Using the right tools to promote and grow your brand is a necessity, irrespective of the size and type of your business. Making your customers aware of your product/service and encouraging them to use it is the core function of every successful business. However, the problem is that with the expansion of markets, ‘marketing’ has become significantly costly.
There are various new touchpoints that modern marketers are now required to cover. The customer preferences are also changing more frequently, requiring brands to adopt new strategies regularly. All these factors when put together, attach a heavy price tag to ‘effective marketing practices’.
This is an even bigger issue for start-ups and small businesses. They need to develop comparatively more aggressive marketing campaigns, with fairly restricted budgets. Therefore, it is important that marketers identify the right tools that can meet the needs of their brand, without having to break the bank.
Fortunately, there are now hundreds of options for businesses to choose from. From researching the market niche to reviewing campaign analytics, the present-day digital space is filled with a variety of inexpensive tools to do it all. All marketers need is to find out the ones that best fit their needs.
To help out, here is a list of the top 5 cost-effective tools for modern-day marketers:
1. SEO Tools
Image Source: Semrush
When talking about digital marketing tools, it is only fair to start the list with SEO tools. Search Engine Optimization is probably the most important aspect of marketing these days. With a large number of young consumers researching products and services online, brands should leave no stone unturned to rank higher in search engine results. In short, it is only through strong SEO strategies, that your brand can stay at the top in this digital era.
There is a long list of elements that modern-day marketers need to manage, in order to fully optimize their brand’s site. From using the right keywords and high-quality backlinking to maintaining page load speed, there is a lot to take care of. Maybe that’s the reason why most people get overwhelmed every time they hear the word ‘SEO’.
However, the latest advancements in this field have made all these tasks pretty easy. Now, one can easily find hundreds of cost-effective SEO tools including free keyword research tools, backlink checkers and much more. These tools allow users to perform complex SEO tasks with just a few clicks while saving a lot of money.
SEMRush is a leading example of SEO Tools. It is an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights.
Learn More: What Are The Local SEO Ranking Factors?
2. Analytics Tool
Image Source: Youtube
Measuring and reviewing the performance of your marketing campaigns is as crucial as creating an effective campaign in the first place. Marketing analytics tools help brands understand how well are the customers engaging with their current marketing campaigns. This allows marketers to identify the gaps and then take corrective actions to bridge those gaps timely. Such tools also help brands in determining the growth and changes in the market as well as customer preferences.
Using analytics tools to automate related reporting processes can also save a lot of time and money. The most important part is that most of these tools have a simple user interface which means anyone can use these tools. So, you longer need to pull complex data sets or hire an expert to analyze them for you. You can simply find the analytics tool that has the specific features according to your need, and let it do all the work.
Currently, there are many free tools available in the market that are highly useful. Google Analytics is the most popular one. It comes chock-full of features and lets users analyze website traffic, bounce rates, goal conversions, and real-time visitor count.
Read More: What’s New In Google Analytics 4? Upgraded & Powerful Features
3. Email Marketing Tool
Email marketing has now become a key component of a successful digital marketing campaign. It allows brands to build a strong relationship with customers using personalized content. It is also helpful in creating brand awareness as well as promoting new products. Sending out weekly newsletters, discount offers or abandoned cart notifications ensures that your brand stays at the top of your customers’ minds.
For small businesses, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing options. However, for higher conversion rates, your brand will need a tool to create an automated drip campaign. Fortunately, there are multiple options for you to choose from.
These tools come with unique features that allow users to not only schedule bulk emails but also send out personalized emails to customers. One such tool is Omnisend. It allows users to automate email delivery using behavioral triggers and timely communications based on customers’ convenience.
Read More: Everything You Need to Know About Email Marketing Automation
4. Social Media Marketing Tools
Image Source: Sniply
Social media has become one of the most effective marketing platforms during the last few years. It allows brands to connect with their global audience and communicate in a much more intimate and informal manner. While businesses of all sizes can leverage these platforms, small businesses have a greater advantage. By publishing entertaining and engaging video content, these businesses can target a larger customer base and create brand awareness by allowing people to interact with them through comments.
However, impactful social media marketing requires marketers to create and publish unique content regularly. This demands a lot of time, effort, and resources. Therefore, it is important that you choose the right tool in order to generate a positive ROI. The tool should let you schedule and analyze your social posts, automate related tasks, and do much more.
One such tool is SocialPilot. From powerful social media analytics to white-label PDF reports, this marketing tool can do it all with just one click.
5. Content Marketing Tools
Content marketing is no longer optional. Every business regardless of its size or nature needs to create engaging content to connect with customers and generate leads. Delivering consistent, high-quality content has proven to influence customers’ decision-making much more effectively than any other method.
The right content has the power to create positive customer experiences and entice people to return for more. However, for this to happen, it is important that all your content is legible and error-free. The good news is there are many pocket-friendly tools available to help you with it. These tools can help you write excellent blogs, avoid plagiarism, and even find inspiration for fresh content without breaking the bank.
Slick Write is one of the most cost-effective and useful content marketing tools. It is a powerful, free application to check your writings for grammar or stylistic errors. It comes with many other features of interest as well.
Read More: Creative Content Writing: A Driveway To Generate More Leads
6. Data Hygiene & Enrichment Tools
Tension between the marketing and sales team plagues organization of all shapes and sizes. One of the biggest issues is the feeling among sales reps is that the “leads” delivered by marketing are low quality or worthless.
Typically, this is not entirely right, but an impression that develops as sales personnel grow tired of running behind the inquiries that turn out to be dead ends. Nevertheless, even such an impression is bad; when sales reps sour on marketing leads, they may overlook or go through the motions on terrific leads, thinking they are more “junk.” Here comes the importance of data validation tools like phone validation, email validation etc.
ClearoutPhone is one of the best data enrichment & phone number validation tools. The duo advantage of the tool plays a great role in increasing the sales team productivity. At first the invalid phone numbers can be taken off the list, secondly, the valid contacts get the data enrichment pointers like location, carrier type, line type, number formatting etc. Both the aspects help in enabling the pre-sales and sales teams with quality and segmented data. The team can spend more time working on quality leads in a personalized manner with additional data pointers that they get about each lead now.
Conclusion
In today’s highly competitive marketplace, using the right market tactic at the right time is very crucial. Thanks to these pocket-friendly tools, modern marketers can now achieve their goals without burning a hole in their pockets. However, it is important that brands do not compromise on quality just to save a few bucks, especially small businesses.
