Essential Digital Marketing Tools for Small Business Owners

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For small business owners, having a robust online presence is critical for success. However, developing a website, managing email campaigns, and reporting on success may seem overwhelming. In addition to your standard options, such as MailChimp, WordPress and Square Space, here are a few less well known, free or inexpensive tools to help you with your website, social media, email, and reporting that don’t require a technical expert to use.

Website:

Sumo: Sumo offers a full suite of tools to help you grow your traffic on your website. From social sharing tools, to forms and interstitials (pop-ups and welcome mats), to heatmaps (to track where users are focusing on your website), SumoMe will help you engage more users and understand how they are interacting with your website.

Social Media:

Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a social media management and publishing tool that integrates with your social media accounts in one simple dashboard. Hootsuite offers several plans, depending on your business needs, which include various levels of features and reporting.

Facebook Power Editor: With its wealth of user data, Facebook advertising is valuable for both B2C and B2B companies. Power Editor enables you to set up, organize, and update your campaigns easily and effectively. This guide from Jon Loomer provides a comprehensive tutorial on how to use Power Editor.

Email:

HubSpot: HubSpot is much more than an email tool. It offers a free CRM and has various levels of features to fit your business needs. These include marketing automation, email, landing page creation, forms, and reporting.

Design:

Canva: Canva offers people who are not professional graphic designers the ability to create attractive social media images, email headers, blog graphics, and more. Many of the layouts and images are free, and others are as cheap as $1.

SEO:

Moz: Moz has both paid and free tools. Two of the free tools — Open Site Explorer and the Keyword Explorer — are key for SEO. Open Site Explorer analyzes your site for back links, broken links, and tells you which of your pages rank the highest in Google search. Keyword Explorer helps you identify the best keywords to target with your website, blog, and digital advertising.

Reporting:

Google Analytics: Google Analytics is Google’s free reporting tool for websites. You can track growth in traffic, gather insights on your users, discover where users are dropping off your site, and report on the success of your digital campaigns.

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Lauren McNitt is an independent strategy and marketing consultant who joined the Canopy team in February 2017.

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