When it comes to digital marketing for small businesses, maximizing your limited time and budget is a must.
If your small business is a one-man operation or you have only a small team working with you, odds are that you’re already stretched for time. You and your partners or employees have to juggle many different jobs at once. Adding additional jobs to their to-do list can slow down operations and put a strain on morale.
Luckily, there are plenty of apps that help with this problem.
By streamlining your operations, apps allow you to make the most of your budget. You’ll get the tools you need in one convenient spot, without limiting your digital marketing reach.
Are you ready to start streamlining your operations and improving your digital marketing strategies? Keep reading to learn about the apps that your small business needs to be using.
Mindly
The first and most important stage of creating a plan for digital marketing for small businesses is the actual planning.
This is the time when you decide what types of marketing will work best and when you’ll roll out each of your marketing tactics. You’ll also learn what your advertisements will look like and more.
Taking basic notes may help you keep track of your individual ideas. But it won’t let you visualize the marketing process as a whole, or see how each of your marketing tactics will affect the next.
But there is an app that can help you do just that. It’s called Mindly and it allows you to create fun, colorful mind maps.
Use these to see how your own ideas fit together. Or use it to see how ideas from different members of your team might function well as a part of your bigger marketing plan.
Consider how one marketing tactic might affect another. Think about when each phase of your plan should be implemented for the greatest effect.
This app is also great for ensuring that your tactics for digital marketing for small businesses fit into your company’s unique brand.
MiniMovie-Slideshow Video Edit
When you’re a small business, building effective relationships with every client is a must. This is especially true while your business is still new.
This means your digital marketing for small businesses tactics should go beyond those that reach the most people.
That’s what makes this app, the MiniMovie-Slideshow Video Edit, so great. Use it to turn your boring photo slideshows or Powerpoint presentations into videos. With those videos, pitch your ideas to new clients. Or present them at meetings, trade shows, or wherever else your business takes you.
These videos can also be used for larger marketing tactics. Integrate them into your social media marketing plan to make the most of the work you put into creating them.
Facebook Pages Manager
Social media is an essential part of any effective plan for digital marketing for small businesses.
Setting up accounts on social media, sharing content, and connecting with clients is free. You may choose to use paid ads, but they are inexpensive compared to many other marketing tactics.
But if your business doesn’t have the necessary budget to hire a social media manager, keeping up can be hard.
That’s where the Facebook Pages Manager app comes in handy. With this app, you can easily monitor your small business’ Facebook pages, respond to comments, manage content, and more.
If you don’t have formal training on using social media for digital marketing for small businesses, this is a great area to invest part of your marketing budget.
If you know what you’re doing, social media is a great place to grow your audience and land better leads in less time than other marketing tactics. An online course on social media marketing can help you learn how to maximize your tactics.
HootSuite
Another great app for managing your social media strategies for digital marketing for small businesses is HootSuite.
HootSuite allows you to plan and schedule posts to all of your social media pages. This includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even LinkedIn.
If you’re managing your small businesses’ social media marketing on your own, making the most of your time is essential. With a little planning, you can reuse content from one social media platform on others as well. This means less work for you, without sacrificing content on one social media page or another.
When it comes to generating leads, regular posts are a must.
With HootSuite, you can line up your integrated posts and schedule them to be launched at the same time or in succession on all of your small business’ social media pages.
You’ll never again have to worry about squeezing in posts between meetings or remembering to update your pages while on the go.
PipeDrive
Maybe you’re a brand new business. Or you’re one that needs to land large sales with a smaller number of clients. Either way, you know how important individual interactions are.
Taking a client from initial exposure to your product or services to the final sale is a lengthy process. When you’re trying to get many clients through that process at once, it can be easy to get mixed up and end up forgetting who is where within that process.
PipeDrive helps end this issue.
This app organizes your contacts and to-do lists in one place. You’ll never again forget when you talked last to each client. Or where you were in your sales funnel with that particular person or business.
When it comes to winning sales, great customer service is a must. One study found that 78 percent of consumers have bailed on a purchase because of a poor customer service experience.
If your customers don’t feel as though they are a priority to you, they are less likely to want to continue doing business. PipeDrive helps you prove to them that you do care about each individual customer and their unique needs.
MailChimp
Building and maintaining a mailing list is an essential part of any strategy for digital marketing for small businesses. But its also a strategy that takes a lot of time and effort to maintain.
First, you have to build your list. This means collecting contact information from those who join via your website. You then have to integrate this list so that you can send mass emails out to everyone on it.
Once your list is ready to go, you have to design your email marketing plan.
Want a successful plan for digital marketing for small businesses? Your emails need to engage your readers, convince them to visit your site and expose them to your products and services.
Otherwise, your email marketing will be a complete waste of time.
With your emails ready and your list prepared, its time to start sending out mailings to your list. Managing when to send these emails and how often you’ll send them can be incredibly time-consuming on your own.
Luckily, there is an app that helps manage and streamline every step of the marketing email digital marketing for small businesses process.
MailChimp helps you build and manage your email list, draft campaigns, and schedule mailings, all from one simplified interface.
Canva
Are your social media or blog posts doing enough to impact your customers? If you’re only utilizing text, the answer is likely no.
Studies have shown that when we read or hear information aloud, we remember just 10 percent of that info three days later. When we see an image paired with that information, we remember a stunning 65 percent of the info three days later.
If you don’t have a dedicated photographer or graphic designer on your team, you may be wondering how you can possibly put this stat on digital marketing for small businesses to use.
Canva makes it easy.
Canva is a simplified photo editing and image creation app. Use it to quickly edit your own photos. Or build stunning infographics and visual guides. No graphic design experience necessary. Canva is simple for anyone to use, regardless of your skill level.
Business Card Maker
If you think that business cards are a digital marketing tactic best left in the past, think again.
Small and large business alike that do any interacting with clients or partners in person should always have business cards on hand.
Business cards give you a fast and easy way to share your contact information. In your clients pocket or on their desk, they become constant reminders of your services.
When you aren’t able to land a sale during your initial meeting, business cards become an easy way for that client to reach you if they change their mind later on.
For most small businesses though, hiring a designer to create stunning, expensive-to-print business cards simply isn’t in their marketing budget. Paying for this service could mean having to cut corners elsewhere. And while business cards are important, they don’t offer the same return on investment that other tactics do.
That’s what makes the app, Business Card Maker, great. No matter the extent of your design skills, you can use this app to quickly and easily design effective business cards to start passing out right away.
QuickBooks
This app may not help improve your plan for digital marketing for small businesses. But it can help save you money that you can then reinvest into your marketing budget.
QuickBooks is a cloud accounting system available online and through an app. By streamlining your bookkeeping, you can better keep track of your finances, spot any issues right away, and make things much easier at tax time.
Maybe your small business doesn’t have the funds for a full-time accountant. Or you’re looking to cut back on spending, dealing with your own finances can be a great way to save money.
But without the right tools, it can also be risky and difficult. Using an app like QuickBooks makes it easy. It also helps reduce the risk of mistakes when it comes time to pay your bills or file taxes.
Slack
Like QuickBooks, this app may not have a direct effect on your strategy for digital marketing for small businesses. But it can be a great tool for connecting your team, allowing everyone to communicate better about your marketing strategies or your business operations in general.
Slack is a messaging app that allows users to share photos, videos, and more. You can create teams within Slack to communicate with the right people on different projects. Plus, Slack can be used on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone, so you can communicate with your teams anytime, anywhere.
Choosing the Right Strategies for Digital Marketing for Small Businesses
When it comes to effective digital marketing for small businesses, making the most of a small budget and limited resources is a must.
The apps on this list make that much easier.
The apps on this list help you streamline operations, saving you time and resources. The time you save can then be spent on improving other digital marketing strategies or adding new tactics to your plan.
The more apps you utilize, the easier your job as a marketing manager for your small business becomes. It’s like adding several part-time employees, but without the added costs.
But while these apps can streamline your digital marketing operations, if your strategies for digital marketing for small businesses are lacking, these apps can’t do much to improve them.
What you need instead is effective training to help you learn how to better utilize different digital marketing strategies.
Check out our products to start searching for courses that can help you learn how to improve your digital marketing skills today! We offer courses on improving your social media marketing, streamlining operations with CRM software, learning to utilize content marketing, and more.