Marketing tools for small businesses that you need to start using today
Running a small business in 2019? Here are six marketing tools for small businesses that you may have never heard of but need to start using today. Marketing is one of the most important aspects of getting your business off the ground. You may have the best product and even the best sales team, but if you can’t generate awareness, support consideration and ultimately generate demand, then you will struggle.
Running a small business is daunting and it’s a risk. How do you mitigate the risk of failure as much as possible? One area that’s often overlooked is investing your marketing toolkit. You need the right tools for the job. Just because your tools don’t fit in a toolbelt and you need to log on to use them, it doesn’t make them any less critical to getting work done.
If you enjoy this article you can find more of our content in our Medium publication — The Digital Marketing Consultant
In this article on marketing tools for small business, you’ll discover:
- a website builder powered my machine learning
- a landing page builder that’s as easy as PowerPoint.
- a tool to discover content your audience will love.
- an email marketing tool designed for ease of use.
- a tool that will let you know which 20% of your effort is generating 80% of results.
- an all in one marketing toolkit when you one a single powerful solution.
As a small business do you need to invest in marketing tools?
Every business needs to invest in a marketing technology (MarTech) stack. That may sound a bit grand if you’re sitting in your office trying to find your sale but these are the tools you need to make it easier to reach and convince your ideal customers to buy from you. If you find yourself needing more leads, struggling to attract traffic or not knowing what marketing tactic is working and what isn’t, then some of these marketing tools for small business will help.
Marketing tools for small businesses
Every business needs a website. Here is a tool for creating a great looking website, unique to your business.
Bookmark.com — A tool that allows you to create a new website for your business at the click of a button. Use machine learning to help you select the best templates for your industry. Pick from multiple variations and then all you need to do is drop in your own text. You could have a new website in under 10 minutes.
Build a completely free website (yours to keep). Included in the free plan is hosting, website security and more. Professional plans start at $11.99 per month.
Lead generation is vital for all businesses. To maximise your conversion rate you need to use landing pages.
Instapage.com — The biggest reason businesses don’t use more landing pages is because people don’t know how to build them. Small businesses often lack the technical knowledge to do it themselves and paying an agency may be out of reach. Instapage is a drag and drop solution for building landing pages. You don’t need a developer and you can start with pre-optimised templates.
Learn more about Instapage, read the case studies or start a free trial.
Social media, is it a fantastic marketing channel or a productivity black hole? This will help.
ContentStudio.com — It’s easy to think social media doesn’t work in business. You can invest hours and have little in the way of results. Social media marketing is getting harder and the social networks are making it difficult for us to reach beyond our existing followers. The quality of your content and its ability to generate engagement matters more than anything else in organic social media marketing. How do you find content your audience will engage with? ContentStudio allows users to search topics for trending content. You could, for example, find content that’s already trending on Twitter and be the first to post it on LinkedIn. The scheduling and posting of content can all be done without leaving ContentStudio.
Get a free ContentStudio account and upgrade to a pro account if you need it. Pro-accounts for ContentStudio start from $39 but the free for life account gives you plenty of features.
You’ve captured a lead, but prospects rarely buy on their first engagement. As a small business, you need to build a relationship and nurture your prospects. This is how.
ConvertKit — Email marketing can be daunting. We aren’t sending a few emails from Outlook, here we are sending out hundreds of relevant and personalised messages. If you’re capturing email addresses then you need an email marketing tool to follow them up. ConvertKit is a great option for new businesses because it’s created with ease of use in mind. ConvertKit is highly visual with a solid set of features that you’ll want to start using as your confidence grows. My favourite feature is the ability to set up automated email flows.
Learn more about ConvertKit and see how easy it’s to use. ConvertKit accounts start from $24 for 1,000 accounts and unlimited sends.
Are you spending time on the right things? This will tell you.
ClickMagic — Email, social, ads, blog posts, web pages, online reviews… the list of marketing channels goes on and on. The problem is, how do you know what is actually working? Which channels are helping you hit your goals and which are is wasting your time? ClickMagic helps you measure every click and much more.
Learn more about the many features for ClickMagic and start a free trial. Plans start from $12 and give you the ability to track everything.
All in one digital toolkit for small businesses
ClickFunnels — Many businesses face a similar challenge. They invest in different tools that work great individually but it’s difficult getting them to work together. You need to connect your website to your landing pages, your landing pages need to connect to your email marketing platform, everything needs to connect to your CRM so you can start scoring leads, the list goes on. Every new tool needs to connect to your ecosystem. What if there was an all in one online business toolkit for your businesses? A platform that gives you the tools you need, features that will support your future growth and is fully integrated into one system? There is and it’s called ClickFunnels.
Learn more about how ClickFunnels replaces all your disparate marketing tools with one solution.
The marketing tools for your business
So that’s my roundup of the marketing tools small to medium businesses should be considering. Some of these tools are available free, others have a free trial, in either case, you shouldn’t be afraid of investing time and money in the right tools as these will optimise your productivity and ROI in the long run.
I can help you unlock sales & marketing challenges using technology. Connect with me today on LinkedIn and start a conversation. Free advice on tactics and tools is just one connection request away!
Originally published at fullerfunnels.com on January 24, 2019.
