As a small business owner, you need tools that you can learn to use easily and quickly. Below are some that you can start using straight away to save you time and improve your marketing.
Tools for your marketing
With digital tools and AI advancements, marketing is more accessible to business owners with little experience. With a few hours of spare time, you can create marketing assets and use them in digital adverts or printed media more easily than ever before.
- Canva for creating everything from logos to digital ads. Thousands of templates are available and you can choose from a huge suite of tools to make the process easier. In particular, the Mockups are great for bringing your adverts to life. The best thing about Canva is its cost – it’s free! You can pay to upgrade and get far more templates, but for a simple project the free subscription is perfect.
- Vista Social to manage all of your social profiles in one place. The combined inbox is great, you can schedule posts to all of your profiles at once, and it even reports on your engagement so you know what to do more of to grow. It’s relatively easy to set up, too.
- Unsplash is amazing for free images. Use them on your website, in your marketing assets, or as a background for printed media.
Tools for your website
There are so many tools you can use to improve your website, but here is a list of a few that we find essential for local businesses like you.
- Google Analytics for understanding everything about your website visitors, including where they’re coming from, what they’re spending, and which pages they’re visiting. It can be tricky to set up if you’re not familiar with websites but once set, shouldn’t require much (if any) maintenance.
- Google Page Speed Insights to check how quickly your website loads on desktop and mobile. Really useful if you need pointers on where to fix first in your SEO and as it produces an easy to understand score out of 100, you can track the difference you’re making.
- TinyPNG – a free website where you can upload images to compress them before uploading to your website. This helps your SEO by making pages load faster; it’s a super easy thing you can do without any support from an expert.
Tools for your SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can be a scary endeavour if you’re new to it. There are some ways you can get ahead of the crowd easily, though, with tools built to help you on your way.
- Google Trends – simply type in your area of business and see what people have been searching for recently. You can use this to plan your blog posts or just update your on-page SEO to make sure you’re ranking in popular searches.
- Answer The Public is great for keyword research as it gives hundreds of related keywords along with their popularity and difficulty. It’s easy to use and covers social media and Amazon, too.
- SEMrush is a tracking tool that allows you to manage every are of your SEO easily. Track your ranking, build a monthly report, discover new keywords and even plan your blog posts.