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From marketing to sales, tech tools can help a business grow faster than nearly any other infrastructure type. Below are five categories any company could use a little help in and the most overlooked and useful tools in each.

Real-Time Infrastructure Management

Most tech tools fit neatly into some part of a marketing stack or workflow. However, each of these building blocks isn't very sturdy by themselves. Sometimes what you need is the glue to hold everything in place and increase the value of the whole.

Infrastructure management tools have been around for as long as stacks for marketing tools have. For whatever reason, plenty of people still don't use them. Even if you only use one or two devices, having them work together in real time will save you and your team time and lost opportunity due to human error.

Zapier, for example, allows you to build simple, connected workflows and automate almost any process. If you use more than one marketing tool with another but have to input any file or data manually, Zapier can automate that process behind the scenes.

Where Zapier is a broad solution, SendGrid has a narrow focus. This tool helps you link your email marketing efforts with the rest of your marketing stack, helping you send smarter emails and track your efforts in real time.

Multi-Channel Account-Based Marketing Campaigns

Customers want a smooth experience. Nearly 1 in 2 customers will pay more for this type of experience. In comparison, only about 1 in 7 customers would pay extra for a minor product upgrade or additional features. 

To get the smoothest possible customer experience, your business will need at least one innovative tech tool capable of managing email, chat, customer service, and informational channels. In many cases, you would need more than one instrument, plus something to get them all to work in harmony.

Then there's Drift. Drift is an innovative marketing tool that allows a business to set up support channels, including advanced chatbots, as well as offer support across several of these channels.

A tool like this is critical for running account-based marketing campaigns. This type of marketing is about to boom in 2020 because of just how effective it is. Instead of taking the wide-net approach of the past, account-based marketing allows a business to spend more time and effort on just the right customers, increasing total spending, and brand loyalty.

Customer Retargeting

A customer visits your website, takes the time to browse what you have on offer, and even adds something to their cart. They close the browser and don't return. What happened? Did they forget, or was it something more. 

In either case, a customer retargeting tool like Adroll can help you recover these 'lost' customers and bring them back to your site. You can use this tool to remind them of what they left behind, give them a new opportunity, or present them with a new version of something they'd shown interest in before.

New-User Guidance

Ever wonder why people never use the search bar on your website? Have a cool feature you want to point out to every new visitor, but you're not sure how to do that?

WalkMe is a tool that allows you to create an easy-to-use and quick walk-through for new visitors or all visitors in a specified time-frame. This can be a handy tool for any business that is undertaking a major redesign or their online presence, or if they have recently added a crucial new offering.

You can also use tools like Crazy Egg to identify problem areas with your website, webpages, emails, or mobile experience. This helps you stay on top of issues, like a critical field becoming static in a specific browser or a search field being too challenging to find.

Gamification for Interaction and Shopping

Referrals are powerful. One of the best ways to get a new, loyal customer is to have a friend of theirs recommend your product to them. Nearly 3 in 4 potential customers consider word-of-mouth to be the most powerful marketing method. Furthermore, at least 1 in 5 customers will identify a personal referral as the source of their decision to purchase a given product or service.

Annex Cloud is one tool that lets you drive engagement and award your users for becoming regulars on your site as well as sharing what they like about your business with others. Through loyalty rewards, digital awards, and affiliate programs, social monitoring tools like these can help your business get an edge.

Enjoy this article? Check out our Ask the Expert with John Grimm, VP of Strategy and Business Development at nCipher Security.