Marketing: Top Marketing Tools to Use

Marketing is an ever-changing part of your company. There are some tools available today that you should be using to help your business grow. If you are not using these, you should consider implementing them.

I know it is basic, but if you or someone on your team is not a Google Analytics guru, they need to be trained. There are free webinars that will help with the training. Sometime a good way is also just to dig into Google Analytics and self teach the platform.

Make sure you have a Google My Business account. This will get your business information properly listed when someone searches for you. It will list your hours, website, location and even provide directions for you business.

Speaking of Google, remarketing ads are a must on the Adwords platform. Remarketing uses a special tracking code to place cookies in the computer of people visiting your website, and then serves your ads to those with that cookie.You are targeting people who have already visited your website and shown an interested in your company. Make sure you really think about the ad content. What will most likely cause someone to take action this time? Whatever they saw on your site when they visited didn’t quite do the trick.

Social ads are growing. Facebook is linked with Instagram, so when you do an ad on Facebook you can include Instagram. You can really use targeting to your benefit. On Facebook you can create look-a-like lists from current customers. For example do you have Summer Camps at your club? You can download your current camp list and target your camp ads to people who “look” like your camp parents. Twitter is also serving up ads now.

Review sites. Make sure you are getting notified when someone posts a review for your business. Google will send you an alert if you have a Google My Business account. If you advertise with Yelp, they also will notify you of any review. Make sure you are staying on top of these reviews and responding in a timely manner.

All of my tools have been based around digital, but here is one that is more “old school” marketing. When you do direct mail, how are you tracking your ROI? Direct mail is expensive, so you want to make sure you are getting your money from this. You can set up call tracking on your mail piece with a unique phone number. There are many companies you can “Google” (sorry, I couldn’t resist) that will help you do this. Another thing I like to do is to download a list of all of my new members that joined during the promotion and scrub them against my mail list. It may have not been my direct mail piece that ultimately drove those people into my club, but it was just another touch point.

Donyel Cerceo is the director of marketing for Merritt Clubs. She can be reached at dcerceo@merrittclubs.com.