Tools That Are Ideal For Small Business Marketing
There are 100’s of digital marketing tools out there, but which ones are right for you and your business? If you are starting out or have a limited budget, you’ll want to be using lower-cost tools to get the most out of your available funds. This doesn’t mean you need to be stuck using paint to edit your images or Wordpad to manually posting each social media post.
We have gathered our favourite FREE or very cost-efficient tools here. We’ve also included a handy PDF download that you can use to refer back to at a later date.
WEBSITES AND E-COMMERCE
For website building, we recommend WordPress (free). Combined with Elegant Themes DIVI builder ($89 per year, or under license from your web developers, something that we provide for our clients on a lifetime license). If e-commerce is your focus, then WooCommerce (free – paid add ons available) should give you everything you need to get started. To take it further, our recommended plugins include:
- Yoast for SEO (free – paid add ons available),
- WP SMTP (free) for transactional email,
- Stripe (very low cost per transaction) for payments
- Diib (free for basic use) – for website optimisation.
SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT
Social media can be an afterthought or even a time concern (the most common thing we hear is “we don’t have time to do it”). To take the pressure out of the day-to-day running of it we recommend Buffer or Planable(starting at free) for content posting across multiple platforms. Quuu (starting at free) for content curation and recommendations of content to post that is relevant to the audiences that you selected.
Communicating with your audience and customers is an absolute must. Both of these tools will help get your message out effectively. Send in Blue for transactional emails from your website (configurable to work with WP SMTP). Transactional email is for any sort of transaction, including signups and content delivery. For everyday email marketing, we recommend Mailchimp. Leaders in email marketing and fully scalable. By the time you have to start paying for it, you should be in a position that each email campaign you send drives traffic to your site and potential sales.
MULTI-PURPOSE TOOLS
To make sure that you get the best out of the above tools and your marketing efforts, we recommend the following toolkit:
- Pixlr for a Photoshop-esquc image editing experience (free),
- Canva for quick social image creation (free – paid version available),
- Adobe Express (free but most images have to be paid for and a lot of fonts may need to be imported.
- Pexels and Unsplash for free to use stock images.
- Grammarly for spelling and grammar checks (because we can’t all be perfect all the time) (free – paid premium version available).
While a lot of the above tools are free, some have premium versions, that we use for clients. If you did want to use the premium ones, we are affiliated with a number of them and the above links include our affiliate data.
If you would like help with your digital marketing, drop us a line and we would be happy to help you.
We are Beyond
Bacon Marketing provides a full review, streamlining and optimisation service that will take your marketing and advertising to the next level.
Please see our range of services or complete the form to discuss your needs with us.
Straightforward Approach
We always start by finding out about your business, its unique, then we get to work on planning, building your strategy and adding sizzle to your marketing.
Our combined backgrounds are a combination of both generalist and digital marketers, largely focused on digital marketing and also how it can be blended with offline marketing. It has meant that we have had to be hands-on and strategic.
