Top 3 Toolkits Of 2016

Toolkits are incredible resources for approaching your marketing needs. They are helpful spreadsheets with detailed instructions that lay out the essential elements of a major marketing piece. Whether it is breaking down an SEO strategy, making major vendor decisions for a marketing automation platform, or conducting a content audit, these helpful tools can mean the difference between data-driven decisions and chaos. In 2016, we offered a new toolkit nearly every month, but three stood out as the most downloaded toolkits.

1. Marketing Automation Vendor Evaluation

When making a major decision on a marketing automation vendor, it can be difficult to even know where to start. With the toolkit from HighRoad Solution, it’s a simple four part process.

First, you begin with an assessment of general technical requirements. These include capabilities to implement Google Analytics and AdWords, import and export from Microsoft Excel, or whether there is a free trial to test-drive the system. In each instance, a particular attribute can be deemed a “Must Have” or a “Nice to Have” and scored from first to last between vendors.

Next, a marketing automation vendor offers a long list of services that will slightly differ from one vendor to another. The requirements listed in this toolkit will you help you to assess the best possible option to meet your integrated and inbound marketing needs. Determine whether a vendor has easy to edit and publish email templates, tracks individual user behavior through web analytics, and the landing pages and forms are easy to customize in this module.

On the other side of the house, how does the marketing automation vendor fair for the sales team? If it offers a good user interface for prospect profiles, and ranks first among all the vendors for lead scoring qualification, then maybe it’s a fit for your sales team too.

Finally, this step of the vendor evaluation ends with assessing the training requirements - or onboarding as we often refer to it - for adopting the system. This is an important last step in the evaluation and will help to determine if you will be up and running within the first 30 days of adopting the new system.

All four areas of the assessment leads to an intriguing last step that you can present to anyone in your organization to gain buy-in and back up your decision making process. It is an aggregated, high-level view based on dozens of key areas that gives you a percentage and points you towards your top choice (with the numbers to back it up!).

2. Web Content Audit

Every organization has had to update content for their website at some point (and it's never convenient!). Whether it is a complete website redesign or a reorganization of existing content, there is a better way to streamlining the process.

Go through the entire website and begin to list each page of content while determining if it’s traffic is high, medium or low. Next, categorize the page of content as Up-to-Date, Needs Review, or Outdated. You will want to spend your time on the pages with the most monthly visitors first, ignore the up-to-date pages and begin with the “Outdated” and “Needs Review” pages. This worksheet allows room for accountability by labeling each page with an owner and date updated. Now with a process in place, your resources will go towards the pages first with the highest traffic first that needs updating the most.

3. Marketing Segmentation and Analysis Tool

This is a robust worksheet that will help you narrow down, chart, and map your buyer personas, market segments, and market opportunity. Marketing segmentation is a little like creating personas for your business and this tool breaks them down into four distinct areas: First, who are your customers (demographics), how do your customers think (psychographics), what are your target audience's website visits, purchase history, and internet usage (behavioral characteristics), finally, where are they geographically (environment).

Once you determine key attributes of your ideal customer, the worksheet will take you through measuring how many potential customer are in your market. Go further into the tool and give your market segments weighted scores based on competitiveness, market opportunity, and attractiveness or technical fit.

From there the worksheet provides you rankings based on your unique segments, and a chart to map out the segments in which you are most competitive and well positioned to compete. For the analytical and chart-loving minds, the last element of this worksheet offers an aggregate view of each of your segments by nine attributes revealing your greatest entry point into the market.

Summary

The three most popular toolkits serve to address complex and evergreen problems within an organization like initial market segmentation needs and later content auditing challenges. The toolkits are designed to help you gain better buy-in from internal teams and supervisors with processes and data-driven assessments for your business marketing decisions. If you want an ace in your back pocket in 2017, download one of our top three toolkits from last year.