When you’re an entrepreneur you spend a lot of time marketing. Marketing yourself, your products, your brand. We’ve seen a lot of marketing tactics for a wide variety of businesses and clients, and here are 10 of our favorites you should consider adding to your toolbox. Subscribe to the newsletter to download a simple one-sheet checklist of these awesome tools and resources.
Favorite Resources For Marketing
In the digital age, marketing efforts are often focused online, as you’ll see from this list of resources. They focus on marketing resources for your website and for social media monitoring.
Website and Marketing Resources:
Mailchimp – One of the most powerful tools you can have for on-going marketing efforts is your mailing list. When you publish a blog post or new page, book, or webinar, you have to entice people to come to you. When they’ve subscribed to your mailing list you can shoot them an email and reach out to them. Mailchimp (referral link) is a robust and easy-to-use system with excellent customer support in our experience, and for those getting started on a tight budget it is free to get started. Click this referral link to get signed up and begin building your newsletter list today!
Moz – Quite simply, there are not many tools better suited for SEO than Moz. I used to piece together several resources and do things the difficult and manual way. And then I started using Moz and wow. The on-page SEO tool provides a great audit process, the keyword and ranking tools, and even backlink analyzing. As your business grows and you are able to invest in good tools this should be on the top of your consideration list.
Google Analytics – If you don’t have Google Analytics set up yet for your website you absolutely must get that set up. Immediately. How can you figure out what your site is doing if you aren’t prepared to see what your site is doing, right? If you have WordPress it’s easy to set up – just follow this no-coding required tutorial.
Google Apps – Speaking of Google, google apps, especially Google Drive, are invaluable. Our agency, Element Associates, uses google docs, forms, and spreadsheets for a myriad of purposes. As a site manager I love that I can track edits on a single document through multiple people.
Social Media Resources:
Hashtracking – Staying informed of the community, influencers, and trends in your topic area with a simple monitoring tool like Hashtracking. You can start with a free trial, but if you’re like me you’ll upgrade soon enough. I love that Hashtracking monitors not only Twitter, but also Instagram.
Social Media Scheduling Tools – There are a couple different programs out there that will schedule your social media posts for you, and help you monitor activity on multiple channels at a time. Two of the best of these are Sprout Social and Hootsuite. Both services provide reporting and analytics, as well as real-time monitoring across multiple channels.
Webinar Ninja – With Google Hangouts changing up their interface I began looking for an alternative for online trainings. Enter Webinar Ninja. Paid or unpaid webinars, live or replays, webinar ninja has a great interface with intuitive options for any digital marketer. The possibilities are near endless.
Canva – Canva is a brilliant tool for creating beautiful Instagram, Pinterest, and other images. Use it to create a downloadable printable. Or quote-image to share from a top statement on one of your posts. Or a collage of several images for a review or tutorial post. With a pro-version you can add team members, sort your own images, or even resize for different channels. Picmonkey is a similar program that can be easily used.
General Business Resources:
Moleskine – Because seriously, I don’t know very many entrepreneurs that aren’t still using old-school notebooks, steno pads, or moleskines. Some people use them for brainstorming content ideas, others for bullet journals, day planners, or other organizational tools. Whatever you decide to use yours for, it’s hard to beat the appeal of pen to paper.
Freshbooks – Any task that is paid by the hour requires an excellent time management system. Freshbooks is more than that though – it’s a time-keeper, invoicing, and client management system all in one. Kind of brilliant. My favorite features include the ability to add notes within the timer itself, and the big pause button which allows me to compensate for unexpected interruptions.
What are your favorite resources for marketing your business? What should we add to our list in the future?