As an entrepreneur, there are only so many hours in a day that you can spend on your marketing, so why not get some help where you can? There are a ton of tools available to help you automate, schedule, analyze and more.
Here are 8 powerful marketing tools that we like and have used (or currently use) for everything from measuring website traffic to automating email signups:
Bonus: all of these tools are low-cost or free, which is perfect for entrepreneurs on a budget!
Google Analytics (or GA for short) is Google’s free tool that allows you to measure and track website traffic. Creating an Analytics account and linking it to your website will allow you to see how many people are visiting your website and how long they’re staying. You can break down that data by time period, device type, location, and more. This information will help you figure out what pages customers are going to, and what they find interesting (or not) on your website.
While there is a slight learning curve when you get started on Google Analytics, they’ve done a great job of building resources, like this free training, for you to learn how to use the tool. GA has also been around for long enough that there are plenty of other websites that have guides for using the tool too, like this Moz tutorial.
Google Trends is Google’s website where you can learn more about search trends. You can see what people in your country or around the world are searching for now and see what was trending recently. Most importantly, you can use Google Trends to do research about terms and keywords related to your business or your business’ marketing, and see how popular searches for those terms have been. This is great for figuring out what your customers are looking for online, and for gauging the popularity of certain keywords.
Canva is a graphic design tool that allows you to easily build content like social media graphics, posters, flyers, presentations, and even videos. The tool allows you to choose from a number of pre-designed templates and format them to your liking. You can change colors, text, stock images, fonts, and more, to make a template work for your business. A great benefit of using a tool like Canva is that you don’t need a design background or Photoshop skills in order to create professional-looking designs.
Once you’ve created a design in Canva, you can export it and save it for later use. We find it easy to make multiple designs in Canva at once, and share them over time.
Buffer is one of many social media scheduling tools available for businesses. Their tool allows you to create a content posting schedule across multiple social media accounts, queue content for the future, and analyze performance. In addition to being able to create, edit and schedule social media content online, Buffer’s mobile apps also make it easy for you to manage posts on your phone.
Zapier is a tool that can connect your other tools automatically. It allows you to automate tasks like adding new customers to your email subscriber list or sending notifications for each new purchase. Zapier is extremely helpful when you’re using multiple tools, like an email marketing tool and a social media ads tool, that don’t have built-in integrations with each other.
CoSchedulde’s Headline Analyzer tool measures the efficacy of headlines and helps you write catchy titles for your content. If you’re writing a blog post or article, this tool is great for fine tuning and improving your headline ideas. They measure your word balance, sentiment, word and character counts, and more to give your headline a score. Then, they suggest ways for you to improve the score in order to drive more traffic to your content.
Typeform is a form and survey creation tool. It’s focused on making forms and surveys easier to fill out, and more aesthetically appealing than your average survey. Most businesses use Typeform for customer research and collecting responses to surveys, however some have used the tool to create an embedded quiz to generate marketing leads. For example, check out these quizzes by Seamwork and Beardbrand. Typeform has easy-to-use templates and makes it easy for you to include your business’ branding as well.
Mailchimp is a marketing automation tool that is primarily known for its email marketing capabilities. The tool can help you build forms to get email signups, automate certain emails, create templates and analyze your email performance. We find it easy to use because they walk you through email creation step-by-step, and there are additional features that more advanced marketers can use. Though there are some limitations on its free version, Mailchimp also offers low cost or pay-as-you-go plans, too.
For full transparency, The Cultivate Method currently uses all of these tools, except for Typeform. We have not been compensated by any of the companies or tools listed above.
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Ada Chen
Ada Chen
