conducted byPixalate. In fact, 2017 alone saw an increase in desktop click fraud from 20% to 25%. Between January and April of the same year, the rate of click frauds on desktop display ads increased from 19.5% to 26.2% – a 34.6% increase.
These fraudulent clicks could significantly hold your PPC campaigns back, depleting your precious advertising money without yielding any results. So if your marketing resources are being wasted, this is one of the first issues you need to tackle. That’s whereClickCease enters the picture. As the name suggests, ClickCease is a tool that blocks invalid clicks and optimizes your PPC campaigns.
The tool monitors your ads 24/7 for fraudulent activity, which could include bad hosts and blacklisted IPs as well as proxy servers. It will then automatically and immediately prevent the attacker from viewing your ads. This means that your advertising budget will be spent on reaching relevant people who are likely to convert after they click on your ad, which will reduce the wasted spending on fraudulent clicks.
In addition to this, you’ll even have an agent automatically filing a refund claim for the fraudulent clicks that do occur on your ads.
3. Lumen5
You’ve been sharing your blog posts on social media on a regular basis. You even have a posting schedule, and have invested in a tool to help you maintain this schedule. Unfortunately, these posts aren’t gaining the traction you’d hoped they would, even though they are high quality.
It’s disappointing that you wasted so much time and so much social media real estate on posts that haven’t been optimized to perform. Perhaps you’re not using the right content format to engage your audience and pass on valuable information. Perhaps your social media followers just aren’t interested in reading your lengthy text posts.
You could tryswitching to social videos if you wish to gain better social reach and engagement as visuals can be more engaging. This could significantly improve your social media performance. In fact,Animoto found that 64% of consumers have been influenced to make a purchase decision after they watched a marketing video on social media.
You don’t have to start from scratch. Tools likeLumen5 can help you repurpose both your old and new blog posts into video clips. This tool is very easy to use as it has an in-built artificial intelligence system. It quickly summarizes the content and accurately matches different scenes with a photo, video, and/or music that’s relevant to them.
4. Neverbounce
Email is still the most popularly-used format among B2B marketers for distributing content. 93% of marketers in aContent Marketing Institute study said that they use email in their content marketing efforts. And 74% of respondents also said that email was the most successful method of content distribution.
At the same time, your business could end up suffering if you’re sending out emails to contacts that are unlikely to engage. This could be anything from a wrong email address to a deactivated account. For one, you’re wasting the monthly email allotment given to you by your email marketing tool.
In addition to this, sending out emails to a lot of inactive contacts could increase the risk of your emails being delivered to the spam folder. So your emails could end up going unnoticed, even by relevant and engaged recipients.
NeverBounce helps you filter out your mailing list so you can make sure to only send out emails to those who will see and engage with them.You just need to upload your mailing list to the tool and it will automatically verify each address on the list for you.
The tool accurately sorts out your list and separates the valid addresses from the invalid ones and the disposable ones. In other words, it effectively and automatically runs a list cleaning process on your behalf.
With a clean list, you’ll ensure that your emails are only sent out to the most relevant and engaged recipients. This increases your click rate and open rate. Plus, it reduces the chances of your emails being marked as spam. So you’ll also be able to improve your deliverability to ensure all your active subscribers notice your email.
5. Google Analytics
You’re already familiar withGoogle Analytics, and you’ve been using it to analyze the performance of your web pages. You could even use it to identify old blog posts that are ripe for updating. This is essential for reducing wasted marketing resources because your old pieces may no longer be interesting or relevant enough to engage all the traffic you’re generating.
So you could end up losing a large portion of the traffic you generated through both organic and paid efforts. This means you not only miss out on a chance to convert them into loyal customers, but you’re also going to experience higher bounce rates.
If you have an old post that has performed really well in the past, it would be a good idea to update it with fresh information, new ideas, images, etc. Or you could even try to improve on an under-performing blog post to increase views and engagement.
Use Google Analytics to discover blog posts that have high page views and posts with low page views. Make a list of them and see which of them you could improve on to optimize your content strategy.
The pages with high page views are already engaging your audience, so updating them could result in even better engagement. As for the pages with low page views, you could either remove them completely, or look for ways to optimize them and make them more interesting.
You should also look at the average time spent on each page, and the bounce rate for each page. This can help you understand which of your blog posts aren’t engaging enough and need to be improved upon. Pages with a high bounce rate and low average time on page are the ones that you need to update.
Look through each of the posts to see what kind of improvements you can make. If you find one that contains some old studies, for instance, maybe you could try updating it with fresher studies and stats. If you find one that doesn’t have a lot of visual stimulants, you could optimize it with original screenshots and graphics. Companies likeHubSpot have even managed to increase their organic traffic by 106% after implementing this tactic.
6. Process Street
It can be time-consuming and frustrating to reinvent your workflow wheel every time you need it. Not only are you repeating the same process, but you’re also wasting the time and energy that could be spent on more productive tasks. Things would be much simpler if you had a way to maintain a checklist of all the tasks that you normally repeat.
Process Street just the right tool for this issue and can reduce wasted marketing resources. This tool helps you create workflow checklists for tasks that you have to repeat. Using Process Street, you can easily create a process template that can then be customized as needed.
It’s much easier to work as a team because this tool also lets you run collaborative workflows and assign them to your team. You can then keep track of the activity and progress straight from the dashboard and even get notified after the completion of tasks. With a more organized and streamlined effort, you can free up significant time and resources for other tasks.
Conclusion
These are some of the best tools you can count on to optimize your usage of marketing resources. Not only do these tools help minimize the time and effort put into your campaigns, they even help you reduce your spending. Which of these tools will you implement in your next campaign? Let us know in the comments below.