Step 6 – Story Sharing Technology
Technology is key when it comes to sharing your stories. In this section, you will learn about understanding, integrating and automating websites, as well as using (voice) search, social media (including monitoring key opinion leaders) and content-sharing technology.
What existing technology do you use?
- What platforms and tools do you use to share your stories?
- Are you using the right technology to attract, engage with and converse with your customers and the personas within your target audience?
- What technology could you add to ensure conversing with your target audience and customers?
- Are you capturing data (i.e., email addresses) at every opportunity you can?
- Search engine and social media campaign calculator
- As you expand, can your responsive website, content management system and e-commerce platform deal with the increased demands?
- Do you know your website structure? Try Slickplan (Slickplan, a website planning system that puts the right tools at your fingertips – making website creation a breeze)
- What is your HTTPS server, hosting, and domain registration setup?
- Is your website fast enough to convert? Try Pingdom (helps gain instant insights into your website’s availability and performance so you can outsmart competition with an amazing end-user experience)
- Cloudflare – Introducing Zero Trust Private Networking. Replace your VPN with identity-based Zero Trust policies inside your private network. Now you can lock down access to corporate applications, private IP spaces and hostnames
Platforms & tools
Below is your exhaustive guide to a range of technology that you could be using. From search engines to social media platforms, lead generation applications and other digital tools, your technology will depend on your business, audience, objectives, and tactics.
Spend some time going through the technology below to check whether you are using the right tools currently, and what else you could be doing.
Google Suite
- Think with Google – Uncover the latest marketing research and digital trends from Google with data reports, insights, and articles, all on Think with Google
- Site: Colon Search – Essentially, running a site: search operator limits the results of your chosen search engine, to only return those pages indexed within your specified domain
- Google Search Console – Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results
- Google Analytics – Google Analytics gives you the tools you need to better understand your customers. You can then use those business insights to take action.
- Google Tag Manager – Google Tag Manager delivers simple, reliable, easily integrated tag management – for free
- Google AdWords (Google Knowledge Panel) – Google Ads – AKA Google AdWords – is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. Since advertisers have to pay for these clicks, this is how Google makes money from search.
- Google Boilerplate (Defensive paid and organic search engine results page)
- Google Page Insights – PageSpeed Insights (PSI) reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.
- Google My Business – A free business profile that lets you easily connect with customers across Google Search and Maps.
Bing
- The Big Bing Theory
- Bing Webmaster Tools – Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service as part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine which allows webmasters to add their websites to the Bing index crawler, see their site’s performance in Bing and a lot more
- Bing Ads (Import from Google) – Microsoft’s version of Google Ads.
- Bing Places – Bing Places for Business is a Bing portal that enables local business owners to add a listing for their business on Bing Facebook/Instagram
- Facebook for Business (including Instagram e-commerce and TV) (Don’t forget the Analytics and Power Button) – Facebook for Business gives you the latest news, advertising tips, best practices, and case studies for using Facebook to meet your business goals.
- Facebook Campaign Master (for a simple campaign)
- Campaign Budget Optimisation with Depesh Mandala
- An interesting alternative to the native platform is Ad Espresso – AdEspresso is a Facebook Ads tool that has become a Facebook advertising partner and a preferred marketing tool for brands all over the world.
- LinkedIn – Cut and paste blog posts, add to the company feed, and ask all employees to share)
- LinkedIn Ads (Targeted Self-Service) – LinkedIn ads can help your business reach a powerful professional audience.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator (Silver bullets) – LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an advanced sales tool that aids sales teams, organisations, and individuals to build and nurture customer relationships on the network.
- LinkedIn Marketing Solutions – Roll out of Product Pages
- New***LinkedIn Profile and Engagement Workbook
- How to become a subject matter expert using LinkedIn in 12 weeks
- Twitter for Business – Personalised tips to guide your business to success on Twitter
- Twitter Flight School – Best practices, resources, and inspiration to help businesses be successful on Twitter
- Trend Map – Fun for seeing what is trending. Visualise topics trending globally, nationally, and in your city. See the top news stories, videos, and images for trends occurring anywhere in the world.
- Followerwonk – Good for organic (sometimes local) growth. Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tool that allows users to gather and analyse information on Twitter users, determine trends in the mentioned social networking tool, and expand their reach to widen their audience, increase their follower base, and forward their business goals.
Live streaming
Amazon
- Amazon Marketing Services – Amazon’s pay-per-click (PPC) platform where sellers can get their product(s) in front of relevant visitors based on keywords, products, and shopper interests.
- Merchant Words – Like the Google Keyword Tool but for BUYING!
Lead generation
- Lead Forensics – Lead Forensics is B2B software for turbo-charged lead generation. Identify B2B sales leads you never knew you had.
- Lead Feeder – Leadfeeder, website visitor tracking software, shows B2B marketers & sales teams the companies already visiting their site.
Messaging
- Vodafone Chatbot – TOBi – The telecoms industry’s first chatbot able to complete a customer transaction from start to end in the UK.
- Chat Bot Logic Questions – Business Example
- WhatsApp for Business – enables auto-response to thank you and quick replies.
Digital tools
- Silktide Sitebeam (Insites) – Review your website’s quality, marketing, and accessibility at a glance, across mobile and desktop devices.
- Screaming Frog – The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that allows you to crawl websites’ URLs to analyse and audit technical and onsite SEO.
- Optimizely – Provides A/B testing tools, in which two versions of a web page can be compared for performance and multivariate testing.
- HotJar – See how visitors are using your website, collect user feedback and turn more visitors into customers.
- Wappalyzer – Wappalyzer is a utility that uncovers the technologies used on websites. It detects content management systems, e-commerce platforms, web frameworks, server software, analytics tools and many more.
- SEMRush (Topic Cloud and Question Banks) – SEMrush offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media, and competitive research.
- Advanced Web Ranking – A powerful rank tracker that enables you to accurately track your search performance for any location, device, language, or search engine.
- Brandwatch – The world’s leading enterprise social intelligence company, allowing users to analyse and utilise conversations from across the social web.
- Similar Web – Compare any website traffic statistics & analytics with Similar Web’s digital market intelligence platform.
- Audiense – The Audiense platform combines rich social data sources with the world’s leading cognitive and machine learning enabling you to understand the audiences that matter to your business.
Actionable Insight
You should now have the right level of knowledge of the platforms and tools that will help you reach your export objectives and ensure you’re engaging your current customers as well as your target audience.
Take it to the next level
Are you working efficiently in English and the United Kingdom? What platforms and tools do you need to add for further online export expansion?