Marketing, particularly for a small business, can take time. Make sure you’re using that time effectively by incorporating these 12 tools into your strategy.
With so many platforms to choose from, both online and traditional, marketing a small business can be a time-consuming task. In 2014, Constant Contact reported that the 1,300 business owners they surveyed were spending 20 hours per week on their marketing efforts.
To make the most of those 20 hours, it’s important to have a system in place to streamline marketing efforts. While some tasks can be automated, like scheduling Tweets to previously published blog posts, effective marketing should be hands-on.
To help you create a system for everything from content curation to productivity, we’ve created a list of 12 free or inexpensive marketing resources every small business owner should have in their toolbox.
1. Blog post idea generator – Enter search terms for a variety of different possible headlines and topics.
2. FollowUpthen.com – A free way to send yourself email reminders such as “send January newsletter,” or “schedule Facebook sponsored post.”
3. Feedly – Keep up with industry news, trends, blogs and more with this easy to use RSS feed.
4. Quora – Use the Questions section of Quora as a brainstorming tool for your own blog posts.
5. BuzzSumo – If you frequently partner with online influencers (bloggers or journalists) BuzzSumo will help you find category leaders
6. Canva – Quickly and easily create social media ads, banners and many more marketing materials with this free design tool.
7. Content calendar templates – Creating new content is arguably the most time-consuming part of marketing. Here are two pre-made calendars with content ideas from Sprout Social and the small business marketer behind the site Chloe Social.
8. Social Image Resizer – Using images that are too large can slow down your site and lower your SEO score, use this site to optimize them for the web
9. Video creation templates for business – Need a video ad for Facebook? This site has easy to use drag and drop templates (paid version removes the Shakr watermark and allows for video download).
10. IFTTT – If This Then That is a powerhouse of automation. Browse “recipes” for everything from expense tracking to your grocery lists.
11. Hemingway App – If you need a bit of clarity for a piece of content you’ve written, copy/paste it here and the app will offer suggestions on sentence length, complexity, and passive voice.
12. Visual.ly Google Analytics Report – Visual.ly will send you a weekly email of your Google Analytics in an easy-to-read chart.
Do you have a favorite tool or resource for your marketing?
Let us know in the comments!
