Small Business Marketing for an International Age

Marketing your small business can get expensive, whether you’re investing money on advertising or spending your time trying to keep up with social media. 

Fortunately, there are tools available to help. Here are 10 free online resources you may be missing out on that can save you time and money.

Social Media

From Facebook to Instagram, social media platforms are free, popular, and can be used to directly engage with potential customers. 

No matter which platform you choose, social media is an excellent tool to market your products and services all while keeping tabs on what customers are saying about your business. 

Additional, well-known platforms include LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. 

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that lets users schedule and post content to multiple social media profiles at the same time from one place. If you are pressed for time when it comes to managing your social media accounts, you can use Hootsuite to schedule content, track analytics, and reply to your followers. This tool is free for managing up to three social media platforms.

Blogs

A blog is an excellent way to share unique, high-quality content that also supports your social media initiatives. A blog can be a website or web page. 

Using platforms such as WordPress, Wix and Weebly are completely free!

Yoast Plug-In

While free website templates are an excellent way to start building an online presence, you still need to optimize the backend of your site to make sure it’s search-engine friendly. 

Yoast offers a free plug-in for WordPress sites for technical optimization.

Grammarly

Since written content is an essential component for online marketing, it’s always best to make sure your content is free of spelling and grammar errors. 

Grammarly is a free grammar and spelling checker available for download to help enhance your writing. It is available for the Google Chrome search engine.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the world’s largest marketing automation and email marketing platforms. 

This free software gives you the ability to design and save templates of all your marketing emails and newsletters and send them to potential customers.

Google Analytics

When investing in advertising or marketing efforts to grow your business, it always helpful to know what is working when it comes to your return on investment (ROI). 

Google Analytics allows you to measure advertising ROI and track your video and social networking sites.

Google Keyword Planner 

Google AdWords campaigns are designed for bidding on keywords so that your business can appear at or near the top of search results pages and help increase website traffic. 

While Google AdWords campaigns certainly aren’t free, Google offers a Keyword Planner at no cost. 

This tool can assist you in brainstorming keywords to boost your campaign’s performance.

Pexels

Pexels is an online photo library where you can choose from thousands of stock images for use in your content marketing and social media posts. 

Pexels’ photos are licensed for re-use so you won’t have to worry about copyright violations.

Asana

With all the above applications and software available to you, online marketing can still seem overwhelming. 

To tie it all together, Asana is a free application that can help you run your business and keep track of projects by managing to-do’s, collaborating with employees, and staying on top of progress.