Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As a marketing team spread around the world — from the West Coast in the US to the East Coast in the US to Canada, to the UK and Singapore, we always keep an eye on the latest marketing and productivity tools to help us stay connected and do our best work.

Our team also covers a range of marketing disciplines from social media to community building, to press relations, to content marketing. So we use many different tools to get things done and work towards our goals.

We’ve written about the best free marketing tools and the most popular tools used by content marketers. Today, we’d love to share our marketing team’s favorite tools! We hope that you’ll be able to find a few tools that can help you....

Pop culture and science fiction have ostensibly redefined artificial intelligence – or AI – to describe a futuristic world with robots and space-age innovations. Yes, it’s cool. And yes, it’s all the rage again, but more in the form of smarter systems and prescriptive recommendations, not Hal 9000.
Simply put, AI means making computers and machines capable of human-like, intelligent behavior. For businesses today, the promise of AI is to improve customer engagement by better anticipating customer needs and optimizing work to provide more relevant customer experiences. Recent advances in data processing speeds, big data processing, and machine learning methods – all at lower costs – means the promise of AI can be even more easily extended to most any customer engagement scenario.

But what will AI mean for marketers? Ironic as it might sound, AI technology will actually help marketing become more human. While there is talk of AI replacing marketers’ jobs, in reality it will be an asset that will make marketers more insightful, effective, and smarter about how they engage with customers and deliver meaningful experiences....

But we need to ask a question: how do you capitalize on this sales-ready segment of the population? How can you make sure your business is placed front and center before their eyes?

It doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, if you use these four tools, you’re virtually guaranteed a position at the top.

I’ve seen businesses rise from having zero online presence to dominating their local markets simply by using these tools. You can do it too. Here are five tools you should be using....

How best to get more visitors to your site? It’s a problem that never quite goes away.

The internet is riddled with shady communities full of snake-oil salesmen busy peddling techniques “guaranteed” to make your website go viral with little to no effort. The real “secret technique” is simple – consistently deliver high-quality service and killer content that engages your audience.

There are however some genuinely useful tactics you can use to turbo-charge your traffic, and running tightly organized contests is at the top of that list.

In this article, we’ll walk you through seven of the best contest plugins for WordPress. Let’s kick things off with a look at just why this is such a powerful traffic-building tactic....

There is no doubt that smartphones, social media, and the always-connected digital world have changed consumer behavior. The buyer’s journey has become more immediate, with consumers expecting brands to meet their needs whenever and wherever they are. And Google has given a name to this real-time trend: Micro-moments.

Micro-moments are those in-the-moment times where a consumer turns to Google or social media to solve a problem or address something immediate. They are the “I want to learn…”, “Is it worth the price…”, “How do I fix…” moments. And they are becoming a significant part of how consumers make purchase decisions.

AdAge describes the new connected consumer, who frequently engages in these micro-moments, as having extremely high expectations of brands:“They want to take instant action and they want instant gratification based on personal agendas and goals. Their movements are comprised of mini-moments and their decisions at each is more unscripted and unpredictable than ever.”

The brands that will continue to win consumers’ hearts and minds are those that can respond to this demand for immediacy and personalization, taking real-time marketing to its pinnacle....

Looking for effective ways to streamline your social media marketing tasks?

Have you heard of IFTTT applets?

Applets let you automate social media posting tasks so you can spend more time engaging with your audience.

In this article, you’ll discover how to automate a variety of social media tasks with IFTTT applets....

Wondering if you should be thinking about implementing a marketing automation tool?

If I said that you could easily double your revenue online with the right tool, would that get you to read this article?

If you’re marketing online and are not thinking about marketing automation, you’re losing out on revenue.

This article will help you make the decision over what type of tool you need and if you need one!...

Seemingly overnight, predictive analytics has moved from the province of statisticians into the conversations of marketing departments everywhere. And while new to the marketer's toolbox, a report from Forbes Insights indicates that the technology can produce significant results within a handful of years.

The survey of 308 CMOs and business unit directors, which was sponsored by Lattice Engine, found that nearly half of those organizations deemed “highly advanced” in their usage of predictive analytics credit the technology with increasing ROI by more than 25%. Marketers from these organizations, which made up 13% of the surveyed group, have worked with predictive techniques for at least five years and describe them as core functions within all of their marketing initiatives.

Some of the areas in which predictive analytics have paid off most, say these experienced practitioners, are preventing early attrition cost of customer acquisitions, digital promotions offered to specific target groups, lead scoring, and customer propensity to buy a specific product....

There are marketing tools that are talked about in just about every single blog post you read nowadays. The HootSuites, the Buffers, the Mozs, and alike.

While those are great tools, they are not the only ones out there. There are lots of amazing tools that are getting people results in their business, but are not getting nearly enough air time.

I decided to ask some of my favorite marketing experts what tools they use, but rarely get talked about. Unlike most surveys, this one produced 42 marketing tools from 42 experts with no repeats.

Without further ado, here are the marketing tools you should consider, from A to (almost) Z...