There’s lots of marketing tools out there, so we’ve put together a blog of some of the best ones for SMEs, and what’s even better is – they are all free! 

 

Design 

Canva is a great tool for design work. If you don’t have the budget to spend on using a designer, Canva’s free plan has over 250,000 templates, over 100 design types and thousands of stock photos that you can use and adapt to suit your business’ needs. 

49% of marketers consider visual marketing a very important part of their marketing strategy, but more than 23% feel like design and visual marketing are some of their biggest challenges. Canva can help with that. 

 

Email campaigns 

Mail Chimp is a really popular email management system, it lets you send regular emails, newsletters and surveys – and what’s better is it’s free for up to 2000 contacts and you can send up to 10,000 monthly emails (with a 2000 daily limit).  

You can import your logos, brand colours, fonts and images straight from your website, so you can create on-brand designs for your campaigns. Mail Chimp is a great way to grow your business and build your audience. 

 

SEO 

Google analytics will help you check how your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is performing and see what is working in your marketing strategy. It tracks website activity and shows which pages your visitors find the most engaging. As well as giving you information about your customers’ demographics and how you’re acquiring most of your traffic. 

Tweaking your marketing strategy to focus on what your visitors engage with most, will help you generate more leads. 

 

Business Profile & Reviews 

Google my business will help you make a great first impression and build your company’s profile. You can add all the essential information about your business, including phone number and operating hours, so potential clients can get in touch with you. As well as adding photos and your logo to make you stand out. 

Perhaps the best bit is that your customers can leave reviews, which you can respond to, which will strengthen your credibility and help you gain new customers’ trust and business. 

 

Content creation 

Producing and sharing regular content is a great way to get your business noticed and boost your search engine rankings.  

If you’re keen to increase the amount of content you produce, but are struggling to engage with your target audience, there’s a few tools that can help: 

Google trends is great for finding content inspiration, as you can see what the world is searching for, to help you write engaging content on what’s trending. 

If you’re struggling with writing an attention grabbing title, you can put some keywords, or a title you have thought of into Title generator and you’ll get 700 different title options at the click of a button. 

Coschedule headline analyzer could also be useful, as it analyses your title and scores it based on the balance of words, including: common, emotional and powerful words which readers engage with most and make the biggest impact in SEO. 

 

CRM  

CRM, stands for Customer Relationship Management, it’s basically a big database that you can use to centralise your contacts, as well as track customer interactions and leads.  

With the free Hubspot CRM you can have up to 1 million contacts and unlimited users and data. Allowing you to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns easily. 

 

Surveys 

Targeting what your customers want is an important part of marketing success. 

So you’re not left guessing what that is, you can use Survey monkey which allows you to send unlimited surveys to your client base, with up to 10 questions. 

 

Web design 

WordPress is a CMS (Content Management System) where you can design web pages using customisable themes, add blogs using your brand colours and modify the content for free. It’s particularly popular, as you don’t need to be able to code to create a look that will appeal to your target audience. 

Wix is another fantastic tool for building websites. Again there’s plenty of templates to choose from, created by designers, as well as a large library of free visual content. Your site can also easily be optimised for mobiles. 

 

Social media management  

Hootsuite makes it easy to manage your social media and get results. The free version allows you to manage 2 social media accounts and schedule 5 messages, saving you time, as you can upload consistent posts across your social media networks and ultimately increase your followers. 

For additional functionality you may choose to invest in some of the premium or subscription packages the marketing tools have to offer, or seek some additional marketing expertise and support. 

 

To arrange a free ideas session with our expert team, call us on 01962 600 147 or email info@tlc-business.co.uk