It’s no secret that in order for your small businesses to be successful in 2017, you need to have a good grasp on digital marketing. It’s a tall order for anyone, even trained marketers. There’s a lot of opinions on how to create successful digital marketing campaigns. There’s even more tools out there at your disposal.
So, let’s say you’ve got a good plan for a marketing strategy. What tools should you purchase? You can waste weeks on tools that end up falling short. Tools that were supposed to save you time in the first place. That’s seriously annoying. Well, here’s a list of tools that we love:
Buffer is a great tool. It allows you to schedule posts at different times of day (it’ll even figure out an optimized schedule for you) and even gives you easy to understand analytics of your posts. When you consider that intro plans are free, this is a tool you need to be using. In the free plan you’re able to connect one account per platform (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, and Instagram). Even if you have more than one account, you can upgrade to their “Awesome Plan” and connect 10 accounts per platform for just $10/month.
If you’re not measuring your traffic and sources on your site, you need to be. Knowing how people get to your content is as important as the content itself. Google Analytics allows you understand an insane amount of information. Want to know how your social media campaigns are doing? Check out how many folks visited your site from social within GA. Want to know how many folks are visiting from organic search? GA will allow you to do this. I cannot stress enough how important this tool is. Just go, get familiar with it. Seriously, stop reading this, come back later.
Not a photoshop expert? No worries. Spruce up those social media posts with Canva. It’s and easy to use and templated graphic design tool that a trained monkey can use. It’ll help you save time and keep your posts looking amazing. They even set templated sizes that are optimized for different social media platforms. Really cool.
If you’re business to business, you probably send a lot of email. You already have a preferred way of sending that email. I don’t care to change that, because there’s so many good ones out there, it’s really tough to pick on that I like the most.
One thing I want to point out is that you’re probably also getting a ton of auto replies. In those auto replies, typically, are a bunch of new contacts. Think: “Hi ‘Original Recipient’ is no longer with the company, please contact ‘New Contact’” – if you pulled all that info out by hand, it’d be a full time job, so my guess is that you just don’t. Siftrock automates that process, and does so very nicely. Natural language processing – it’s like robots or something. Don’t ask me how it works, ask them. It’s really cool, either way.
I get it, sometimes you need more out of social media. Sometimes you just don’t have time to grow a massive follower base. Socedo allows you to do some really cool things. You can strategically grow your follower base and automate a ton of engagement. You can also pull lists of contact information for email marketing. In 10 months of using it, I was able to grow my followers from 0 to 10k, all with minimal effort. These were all relevant followers, as well. Highly suggest checking it out.
