A company cannot succeed without marketing. Although there are many ways to market a company, it can be difficult to decide where to start. This article will help you choose marketing platforms.
What Are Marketing Platforms?
A marketing platform is a way to market your company to its target audience. It is a tool that helps you to market your company through different channels.
Traditional Marketing Methods
Before the age of the internet, companies wanting to increase their exposure had to rely on traditional marketing platforms. Some of the most popular examples of traditional advertising include:
- Television
- Radio
- Direct mail
- Newspapers and magazines
- Traditional and digital signage
If you don’t know how these methods work, it’s a good idea to get a general overview of each topic.
Television
If you want your business to advertise on television, most likely this will be done in the form of commercials. These are typically 15-60 second long advertisement slots. Companies who want to use this marketing method will save money by airing local commercials, which on average cost $115,000.
The amount you pay for a commercial spot usually depends on how many people will see it. If the commercial will be aired in an area with a lot of people, it will cost more than if it aired in an area with fewer people. The amount you pay will also depend on how long the commercial is and when you want it to air.
If you want to air a national commercial, you should expect to spend at least $1 million. If you want your company’s national advertising campaign to air during popular television programs, you will need to set aside even more money.
Radio
Many businesses choose to advertise on the radio because it is significantly cheaper than advertising on television. This makes radio a very popular marketing channel.
On average, radio marketing campaigns cost between $100 and $8,000. The main factors that affect how much you pay are when and where your radio spots air.
Direct mail
While it might be easy to write off direct mail marketing, it might not be the best decision. This is because 41% of adults in the United States look forward to checking their mail each day, and the Direct Marketing Association reports that the response rate for direct mail is 4.4%, compared to the 12% response rate for digital marketing.
When you get the mail, you’re probably skimming through it and touching each letter. This might be one reason B2B marketers assign 18% of their advertising budgets to direct mail campaigns.
Typically, people have fewer competitors vying for their attention in their mailbox than in their often full email inboxes.
Newspapers and magazines
You can’t talk about traditional marketing methods without talking about newspapers and magazines. Your company’s success with this advertising method depends a lot on how targeted these publications are.
If you were to own a guitar company, it would not be beneficial to spend your marketing budget on an ad in Cosmopolitan. Ad space in Guitar World, which has an audience made up of people who are passionate about guitars, would be a wiser investment.
The cost of magazine advertising can vary a lot depending on the publication and how much space you’re buying, usually from $500 to $20,000.
While local newspapers may not have the same level of targeting as niche-specific magazines, they can still reach a significant number of local customers. On top of that, newspaper advertising is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies, with ads typically only costing a few dollars.
Digital and Traditional Signage
If you have a business that requires a physical space, you probably have a sign that tells customers and partners about your company’s location. Companies that want to take this further usually purchase large signs, which can be either digital or traditional.
Many business owners feel that digital signs that offer all of the functionality and have LED bulbs are worth paying a bit more. The cost-effectiveness of LED bulbs means you won’t have to worry about an outrageous electric bill.
It is essential to differentiate between conventional business signs and billboards. The former are typically located on or near the premises, making the business’s location evident to the public. The cost of this type of sign varies considerably, depending on the materials used, starting at around $50 and reaching several thousand dollars.
Signs that are high above roadways and buildings, that businesses lease out, and that can cost anywhere from $300 to $50,000 for a typical 4-week lease are called billboards.
Online Marketing Methods
It can be difficult to keep up with the internet because it is constantly changing.
Here are several of the most popular online marketing platforms:
- social media marketing
- email marketing
- video marketing
- SEO/content marketing
Best Content Marketing Tools and Platforms
This analytics tool provides you with quick and reliable insights/alerts about your content usage, and produces high-quality reports.
Monday.com
Monday.com’s marketing project management tool offers content planning, a content calendar, blog planning, and more.
The editorial calendar is a great way to keep track of content assets by channel, type, priority, and publish date. This will make it easier to assign designers and editors and keep track of who is doing what and when.
Pros:
- Monday.com has a facility that will let you invite clients as guests so that they can see the progress and share feedback.
- Through creative requests, you will be able to easily share assets as well as receive feedback. Monday.com allows you to customize such forms.
- Editorial Calendar is the facility that will let you plan the content.
- Monday.com is the platform that can be used to plan and manage small as well as large events.
- It can provide file storage from 5GB to 1000 GB.
Cons:
- Monday.com has a little bit of a learning curve.
- Verdict: Monday.com offers one platform with multiple capabilities. It has communications essentials, collaboration essentials, Insights Essentials, and features for security and control.
HubSpot
Best for small, medium, and large business enterprises.
HubSpot helps marketers in creating quality content. It produces a variety of content to target a wide range of customers. It administers the complete content marketing system. It analyses the impact of the content. And it maintains the quality of the content.
Pros:
- Easy to set up and use.
- Effective and personalized content creation for the target audience.
- Content impact analysis.
- Affordable prices of software.
- Manage content and store it in a central location.
- Make the content mobile searchable.
- Content Automation provides simplicity to marketing activities.
Cons:
- E-mail Marketing, Blogging, Video hosting, and management is in the paid version.
- YouTube integration is only in the Enterprise package.
- Feature and price equations have an imbalance.
- Works best when you can produce a large amount of content.
- New features/updates are introduced often.
- Difficult to export and move the content.
- Limited design templates.
- Tracking edited content is difficult.
The HubSpot content marketing software is the best on the market for a number of reasons. It offers excellent capabilities for blogging, social media, emailing, managing landing pages, and automating marketing. In addition, it provides great guidance on SEO and accurate web analytics. The biggest benefit of HubSpot is that it allows Salesforce integration and monitors social media activities.
Semrush
A content platform that is best for combining creativity and analytics in every step of your workflow.
The Semrush all-in-one marketing toolkit is a digital marketing professional’s dream. It offers a variety of services for SEO, Paid Traffic, Social Media, Content & PR, and Market Research, as well as solutions for E-commerce, Enterprise, and competitive research.
This tool can help you discover your top competitors, and learn about their traffic shares and trends. It can also provide insights into your target audience, and help you research your target audience.
Pros:
- The platform will help you with the topic research.
- You can create a content plan.
- It can provide SEO-Friendly content.
- It will let you track your team’s tasks and deadlines for ensuring all activities will be implemented in time.
- It provides the functionalities to order content, optimize the article, measures the content impact, and for revising & improving the content.
Cons:
- As per reviews, UI needs improvement.
- Traffic volume is not accurate.
The Semrush Content Platform will help improve your content marketing skills by providing tools to manage and measure your campaigns across all online channels. This will allow you to excel in your everyday marketing tasks and produce better results.
Outgrow
This tool is most beneficial for small to medium business enterprises.
Outgrow has many features that are beneficial for content marketing, such as the ability to target a specific audience, manage your brand, track conversions, distribute content easily, and optimize your content for search engines. Additionally, Outgrow also has excellent video management capabilities.
Pros:
- Flexible and intuitive app.
- Easy to use even for beginners.
- Best for inbound marketing.
- Builds unique interactive lead magnets.
- Provides interactive content.
- The credibility of data is filled by the visitors.
- Exports aggregated data.
- Merge data easily.
- Perform advanced analysis.
Cons:
- Can send only contact details, and not any other information.
- Basic interface for analytics.
- Writing calculations can be overwhelming in the case of complex forms.
- Exploring all features can be time-consuming.
- Minor level script issues are found.
- Costly plans and low tiers don’t allow you to use all the available features.
It’s a great lead generation tool with feature libraries, templates and other documentations to help users a great deal. It speeds up the lead qualifying process, helping with customer engagement and conversions while saving time by pushing leads directly to salesforce.
This software captures leads and automatically adds them to the CRM. It uses these leads to send emails via MailChimp. It is recommended for businesses that require a large number of leads to close sales.
Mediafly
Mediafly is best for small and medium business enterprises.
The integration of Datanyze with Salesforce, SharePoint, and Dropbox provides businesses with the ability to work more quickly and efficiently. Even if you have a large sales team, Datanyze can help streamline digital marketing processes.
Pros:
- AI-powered content recommendations.
- Checks the ROI on content.
- Optimized search capability.
- Easily interacts with the customers.
- Secure and dynamic software.
- Manage digital assets efficiently.
- Select multiple items and edit in bulk.
- Target the right audience with the right content.
- Track how teams are using the content.
- Know where your mobile content is accessed.
Cons:
- First-timers can find it difficult to use.
- Expensive when the number of users increases.
- The console can be more engaging.
- Internet speed has to be fast else it causes interruptions.
- Accessing complex controls is simpler once you get hang of it.
- Navigating through the dashboard is tough initially.
This software is great for increasing productivity among sales teams, as it provides content effectiveness, access, and revenue-related information that businesses can use to make necessary changes.
Visual.ly
This tool is best for businesses that are small to medium in size.
Visual.ly helps us to create videos, infographics, ebooks, other types of social media content, and interactive marketing content effectively.
Pros:
- Create personalized content without worrying about hiring people.
- Create content for target-specific.
- Content analytics and tracking.
- Faster and affordable tool.
- Cloud-based collaboration.
- Great for creating visual content.
Cons:
- Takes time for the user to understand and use smoothly.
- Limited features.
- Dependency on the company for various services like content creation, etc.
Visually is a good tool for companies who want to market multiple types of content. The reports and presentations from Visually are simple to access and easy to understand. Companies that trust Visually for their marketing needs include Salesforce, Johnson’s, VISA, and National Geographic.