Marketing is a crucial determinant for the success of small businesses. You must present your products or services to your target audience and build relationships with them. You must establish your brand so the public recognizes and responds positively.
Fortunately, the digital age affords opportunities for doing just that, opportunities that didn’t exist a couple of decades ago. The right online marketing tools make these opportunities available today to any business, no matter what size.
Digital marketing includes reaching potential customers wherever they are in the online world. It requires connecting with them through multiple media and understanding their demographics and preferences.
It means tailoring your marketing to segments of your audience. You need to make it easy and convenient to learn about you and buy from you.
Here are some online marketing tools that every small business owner should consider for their digital marketing toolkit.
Social Media Marketing Tools
Without these tools, you’d have to work your social media accounts individually. You’d go to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to repeat the same posting and monitor and react to replies.
You’d have a track of what’s trending on each of them separately. As new social media apps arise and gain importance, you will face a near-impossible task.
You need control to manage your social media marketing, and several tools do that. They organize a social media calendar so that you can schedule and track your activity in one place. They help companies identify segments of their social media audience for targeted messages.
Sprout Social is a leading social media marketing application. Their inbox gives you a high-level view of all your social media posts and responses. If there’s any comment on any platform you need to address, you’ll see it promptly. You can publish content across multiple platforms without signing on to each. Some analytics evaluate your posts’ performance and identifies the best ones.
Many social media marketing tools provide general information about social media platforms, including trending topics and prominent hashtags. You’ll now have the opportunity to jump in where the action is.
Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing is an old-timer of the online universe, and companies continue to use it for one main reason – it works. It is scalable, and it attracts the most promising potential customers. Also, some tools will do a great deal of work with a moderate amount of oversight, thus requiring less manual intervention.
Check out the best email marketing software and their comparisons and reviews – BlogHeist Email Marketing Collection
Email solution features include list-building, improving deliverability, and suggesting email campaign topics. Most will optimize content to avoid an impersonal or “spammy” feel. They often offer or create follow-up content for recipients who reply.
There are usually reporting features to gauge the effectiveness of individual emails and campaigns.
HubSpot, a customer relationship management (CRM) provider, recently added email marketing to its capabilities. It provides email templates that have been tested for their effectiveness in converting prospects to purchasers. It supports A/B testing to show which two subject lines generate the most opens. It automates scheduling so that emails appear in users’ inboxes at ideal times across multiple time zones.
The most significant power of this tool comes when it’s used in conjunction with the HubSpot CRM. This allows maximum personalization of individual emails with details that resonate with the target reader.
Aside from these tools, you can also find a lot of online guides and helpful information on email marketing that will help you understand it more and develop a strategy.
Related – Sendinblue Email Marketing Tool Review
Visual Branding Tools
A visual brand consists of elements establishing a company’s brand in the public mind. When they’re well-chosen and work together, they remind people of a brand wherever they appear. These elements positively resonate with the general way and distinguish an organization from the competition.
Visual brand elements include:
- Logo: a recognizable symbol that you use to represent your brand in all media. When it’s well-designed (think Nike swoosh or Amazon smile), it brings your brand to mind no matter where it appears.
- Color palette: usually consisting of two or three core colors. Colors have personalities and express emotions (for example, red = excitement and passion, blue = reliability), and yours should be chosen based on how they register with your target customer.
- Typography: It consists of two or three fonts and should be consistent everywhere you use it. Typography can be traditional, modern, or playful, depending on which fonts are used and whether they have serifs.
- Images: these are sometimes categorized into pictures and geometric graphics. It is essential to keep these consistent and ensure they work with the other visual element.
Several tools help with one or more of these. One of them is Designs.ai. As its name suggests, it employs artificial intelligence. Its logo maker is easy to use and requires no graphic design experience. It presents samples you can customize based on what you tell it.
You wind up with a logo and a complete brand identity kit. The tool is a suite that additionally includes Colormaker and Font Pairer.
Additionally, the Internet is filled with resources that can help you obtain initial ideas and get inspiration for your branding elements before you design and choose them. No matter your industry or niche, you can effortlessly search for anything from logo design examples to icons, different color schemes, and fonts.
Related – LogoAI Review
SEO Tools
What do you do if looking for a product or service online? Like most people, you use a search engine and click on one of the results toward the top of the first screen. Search engine optimization gets your website (or someone else’s!) a prominent position on the search engine results page (SERP). Big companies retain teams of experts that specialize in SEO.
A significant part of SEO is identifying the keywords that a search engine favors and including them in your online text. There are quite a few tools to assist in this. They do your research for you and tell you what keywords are most appropriate for a topic. Some will suggest long-tail keywords, i.e., keyword phrases with many words that can distinguish your content from competitors.
The tools evaluate your blogs and other text and identify which sections are best SEO-optimized and which could use work.
Perhaps the most frequently recommended is Ahrefs. It highlights parts of your website based on how high they’re likely to rank. It identifies broken links, i.e., links on your site that no longer go anywhere. It points out sites that link to you and the competitors who are linked frequently.
Website Analytics Tools
How many people visited your website today? Did they come from another website, an advertising link, or a SERP? What are their demographics? What did they do once they arrived?
You need a website analytics tool to capture this critical information. One of the most popular and accessible is Google Analytics. There’s an expensive version of the device aimed at big companies, but the one for small businesses is free.
Google Analytics will tell you who came to visit yesterday, last week, last month, or during any period. It will report where they came from. It will show the keywords that guided them to your website. I can tell you something about their demographics and their interests. The tool will note how long they stayed and which pages they viewed.
A website analytics tool can show what percentage of visitors took action, such as buying or subscribing. It can provide similar information about your competitors. It may even tell you which affiliate marketers drove business to your competition and thus point out new affiliate opportunities for your business.
Digital Tools for Total Marketing Support
Additional online marketing tools will assist our conversion optimization, lead enrichment, and lead capture. However, devices in the above five categories will enable you to get your marketing off to a running start. You may not have your marketing department or a high-priced marketing consultant. Still, the right set of applications will give you what you need to compete in today’s digital business environment.
