The Best Marketing Strategy is to Master a Few Tools

The best way to leverage marketing tools effectively is to master them. If you’re like every other business, trying to keep up with the flood of new marketing applications it should come as a relief to know that your greatest success is going to come through mastering 2-4 tools, rather than trying to learn and apply the 20+ that you think you should be using.

Very large organizations have the resources to fully leverage every marketing tool available, but the vast majority of businesses do not. In fact most of us (I used to) have spent a lot of time driving ourselves crazy by trying to incorporate every social, digital, direct, indirect, print/broadcast, etc.. tool available. We quickly learned that the strategy turned marketing efforts into a Swiss army knife (doing a lot of things, but none of them really well) rather than a small set of real knives (only doing a couple of things, but doing them very effectively).

A good tactic is to choose 2-4 marketing tools that align well with goals. Only after you’ve mastered those tools and you get to the point where they are no longer working does it make sense to abandon them and move on to something else. Many marketing tools, particularly social and digital tools continue to evolve, so mastery is an ongoing process.

So which tools to adopt and master? To start off, look for platforms that have been around for a while and are still growing in popularity; examples are HubSpot and SEM Rush. While both of these tools have excellent customer support, it’s still going to take time and effort on your part to get the most out of them.

In the case of SEM Rush, which I happen to be more familiar with, they’ve done an excellent job of making it easy to get started with account setup and report generation. I’m guessing that most people stop there. However, if you really master this tool, the analytics capabilities are incredible.

At Smart PR Communications we do a few things well and they bring results.