Digital marketing software can be quite expensive if you are a freelancer, but in this guide, you will be introduced to software tools that are all affordable. It doesn’t matter if you are a multimillion-dollar award-winning marketing agency or a freelancer in trenches helping your clients capture relevant online traffic, these 3 tools are all affordable and should help your business become more productive.
Google Webmasters/Analytics
Whether you are an SEO or not, Google Webmasters and Analytics are incredibly useful tools. For a start they are virtually free – although Google analytics does have a paid version for those with larger websites. Secondly, you will be able to gauge exactly how site visitors are viewing your customer’s website via both tools.
On Google Analytics you can set country specific tracking and even narrow down the search analytics to a city. Now that is pretty special for something that does not cost a penny. It is also useful for digital marketers in all fields of traffic generation.
You can see how visitors from social media, email marketing, search engine paid ads, organic search traffic, and pretty much track any source of traffic browse the site. You can filter out these behavioral patterns by device, operating system, and even by the type of browser being used.
Webmasters is not as flexible but also has its uses. It is mostly for SEOs that want to gauge traffic to the website as well as see which ‘search terms’ are being used to get to the website. This can also be useful for other digital marketers to see what is trending in terms of search phrases used which are an indication of popular topics. There are also a plethora of other components to the Webmasters tool that are beyond the scope of this guide, so make sure you check it out if you haven’t already.
In fact, these tools have so many in-depth features, Google has created entire certification courses around them, which we might add are free. Check out the free Google analytics academy here.
Video Animation Software
Now many marketers do not have time to learn how to put together a free animation explainer video. However, times have changed. Most of the youth today use, or even prefer to use, video to learn about services, products, and so on. They are mostly known to marketers as Gen Z (Millennials) or Gen Z used by some marketers as a place holder to describe the youngest generation.
Yes, blogs still work, and so do images and infographics because many of the baby boomers online, Gen X, and Gen Y categories still like to read, or this guide would not be written! However, if you are marketer, and you want to catch people’s attention across a wide generation spectrum, then video animation software is one of the easiest ways to do so.
Infographics still have their use but think of video animations as an upgrade that will help capture the youth of today – essentially those that will have the most spending power in the future.
Now that the concept and reasoning has been explained let’s cut to the chase. Getting your hands-on animation software to create explainer videos is incredibly easy. There is software out there that already has the slide ready-made – all you need to do is add in text and an auto voice will dub over the top.
As a freelancer, this type of tool is invaluable because you can cut out the costs involved with paying someone to create the video for you. Plus, for those of you working in a large corporate marketing company, you can easily use the software to create demos which will help you in your career no end simply because you will stand out above your colleagues.
If you buy a life membership from a reputable animation software company, then you could pay as little $300 as a one-time deal. If you cannot find a good lifetime membership, then shortlist a few of them and wait until ‘Black Friday’. By the time you read this, Black Friday may be a long wait so you might want to go for a monthly deal and use free trial offers in the meantime to try them all out.
VPN Software for Research
One mistake many marketers using online marketplaces to sell their services make is that they do not account for their customers’ location. Marketplaces will gain you a lot of international clients, but the issue here is that you could end up giving the customer wrong information if you are not using a VPN.
Now assuming you have a client from overseas, the results your customers see from their IP address being used in their own country will be different to the ones you are seeing in your country. Without being able to see what they see; you will be of little help.
VPN software will allow you to connect to a sever in the same country as your customer. Some will even have a server in the same city. Once connected, you will be able to see similar or if not exactly the same results as your customer is seeing. You will then be fixed up to offer a reliable and accurate digital marketing service for your client as well as put your clients’ minds at rest.
Recap
In this article you have been introduced to 3 tools that all digital marketers should make use of. Google Analytics and Webmasters are free so even if you already have an analytics tool, it does not hurt to also set up Google’s version which you could treat as a second opinion so to speak. Webmasters is also a handy tool for traffic analysis and trending search phrases. Next, the subject of starting to incorporate animated explainer videos into your marketing strategy. This is something that all businesses will need to start using in the future because those with the most pending power will be the youth of today who prefer videos to books.
Lastly, we touched on the subject giving your client’s localized data and accurate customer research. Make sure you eliminate the risk of providing your clients with misinformation and putting your reputation at risk. You can easily do this by using VPN software.
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