5 digital marketing tools for small businesses

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.

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.
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Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott writes the award winning Fairy Blog Mother blog for beginner and post-beginner bloggers to “explain things really simply” about blogging and WordPress. She provides simple, easy to understand, highly visual courses and tutorials using ordinary, everyday words. Visit her new Beginner Bloggers blog to find her latest learning resources.