With more and more technology, marketing is becoming easier and easier for small businesses to scale, make a bigger impact and boost their return on marketing. It can be hard to keep up with all the great new toys for marketers to use to promote their message to their audiences, so let’s look at five must-have tools every small business marketer should have.
1. SMARTSHEET
Smartsheet is basically an excel file on steroids, but so much better! Many small business marketers create a marketing action plan in excel. Put it in a Smartsheet and with a click, you can quickly identify what tasks are on time, and what’s at risk of going late. Then you can populate a social posting calendar that other campaigns and plans feed into. You can even assign tasks from Smartsheet. And this is just one application of this must-have tool.
2. POWTOON
Creating videos can be time intensive and cost a lot of money. But it doesn’t have to be with tools like PowToon. PowToon is a low-cost online tool that allows anyone to create simple, animated videos using everything from templates to more customized animation. And it’s simple enough that anyone can create a video. You still need to script your video, but with PowToon, you can go from concept to publishing in less than a day. That’s a must-have tool!
3. HOOTSUITE
Hootsuite is an oldie but a goodie, mainly because it works so darn well. But if you’re just starting out, you may not know about it yet. Hootsuite is a single online platform to manage practically all your social media channels. Schedule posts so your feeds are consistent, monitor keywords, competitors or mentions so you can respond right away. The easy-to-use platform and constantly growing capabilities make Hootsuite a must-have tool for your marketing.
4. BLOGABOUT
BlogAbout’s Impact blog title generator is invaluable if your small business has a blog that it uses to draw traffic. This free tool allows you to add the topic of your blog into its search field and the tool will automatically spit out lots of titles for you to consider. And if you write a lot about the same topic, you can even favorite the best titles right there in the tool, or email them to yourself so you don’t have to go back every time you write on the subject. When you find your creative juices running on low, this tool is a must-have.
5. CONTENT GENERATOR
If you need more help than just the title of your blog, Portent’s Content Idea Generator is a must-have resource. Enter the keyword you want to target with your SEO and it will not only create unique titles for content, but will tell you why you should use certain inputs into creating the title so you can learn how to do it on your own in the future, and identify new ideas for future content.
There are definitely more than five must-have tools to help improve your marketing, what are some of your favorites? Tell us in the comments!