Did you know that one survey shows that 91% of consumers favor shopping or engaging in transactions with small businesses, highlighting the significance of effective marketing tools?
Yes, you read that right! Small businesses tend to provide better customer service and a more personalized experience for consumers. However, the small-scale industry also comprises 99.9% of the total businesses in the US. This means you need to develop your strategy to get ahead of the competition.
But the good thing about modern business is that digital tools are available to drive tangible results. From planning website design features to incorporating plugins, we will help you look into different online tools for your small business.
For Social Media Management
- Hootsuite
- Loomly
- Followerwonk
For Email Marketing
- Mailchimp
- Moosend
- SendGrid
For Content Management
- WordPress
- Grammarly
- Trello
For Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Ahrefs
- Yoast
- KWFinder
For Graphic Development
- Canva
- Creatopy
- Visme
For Conversion Optimization
- Google Analytics
- Unbounce
- Optimizely
WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING?
Professional markets have stressed the importance of online marketing for modern businesses. As more individuals go online, your business should undoubtedly follow suit. Whether building a website or social media profiles, your online presence lets potential customers see what’s in store for them.
Furthermore, you need to consider the growing business competition online. Making a social media account is the first step but you will need to do more than that. This is where digital marketing becomes an essential resource.
Digital marketing is the use of all available tools online to promote brand awareness, gain leads, convert leads to sales and revenues, and build a community of loyal customers.
Read below to see further details.
FOR SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT
The growing number of social media users entails your business must also be visible on social sites. But if you are running several social media profiles, these tools help you organize your strategies cohesively.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a tool perfect for managing multiple social media accounts. Regardless of business size, this tool helps you manage multiple social media profiles in one place!
Online tools such as Hootsuite contain features that let you schedule your social media posts. For instance, you can utilize the tool’s templates to address customer queries efficiently. Also, the tool has a unified dashboard to respond to your followers’ comments without having to visit each platform.
Loomly
If you are running a startup of smaller teams, Loomly provides the necessary social media resources you need. With its streamlined calendars and work-friendly features, you can brainstorm your social media content effectively.
Furthermore, Loomly may curate content topic suggestions based on what is trending on social media. As a bonus, this tool boasts an easily navigable design, which is suitable for those who don’t consider themselves tech-savvy.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is a social media marketing tool built for business profiles on Twitter. This tool digs deeper into your followers’ data by analyzing their online interactions with your account.
With this tool, you can get a bird’s-eye view of your followers based on their location, other followed profiles, bio, likes, and more. These pieces of information will help you curate your social media content effectively.
FOR EMAIL MARKETING
The truth is email marketing still works in 2021. Many businesses and individual consumers are closing deals by exchanging emails. As a small business, you should maximize the benefits of email marketing to drive leads and grow sales.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is among the most popular email marketing tools today. By letting your consumers or followers subscribe to your mailing list, you can send out marketing materials using this tool. As a result, Mailchimp emails offer one of the highest returns of investment (ROI).
Moreover, Mailchimp allows you to plot your emails according to schedule, type of content, and other criteria. Its fundamental services are also free until you hit 2,000 mail subscribers.
Moosend
Moosend is known for its easy-to-use and user-friendly solutions to email marketing. If you need a robust email organizer at affordable rates, this tool might be the one for you.
This particular tool maintains simple, easy-to-read reports and automation that are perfect for those who are starting a business. What’s more ─ a paid subscription with Moosend provides additional features, such as countdown timers, landing pages, and mobile popups, among others.
SendGrid
SendGrid’s email marketing solutions are well-disposed to both business novices and veterans. One popular feature is its scalable designing tool that includes drag-and-drop and visual editing. You can easily customize your dashboard based on your preferences.
Also, SendGrid has a built-in performance analytics tool and deliverability features to determine which emails work best. Above, what makes this tool stand out from the crowd is its competitive pricing. Its basic services are available from its free plan. And as your business grows, SendGrid also offers flexible pricing packages to match your growing mailing list.
FOR CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Content is, indeed, king! Your online marketing strategies should be paired with quality content that drives results. With that, we have listed some of the most renowned content management tools to support your small business’s needs.
WordPress
WordPress is a content management and website-building tool that offers tons of features and plug-ins. Arguably the most recognized website builder, WordPress allows you to personalize your site design, content strategy, and even SEO campaign.
On the other hand, WordPress may be overwhelming for small business owners who are new to digital marketing. But you can always work with professional marketers to help you navigate the built-in features and tools around WordPress.
Grammarly
If you are not confident with your content writing skills, Grammarly can help you. Grammarly is an online tool that checks your content’s grammar, tone, style, coherence, and clarity. Although known as a grammar checker, Grammarly offers more!
For example, you can set your content to a specific English variant (American, British, Canadian, or Australian). A paid subscription also grants you access to Grammarly’s plagiarism checker and human proofreader.
Trello
Trello provides a structured platform to brainstorm content ideas and manage your team’s projects. Its features are designed to promote collaboration across all team members.
This tool’s content planning features allow you to share blogs with your team members before the publication and create article subjects or notecards for the team. The notecards can be modified by the users while they take notes or update the project status.
FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)
Managing your content involves analyzing its performance in driving sales. Online SEO tools help you boost your digital presence in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more. Improved SEO means growth in sales, revenues, and leads.
Ahrefs
A lot of digital marketers trust Ahrefs when starting an SEO campaign, and we know why.
Ahrefs can run an in-depth competitive analysis of your website’s performance against your competitors. This tool lets you:
- Find organic and relevant keywords
- Keep track of your competitors’ performance
- Keep track of your mobile and desktop search rankings
- Look into your site’s backlinks
Over the years, Ahrefs has also expanded its services to:
- Site analysis and audit for performance bugs or issues
- Look for keyword gaps
- Website rank tracking
- Content explorer
Yoast
Even with its free version, Yoast offers staggering SEO services to optimize your digital content. Some of its basic features will help you:
- Improve content readability
- Determine what you do wrong that affects your site’s performance
- Identify where to place your primary keywords
If you are planning to upgrade to Yoast’s paid version, you can take advantage of these added services:
- Semantic keyword search
- Get real-time insights
- Receive internal link recommendations
- Add more related keywords
You may get started with the free version to get acquainted with its features. As your business grows, you can, then, upgrade to its paid versions to further improve your content.
KWFinder
KWFinder is a wonderful alternative for small businesses with a tight budget. This tool offers accurate and helpful insights to boost your content’s searchability. By encoding a seed keyword, KWFinder provides hundreds of keyword suggestions, including their ranking scores and search volumes.
Further, plans are also available to gain access to more tools for website analysis, backlinks, SERP watchers, and more.
FOR GRAPHIC DEVELOPMENT
Many consumers prefer reading a creative graphic with compelling content. So, come up with eye-catchy visuals to keep your audience hooked. Here are some tools to lavish your creativity and improve your marketability.
Canva
If you need engaging visuals for your audience, Canva is a great tool to start. Within a few minutes, you can create appealing, relevant, and original graphics for your business.
Canva also offers free cool templates! You can use ‘freemium’ photos on-site and polish them with your own images. The best thing about this tool is you don’t need experience in graphic designing. Canva has a drag-and-drop feature that arms you with several editing options, image sizes, effects, color palettes, and more.
Creatopy
Creatopy is largely similar to Canva, but it offers fewer features for digital marketers. However, the tool helps you collaborate with other marketers through its unique brand kits and design sets. Thus, this platform is useful for businesses that manage multiple social media accounts.
The best feature, perhaps, of this tool is its single-click, same-design editing across several formats.
Visme
Visme is a graphic design tool that focuses on data visualization and presentation. This tool is ideal for marketers who frequently share research data with social media platforms.
Further, Visme allows you to pull information from various sources, including Google spreadsheets, to create a graphic presentation with ease.
FOR CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
The goal of any digital marketing strategy is to convert visitors to long-term customers. And any minor changes on your platform (e.g., color changes in CTA buttons) can make a difference. These conversion and analytical tools give you valuable insights into your digital marketing performance.
Google Analytics
It has become an unconventional rule to include Google Analytics in your digital tool kit. Being the most utilized search engine, analyzing how your website performs on Google can drastically improve your strategy.
For example, you can keep track of where your website traffic is coming from (organic clicks, social media, referrals, etc.). You may also explore your visitors’ behavior while on your site (what they click, how long they stay, the pages they visit, and more).
You cannot just ignore the power of Google Analytics in the digital marketing game. The data you can extract from this tool helps you structuralize and design your marketing strategy.
Unbounce
When launching a landing page live, Unbounce is a tool where you can perform A/B testing quickly and effectively. This way, you will know which landing page variant works well. You can also sneak into which parts of the working landing page make the difference (call-to-action, design, content, etc.).
If you are worried about designing your landing page, Unbounce has lots of templates to choose from. Whichever works, you can customize the page to your preferences and style.
Optimizely
Like Unbounce, Optimizely runs landing page tests efficiently by combining visual development and audience targeting tools. You can also customize a specific group of audiences to test.
No coding is needed. Optimizely allows you to evaluate each (minor or major) edits on your pages. Then, the tool provides quick results, on which you can base your next strategy.
THE TAKEAWAY
Digital marketing is never easy, especially for startups and small businesses. Nevertheless, you will no longer need a background in coding to learn digital marketing. But you need to invest enough resources (time, finances, people) to effectively run an online marketing campaign. With consistency and the right strategy, you can reap tangible outcomes in the long run.
Furthermore, the tools listed above have been proven to drive results. Also, it all boils down to how much resources are you willing to spend on your digital platforms.
Your competitors might already be using several digital marketing tools to their advantage. How about you? Take advantage and partner with the professionals in digital marketing and web development. At Proweaver, you can achieve all this and more. Get in touch with our team today by giving us a call at +1 (866) 777-8315 today!