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(you can) Get By With a Little Help from MY Friends (and their digital marketing tips)
If you’re a small business owner, you need the best digital marketing tools you can find. You know the isolation and overwhelm you sometimes feel when you face the daunting task of MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS (doesn’t your website just seem to shout that at you sometimes?).
That’s why I put this compilation of Online Digital Marketing Tips and Tools together. I was talking with Ed Reese, a friend of mine who does usability testing for some really big companies, and I suddenly had a flash of insight: I actually know some REALLY knowledgeable people in the digital marketing field, and their insight would most likely help just about any small business owner.
Thus, this.
5 Marketing Tips from 5 Pros (with a bonus).
This will cover some different areas:
- Usability Testing (where are the pain points on your website?)
- Adwords
- Conversion Rate Optimization (how many times do your visitors do what you want them to do?)
- Video Marketing Tips (if you’re not using Video Marketing, you should be!)
- Email Marketing Tools
- Digital Marketing Tools Round Up
Okay, let’s get started.
Usability Testing (also known as A/B Testing)
Ed Reese is a Usability Testing specialist in the Spokane Washington area, and does some really great work for large companies.
“I’m not a large company, though; I’m a small business”, you say. How can high level Usability Testing be an effective digital marketing tool to help a small website?
Great question. Ed’s got the answer.
His blog has a great round up post with 5 affordable Usability Testing options that should help any small business. It’s great advice. You should take it. See, it doesn’t matter how much SEO you do. If your site’s usability is bad, all that effort is wasted.
Starting around 2015 and progressing to now, Google has dramatically increased the importance of User Experience (UX) as a ranking factor. Site speed and mobile optimization are just two of the many aspects of usability they assess, and this will only increase. The rise of semantic search, culminating with the BERT update in the fall of 2019, is the culmination of their emphasis on user experience. If you have not put this at the center of your SEO efforts, you’re failing.
Google Adwords, The Most Powerful Tool for Small Business Marketing?
Adwords is perhaps the most misunderstood, and thus the most underutilized, digital marketing tool in existence. There. I said it. You can quote me if you wish.
There might not be an easier way to waste $5,000 (when you do it wrong).
Of course, what makes it so underutilized is that it CAN be the most powerful tool in your arsenal for getting traffic and sales.
You need an Adwords Hero, and Steve Huskey is that hero.
I’m linking here to a short Q&A he did on Google Adwords. If you have more questions (and you should), contact him on his website.
For the purposes of this article, the sheer raft of data you get from Keyword Planner and the monthly data from the dashboard is worth every penny. Even if you just spend a little, you can leverage the knowledge you receive into value for any other marketing effort you use, online or off.
That’s a real lab coat.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion Rate Optimization is the science (more on this later) of measuring and optimizing elements on your website to maximize the possibility that your site visitor (read “Prospect”) will do what you want them to do on that page.
Brian Massey has made a career out of knocking the ball out of the park in CRO. He’s called “The Conversion Scientist” for a reason, and has the lab coat to prove it.
Check out this blog post on “How To Write An Author Bio: 7 Byline Examples Turning Readers Into Leads”
Video Marketing
If you’re not on the Video Marketing Train, you should buy a ticket. FAST. (See how I kept the metaphor consistent?)
I’ve assembled a full page on this topic (linked above)., and I hope you find it helpful.
In short, Video is a powerful digital marketing tool for small business owners because of a few reasons.
First, a certain portion of your demo will only watch video. You can spend time and energy railing against “them whippersnappers”, or you can just go ahead and supply some video content.
Next, video offers support in a key part of the Sales Process; Presentation and Demonstration (the 3rd and 4th steps in my 5 Steps of the Sale). You’re able to clearly present your solution to your prospect’s problem, and then clearly demonstrate how that solution solves the problem, and how your prospect will feel during that process.
You can actually use video anywhere in the process, and even after, with testimonials. There may not be a more versatile digital marketing tool. Want to make a video from Powerpoint, Google Slides, or other images? Screencastify is a great tool for this.
Pat Flynn’s 5 Email Tools for Small Business Owners
Email is one of the strongest digital marketing tools out there, and it also might be the most overlooked.
Pat Flynn is an Online Marketing heavyweight, and not only tests everything he does, but he also shares everything he learns. This list of 5 Email Marketing Tools is no different. If he says it’s good, you can take that to the bank.
Oh yeah, this is a podcast, too! You can use the links here on that page to check it out, and I highly recommend it.
I often say that Pat Flynn gives away more knowledge than anyone on the internet, and this list is a great example of that!
My Favorite Digital Marketing Tools for SEO
I’m gratuitously including myself in this list, but only to talk about my favorite online marketing tools. This post is where I link to all my favorites. As you can imagine, it’s always growing as I find new and fascinating tools that I can share with you. Enjoy!
Hopefully this list of Marketing Experts’ advice, and their recommended digital marketing tools has helped you.
Continue on for even MORE Digital Marketing Tools!
MORE Digital Marketing Tools for Small Business Owners
Digital marketing isn’t easy, but here are some more highly recommended free tools for content marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing and more.
The list below consists of all digital marketing tools that I have used, not just tools I’ve read about. I wanted to include marketing tools that I am confident in and can recommend without reservation.
Please take a look and tell me what you think, and maybe even share your favorite!
Google Chrome
Google Chrome may not come to mind immediately when you think of small business digital marketing tools, but I believe it’s actually one of the strongest tools out there for a small business owner trying to do their own SEO, monitoring campaigns, social media, etc…
Why?
One word: Extensions.
Google Chrome Extensions enable a small business to function at a much higher level, and most of the time, they’re free! They can dramatically improve your social media marketing, streamline your productivity, increase the effectiveness of your content marketing, and just about anything else you want.
If you’re not using Chrome, you should be.
Buffer is a great Posting tool for your social media marketing efforts, but even better is the Buffer extension (see the part about Chrome Extensions above) that allows you to simply click on that icon and it will pull in the article preview that you’re looking at, then allow you to make use of the great scheduling options they have. Outstanding social media marketing tool!
As an aside, if you’re not thinking of social media as a key part of your digital marketing tool box, you’re almost certainly leaving money on the table.
Social media is a fully mature digital marketing ecosystem, and customers rarely make purchases or do product or service research without consulting one or more platforms. If you don’t have these linked directly on your website, you’re sending signals to your prospects that you’re not fully in the game, or worse, hiding something.
Buffer saves you tons of time and helps you craft a cohesive social strategy. Great tool.
Word Counter
Here’s one you might not have considered as a digital marketing tool.
Wordcounter.net is a wonderful site that does just one thing: counts words (technically, it counts characters, too, but who’s counting? Well, I guess Wordcounter.net is…).
Why is this so important? Well, in SEO you need to know exactly how many words are in your meta descriptions, how many characters are in your Title Tags, how many words are in your blog posts, etc…
Other tools do this, and WordPress wysiwyg editor does it if you’re in default editor, too. But because there are many themes now that have a builder (like Fusion Builder with Avada, for instance), it’s nice to have a tool that will count your words and/or characters.
As a bonus, it does not change the format like Microsoft Word does, so you don’t have to end up reformatting.
Trello
Trello is another wonderful digital marketing tool, simply for its productivity values. You could say that it transcends online marketing, since it can be used for any type of list making and sharing of tasks between parties or team members.
I’ve seen it effectively used for sales teams that do lots of intertwined tasks between themselves and the home office, as well as between marketing members of a team for an online marketing company.
The effectiveness of it is that you can attach documents, spreadsheets, links, and anything else you want inside these cards that can also have checklist attached to them. Add on the fact that you can put an expiration date or due date on it, and you got all the makings of a wonderful tool for productivity.
It has a couple of flaws, but being free makes up for that! I’m sure there are better tools out there, but I’m not sure there’s a better free one. If you have not checked out Trello, you should do it today!
Yoast: SEO for Austin Small Businesses
Outside of Google Analytics and Search Console, there may be no stronger free tool for SEO & Small Businesses than Yoast SEO Plugin.
Yoast is a plugin for WordPress sites, and helps you align each page for proper SEO best practices, as well as site-wide help for your SEO. You should have a WordPress site, and you should be using Yoast SEO plugin.
Relay That
Really That is a very pleasant surprise new member to my marketing tools list.
I was introduced to this wonderful image tool in a conversation over Twitter, so you know Twitter still works… LOL. I checked out the tool and loved it immediately.
For someone who is not design first in the graphics field, it works really really well. What’s really great about it is that it yields several copies of your graphic design, and is already pre-set for LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and others. It’s really intuitive and once you get the hang of how to work through it, it produces a lot very quickly.
I highly recommend it. If you are slogging through doing text on image and other graphic work, you should check it out. There is a free version, but the paid version is not expensive at all. Especially for what you get.
Engagement Grower
Engagement Grower is another new tool that I’ve used, and I’m really liking it.
It is a plugin for WordPress sites, and the thesis is to drive more engagement through suggested post. The power of it is that you can choose the post for each one of your pages to suggest, then measure and split test against previous performance.
It’s a win-win when you can suggest post and get measured data from it to improve your marketing.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is, or should be, a no-brainer for every person reading this. If you have shied away from it or chosen not to pursue it because it seem too daunting, please do yourself a favor and get it attached to your website immediately!
The raw data that you get from connecting your site to Google Analytics is like unmined gold.
Connecting it further to Google Search Console, which I’ll discuss a little later, quadruples the effect. With Google Analytics you can tell where your visitors come from, where they visit on your site, and where they go after that page.
It tells you how long they stayed, and where they came from a mobile device or a desktop. And it does all this for the very very low price of free!
Search Console aka Webmaster Tools
Search Console is the new name for Webmaster Tools. Google changed the name back in May of 2015.
Google is always updating the tools and tactics in their two flagship products – Search Console and Analytics – so you can expect that to continue.
Why use Search Console as well as Google Analytics? Why not just use one? Because Search Console gives you the data that Analytics does not. There are some great tutorials out there that get you started in it, and I have one here that is a Google Analytics basics video.
Fresh Start: Cross Browser Session Manager
This is one of the GREAT tools out there for any of you, who, like me, have 47 tabs open. Well, I used to until I started using this tool. Really. It’s great.
If you don’t know what a session manager is, it saves all your tabs so that you can go back to that session whenever you want. It gives you permission to close those tabs!
Hope this helps.
