9 FREE must-have marketing apps for Business Owners
Got 2 minutes spare? No business owner has. So here’s 9 DIY Marketing tactics and the apps you’ll need to adopt them in your business. Knowing which marketing apps are going to be benefit you is half the battle. These marketing apps will help you:
Improve your customer response time.
Identify customers for win-back.
Identify security holes with your existing marketing logins.
See which of your customers are using newer platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.
Help you get newspaper coverage.
Get alerted to online conversations about your business.
1. Measure print mail drop success via the Google Analytics app.
Google Analytics shows you instantly what people are on your website, when they visited and from what device. You’re probably more familiar with the desktop version, but the mobile version is much more elegantly put together.
You don’t have to be checking in everyday to Google Analytics, simply check in when you want to either confirm or reject a hypothesis. If you have done a maildrop with a digital ‘visit website’ call to action, this is where you’ll see traffic show up.
2. Creating customer win-back campaigns from Mailchimp app
Mailchimp has a powerful analytics engine and knowing how to interpret that data is important for managing database health. You don’t want to have your email deliverability affected because of poor database management practices. If you’re sending regular email marketing (and you should be), the Mailchimp app is an easy way to check in on campaign performance.
Look at the unsubscribe rate, who has unsubscribed? Just because they’ve left your list doesn’t mean they’ve broken up with your business. Correlate back to their spend with you and segment out the most important ones for a winback campaign, but don’t be creepy and email them back immediately! Just make sure they’re on your radar for follow up. It’s much easier to retain and existing customer than acquire a new one.
3. Reply to your customers using Facebook Pages on the go.
‘Leave no comment unanswered’ should be the motto of every small business marketing function. Anyone who takes the time to comment on your business page deserves a timely answer.
It’s not always possible when you’ve got a million things to do, that’s why putting your Facebook Pages app directly on to your phone instantly will improve the speed of reply metrics on your Facebook page.
Don’t wait until you’re at the office Monday 9am, take that 3 minutes waiting in line Saturday afternoon and reply.
4. Optimise social ad spend immediately after campaign launch
Again, another Facebook app that isn’t utilised as much as it should be. The Advert app provides all of your current campaign performance in one location. This is useful for monitoring performance 4–8 hours after launch when you can see whether you’ve got a cash cow or a dog on your hands.
Why is this important? You can cull the ‘dogs’ before they cost you a bunch or you can double down on the budget of high performing ad units. Adverts does more than provide a ad monitoring function, it let’s you create full blown ad campaigns and setup targeting. However, I tend to leave the creation and distribution activities for the large screen — they’re too important to create on the go.
5. Monitor your brand name mentions across the entire web
Ok this isn’t strictly an app, yet can give your precious hours advance warning that an article has been published or a review has been uploaded about your business.
You can setup a Google Alert for pretty much anything, however I’d start with your business name and potentially a couple of your competitors if you’re the type to want to know what’s happening over the fence.
6. Stop someone stealing your database, your website or even your money.
You’ve worked hard to build your audience and your digital profile, so the last thing you want is to lose it. It’s not as uncommon as you think. All it takes is a weak password that you use time and time again, to be lost on one platform to compromise all your platforms. Want to know if you’ve already been compromised?
Go to this site and put in your email address: https://haveibeenpwned.com/ or the email address of any of your employees.
If you’ve lost your LinkedIn password, you’re not alone. 164 million people lost theirs in May 2016. If you come up on this list, you can be assured that your data is for sale on the dark web. If you’ve used the same passwords to secure your company Dropbox, your Wordpress website or worse, your banking… this should be the first thing you switch out today.
Now, secure those sites with 2 Factor Authentication which turns your phone into a second password for the key business services you use. Download Authy, a great 2FA. Most online marketing services offer a 2 Factor Authentication mode and you should be asking your marketing agencies to ensure they’ve protected your data with 2FA too if they don’t already.
7. Online order delivery management
If it’s ordered online you can manage the processing of that order directly from your phone. For eCommerce operations that utilise the Wordpress infrastructure, download the Woo Commerce app on to anyone’s phone who is part of the order processing team.
That way, as orders are processed, they can update the order directly from their tablet or phone. Then, you can see at a glance directly in WooCommerce who’s orders have been fulfilled, packaged and dispatched.
8. Keep your ear to the digital ground in your industry
OK so Twitter’s dead right? Not so fast. Twitter makes a great listening tool. Instead of checking in to the limitless stream of tweets, be a little more discerning and turn on notifications for key Twitter accounts you want to take notice of.
For example, instead of reading the newspaper cover to cover, turn on notifications for a couple of your favourite reporters.
This can also be a smart way to get to know what kind of stories a reporter covers before you approach them with a story pitch.
9. Learn a social marketing app that your customers already using. Seriously.
Get comfortable learning the language of a new social app and see if your customers are on there. Yes you could download Instagram or Snapchat and just get started but…. there’s a smarter way. Before you decide to jump into a social network, cross reference your customer list with the social network and see how many of your customers are already there.
To do that, download your list into your phone, before you join the new social network. Then when on signup it asks whether you’d like to check your contact list, say yes. If there’s a correlation of 30% or more, you should probably be present on that social network.
BONUS!
Get inspired to business greatness on the way to the office!
Download Soundcloud and listen to your choice of any number of New Zealand CEO’s talking about their business and what marketing works for them on the ryan marketing show. Yes I’m the interviewer and this is a little project I started to interview 100 CEO’s about their business and marketing.
If you prefer to receive the CEO interviews by email, you can subscribe here.
