If you’re running a small business or startup, you have a lot on your plate. Chief among your priorities is how to grow your business. Depending on your niche, scaling can be challenging, especially in today’s highly competitive global marketplace. In today’s digitized ecosystem, your marketing plan must focus on digital strategies, especially social media.
This article shines a spotlight on five lesser-known digital marketing tools to help you grow your business and get ahead of the competition.
Reputation Management
Remember that word-of-mouth concept we’ve been talking about in previous articles? Word-of-mouth is still the best way to grow your business. Of course, those conversations might take place on the phone or over a cup of coffee. But with billions of users on social media today, most of the discussions about you are taking place on the internet. And this is why you need a tool to help you hear what people are saying about you and your brand.
- A good word from your current customers will grow your brand reputation and business revenues.
- On the other hand, a negative comment from customers can tank your business.
Awario: A Social Listening Tool
Awario is a social listening app that will help you grow your business. Its mission is “to make social listening, social media analytics, and competitive intelligence affordable for businesses of any size—from startups and small businesses to marketing agencies and international corporations.”
Awario crawls the internet to find all mentions of your brand. With the intelligence and analytics Awario provides, you’ll
- learn what people are saying about you
- catch those negative tweets and posts before they catch fire,
- assess the effectiveness of your messaging,
- know what social media channels are working,
- and be ready to reach out immediately to those saying positive things about your brand.
Awario offers three subscription plans, beginning with a Starter Plan, perfect for small businesses or startups.
You may not have the budget for a social listening tool like Awario. In that case, you can do it yourself by signing up for Google Alerts. It’s easy to set up by inputting your company name, brand keywords, your name, and the names of your executive team. It’s more time-consuming to do it this way, and time is money, so you might want to make room in your operating budget for a paid social listening tool.
Grow Your Business With Expert Website Analytics
Your website was always essential, but with a pandemic-induced shift to online interactions, a user-friendly website is critical to thriving in the “new normal” marketplace. Even if you have a brick-and-mortar store or office, many of your consumers will continue to search for your services and products online. They may come to your physical location, but they won’t give up the online experience. This is why omnichannel marketing has become so crucial to your efforts to grow your business.
Analyzing your website performance is key to customer acquisition, retention, and conversion—three essential stages in the customer journey. Analytics provides you with key insights into how your website is performing.
Finteza: Website Analytics to Grow Your Business
You already know about Google Analytics, a powerful platform to help you boost your website performance. But if you’re interested in exploring alternatives, you might want to check out Finteza. Tapping into cutting-edge technologies such as big data processing algorithms, Finteza
- analyzes website traffic
- breaks down your audience
- assesses the performance of individual pages on your website
- automates funnels
- and more depending on the package you choose.
Email Marketing is Not Dead!
Did you read our article “Email Marketing is Dead? Fake News!”?
An effective email campaign helps you maneuver around the algorithms that block the delivery of your content to your target audience. For example, in that article, we referenced research that found that engagement on Facebook had fallen to 1%. Furthermore, only 5.5% of social media followers see your content because of platform algorithm changes.
The only way to own your audience is through an impactful email campaign. You can communicate whenever you want and be sure that your message arrives in their inbox.
The number of email users is projected to increase to 4.3 billion in 2023. According to Kinsta, email is one of the top three channels for sharing business content. The other two are LinkedIn and Twitter. Furthermore, the 2019 ROI for email marketing was 42%, which means that for every dollar you spend on your campaign, you get back $42! With more people going online, you can expect to see this ROI improve in the coming year.
SendX: A SaaS Email Marketing Platform
When thinking about email marketing tools to grow your business, MailChimp and Constant Contact are usually the first to come to mind. However, SendX is a lesser-known digital marketing tool that packs a powerful punch to help you manage email campaigns that deliver results.
SendX is a SaaS (software as a service) email marketing platform that began as what the founders describe as a “hack.” As they attempted to scale their e-commerce business, they encountered many of the same obstacles all of us do as small business owners. Working to increase traffic and revenue, the founders of SendX realized that they needed a digital marketing tool that measured more than opens and clicks. They wanted a tool that delivered results, and this is how SendX came to be. Its mission is to help small businesses thrive. SendX helps you
- Build your email list
- Design and schedule email campaigns
- Automate email sequences
- and offers heatmap analytics to help you see which CTAs are working and which links people are clicking.
SendX offers affordable subscription plans, beginning as low as $10, perfect for small businesses with low cash flow.
SMS Marketing is a Smart Way to Grow Your Business
In a recent Forbes article, author Steve Weiss said that the average American adult spent more than three hours per day on a smartphone in 2020. For sure, the pandemic caused people worldwide to turn to digital channels to stay in touch with family and friends. Many social media platforms such as Facebook and Zoom became a favorite, but most people turned to text messaging.
Additionally, the pandemic caused a spike in the number of consumers making mobile purchases, with “shopping apps reaching 14.4 million downloads in the US between March and April 2020.” Today, the world is slowly reopening, but people are not spending less time on their smartphones.
SMS is one of the fastest ways to reach your consumers. On average, a consumer takes 90 minutes to respond to an email, whereas they’ll answer your text message within 90 seconds. So it’s one of the most effective tools to get your consumers to complete their purchase, promote new products or services, launch events and sales, and handle customer inquiries.
Messagely: SMS Marketing
Messagely is another company launched because its founders couldn’t find what they needed to scale their business. In this case, they were searching for live chat and help desk software but couldn’t find an affordable package that met all their needs. So, they built Messagely.
Messagely says it is customer-driven, focused on helping you grow your business. They offer a streamlined package of SMS marketing tools including,
- Live chat
- Targeted messages
- Chatbots
- Knowledge base software to improve customer success
Messagely works on Android and iOS and integrates with more than 700 digital platforms such as Stripe, Shopify, Hubspot, Google Analytics, and Slack. It offers three affordable subscription plans, beginning at $29 per month.
Grow Your Business With Dynamic Graphics and Designs
Okay, Canva used to be one of those lesser-known digital marketing tools. Still, having broken the $40 billion barrier, it may seem out of place on this list. However, it’s one of my favorite digital marketing tools. I still put it on this list because it’s a purpose-driven brand that makes our lives easier and small businesses succeed.
We spoke about the importance of imagery in your social media posts and website pages in previous articles. The latest research shows that people have around an eight-second attention span. Therefore, you need stunning visuals, such as photos, graphics, and video, to build a relationship with your audience.
But, if you run a small business with limited time, staff, and resources, how do you design all this visually-engaging content? First, you need a design program, and Canva is one of the best on the market.
Canva is a purpose-driven brand that comes from humble beginnings. After its recent $40 billion valuation, the founder and her team decided to give a 30% stake in the business to a charity fighting poverty.
If you’re looking for user-friendly, comprehensive, and affordable graphics design software, you might want to check out Canva (if you’re not already a customer). You can quickly design creatives for any social media platform and brand logos, website banners, and graphics.
And, as you know, video is king on digital media these days. A video story on your website, for instance, will keep your visitor there long enough to be motivated to move through your website to learn more about you. Canva’s new video creation suite helps you create professional video presentations featuring
- scene-based editor
- single layer timeline
- multiple audio tracks
- animations and
- screen and camera recordings.
And all at an affordable price.
Bottom Line
The marketplace is very competitive, and the internet is crowded. There are thousands of small businesses publishing millions of content every day. Digital marketing tools such as the ones featured in this article save you time and help ensure that you reach your target audience and don’t waste time and money.
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