In many ways, marketing is the beating heart that keeps businesses alive by drawing in new customers and reminding old customers how much they like your business. There is even a strong argument that businesses should adopt a marketing first approach.
While that move might feel too extreme, there are many marketing tools for small businesses that can help streamline your efforts and boost your marketing might. Keep reading for five of the best marketing tools for small businesses.
- Search Engine Optimization
Before you worry about anything else, you must get your website and content seen by your intended customer base. That means you need solid SEO. In fact, SEO is one of the foundational online marketing tools for small businesses.
Love it or hate it, search engines play a huge role in who finds your website. If you don’t show up on page one for at least one or two critical keywords, you’re going to struggle to snag market share. Search engine optimization provides you the key to getting those higher rankings.
- Email Marketing Tools for Small Business
Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs of all forms of digital marketing, coming in at around 4200 percent. There are a few email tools that you can deploy. There are newsletters, which favor structured content such as short articles or blog posts.
You can use drip campaigns which function as a digital slow sell for high-ticket products or services. You can also use email blasts to announce sales or exclusive promotions.
- Social Media
Social media is one of the more powerful digital marketing tools for small businesses. Social media gives you the opportunity to talk directly with customers. That lets you build relationships, reinforce your branding, and talk up your product in a much more organic way.
- Graphic Design – Canva
Good marketing campaigns need good graphics, whether that’s an image for a blog post or a graphic to highlight survey results. Canva offers a low-cost option for creating customized images and graphics that will get better traction than your average stock photo.
- Marketing Automation Tools for Small Business
Automation has come a long way in the last decade or so. You can automate everything from email campaigns to social media posts and even website personalization. Just as importantly for small business owners, it helps you save time while delivering equivalent or better marketing results.
Looking for some help picking your automation tools? Check out these automation software reviews.
Choosing Your Marketing Tools for Small Business
With so many marketing tools for small businesses out there, you can find yourself constantly reaching for the next shiny object. Take a slow and steady approach with marketing tools.
Apart from the tools & software, you need to think of designing an extensive marketing analytics dashboard that helps identify key business metrics like bounce rate, traffic, visitors, duration, etc. these KPIs help in monitoring business growth and make the right decision. Here, an agency like “Marketing Reports” can provide valuable support.
Start with crucial needs like SEO and email marketing. Once you get those locked down or tuned in, move on to social media, graphic design, and automation. Remember, more tools don’t necessarily mean better results.
Leverage the essential first. Then worry about bells and whistles. Looking for more digital marketing tips and advice? Check out the posts in our Marketing, SEO, and Business categories.
