Marketing a small business can be costly and time-consuming. That’s why the emergence of online tools has been such a game-changer for so many business owners.
Marketing technology comes with great opportunity but it is a crowded marketplace with over 7,000 options.
As a digital agency owner, I’ve tested hundreds and take great pleasure in sharing which we use and recommend.
These six tools are just some of those that will allow small businesses to revolutionise your current workload and boost your performance.
Lack of design skills, or simply don’t have the time or budget to produce graphics worthy of your business?
As graphics become more sophisticated, it’s crucial to ensure your marketing efforts look sleek and professional. Canva’s ideal for small marketing teams and budgets as it uses simple, drag and drop features with professional layout options.
Canva’s design capabilities extend beyond simple presentations, users can also create social media posts, logos, flyers, resumes, posters, infographics, brochures, invitations, business cards and business documents. It also has photo editing capabilities.
While many features are free, the pro version (free 30-day trial) has the tools to create your entire brand kit, using your exact colours and fonts.
The problem with most social media scheduling tools is that after your updates appear, they won’t automatically repost. Instead, marketers must post their content into a spreadsheet and then laboriously reload them into the scheduling tool.
Fortunately, Meet Edgar solves this problem by automatically reposting your updates; all you need to do is upload your content by importing or using an RSS feed then, colour-code your content to sort into categories. Meet Edgar gives an example of a company using motivational quotes on a Monday, blog posts on a Wednesday, or conversation starters on a Friday evening.
The other major benefit of Meet Edgar is that it has auto-variations which write your posts for you by using quote-worthy text from articles or blogs.
Meet Edgar currently has a free, 30-day trial. Otherwise, pricing starts at $49 per month. For up to 25 social media accounts.
If you’re running a business, you’ll want to know how well your marketing campaigns are performing. And, while you have access to Google Analytics, Google My Business, Google Search Console, Facebook and Instagram insights, the problem doesn’t end there, in fact it only begins.
Looking at analytics can be like falling down a rabbit hole. There’s too much data to take in, so that that in the end you feel overwhelmed and confused. Additionally, you feel frustrated that you’ve spent far too much time learning how to read the copious amounts of data that they spew out.
That’s where Pocket Insights comes into play – it allows you to track performance and benchmark campaign success with ease, making it a dream come true for the smaller companies and solo players.
Pocket Insights gives users a weekly and monthly email showing you the more important marketing metrics. Rather than overwhelming, it’s a straightforward report in one email. With everything in one place, it means you can read through the information quickly, take note and action.
Pocket Insights offers a free 30-day trial and price plans from $15 per month.
You’ve spent ages writing your content, next comes the promotion, however, a common problem for marketing a small business is having the time and capabilities to extend your reach and engage with higher numbers of relevant readers.
Quuu Promote is an online promotion tool, loved by people like Neil Patel, with 40,000 real people (no robots here) sharing your content over 500+ interest categories.
To use it, enter the URL of your chosen content (it doesn’t need to be new, you can use your evergreen posts) into the tool. After building your campaign, and following the curation guidelines, Quuu Promote shares your content with its followers who then share it on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (your @twitterusername remains).
While not free (it costs $25 for each) the promotion period lasts for 30 days.
Do you use hundreds of different web applications? Are you spending an infinite amount of time jumping from MailChimp, Slack, Facebook, HubSpot and more?
Zapier is an integration tool that connects two or more of your apps and software (each integration is called a Zap) so that your daily and repetitive processes are carried out automatically, triggering one action followed by another (or more) and thereby, saving you heaps of time. Zapier estimates that it saves businesses about 40 hours on average a month!
Far from a flash in the pan, Zapier is the tool of choice of 4.5+ million people and companies and, has more than 1,500 integrated apps that allow users to create zaps. For example, you can create a zap of Mailbox Validator and Mailchimp to work through and clear your MailChimp email lists.
While many would love to integrate their apps and software, they’re not tech engineers. However, Zapier is very easy to use and requires no previous technical experience. If you do get stuck? There’s plenty of video training courses to help you along.
A Free trial is available across all plans which start from $0 for personal use and 5 zaps.
You’ve spent ages writing your content, it’s taken sweat and tears (hopefully not blood) so the last thing you want is for all your hard work to get lost into the vortex that is the internet.
Creating a great headline for your content makes all the difference. However, creating and crafting a headline that capitalises on your content, converts, is captivating, scannable and easy to digest is more complicated than it sounds.
Co-schedule’s headline analyser allows you to type in your headline for analysis. For example, the headline ‘5 ways to nail your job interview’ performed poorly. A simple play with words, changing it to ‘5 ways to win in your job interview’ produces far better results.
CoSchedule Headline analyser is free to use.
So, with these six tools to help, you can smash your marketing goals while focussing on other critical elements of your business.
This post was written by Quentin Aisbett, Digital Strategist, OnQ Marketing
