Are you the proud owner of a small to medium-sized business, who’s looking for a way to grow? Whether it’s your own start-up or you’ve inherited a company from a family, there are certain short-term and long-term goals that you want to reach. First, let’s talk about what marketing means for SMBs.
At its most basic level, marketing is a way of getting your message out there. You want prospective customers to learn about your products or services in order to increase customer loyalty and spur sales. A successful digital marketing strategy can help you do just that – but how do you go about building one? Luckily, the tools and software available on the market today make it much easier than ever before. At Basilisk SEM, we believe that every small business should have access to quality digital marketing services – so we’ve compiled our list of essential tools every business should be using. Keep reading to find out what they are!
Content Management Systems: Build Your Website
Whether you’re just starting out or have been running a business for years, having an online presence is essential for success in the modern world. That’s why a content management system (CMS) is one of the must-have marketing tools for any business.
Using a CMS platform allows you to store, publish, delete, and modify content on your website quickly and easily. WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS, powering over 37% of all websites on the Internet. It’s free to use and offers a vast array of free and advanced features.
For those looking for more advanced features, HubSpot’s CMS Hub offers even more flexibility than WordPress with its free tools and advanced features. But if your top priority is total control over your website experience and design, then Sitecore may be the perfect tool for you. Sitecore is one of the leading enterprise CMSs in the market today and is built on ASP.NET.
Email Marketing Software: Stay in Touch With Customers
Email marketing is one of the most essential tools to market your business, as it helps you to stay in touch with customers and increases brand awareness. It is also one of the most cost-effective and easy-to-automate digital marketing efforts.
With email marketing software, you can target customers based on their location, interests, or past purchases. You can also personalize emails for customers, using their names in the message or suggesting products/services related to their interests. By delivering targeted, personalized content to your customers, you can make sure that each message sends out the most relevant promotion or offer.
Plus, email marketing is much less expensive than traditional marketing methods of print and mailing. Automation tools like drip campaigns and autoresponders can be used to save time and money—meaning you can reach your target audience quickly and efficiently for a fraction of the cost.
Social Media Management Tools: Expand Your Reach
Social media management tools are vital for any business that wants to increase its reach and engage with potential customers. With these tools, you can schedule, publish, comment, listen, and measure engagement on all your social media accounts—all from one place.
Having a cohesive and professional presence on social media can help you reach your goals faster. Even if you don’t have the time to dedicate to social media growth and management yourself, using a designated tool will help you accomplish more while also giving your followers an impression of quality and consistency.
There are plenty of free and paid options available when it comes to social media management tools. You can choose what works best for you based on cost, features, and time savings. You can also get creative with different platforms by customizing posts with images or videos that reflect the tone of your brand.
Having a cohesive social media presence allows businesses to reach their target audience faster than ever before. With the right tool in hand, businesses can build trust and authority in their niche—all while growing their customer base in the process.
Search Engine Optimization Tools: Improve Your Rankings
No matter your business size, understanding search engine optimization (SEO) and finding the right tools to manage your SEO strategy is essential. Fortunately, there are a few key tools you can use to help with your overall SEO journey.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the largest website crawlers, and it’s one of the most powerful SEO tools available. This comprehensive platform allows you to enter a website and see data on organic traffic, backlinks, competitor analysis, keyword research, and more. It’s especially great for helping you find out what keywords you’re ranking for—and how well. Embedded in the tool are many complex algorithms that help paint a full picture of what’s happening with your site’s visibility in search engines.
SE Ranking
SE Ranking is another tool that helps you track both SEO and PPC metrics. With this software, you’ll get daily rank-tracking updates as well as competitor analysis. It also helps uncover any potential link-building opportunities by researching top-performing keywords from certain regions or industries so you can optimize accordingly. A great plus is that SE Ranking offers real-time tracking for numerous metrics, such as keyword positions for both desktop and mobile devices.
Google Search Console & Google Analytics
Google Search Console enables you to submit XML sitemaps so Google knows which pages it needs to index on your site while tracking any potential issues with detected URLs or crawl errors. On the other hand, Google Analytics captures valuable data on both website performance and user behavior. It’s an indispensable source of insights into the success of your content marketing campaigns and allows you to identify which pages are driving repeat visitors and conversions from organic search traffic—and why
Analytics Tools: Track and Measure Your Success
When you’re running a business, it’s important to track and measure your success. Analytics tools are one way to do that. By getting Insights into your website performance, key performance indicators, customer engagement, and employee performance and satisfaction, you can make more informed decisions about how to improve your business.
Not only do these tools give you visibility into what’s working, but they also help you identify problem areas in need of improvement. For example, with product analytics tools, you can monitor product design progress and customer feedback, generate usage reports, and collect customer data. This helps ensure that your products are designed the right way and are being used as intended by customers.
Analytics don’t just measure success in terms of sales—they can be used to measure app success as well. With analytics tools that measure user behavior within a mobile app or website, you have an inside look at how users interact with your product or service so that you can optimize accordingly.
To sum it up, analytics tools provide invaluable insights that can help boost your business’s performance. Whether it’s measuring website performance or tracking sales and key performance indicators, analytics tools provide the data needed for making informed decisions about how to best grow your business.
Project Management Software: Keep Your Team on Track
Project management software is essential for businesses to stay organized and collaborate efficiently. With project management tools, you can compare actual project metrics to estimates that have been made previously. Wrike is a great example of a cloud-based collaboration and project management software, while Ravetree is a strongly recommended cloud-based work management app.
Organizing your tasks into unified projects and keeping track of assigned tasks is what project management software allows you to do. You can assign tasks to team members, create subtasks, set due dates, add attachments and comments, and even define the workflow of your projects. With these tools, you can also view the performance of each staff member in real time and make any necessary adjustments as needed.
By staying organized with project management software, managers are able to quickly identify any potential bottlenecks in the workflow to stay ahead of schedule. And for businesses that need to keep track of time worked on different projects, Timely is an automated time-tracking tool that you might want to consider using. With Timely’s intuitive online dashboard, you can accurately account for time spent on each task with detailed reporting.
Conclusion
Whether you’re just starting out or investing in the growth of your business, it is essential to have the right marketing tools in place. Investing in the right digital marketing software can help you reach the right customers and maximize your ROI.
Thanks to search engine marketing tools such as Google Ads, social media management tools such as Hootsuite, and analytics tools such as Google Analytics, businesses of all sizes can now easily track and analyze their marketing activities and make data-driven decisions to improve their results.
By selecting the right tools for your business and taking advantage of the extensive features that are available, you can maximize the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts and help your business reach its potential.