6 Must-Have Online Marketing Tools for Your Small Business

Want More Powerful Online Marketing Results? Check Out These Tools

Call me Captain Obvious, but it’s no secret to entrepreneurs like yourself that running a small business is hard work. You have lots of irons in the fire and an ever-growing to-do list. And to top it off, what may be the most important part of running your business often feels like the hardest one to do consistently and well.

What part is that? You guessed it. Marketing. It doesn’t matter how well you run the rest of your business if it doesn’t have customers. Marketing done right helps you get more customers. Sounds pretty important, right? Legendary direct response marketer and copywriter Dan Kennedy thinks so. To paraphrase Dan, “focus less on being the doer of your business and more on being a great marketer of the thing you do”.

So yes, marketing matters. A lot. And to be a great marketer in the modern online business world, you need the right tools. Today let’s talk about some very useful marketing tools you might not be aware of. These will all be tools you can use without the help of an expert. They will be either free or quite inexpensive.

One of the most powerful aspects of digital marketing is this: You can test and tweak and optimize it. If part of your approach isn’t working, you can change it. Since copywriting and content marketing are so important to your success, let’s start with a tool that can help you do these crucial tasks better.

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

Your content and copy headlines and titles are crucial. They determine whether or not readers will go on to the next part of your content.

Whether your headline arouses a sense of curiosity in the reader or it hints at one or more strong benefits you offer your customers, you want it to pack a punch. You want it to strike an emotional chord with readers. Simply copy and paste your headline into the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. It will return a numeric score and will give suggestions on how to make your headlines stronger.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web-based tool through which you collect and analyze data about your website visitors and their activity on your site.

Chances are you’ve heard of this powerful tool. You may even have it installed for your website. But are you using it and harnessing its power to help improve your online marketing results? Doing so can greatly improve your website’s user experience and your conversion rates.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg is a heat mapping tool that gives you solid insight into what your visitors are doing on your website. It tells you where they are scrolling, clicking, etc. It can be extremely useful as you work to optimize your website.

And remember, your website is your online marketing hub. So optimize it! CrazyEgg delivers a number of key benefits. Bottom line: It can help you enjoy better site visitor engagement and more conversions.

Optimizely

Optimizely helps you efficiently run simple A/B tests on your website, landing pages, etc. So what is A/B testing and why do you want to do it? A/B testing, sometimes called split testing, allows you to compare to different versions of a webpage to determine which one is performing more in line with how you want it to.

Rather than guessing at how your pages are performing, you can use A/B testing to gain valuable, accurate insight that can help you make specific changes for the better. Just about any element of online marketing can be tested these days, including font types and sizes, call to action button colors, image placement and selection, content headlines, and on and on.

Here’s an important tip: Test one thing at a time. For example, put up two versions of a landing page. Make them identical, but give each with a unique headline. Measure your results. Implement the better-performing of the two headlines on all your landing pages and then test something else.

If you change multiple items all at once, how will you determine what was responsible for your results? So once again, A/B test one thing at a time.

Lander

Landing pages are one of the most critical tools for successful online marketing. Whether you are running an online store or are using content marketing along with email to “sell” downloads of your latest free whitepaper, you want to use landing pages to help you “seal the deal”.

Lander offers an inexpensive, easy-to-implement landing page service with clean, simple design. The page templates are engineered to help small businesses enjoy a higher conversion rate.

Lander enables you to run A/B tests on your landing pages, and the platform integrates easily with PayPal.

Hootsuite

Small business owners who are savvy marketers treat social media as an important tool in their marketing toolbox. They also understand that social media can quickly become an unmanageable nightmare. Hootsuite can help you tame the social media beast. It is a social media management tool that allows you to quickly and easily schedule updates in advance. Perhaps best of all, you can use it to “listen” to what people are saying about your company. It will help you respond quickly.

The topic of free or inexpensive online marketing tools is way too big to cover in one brief article like this. You have so many tools available to help you improve your digital marketing results, it can seem overwhelming. Hopefully this article will give you some clarity and guidance.

And when you are looking for simple sales and marketing software designed to help small businesses like yours stay organized and on track as you do the important task of marketing and selling, consider how Hatchbuck can help you.

Click here to learn more!

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