A guest post by Laura Jimenez.
All small businesses yearn to use digital marketing on a life-sized budget. But is this possible?
The answer is yes. Digital marketing for small businesses doesn’t have to differentiate between corporate mammoths and budding start-ups. You can learn how with a planned approach and implementation to truly flourish within your market.
This list of tools can help small businesses harness certain areas of the digital boom. Also you can initiate and automate most of these processes with minimal cost.
As a leading digital marketing agency in London, we are letting you in on a little secret… You don’t need to do the whole shebang at once. Just pick up a few areas and get going.
Let us show you how a little effort can go a long way.
1. Google Analytics
As the holy grail of digital marketing, Google Analytics is your friend, advisor and teacher. This completely free software integrates with your website to reveal insights about your web visitors. It also highlights pending issues and helps you understand which marketing channel is working the best for you so you can use it more.
With Google Analytics you can capture:
- Visitor volumes
- How they landed on your site
- Keywords that are associated with you
- Overall demographics and user metrics
- Bounce rates and average time spent
2. HubSpot
HubSpot offers sales, marketing and customer service. Its free version accumulates data about your customer funnel so you can learn how to optimise it for better sales.
HubSpot is the most popular marketing automation portal on the Internet. It it unifies all your channels for a complete overview of your marketing efforts. Such as email marketing to create custom lists and drip campaigns.
Some of the HubSpot features are:
- Maintaining lead status and buyer journey
- Campaign automation
- Targeted leads through emails
- Social media management
- Detailed analytics
3. SEMRush
Sporting 6 million users, 20 billion keywords and 821 million domain, SEMRush is your go-to tool for all things SEO. Growing small businesses need SEO initiatives to closely monitor and continually tweak for higher rankings. SEMRush provides comprehensive information about analytics, keywords and competitors.
It also points out any impending SEO issues with your website. This could be the overall site health and untapped opportunities for building up your performance statistics.
SEMRush offers:
- Web analysis
- Keyword research
- Complete SEO audit
- Backlink generation
- Content Ideas
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite serves over 80% Fortune 1000 companies. However, there is no need to think they only available for the big players. The tool is equally well-optimised for small businesses.
It is your best bet towards building an authoritative social presence. Digital marketing as sometimes considered synonymous with social media management. So this platform acts as a robust aggregator for all your social media efforts. Apart from post scheduling, it gives you to power to check advanced reporting and performance metrics.
It offers a centralised dashboard to manage over 30 different platforms. What can seem like a manual nightmare can turn into a sweet dream, and save you a lot of time.
HootSuite allows you to:
- See and engage with all your tags, mentions, and comments from one place
- Identify the influencers your brand can associate with
- Calculate the ROI in one go
5. Canva
Canva is a design centre for the technologically-challenged. It allows you to easily upload aesthetic graphics and high-quality images across all channels. Canva’s templates change how small businesses communicate through visual graphs, enticing infographics, colourful presentations and custom charts.
You don’t need to know anything about designing graphics. Its easy drag and drop interface brings visions to life without complicated tools or processes. You can do photo editing, resizing and font selection. And makes it easy to create complementing colour palettes for your brand – all for free!
Canva brings in its proficiency to:
- Create graphics through pre-set templates
- Design social media posts
- Set your brand colour scheme
- Develop business communications
Bonus: 6. MobileMonkey
MobileMonkey is a messaging platform that allows small businesses to interact with their audience in real-time via Messenger, SMS and Webchat.
It is also a marketing platform for running Facebook messenger marketing efforts. It allows users to create chatbots within minutes and collect messenger contacts, send chatblasts or messages, create drip campaigns!
The key features of MobileMonkey are:
- Multi-User Management.
- Multi-Bot Dashboard.
- The Ultimate Chatbot Builder.
- Q&A Triggers.
Bonus: 7 Venngage
Venngage is a simple and powerful design platform to make infographics for small businesses. You don’t need to be a professional designer to create beautiful graphics.
You could easily learn how to make infographics by using any of the 1000+ templates as a starting point. With a business account, there are features such as team collaboration, auto branding (to add your business colours and logo automatically to all of the designs), priority customer support, among others. There’s also a free plan that you can take advantage of.
What can you use infographics for:
- Report to your team on latest announcement and ensure company alignment.
- Educate your audience or employees about your latest features.
- Influence people visually to buy your product or service.
Bonus: 8 Hunter Verifier
If you’re doing email marketing, then having Hunter Verifier is a must. Far too many people neglect the importance of email verification while doing prospecting, so their emails might never reach its target. Hunter Verifier offers an intuitive way to verify your email lists and make sure the emails get delivered.
How does it work? You just need to add email addresses that you’d like to verify and you’ll get the email address status and verification score. In case you’re working with huge email lists, Hunter offers bulk verification allowing you to add multiple email addresses at once and get accurate results.
The key features of Hunter Verifier are:
- Bulk email verifier
- Email verification API that you can use in other applications
- Quick email verification score and status ensuring highest deliverability rates
Bonus: 9 Meetgeek
Free yourself from note-taking while improving meeting efficiency and enhancing your team’s productivity. Meetgeek is a virtual assistant that will make your online meetings run smoothly. It allows you to focus on the topic of your meeting while doing what it knows best, recording and taking notes during your call.
This tool makes it easier to save time, always have great notes, and on top of that, it allows you to share meeting highlights and recordings with your team.
The key features of Meetgeek are:
- Automate meeting notes and write better minutes
- Record and transcribe your meetings
- Share meeting outcomes with your whole team
- Stay in the loop without attending
- Search recording from previous meetings
- Integrate with Jira, Trello, Google Drive, Slack
- More updates are coming soon.
Are you one of those small businesses who are ready?
Digital marketing shouldn’t contribute to your troubles. A well-planned marketing strategy which uses all these tools will create a consistent and valuable brand image which fetches both awareness and leads.
While most of these tools are free, others do offer free trials and demos to try your hand at something new. Regardless of your marketing cycle, keep experimenting with your content to find the right balance between all your channels.
About the author
Laura Jimenez is an SEO Executive at Minttwist, a London based digital marketing agency.
.
- Top 6 essential SEO tools used by small businesses - 24 June 2022
- Tips for optimising photos for online shops for search engines - 26 May 2022
- What makes an ideal workstation for the WFH blogger? - 1 May 2022