Are Your Marketing Tools Helping You Reach the Right People?

Marketing is all about reaching the right people at the right time. Unfortunately that can turn into a guessing game if you don’t have the right tools. The marketing tools that we use are essential to our success so if you’ve just been “winging it” or going on intuition, you’re only selling yourself short.

Use Marketing Tools to Reach Your Audience

Here are some of my personal favorite marketing tools that will help you find the right people to get your message, product or service in front of. Of course, you will need to know your target demographic first, but after you do, these tools will help you engage with the right influencers in your industry, the most active fans and most of all, your motivated buyers.

1. Lead Social. While you will have to pay to use this social media tool, it’s one of the best in the game for anyone marketing on Facebook. What it does is it measures your Return on Investment (ROI). Your Facebook ROI is crucial for your budget so if you aren’t reaching the right people, then you’re just throwing money out the window. Lead Social works by assigning a monetary value to each of your Facebook ads and regular posts. In addition, Lead Social highlights users that are engaging with your content the most, giving you an opportunity to reach out to them, follow up with them, thank them, whatever. What you get is real time statistics on how much value you are getting out of each of your posts and ads. Then, just replicate your most valuable posts and ads (and boost them) so you reach people in the places it does the most good.

2. Tactics Cloud. This is one of my favorite Twitter tools of all time because it lets you target any person you want on Twitter. Find relevant users and follow them for follow backs. You can search for groups of users by location, keywords, who they’re following, who is following them, etc. Essentially, this is the ultimate search tool for Twitter marketers, giving you a direct route to the people you need to reach.

3. Little Bird. If you are trying to build relationships with influencers in your industry, Little Bird is the tool you need to find them. This shows you who you should be following as well as people that should be following you. Basically, you can think of this tool as a matchmaker, all you have to do is reach out and build the relationship.

4. GroupHigh. My final tool for reaching the right audience that I keep in my belt is GroupHigh. While this is another paid tool, it’s a valuable one. This gives you an enormous database of bloggers from which to search and the ultimate search tool to do it with. You can find the bloggers that you need to get in contact with, get their contact info and keep up with all of their latest posts. GroupHigh also lets you track your outreach efforts and relationship building.

All in all, I highly recommend all of these tools if you’re really trying to reach the right people in your industry and your target demographic. Of course, if you’re not on Twitter, it doesn’t make sense to get a Twitter tool and the same goes for Facebook tools with Facebook. But it serves your best interest to check out the tools that are out there for each social media platform you are on and beyond.

Is Google Doing Anything Different For Twitter Results?

This video explains Google’s approach to indexing topical search results from Twitter, which indicates the growing trend of many people using the micro-blogging platform as a social search option. Google actually does not treat Twitter results any differently than other types of content. Tweets and replies get indexed in much the same way. If a noticeable number of users link to one particular tweet or message, it will catch more of Google’s attention and rank higher on a search results page. This kind of ranking system reflects Google’s emphasis on social clout among content creators across all types of online platforms.

More links equals more credibility and value according to Google’s algorithms for all types of content, including brief messages limited to 140 characters or less. The core of a particular Twitter message and the number of links to it are both subject to the same basic scoring methods. Search results come from Google crawling all types of different content, from web pages to social media profiles to individual tweets. There is no special or altered methodology involved for Twitter or any of the other lesser-known micro-blogging sites out there.