Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. Small owners often worry about engaging in marketing campaigns due to budget constraints. Of course when you hire a fancy agency cost is a factor. Luckily there are a lot of resources available these days that can help small business owners leverage effective marketing campaigns without breaking the bank. This post will look at five free marketing tools that can help you elevate your branding and promotional efforts.
Survey Planet
Any marketing campaign is only as good as your targeting. You can spend a fortune on advertising but if you are trying to sell to the wrong demographic you’ll end up with a negative ROI on your advertising spend. Before you start any promotion it’s best practice to conduct a survey. Try a free tool like Survey Planet to create and publish a survey. They offer lots of features to truly customize your survey ranging from survey layout, design, response format and more. Once you have gathered enough responses it’s time to analyze and then plan your marketing campaigns accordingly. Remember the more data you gather the better your understanding of your core demographic.
Business Cards
In this digital world there is still a traditional way to make a good first impression. A set of beautifully designed business cards can help you stand out from your competitors. With a free design application like Business Cards you can design unlimited versions of your card. The design process is quick and easy since it is template based. Simply choose a template you like or start with a clean canvas. You can fully customize fonts, background colors, images, etc. Pro tip, upload your logo and match the design to those core colors. This will give your cards a professional touch that’s consistent with your branding colors. Once you download your printable business card files send them to your local printing shop or print on your own machine.
Adobe Spark
These days it’s almost unimaginable to discuss a promotional plan that doesn’t include some sort of social media presence. If you don’t have an in-house designer, which most small business don’t, use a tool like Adobe Spark. This free design application was launched by the graphic design software giant Adobe. Although a bit late to the party of web based do-it-yourself solutions they came up with a great application. Use this resource to design beautiful social media posts. The design process will only take a few minutes. Whether you need an Instagram post, Facebook cover or YouTube channels design you can quickly do it with Adobe Spark. Once you are done customizing your design you can download and publish instantly.
Tawk
The purpose of all of your marketing efforts is to drive traffic to your website and to convert them. Most entrepreneurs are happy when they get traffic to their site. That’s only half the battle however. Once they are on your site a large majority will bounce right away or leave without ever entering your sales funnel. To help with this marketing effort, use a free tool like Tawk. Tawk allows you to add a live chat to your website by just adding a short code snippet. As soon as the code has been added to your site you can engage with them and track chat performance through analytics. Being there to instantly answer questions and address any concerns potential buys might have can significantly improve your conversion rates.
HubSpot
Another effective way to promote your business is through blogging. Not only can you drive organic traffic to your site through his channel but it can help you establish an authoritative presence in your field. Coming up with clever blog post ideas and producing the content can be challenging. To help generate interesting blog post ideas quickly use a tool like HubSpot. Their free blog ideas generator is a wonderful resource to kick-start your next brainstorming session. To use it simply enter a keyword you are interested in writing about and then sit back and watch ideas come in.
A Few More Thoughts
Marketing is often not a set science but a process of trial and error. You have to be willing to adapt and scale what works and drop what doesn’t. Having access to free resources allows you to save dollars and extend your runway as a startup. Before you engage in your next promotional effort revisit this post and try some of these resources. Once you have mastered these, there are a lot of other do-it-yourself marketing resources available that you can quickly discover through search engines. Good luck with your next promotional push!