Welcome to another post in the Burlingame Business Tips series. This time it’s all about marketing, more specifically, which marketing tools you can use to your advantage in your small business. Read on.
Many small businesses simply don’t have the big budget needed to hire an outside firm to run a marketing campaign for them, so doing it in-house seems like a no brainer. If you do decide to build your own email lists, monitor your online presence, share social content across a variety of channels, create your own original content, or tackle other aspects of marketing yourself, then you need some secret weapons in your arsenal.
Start with our list of five top marketing tools which help make marketing easy. You can try out all of them for free.
- MailChimp.
Sending out regular emails and newsletters to your customers can be a bit of a headache if you don’t have a good tool to keep things simple and keep you organized. Step in MailChimp! The predesigned templates look professional and are easy to modify, and with the free plan you can send up to 12,000 emails a month – enough for most small business to begin with. Keeping your customers in the loop becomes much easier when half the work is already done for you.
- Hootsuite.
Keeping all your social media channels not just ticking over, but regularly updated with fresh content can be a time consuming task. With Hootsuite you could potentially save yourself hours of time spent uploading content across multiple platforms. Connect your social accounts and do everything from one place – publish content, schedule posts for the future, monitor your brand (and competitors) and report on your progress over time.
- HARO.
There are two ways to use the ‘Help a Reporter Out’ service. Firstly, respond to requests from journalists in order to gain some PR for your business – perhaps they’re looking for an industry expert or a product you could supply them. Secondly, use the service as a resource when you’re creating your own content. Just like a reporter, source expert quotes for your blog or gather relevant information from others.
- Canva.
If you don’t have a graphic designer on staff how do you give your company a consistent brand identity? You outsource right? Wrong. With Canva’s sophisticated design templates even non-designers can create beautiful images for social media, presentations, banners, ads and more. The professional monthly plan costs $12.95 and has some useful features like unlimited storage, the ability to save color palettes for you brand and access to more templates and photos.
- Google Analytics.
If you’re not monitoring your website how do you know what’s working and what isn’t? Google Analytics is free and allows you to report not just on the statistics but also on things like how people are directed to your website, what content keeps them interested and what causes them to click away from your site. Use this information to review your marketing content – which advert is bringing people to your site and why is a particular blog post converting into sales for example.
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