Marketing Toolkit for your Business

There are so many marketing tools out there that can help you effectively market your business online but which ones are actually useful? We've used a lot of marketing tools in our time - we believe that you will know if a tool will really help you within the first 10 minutes of using it. It's not just what the tool can help you achieve but it's also important to look at how time consuming using the tool is and whether the value it provides is worth it. The truth is that there are tools out there that can give you the competitive edge when it comes to marketing your small business and here we talk about our favourite ones.

Email marketing technology is used by more than 80% of B2B and B2C companies so this really isn't something that you should ignore in your marketing strategy. Email marketing gives you the opportunity to engage with customers and potential customers, tell them your news and inform them of special offers.

There are a lot of email marketing tools out there for small businesses but we have yet to find one we like more than MailChimp. It has over 10million customers and the pricing is great for small businesses. There is a free plan for those with less than 2,000 subscribers and those who don’t send more than 12,000 emails per month - this is a great option to test and set up your email marketing at virtually no extra cost.

Trello allows you to organise all your marketing activities in one place. You can set up boards for your activities eg. Blog Posting and share these with the people you work with to get their insight. Trello also allows you to organise tasks and set timelines and due dates.

We use Trello for all our projects and it helps us to stay organised and on top of tasks we need to complete. There is also a free plan which allows you to set up unlimited boards and see if Trello is right for your business.

Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that should be part of your digital marketing strategy from the very beginning - it allows you to track what is going on on your website. It shows you how many visitors you are getting, where those visitors are finding your site and what content is most popular. Although it's good to have Google Analytics set up from the beginning, as historical data can't be tracked but it can be set it up at anytime.

Managing various social media profiles for your business can seem daunting but a tool like Hootsuite helps you schedule and manage social media profiles for more than 30 platforms making it much easier. It allows you to plan your social media posts in advance and schedule them throughout the week/month. With Hootsuite you can also see how your posts are performing and what is getting the most engagement allowing you to refine your content strategy. Subscriptions start at €25 per month.