What MarTech Package is the smart play in 2021 to help your business increase conversions for leads and new customers? That’s the question we asked ourself this year and I am pleased to announce a great set of tools our Agency will be using forthwith.
First, let’s look at the goals we wanted to address to help our clients :
- Look for efficiencies in workflow and SaaS costs. Do we really need four separate programs for a CRM, email marketing, social media presence, and SMS broadcasts?
- Bring together a synergy of platforms designed to work together to increase conversions. Conversions should be the primary focus since this grows leads and customers.
- Find a MarTech package that integrates in smart ways. Your MarTech solutions should be able to “talk” to each other. One simple example are forms result that automatically get captured in your CRM.
- Most importantly… cover the things that clients want but do not have time to do. Everyone wants more customers. Every client (we focus on healthcare B2B and B2C businesses) agrees that split testing, for example, will improve their results. But few have the time to do this. Many Directors of marketing would like to have a true presence in social media, but run out of time to do it each week.
How we selected our MarTech Package for healthcare business growth
Let’s take a quick look now at what we came up with based on our goals (stay tuned for deeper dive posts).*:
- One CRM to Rule Them All: we found a great CRM that combines several essential marketing services in one. We’ve used at least half a dozen over the years and never found one that pulls email marketing, customer relationship management, social media presence, and SMS marketing… PLUS landing pages, popups, video publishing… and more. EngageBay. Do you have to switch your CRM to Engagebay to take advantage of this great marketing too No. You can simply replace 3-5 other MarTech SaaS services and get efficient with one login. But you may wish to switch after you see how it works. Hey… we have used Pipeline, One Page CRM, SalesForce (huge and clunky) and others, so we know the different systems. Engagebay offers a great unified marketing synergy.
Smart email sequencing is easy in EngageBay. Marketing automation can save many hours by nurturing audience automatically with a series of email sequences.
- One dashboard for all our hosting clients when you choose top WordPress host SiteGround. This makes us efficient in supporting clients. Depending on which plan you select with us, we can actually host smaller sites, or you can go direct with the SiteGround folks and add us as collaborators.
- Local seo… plus, Reputation Management… plus, Review Management (and promotion)… plus, citations and NAP submissions (NAP = Name, Address, Phone numbers for your business on a few dozen key directory sites), all in one brilliant system — BrightLocal.
- Sales funnels, with constant testing for CRO to always be improving your conversions… AND cost per conversion. We always recommend a “test lab” model so we do not make changes to your core business and site pages until tests prove themselves. How do we do this? Well, a good sales funnel starts with PPC ads (we like to test affordable Facebook ads first) with a really smart testing strategy; then a split testing tool(s) (we use landing pages in Engage Bay for a laboratory, a WordPress them with built in split testing, and Google Content Experiments most often), and smart lead magnets and follow up meeting technology.
There you have our MarTech package for 2021. We will dive deeper in future posts, but I wanted to answer a few questions before we finish:
What about all in one platforms? Yes… there are some out there like hubspot, for example. But we don’t think a simple platform can be good for each of the MarTech components. So, we see a great opportunity to work with market leading software in a number of categories and stitch them together with integrations.
Isn’t this an expensive package? The package itself costs LESS than
*Note that we are affiliated partners with the smart marketing solutions we mention here — and we use them for our agency Webdirexion too.
Scott FrangosScott serves as CMO & Chief Optimizer on the Webdirexion LLC agency digital marketing team for both development and content marketing strategy, and is the author of the new book, "The Marketer's Concise Guide to CRO" (Oct. 2015). He is a career marketing communications professional with niche industry specialties in healthcare, law firms, and hotel marketing and holds recent certifications in Google Analytics Mastery (Udemy), and RACE Digital Marketing (Smart Insights). He is currently working toward Professional Certified Marketer (PCM) in Digital Marketing through the American Marketing Association which also requires annual training and 3-year recertification. Scott has also taught business, web programming and eCommerce courses at colleges in the Portland, Oregon area. He currently teaches WordPress Content Marketing Power, an online course through Udemy, and has spoken at several Content Marketing conferences. When he is not geeking out on a Mac, Nexus 7, or Google Chromebook, he enjoys Tai Chi, walking with his dog (Steggman), and camping trips. Scott says he survives on Coffee and Pizza.