7 Marketing Essential Tools for a Start-Up Business
Planning out your marketing strategy is stressful enough. But what about making one for a start-up? With limited resources and a brand new name, it can be challenging to lay out your ideas. Thankfully, there are tools you can use to make your marketing planning easier.
Why Marketing Tools are Important for Start-Ups?
There are numerous marketing tools you can choose from. All of them can benefit your business structure in various ways. But if you’re just starting out with your business, your choices may be limited due to budget constraints.
What startups need are tools that are easily available and provide huge functionality. Automation, for example, streamlines and mechanizes repetitive tasks and processes – a very useful system to have. A lot of these can be found on the web and are available for free at an affordable rate.
So in this article, you get seven of the most useful marketing tools for your growing business.
7 Must-Have Marketing Tools for Start-Ups
1. Google Tools
When doing digital marketing, every business needs to work with Google. So using their tools is crucial to be competitive in their arena. These include Google Analytics and Tag Manager. Thankfully, both of these are available for free.
Startups require a lot of data so that you can improve your products and services. Tons of them need to be processed during and after campaigns to produce successful online marketing campaigns. You can also analyze data so that you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Google Analytics and Tag Manager help keep track of the website visitor data. Using both tools together gives you a better picture of the data that you can analyze.
2. Search Engine Optimization – SEMRush
Search engine optimization (SEO) for digital marketers is integral in developing organic search. Effective SEO is capable of ranking websites on the first page of search engine result page (SERP). With over 3.5 billion searches everyday on Google, this is one marketing aspect that you can’t neglect.
For SEO, SEMRush is the perfect tool to adopt for your growing business. It’s a workflow tool that offers tons of features that are helpful in data gathering, organizing, keyword research, and analytics report. You can also discover the strategies of competitors in organic search and link building, among other things.
3. Social Media Management – Buffer
The world continues to become more connected online, and social media is now a crucial part of developing a small business. According to a report by Brandwatch, “there are 60 million active business pages on Facebook,” while “65.8 percent of U.S. companies with over 100 employees use Twitter for marketing.” To maintain a presence on these channels and other platforms, you should plan out a proper social media strategy.
Buffer is a helpful tool for your social media requirements. The platform allows you to schedule and publish content on different channels. It dramatically diminishes the time and effort you need to publish content online and reinforces your social media presence If you need to optimize the frequency of your posts, you don’t have to keep logging on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or any other channel to do so. From aggregating content to social analytics, it virtually has everything you need to jumpstart your social media campaigns.
If you’re constantly on the go, Buffer also has a mobile app. It’s one of the few good investments you can make when you’re just starting out. With just 10 dollars, you can use its premium plan and pay 390 dollars to upgrade once your business starts growing.
4. Email Marketing – MailChimp
To remain competitive, you need to implement something to keep your audience engaged and interested in your brand. More than 80 percent of both B2B and B2C companies use email marketing tools. For this area, you need MailChimp.
MailChimp is the top email marketing service provider with over 12 million customers. This user-friendly tool allows you to design newsletters and send them out seamlessly to thousands of contacts. It also offers self-service support options for better customer service. Along with this, you can use their free plan if you only have less than 2,000 subscribers with a limit of 12,000 emails per month.
Another matter to consider when doing email marketing campaigns is spamming. Google, Yahoo, and other email providers may filter marketing emails as spam, especially if your IP or domain isn’t recognized yet. With a trusted brand like MailChimp, you get to send emails to inboxes without worrying about this at all.
5. Blogging Tools – WordPress
Small businesses can benefit from blogging in several ways. It’s good for your website’s SEO by creating fresh content, especially if you publish regularly. Blogs also provide opportunities for your audience to engage by sharing and connecting with your brand. Establishing authority as a thought leader can be done as well by posting original blog posts.
For blogging, the best choice is WordPress. You can build your entire website just by using their services. Their plethora of themes also allows you to customize the appearance of your site for better branding. Another reason why it’s the top pick for blogging is that it’s easy for beginner and advanced developers to tweak the design.
In terms of SEO, WordPress also adds tons of value to your site. Purchasing premium themes gives you better chances of ranking higher on SERPs. On top of this, their SEO plugins easily boost your page rank and allow you to perform on-page optimization on your own.
6. Online Image Editing – Canva
When marketing through social media channels, creativity is necessary. Users like to engage with pretty designs and interesting subjects. This is where start-ups can use Canva.
The cloud-based image editing and designing service allows users to create designs for social media posts, logos, web graphics, letterheads, presentations, and many more. Though Canva is available for free, you get even more features by subscribing to their paid plans. By registering you get more features like priority support, unlimited folders, and better collaboration.
7. Project Management – Trello
Using all of the tools above can be overwhelming if you don’t have a proper structure. Project management is crucial in effectively planning out your marketing strategy. So make sure to adopt Trello for this.
This organizational tool helps users manage tasks and keep track of objectives. It lets you see what you and your team need to accomplish. You can review posts before they get published and invite other members to collaborate without delay.
Though it isn’t unique, Trello is still the top choice for project management. It takes a couple of minutes to set up and makes online collaboration seamless, making it great for start-ups.
- 7 Marketing Essential Tools for a Start-Up Business - January 8, 2020
