One of the most exciting aspects of digital marketing is how it equates the playing field for small businesses and individuals.
If you have an incredible product or service idea, you have plenty of affordable and user-friendly tools to reach new audiences and market your brand.
Gone are the days when you needed a multimillion-dollar marketing budget to outperform your competitors. Digital marketing offers a high ROI whether you invest cash to outsource the job or do bootstrap by investing your own time.
Beyond the possibility of great income for a small budget, countless digital marketing tools can take some work pressure off your shoulders. These tools are especially valuable for small businesses that do not have the budget to dedicate a team to in-house marketing or to outsource work to a marketing agency.
Quick way:
- Some digital marketing tools are mandatory for keyword research, brand monitoring, email automation, and more.
Most tools offer both free and paid options. Some tools offer a compatible freemium version with limited features while others offer a free trial of the full version. - Plan a specific budget for your equipment and add more as the ROI arrives
Plan your tools based on your brand goals for your digital marketing strategy. It helps to have a dedicated tool for every task like keyword research, content research and social media. - However, some tools offer a complete suite of relevant features to cover almost everything.
In my first CMO role for a small business, I found that leadership, effective content marketing, and publishing consistently are the fastest and most cost-effective ways to achieve marketing ROI.
But we need a way to measure traffic gain, promote content, capture leads and conduct continuous research on our customer search trends. So here is a list of the top digital marketing tools we have used as a small business to achieve 2-3X growth every year for 5 years.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is completely free software that provides valuable insights into who is visiting your website and how they engage with it.
It integrates well with Google Search Console – another free digital marketing tool that helps you identify any issues with your site and optimize for traffic.
Some of the data points that Google Analytics offers you include:
- The number of visitors to your site by day, week, month, or any time you choose.
- Where these visitors are coming from – referrals from other websites, organic search, advertising, social or direct.
- The keywords that people use on Google to find your site.
- The population and interests of your users.
- How much each user spends on your site and which pages they visit.
All of this information is interesting, but it is vital knowledge that can help you optimize your website and marketing campaigns (keeping your SEO efforts low).
For example, you might notice through a search console or analytics that you’re getting a lot of traffic from a keyword that lacks your content. Write a blog post optimized for that keyword and see your traffic and engagement level rocket.
Getting loads of visitors from Facebook but no one from Twitter? Maybe this is a sign that your marketing efforts should be focused on your main channel.
It’s all about insights – not just analysis.
