We’ve gotten some questions about the types of tools we use for marketing
There will be some free tools mentioned, but in this article, we are going to include a few paid tools which we think are completely worth their cost.
A good CRM!
First up for a growing small business or tech startup is a good CRM. CRM’s keep contacts with sales leads and even past customers easily organized, often with substantial analytics and scheduling tools. These let you quickly build a call list, or move customers down the funnel, which lets you provide notes on a specific all or demo session. There are a number of very popular CRMs out there, Hubspot and Salesforce being some of the most popular. Salesforce has built its reputation heavily on the CRM space.
At the end of the day, you need to build revenue via client interactions and customers, a good CRM makes this process a lot easier, letting you focus on things other than writing out schedules and manually coordinating conversations with your team members.
Pricing on CRMs vary, some offer free tiers, but typically they are priced on a per-user basis.
SEMrush is a very popular tool for SEO management and keyword research. Knowing what your customers search for when they find you, what your competitors are using as keywords and how to better rank is a huge part to any inbound or SEO strategy.
SEMrush makes all this much easier, albeit is one of the more expensive tools on this list.
Google Analytics should be one of the first tools you learn and integrate into your website. Google Analytics gives you all sorts of interesting insights into most viewed pages, the geographical location of visitors, how long they are on your page, and other insights.
Email marketing is crucial whether for customer outreach or stay in contact with previous customers. For many businesses prior customers make up well over 50% of total revenue, so maintaining those relationships is important.
There are a number of great email marketing tools, but perhaps none is more popular than Mailchimp. It provides a whole host of email marketing tools, automation, audience segmentation, and measuring how many open or click links. All of this gives you better insight into the type of emails and content that your customers/audience engage with, allowing you to better tailor your messaging going forward.
Mailchimp has a number of competitors including HubSpot and constant contact. Mailchimp offers a free pricing plan to allow you to learn how the software fits into your marketing plan, from there pricing ranges from $10-15 per month unless you are a very high volume email sender.
Ahrefs is another paid SEO tool that is pretty ubiquitously viewed as highly important as you grow in size and want to better your SEO and keyword strategy. A popular function of Ahrefs is its audit and keyword research system.
Keyword research is important not only to organic SEO ranking but also paid PPC since building a better bidding strategy based on the keywords that are relevant for you can decrease your cost per acquisition and increase the number of potential customers that might see your ads.
Dropbox is a fairly standard low-cost file-sharing system. When you are working remotely, which so many are still in mid-2021, you need a quick and easy way to transfer sometimes large files such as videos or large presentations quickly and easily. Dropbox is one of the most popular, but not the only cloud file system. Many also use Microsoft or google’s drive for this service as well.
Adobe, particularly their creative suite, is perhaps the single most important tool for the creators actually making your ads and visual designs. Tools ranging from Photoshop, InDesign, after effects, premiere, and illustrator are mainstay tools for any graphic designer, web designer or video ad creator. These are expensive software tools, but learning how to use them even at a basic level will give you some flexibility to make your own static ads or visual elements.
Canva is a popular and free visual design provider. Sort of a “lite” version of something like Adobe’s illustrator or photoshop. It is more limited in what it can do, but if you want to create a similar static ad or Instagram post etc, it’s a great option for more basic visual design projects.
Shopify or Woocommerce are “the” methods for creating a fairly straightforward e-commerce store. If you sell physical products, you should consider building a website that uses one or the other as a way for customers to buy directly from you. You can continue selling via Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc, but having a direct buy option can increase margins and reduce risk across your business. These services are paid, but well worth their monthly fees. Either has widespread support and breadth of users, documentation, integrations and skilled developers you can hire to help create the store you want.
Spend some time working with a web developer or on google to decide which is best for you. In short, Shopify is easier to set up but offers a little less customization.
WordPress is the most popular web platform for creating great-looking and highly functional websites. WordPress itself doesn’t cost you anything, but building a website and hosting it certainly will. In short, if you are a small or medium business, there’s little reason not to go with a WordPress site of some kind. With a huge range of flexibility and a massive number of plugins, themes, and thousands of highly experienced WordPress developers it’s an easy choice.
Asana and Trello are both excellent project management systems that are very commonly used to coordinate tasks and make getting projects done easier. Either is a solid pick and will provide you a way to plan out tasks across a week and assign them to team members then review progress as it’s made.
With more working to continue likely indefinitely, maintaining productivity is important.
Grammarly is a free editorial tool that installs on your browser or you can use their desktop app, but either way, it proofreads what you write and is like a spell check system on steroids.
We love Grammarly, because it’s so easy to use, integrates well, and catches lots of writing errors that spell check doesn’t. In short, it makes your writing quicker and more accurate!
Want to get feedback quickly and easily from customers?
SurveyMonkey is the most popular survey tool, it’s super easy to use and used for a massive range of purposes. Forget mailing surveys to gain feedback, this is a huge waste of paper and time. Instead, a service like SurveyMonkey will get quicker, cheaper and a greater percentage of feedback.
There are quite literally hundreds of marketing and advertising tools, some more suited or specialized for different industries or types of businesses. Just as an example, there are tons of marketing/CRM tools designed specifically for physician offices and others for restaurants. The ones above are some of the most widely used regardless of firm size or industry.
While it seems daunting or expensive to incorporate a bunch of paid marketing tools into your business, the reality is that each should provide more value than it costs, both in direct revenue-generating help or through less wasted time.
