Marketing is a challenging task even for the most experienced marketers. Depending on your niche, you are competing against numerous and often well funded competitors. How do you make inroads into a new market or expand your market share in that case? If you can’t compete based on resources then it’s time to leverage free do-it-yourself marketing resources. In this piece will take a look at five free marketing tools that will help you boost your efforts in beating out your competition.
Let’s start with the basics. You can put the most sophisticated promotional strategy in place but if you don’t do the fundamentals right you are missing out. In this increasingly digital world it’s important you execute your print promotional assets properly. Business Cards allows you to quickly and easily design your own free set of cards that will help you stand out from competitors. To get started choose a template and then populate it with your name, contact details, job title, etc. Make sure you implement your brand colors and upload your logo to make the design match your branding vision. Once you are happy download in printable format and print on your home printer or send them off for printing.
On the other side of the marketing tools spectrum you can find short promotional videos that are leveraged on social media channels and throughout other websites. Platforms like YouTube, Instagram Live and other popular social destinations where your target customers spend time are ideal for promotional videos. Use a free tool Animoto to create your own marketing videos. The process is simple, decide what kind of video you want to make, choose a template, add your content and branding and you’re done. You can save your video for later editing so you can gather feedback from business partners or publish to your preferred platform or video-sharing site right away.
When it comes to marketing a lot of focus is on getting eyeballs on your content and driving visitors to your website or store. What happens once they actually get to your website though? If you already have a website up and running and installed an analytics tool like Google Analytics you know your visitor behaviour. There is always room for improvement when it comes to bounce rate and shopping cart abandonment. To help in this marketing effort try a free tool like Smart Supp. It’s a popular chat solution that allows you to communicate with customers on your website live. All it takes to get started is a code snippet installed. Once it’s in place you can chat and analyze chat history right away.
Another effective way to market your business is through your blog. Your blog is an opportunity to introduce your business as a valuable resource to potential leads and existing customers. Coming up with clever and engaging blog titles can be time consuming which will take away from your time of actually writing the post. Try a free tool like Tweak Your Biz to help expedite the brainstorming process. To generate ideas enter a keyword, choose whether it’s a noun or web and then select if you want the results to show as title case, sentence case or all caps. As soon as you click submit you are presented with a list of article ideas.
One of the most valuable ways of engaging potential leads is through email. Anytime you have a chance to collect a website visitor’s email address you should try and do so. The ability to build trust and create value over time through a well-thought email campaigns is hugely valuable. Send In Blue offer s free plan to help promote your brand through the use of beautifully designed emails. Use their drag-and-drop editor to create a beautiful email template. From there you can easily personalize the content and then send to your carefully curated email list.
Time to Get Busy Marketing Your Business
There are lots of ways of marketing your business. There are no right and wrong approaches. You just need to find out what works for you and what doesn’t. The trick is to stay in the game long enough until you figure out which methods provide a positive ROI. That’s where free marketing tools come in. Marketing resources like the ones listed here don’t cost you anything so they are worth a try. Once you work through the five listed here, find another set and rinse and repeat.