The marketing landscape is fast changing with brands striving to deliver fast and frictionless experiences keeping up with their evolving customers. Brands are navigating the increasing complexity by embracing new marketing platforms and technologies that can help them to design, execute, and automate campaigns, freeing them up to focus on two imperatives - costs and revenues. They need to grow marketing performance - response, conversion, ROI, and ROAS.

However, most brands and advertisers are puzzled by the existence of a plethora of marketing platforms offering vivid features, analytics, insights and recommendations. Brands should not overlook the customer journey when considering which platforms work best for them. A digital marketing platform should be automated, scalable, and interactive for creating a personalized experience and engagement. The majority of brands use one or more digital platforms to create and manage campaigns. These platforms should be seamlessly integrated to share customer data points to create that 360-degree view of the customer.

The best performing marketing platform is expected to monitor the campaign ROI exactly, keep track of and analyze massive campaign data points accurately including leads, clicks, sales, conversions, and response rates; boosting business revenues. It lets brands easily check performance; determine and minimize cost per lead, cost per customer acquisition, maximize conversion, analyze what’s working, and optimize the digital marketing efforts.

CMOs and CIOs need to determine how, when, and what tools can streamline every aspect of customer lifetime value management — lead capturing, nurturing, customer education, customer support, customer relationship management, and much more. This article helps brands to navigate the best performing marketing platforms - a spectrum of digital marketing tools that will put brands in the upper echelon of the industry.

1. SEMRush

For brands, driving traffic to websites is really challenging work! Moreover, the competition is cut-throat when it comes to SEO. Brands can save a lot of hassle by just embracing the right SEO tool like SEMRush. Market is full of SEO tools that can do keyword research, competitor analysis, and implement SEO strategy. SEMRush is one of the most powerful search engine optimization tools, and happens to be the one that brands like the most. Brand marketers across the globe trust SEMRush. Major brands such as Amazon, Apple, Samsung, IBM, Forbes, and more use this SEO platform.

SEMRush holds specialization in competitor analysis, keyword research, and ad campaign optimization. It helps brands in tracking the keyword strategy of the competitors, runs SEO audits of their blogs, looks for backlinking opportunities, assists in building backlinks, and more.

SEMRush holds a huge database of more than twenty billion keywords and eight hundred million plus domains crawled. It tracks the organic position of a web domain or landing page URL on Google’s search engine results pages, pay-per-click ads, competitor analysis, and much more. Overall, SEMRush makes a big impact on digital marketing from strategy level to research level, to optimization level, and beyond.

SEMRush empowers brands keyword research and content optimization via its keyword magic tool. Marketers can find and target the right keywords likely to get their brands in the most searched. They can take a close look at their website’s performance in a few clicks.

SEMRush offers a domain overview tool that gives marketers a snapshot of the current organic traffic, paid traffic, backlinks, search performance, and more. It is a powerful platform for finding out new content ideas for blogs.

For smaller brands, the tool could be a little overwhelming. traffic predictions. Smaller businesses find the traffic predictions made by SEMRush often misleading and inaccurate. Also, it could be quite expensive for them.

2. moLotus

moLotus mobile video customer interaction platform is a disruptive GSM-based mobile technology, developed and owned by Novosol. The innovative technology has redefined mobile advertising and digital transformation for brands and telcos. It is the only spam-free tool, not requiring any mobile app download or data connection. Big brands like Amazon, HSBC, Suzuki, DBS Bank, L’Oreal, etc. are using the new platform to generate more revenues at low costs.

Brand marketers can integrate images, text, videos, and links into a single message and deliver directly to the inbox of millions of customers via moLotus; rendering on all kinds of mobile handsets. The marketing platform is capable of delivering customized, personalized, interactive, automated mobile campaigns for customers across geographies and verticals for a variety of marketing usages.

Brands can create interactive and intriguing campaigns with multiple customer response options like SMS, Callback, USSD, Web URL, and more. The ad campaigns provide vivid customization options including demographics, languages, interests, age, income groups etc. The advertising platform assists in brand exposure, awareness, lead generation, customer acquisition, loyalty, retention, cross-selling, upselling, direct sales and more generating huge marketing ROI for brands. The campaigns offer more brand visibility & customer response.

moLotus introduces new revenue generation models for advertisers, upscaling performance via easy online campaign creation, big data reports & analytics, revenue & response management, detailed report generation, and mobile automation API.

Big telecom brands like Indosat Ooredoo Hutchinson, Vodafone, Celcom, Maxis, Airtel, and more have entered into win-win partnerships with moLotus.  The technology offers them new ways to leverage their enterprise and mobility assets together with current infrastructure; rescued telcos from OTT entrants which are cannibalizing the traditional telco services. Telecom brands have hugely benefited out of the unique subscriber data monetization opportunity provided by moLotus adding to their top-line and bottom-line revenues.

This year moLotus is giving brands new opportunities to perform better by automating and transforming all customer processes. It is bringing down headcounts in call center processes together with cost savings on training, printing, compliance, and distribution.

Industry verticals including Banking, E-commerce, Insurance, Retail, Automobile, Consumer Electronics, Government Sectors, etc. are getting benefited out of moLotus one-stop marketing solution.

3. ChatGPT

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence based chatbot, designed and developed by OpenAI, has become a buzz among brands. Launched recently in 2022, ChatGPT is a part of OpenAI's GPT-3 large language models. It has rapidly grabbed attention from brands for its articulate answers and detailed responses based on multiple domains of knowledge. ChatGPT’s release led to a rise in the value of OpenAI, which is estimated at USD 29 billion in 2023. ChatGPT is currently bringing a multi-billion investment from Microsoft.

Although the core capability of any chatbot is to mimic a human conversationalist, ChatGPT happens to be more versatile as it can generate human-like text based on inputs. It is capable of understanding and responding to natural language. ChatGPT’s uses further include language translation and conversational AI (chatbots), which is most relevant to brand marketers. Brands can generate human-like text in multiple styles and formats using ChatGPT. Unlike its predecessor AI tools, ChatGPT is capable of generating text that is more cohesive and coherent making it a useful content creation tool for digital brands.Brand marketers can use it for creating compelling content for social media posts, brainstorming product names and a great variety of other content marketing tasks. It can be used for analyzing customer data and providing insights.

By embracing ChatGPT, brand marketers can create more personalized and effective marketing campaigns, improve customer service, and stay ahead of the competition. The future of marketing is here—and it’s time for marketers to get excited about ChatGPT and the endless possibilities it offers. However, the biggest drawback of the tool is that it lacks factual accuracy sometimes.

4. Google Analytics 4 or GA4

Google Analytics 4 or GA4 is a new advancement to Google Analytics. The new version was launched by Google in the year 2020. The new web analytics measurement tool is going to replace the earlier Universal Analytics on July 1, 2023. For brands using the existing Universal Analytics, early migration is crucial in order to establish their current data structure and collection in the new platform. Otherwise, brands might not be able to keep their important data history for future reference.

In comparison to the old Universal Analytics properties, brand marketers can use the new GA4 for website, app, as well as both. Using Google Analytics 4 brands can collect data not only from their website but also iOS and Android apps.

GA4 uses Google’s advanced machine learning models for delivering extraordinary performance in tracking customer behavior across devices and platforms and the latest market trends; having a complete view of the customer journey.  It ensures marketers to get better ROI, and long-term success. It offers new privacy controls, including cookieless measurement, to ensure that brands owning websites can collect customer data more ethically.

GA4 uses event-based tracking replacing session-based data tracking. Predictive metrics used in GA4 let brands project future customer behavior, such as the purchase or churn probabilities and predicted revenue. GA4 provides an advanced exploration feature that lets marketers use different analysis techniques to gain deeper customer insights. This is quite similar to the analysis hub feature in Universal Analytics.

One of the major drawbacks of Google Analytics 4 is that it needs a new property, which means starting from scratch. Marketers cannot transfer their historical data from Universal Analytics to GA4. Unfortunately, migration is a complex process and brands should plan carefully.

5. WhatsApp Business

WhatsApp is a cross-platform instant messaging service - for mobile and PC - that already forms an integral part of every individual's daily routine.  This year it is expected to become one of the most widely used messenger marketing apps for marketers.

Jan Koum and Brian Acton founded WhatsApp in 2009. At that time, it was only available for iOS users. The real user growth came in the year 2010 when it became available for android users.  Facebook took over WhatsApp in 2014 for USD 19 billion. Presently, WhatsApp has approx 2.44 billion active users across the world. This number is expected to grow rapidly by the end of 2023.

More and more brands are promoting their products/services, replying to your customer’ queries, and engaging customers. The WhatsApp for Business app has additional, easy features that allow brands to create their business profiles with basic info such as name, profile picture, business address with map, business hours, business description, business category, email address, and up to 2 website links. Such info is quite helpful for brands reaching current and potential customers. Both brands as well as customers can connect with each other instantly when required. Customers whom brands message through the business app can see that the contact belongs to a business account.

WhatsApp offers a plethora of business options. Apart from setting a unique business profile, brands can make use of powerful features like seeing message statistics including number of messages sent, delivered, read, and received.

WhatsApp, however, is not free from drawbacks. The biggest being the WhatsApp Business app data protection issues. For example, the business application automatically reads all saved contacts that are stored. Another drawback of the app is that it can only be installed on one smartphone and up to four other devices. Each of these devices must be linked to the same number and shared between employees, if required. WhatsApp needs to overcome these and more drawbacks to reach the top slot in the digital marketing space.

Conclusion

The selection of marketing platforms for brands entirely depends upon marketing budget, goals, industry dynamics, and other micro factors. A thorough understanding of the platforms highlight the fact that they have brought in large scale innovation and transformation in marketing. However, most of the platforms are either app-based or consume data. moLotus is the only exception requiring no data plans or mobile app downloads giving it a considerable edge. It is advisable for brands to use them in combination for meeting their marketing goals.