If you are a
small business owner you must be aware of what entails running your enterprise.
Marketing and promotions, managing finances, setting targets, dealing with clients
and a million other things are part of daily routine.
In short,
it’s hell lot of work and never enough time right.
To ease some
of your workload I am sharing my list of favourite digital marketing tools to
promote your business.
Most of
these are freemium apps absolutely perfect for small business owners. If you
have or are just starting your business you can try out the free versions first
and then upgrade to paid plans later.
(Some of the links in this post are
affiliate links. If you choose to purchase via my link, I may receive a commission
at no extra cost to you.)
11 Useful Marketing Tools for Small Business
Social media scheduling and automation: Social media scheduling is a task in itself. It can get really overwhelming if you haven’t planned before.
As small
business owners we all understand how important social media is for our
marketing and promotional efforts.
You have
keep some time aside for meaningful social media engagement which is only
possible if you have planned your promotional content ahead.
If you move
from day to day trust me it will be really tiring each day. Thankfully these
lovely apps below help you in scheduling and automation of your social media
content.
Planoly: This is a freemium app. I struggled with Instagram a lot and hence started using Planoly to schedule my posts, where I could visually manage my IG grid.
It is an amazing Instagram scheduler with the free account you can post upto 30 stories and posts a month. It has a clever drag and drop feature, making it easy for you to plan your grid. Click here to see my Instagram feed.
Digital Marketing for Instagram is so important for any small business owner after all a billion users are active on Insta right now.
I really free Planoly gives you value for money. You can sign up for free and schedule 30 posts each month without spending a dime.
Huge save on
that marketing budget!
The paid plans start from $9 per month or $7/month billed annually.
Tailwind: Tailwind is exclusively for scheduling Pinterest pins. Pinterest is not a social media platform but visual search engine and it is has a huge potential in driving traffic to your website.
Tailwind is
a freemium app. With the free account you can schedule upto 100 pins, while the
premium one lets you schedule unlimited pins.
It also
provides with optimum time slots to post your pins when Pinterest users are most
active.
It’s a good
idea to consider investing in Tailwind because I honestly believe Pinterest can
be such a game-changer for your business if you schedule properly.
I promise
you if you pin consistently using this scheduler you will notice a spike in
your traffic within weeks.
Plus on the
paid plan you will be able to schedule your Insta posts also. Tailwind has an
amazing feature where it provides you with hastags suggestions, graded on the
parameters of their competitiveness. So you can easily avoid hastags that are
too competitive.
There are
both annual and monthly plans, starting from and from $15 per month and $9.99/
per month billed annually.
Buffer: There is a reason why Buffer is still one of the most preferred app for digital marketing.
It is user friendly and you can link three social media account in the free plan and schedule upto 10 posts a day.
It is perfect digital marketing tool for small businesses as you can plan almost a month’s content when you consider the fact that it allows schedule 10 posts a day across three social media platforms. I mostly prefer to use Buffer for my Facebook Page and Twitter updates
The paid plans start from $15 a month.
IFTTT: IFTTT stands for IF This Then That it is an automation app and really cool one at that. I am new to this app but so far loving the experience.
IFTTT allows
you to inter-connect all your apps so that whenever you post something on one
platform it’s available on the other one as well. It saves you so much time
with automation.
Like suppose
you post something on Insta but want that same post to appear on your Twitter
as well, so you simply connect Insta and your Twitter accounts and all your
posts will be available on Twitter as soon as you post in Insta! That simple.
You sign-up
for free and create as many workflows or ‘applet’ as IFTTT says. There is a bit
of a learning-curve but you can master this in a few minutes.
As small
business owners it is important to track your brand performance as well as any
potential competitors. These are some important tools to help you achieve that.
Ubersuggest: Ubersuggest by blogger and digital entrepreneur Neil Patel is an amazing digital marketing app for small business owners.
It is a free
SEO tool and a great alternative to paid apps like AHREF, SEMRush, Buzzsumo
etc.
You can use
it for keyword research, see how your posts are performing, use it to track
your organic audience; it also shows you the CPC worth of your keywords.
It also
gives you so much information about your competitor’s content. Just type in the
URL of any website you wish to check, Ubersuggest will show which content is
performing well by its search volume.
I really
think this app provides an excellent insight if you are not ready to invest in
premium apps as yet.
Buzzsumo: Buzzsumo is a freemium app. Just like Ubersuggest it helps you to track the performance of your content and those of your competitors by how much it has been shared by social media.
You can also
use this app for generating post ideas. Type in your keywords in the search bar
and it will show you most shared content on the topic.
The free
version shows up to 10-11 URLs, which is certainly not bad for a free version.
Google Analytics: This is a must for any business and an absolute no-brainer. What I love most about Google Analytics is it is so exhaustive. (pic)
You have
your audience behavior, where are you getting most traffic from, the devices
your audience uses, real-time audience etc.
So these
little details are crucial when targeting consumers, This tool is free but may
be a little intimidating for beginners, but you will get a hang of it within no
time.
Besides
Google Analytics, Google Search Console is also a really powerful tool to monitor your web traffic.
Google Alerts is a free tool for online monitoring of your brand. You can activate unlimited alerts for your business, especially when you want to monitor any media coverage for your business. Set up alerts in your name, your business name, or any keywords related to your business.
Email Marketing For Small Business
Email marketing is absolutely necessary for small business owners. It is more personal since you are speaking directly to your readers and consumers. It is a great tool for networking and building relationships with prospective leads and your existing clients.
Mailchimp: For your marketing efforts I recommend Mailchimp. It is user-friendly. You can set up targeted campaigns for your audience comprising freebies and sales funnels.
It is easy
to set-up and automate, so you can set up welcome mail whenever a new
subscriber joins your list.
You can also
design beautiful emails using templates from Mailchimp library.
It’s free
for a subscriber list of less than 2000.
Some may
argue there are great alternatives to Mailchimp like ConvertKit and Active
Campaign but if you are just new to email marketing and don’t want to
invest in paid tools as yet, you will find MailChimp perfect for sending
regular updates to your consumers.
Graphic Designing
“An image is worth a thousand words,” Images are powerful and they have the potential in elevating your brand awareness.
People
identify your business with the images you use, eg your brand logo.
Thankfully
these days you don’t need expensive software like Photoshop to design your
content.
Canva: I absolutely love Canva. It is a freemium graphic designing app with an extremely easy to use interface.
You can
create logo designs, flyers, invitations, social media content, A4 presentations
and so much more with this app.
It is
ideal for those who have no clue about graphic designing and yet don’t want to
invest in a professional photographer and graphic designer.
It
allows you to design quickly, without much difficulty and create eye-catching,
beautiful designs.
The paid
plans of the app, billed at 12.95 a month, gives you access to Canva’s huge
library resources of pictures, graphics and fonts.
Related:
Blogging Basics: Free Blogs VS Self-Hosting
Apps for Client Meeting
Here are some smart apps you can use to schedule meeting with clients and collect information on prospects.
Acuity Scheduling: This is a calendar app which helps you to book appointment with your clients on the basis of your availability.
You can block times in your calendar when you will
be availability and block off any times you are not available.
This is helpful for your clients as well they can
easily choose a date and time from your available slots.
Zoom: Zoom is good for
setting up remote meetings and ideal for small businesses. You can use it both
for making video calls and webinars.
You can connect upto 100 participants and schedule a
40-minute call in the free plan.
So it is an excellent option if you want to set-up
one-to-one meeting with your clients.
Typeform: Typeform make data collection so easy. You can create surveys for clients to get them to know better.
You can create surveys as part of
your email-marketing efforts or to gain feedback, improve your services.
It is easy to use, looks really pretty and
professional. There are both free and paid versions of this app. But for small business
owners the free version is enough to get started.