Written By: Alysha McLean, MNLP, MTLT, MCHt
Essential Marketing Tools for Small Business Owners
Written By: Alysha McLean, MNLP, MTLT, MCHt
One of the great benefits that small businesses have in the modern digital world is they don’t have to worry about how large or small they are.
There are many tools to make it easy to get your business in front of thousands if not millions of potential prospects without having to rely on people who pass by as local businesses do.
Many years ago, a small business would need to acquire funding to be able to compete with the big players in the market.
Gone are those days, though!
Let’s take a look at some free marketing tools that every small business should be utilizing,
Google Analytics
This tool is completely free and allows web owners to see how people are engaging with the website.
To make the best use of Google Analytics, you can combine it with Google Search Control. This lets you find out more about your site visitors to help optimize your website for online shoppers.
Some of the data you can access thanks to Google analytics is:
● How many site visitors your website is getting per day, week, month or year.
● Which sources of your traffic is coming from
● Demographics of site visitors
● Keywords that site visitors are using
Mailchimp
Contrary to what many people think, email marketing is still alive and well. You know that you have acquired a lead when a site visitor signs up for your mailing list.
Did you know email marketing provides a much higher return on investment than any other marketing strategy!
To make the most of email marketing, you need a tool that will help you capture visitor emails, create and manage a mailing list and send email campaigns on a schedule.
In comes Mail Chimp, and it’s free for the first 2000 mail subscribers.
So hey, if you’re starting an email marketing campaign, wonder no more - This is the go-to tool!
Auto Scheduler
To remain relevant and competitive in today’s digital business environment, your business must have a social media presence.
This is easier said than done, though, and it’s why you need a tool to help you with specific tasks, such as scheduling posts. Gone are the days of manually posting each post yourself, you have sales to make, not social media to post.
You can also access advanced reporting tools to evaluate your social media marketing campaigns all from one central location.
There are many different schedulers out there, so take a look at which one would work best for you and your business needs.
KWFinder
Any modern business, whether big or small, needs a website.
That said, it is critical to ensure that your site ranks to become visible to online shoppers.
This is where SEO comes in.
To optimize your website for search engines, one of the major factors to incorporate is keywords.
KWFinder helps you find exactly which keywords online shoppers are using when searching for content and products online so you can use them in your copy.
When implemented correctly, this ultimately allows your business to become more visible.
HubSpot
For a small business to thrive in the modern business environment, it needs to run multiple campaigns across different channels such as email marketing, and social media.
Granted, it can be hard to manage all of the campaigns.
Hubspot creates a central location where you can manage all of your different campaigns.
It also provides access to analytics tools to help you find out which campaigns are working and which are not.
Slack
If your small business has a marketing team with individuals located in different parts of the country or the world, then you could use a communication tool that makes it easy for team members to exchange information, documents, and data without restrictions.
Slack is such an amazing tool.
Not only is it simple to use, but it also readily integrates with many other project management tools.
Final Word
For your small business to survive and thrive in the modern business world, it needs to become more efficient.
It needs to evaluate large volumes of data and complete tasks quickly.
So regardless of what your business entails, don’t stop asking yourself this question - What online tools exist to make my life easier and my business better? THIS is where the answer of optimization hides!