10 Online Marketing Tools For Big And Small Scale Firms

Are you aware that the Internet contributes to over $2.2 trillion in annual sales? Do you also know that more than 45 percent of the world population now use the internet for some day to day activities?

As a matter of fact, research shows that in some countries like Japan, Iceland, Denmark, and the Netherlands, just to mention a few, over 90 percent of their total population uses the Internet.

When it comes to increasing sales, anything and everything can be useful, but at the same time, it is essential to identify what methods and strategies truly make a difference.

However, the Internet is a very powerful element that can never be ignored as it contributes immensely to our economy -- it is a channel that businesses use to connect with customers globally and make more sales.

Below are 10 online tools that would greatly enhance the sales figures in your firm.

1. Salesforce

Be it sales opportunities, product support to training, almost everything falls under its purview. Salesforce is a window into everything that touches your customers.

Salesforce has already made a great impact and developed an immaculate reputation as a CRM tool. It is designed to make the Sales department work smoothly and multiply its efficiency and effectiveness.

The best part about Salesforce is having everything in one place on one platform will help you keep everyone who touches your customers work together; providing a unified and consolidated help to your customers; thereby encouraging them to spend more on your product.

One added advantage of this tool is the Salesforce Chatter feature. -- a social collaboration tool embedded in the Salesforce CRM solution. It helps in improving business agility and customer delight. Salesforce Chatter allows employees to collaborate around a specific topic in a social stream. Enabling you to connect areas of the business in ways not possible through traditional means.

You are also provided with groups for discussions around your competition, details

on vertical markets along with the various sales tools and more by Salesforce.

2. Marketo

Marketo is a marketing automation platform -- It aids you with automated lead nurturing and very sophisticated campaign management down to the very details.

Marketo’s Sales Insight component gives you granular data on who is visiting your website, which can be used as a signal to reach out to the ones browsing your site so as to meet their needs. It would also help you to engage customers at scale and manage their identities.

Many of its customers testify that they have managed to close deals worth over ten times compared to what Marketo costs them annually.

Use of Marketo will help you significantly grow your sales pipeline. This further validates its capability to provide a strong return on your investments -- Provided you implement its marketing automation and lead nurturing capabilities to the fullest.

3. Data(dot)Com

Data(dot)com is another sales tool that is used to clean the customer and prospect data as well as the source in new leads. It connects you to your most valuable customers, partners, and supplier.

It can be built into your Salesforce workflows and has the ability to provide a tremendous improvement in your customer data quality. Data.com have a licensing agreement with Dun & Bradstreet thus the data is made even richer.

Data.com will allow you to automatically clean and enrich your data so that your sales unit is always working with the latest and most up-to-date information.

4. InsideSales

InsideSales is one nearly configuration free cloud-based marketing tool. It is an outbound dialer integrated with Salesforce.

With Insidesales as your tool, you now have fewer worries -- No adjusting of any hardware, no extra integration work, and nothing to do on your private brand exchange. It is simple and elegant!

Insidesales.com is a great tool to get analytics and total visibility about all calls. It greatly boosts the ability of your sales team to have an impact through calls. Besides, it helps auto transport companies, online brokers, and others to attend to their customers’ pressing need.

5. LinkedIn

LinkedIn has emerged as a tremendous source for new leads. You will be amazed at the reach of your collective network of contacts. It is incredibly hard to successfully connect to a manager without the buying power of introduction by someone in his network. LinkedIn aids to establish that network and makes it possible to get those introductions.

The primary step is to encourage all your employees to connect to your sales teams thus enabling the rapid growth of your networks. Secondly, encourage everyone to make introductions for the sales teams when required. Thus, by harnessing the power of your company’s collective network, your sales teams are able to reach the right people!

6. Box

Box provides you with a simple and secure way to share files with your employees, partners, and customers.

Every good marketing team maintains a library of materials to provide support to the field teams. Box helps these teams sync the library with their laptops and mobile devices, thus enabling everyone to always have the latest and greatest updated materials without having to hunt them down in the huge and vast array of files. It also makes it possible for you to access your data from any device.

7. Google

Everyone knows the range of tools Google has. It is a wealth of tools that can assist immensely in your sales and marketing efforts. There are varieties of Google Apps for mailing, calendaring, and to increase collaboration with partners and customers.

Also, Google Analytics provides insight into your web traffic, Google+ Hangouts is a simple way to have video conferencing with your team members as well as prospective customers and while you’re busy doing all this other Google stuffs, you might as well do some research on market needs with Google.com.

8. CloudFactor

CloudFactor is one very cool integration tool that aids the marketing process. It provides the context sensitive data from Salesforce right in your Gmail.

Without having to leave Gmail you can see all the Salesforce contacts, accounts, case, and opportunity information. CloudFactor also provides a contact syncing component to keep your Google and Salesforce contacts in sync.

CloudFactor will save the time of your sales force as they correspond with your customers, as it will enable them to quickly see current information as well as easy way to log the current conversation to the customer record in Salesforce.

9. TimeTrade

TimeTrade integrates with both Google and Salesforce. It is a tool that embeds a “Click to Schedule” button at the bottom of any outbound emails. It thus offers employees available time slots to schedule a call.

It is simple and works efficiently. Just by having this simple convenience in your emails you can generate many opportunities you would have missed otherwise.

Timetrade drastically reduces the constant back and forth of trying to schedule meetings and will allow you to better focus on your customers.

10. Okta

Okta is a cloud-based tool that will provide you a central entry point into all of your mechanisms.

Okta will provide your marketing team with a personal application dashboard where they can work from and showcase what the firm’s got.

Okta is not really a sales and marketing tool but its features make it critical to the success of all other tools.

Explore these tools if you haven’t already and incorporate them in your sales and marketing departments. The whole purpose is to provide more accurate, up-to-date data with added simplicity with the end goal of becoming more efficient and effective as well as boost sales.