Marketing is a crucial component of business, but can be time consuming. You wear so many hats as a business owner, that it’s imperative you focus on the tasks that will make the largest impact on growth. In todays episode, we are focusing on some of the best marketing automation tools for small business and marketing tips for small business owners to help maximize your time. Host Megan Spicer talks with one of PJS & Co’s newest members, Amanda Mulcahy, about the tools they utilize on a daily basis to help make marketing manageable.
What we cover in this episode:
- 05:22 – Tools to help you batch and automate
- 16:02 – Tools to take the guesswork out of marketing
- 24:01 – Tools for design
Tools to help you batch and automate
Being able to batch and automate work can save you time and allows you to focus on completing tasks. We are huge fans of being able to batch workload. Batching work is when you group together tasks so you can complete them at the same time. For example, we like to create the majority of our social media content at one time, on one day versus creating 1 post a day for a month.
The one-up to batching work, is being able to automate it. Automating work typically includes using technology and in the case of creating our social media content, it does involve technology. We like to use tools that help us be more efficient when it comes to marketing. An example of automating our batch work is using a social media platform that auto posts our content to our social account.
We discuss the social media scheduler Buffer; Calendly for scheduling, and two of our email campaign tools, Keap and Mailchimp. Here are what we think are some of the best marketing automation tools for small business and why we love them.
This is an automated hub for scheduling meetings, efficiently and professionally while eliminating the back and forth emails.
- Availability Preferences: customize your availability preferences
- Team Scheduling: look over all your teams schedules to schedule meeting effectively
- Workflows: add automated reminders and follow ups
- Embeds: streamline scheduling directly from your website or email
- Calendar Connection: integrate your personal calendars to see real time availability
- Routing Forms: automate communication with your website visitors or invitees
- Meeting Polls: send polls to find the best times to schedule your meetings
Why we love it: We are all busy, so being able to give podcast guests or clients the ability to book when they are available without a back and forth is amazing. One of the best email marketing automation tools!
This all-in-one social media platform can help batch and automate your social media department. Here is what you can do with it!
- Publishing- plan and publish content and campaigns to multiple platforms at once
- Analytics- analyze your social media analytics and create reports
- Engagement- navigate and respond to your comments and engage with your followers
- Start Page- build a customizable landing page
Why we love it: You can create one post across multiple platforms and then customize each platform without having to recreate the post each time. Perfect tool to use for social media for small business owners!
Keap:
All in one CRM and Sales and Marketing Automation Software.
- CRM: automated client management system
- Sales Pipeline: track and manage leads and opportunities
- Sales and Marketing Automation: use the campaign builder for automated responses
- Appointments:online scheduling available
- Quotes and Payments:take payments from customers
- Integrations:connect your data, applications and devices from across your business
- Text and Email Marketing:utilize curated templates for emails and text messages
- Dedicated Business Line: phone calls and text messages available
- Analytics:real time data visible and real time reports
Why we love it: Automating our email campaigns!!!
Tools to take the guesswork out of marketing
Gaining more transparency to the in depth technical marketing world is always needed. Being able to see how and why your customers are interacting with your website can help with growth of your business. Finding out how to bring them to your website, blog, podcast, etc. can also be a major complex task. We discuss two of the best marketing automation tools for small business that we use to take out the guesswork.
A visual platform where you can consolidate and communicate user needs when it comes to your website.
- Heatmaps: ability to see user behavior
- Recordings: record and see what the user sees
- Feedback: find out what your users are thinking and feeling
- Surveys: hear directly from users
- Integrations: connect with all your favorite applications
- Survey Templates: launch surveys quickly
Why we love it: We are able to view website visits and see how our users are interacting with our website so we can enhance their experience where needed.
A tool to optimize and run your contents strategically without needing to hire experts.
- SEO: keyword search, on page SEO, rank tracking, link building, competitor analysis
- Content: marketing, creation, distribution, optimization, analytics
- Market Research: competitive analysis & monitoring, market analysis and advertising
- Advertising: PPC keyword research and website monetization
- SMM & SERM: social media management
Why we love it: SEMrush makes it easy to find relevant SEO keywords, quickly, for our content.
Tools for design
Not a graphic designer? No worries, these tools are here to help you. Creating content is already a full time job, but having to edit photos, create layouts, and picking fonts can be overwhelming. Although there are a plethora of tools available, free and paid, we give you some of the ones we have found to be best in the small business world.
An at your finger, design tool used to create social media, graphics, presentations, visual content and more.
- Design: create professional designs from scratch, utilize hundreds of premade templates for anytype of graphic design or content you can think of
- Business/Teams: plan, schedule, build and create with your team
Why we love it: (one of our best marketing tips for small business owners is to use Canva) We create the majority of our content here, making it quick, easy, and excellent!
An extensive portfolio of design, marketing and creative platforms.
- Photoshop: Image editing and design
- Adobe Express: Social graphics and more
- Lightroom: cloud based photo service
- Illustrator: vector graphics and illustrations
- Premiere Pro: video editing and production
- Adobe Stock: high quality licensable assets
Why we love it: A great platform to convert files and images, to detail edit photos and videos, or to use if you want to go above and beyond when creating content.
Free stock photos, images and videos.
- Images and Videos: upload and share or use high quality images and videos for free
Why we love it: Wonderful images and videos for free!!
Conclusion
Marketing your business is not always an easy task, especially when you have a dozen other things to do, but it is important. You don’t have to compare your skills or content to big brand companies when it comes to marketing because they have resources that you do not, and that’s ok. However, you can make the most out of what you are doing to maximize your business and time.
One of the best marketing tips for small business owners we can give is; find ways to automate, batch, and shorten processes. Try out what we consider some of the best marketing automation tools for small business and let us know what you think!
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