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5 Digital marketing tools for entrepreneurs

30 November 2020 •

By: Mira Expertise

The number of digital marketing tools available can seem overwhelming, especially when you don’t know where to start. You’re inundated with websites and blogs providing surety that they’ve cracked the code. You may feel it's borderline information overload, but don’t panic just yet. We’re here to help guide you and share our favourite digital marketing tools, which have made our lives easier and will hopefully help you establish your business in a competitive market.

The five digital marketing tools this article will explore are Ubersuggest, MailChimp, HubSpot, Canva and Hotjar. Each of these tools provides both free and economic pro plans, instrumental in helping you develop a well-rounded digital marketing strategy centred around SEO (search engine optimisation), content creation, email marketing, analytics and CRM (customer relationship management).

Customer is king

There are many starting points to ignite your ignition. ‘Customer is King’ is an old-age business mantra that emphasises the importance of customers in every business. We firmly believe that finding innovative solutions to your customers’ pain points is what will set you apart even in a saturated market. 

“The internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow." - Bill Gates  

The benefits of a well-rounded digital strategy

The benefits to developing a well-rounded digital strategy include: 

  • Brand awareness and advocacy
  • Developing a business-client relationship
  • Increased exposure and sales
  • Easy access to customer feedback
  • Boosting traffic and search engine ranking
  • Reduced marketing costs

A strong online presence reinforces trustworthiness and ultimately leads to attracting new customers whilst retaining existing ones.

"Knowing how to distinguish between an ideal keyword and the reality of queries will help you to refine your strategy and success as an online marketer.” - Neil Patel

These are the tools that have helped us in our digital marketing journey.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest, an SEO tool founded by digital marketing guru Neil Patel, is a great platform that will really amplify your keyword research. 

What is SEO? In the words of Neil Patel himself, “Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising your online content so that a search engine features your website as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.” If your website features near the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), you will see a dramatic increase in traffic volume as people are more likely to click results appearing on the first page.  You can read more about this on his blog here.

Ubersuggest will ultimately help you rank higher in search engines. This handy tool shows you how relevant keywords you search are and suggests other words that may help when constructing your content. It is great for content marketing and monitoring how effective or ineffective the content your competitors are creating; it provides insights regarding what keywords they’re paying for and how much traffic they’re receiving simply by adding their domain into the search.

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is an SEO haven with several tools to help you get a leg up on the competition. 

The keyword overview section gives you data on any keyword you are researching within a few seconds, including the overall volume of the query being searched, its dividends between search conducted on mobile and desktop and the cost-per-click, which is useful when considering how much money you would like to allocate towards display advertising. (For example, a digital banner, similar to a billboard, placed in and around blog posts.)

Mailchimp

Email marketing is a powerful tool in driving newcomers to your website and keeping current clients engaged. It’s one of the most cost-effective digital marketing strategies and when personalised can increase return on investment.

“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable personal touches — at scale.” - David Newman

Mailchimp

MailChimp is a user-friendly email marketing platform that helps you build meaningful relationships with your customers.

MailChimp is an email marketing platform used by both B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to customer) companies. The platform offers a Free Forever plan for businesses with less than 2 000 subscribers and doesn’t send out over 12 000 emails per month. 

The free plan doesn’t include an automated email series, which may be a dealbreaker if you’re wanting to utilise that service. The several customisable pre-designed templates are easy to use with their drag-and-drop feature. You can also store and manage all your images and files within their content studio, which is useful when constructing new emails. 

It’s easy to upload, segment and manage your contact list directly from the platform so you can send seasonal campaigns, drip campaigns and more targeted newsletters.

Another useful feature is the ability to run an A/B split test and view the analytics revealing the click-through rates, clicks, opens and more. You can also compare which subscribers are more engaged and integrate third-party apps like Google Analytics and social media.

“Email is possibly the greatest owned media channel for brands.” - Joe Pulizzi

HubSpot

HubSpot is a free CRM gem for entrepreneurs who want to focus on driving traffic and engagement using email marketing. You can create free professional emails without needing to be a code guru, their ready-made template and drag-and-drop features make customising a breeze, especially when you’re just getting into the groove.

You can import any ready-made contact lists you have into HubSpot and segment the list according to common traits such as what stage they are in the pirate funnel; awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral. Their analytics feature allows you to see if your efforts are getting the desired results you wanted by analysing the open rate, click rate, successful deliveries, top clicked links and the top engaged contacts to name a few. HubSpot also has additional tools that are free, including their landing page builder, lead generation forms, and their ad tool.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a brilliant CRM platform boasting unparalleled functionality to monitor the effectiveness of your campaign.

There are many templates to select from their landing page builder and incorporate pop-ups or embedded forms to any webpage to collect information from your visitors, which will turn those anonymous visitors into leads. These features don’t require technical experience to manage. The platform does that for you by adding your visitors’ details from your lead generation forms directly to your contacts database, where you can automatically trigger a follow-up email to them. This seamless integration makes sending seasonal promotional mailers a click away.

Connect your Facebook Ads account so you can create, launch, and monitor your ad’s performance within the platform. Anyone clicking onto the ad will be redirected to your website or newly created landing page where they can fill in their details to your lead generation form. Their ads dashboard has useful insight covering impressions, clicks, contacts, the amount spent and R.O.I. (return on investment). 

Putting a face behind the name has never been easier, you can access the total count list and see who clicked your ad and filled in your form.

If you need to reevaluate where your customers are within the pirate funnel, seeing all their interactions and activity timeline will be useful when re-segmenting your contact list to ensure visitors who are interested in certain products are sent relevant campaign content.

“There are three responses to a piece of design - yes, no, and WOW! Wow is the one to aim for.” - Milton Glaser

Canva

Canva is a free graphic design platform with over 50 000 designed templates including business cards, social media posts, presentations, posters, brochures and Zoom backgrounds to name a select few. The platform’s user-friendly drag-and-drop interface makes customising effortless, and its wide array of features including photo editing makes it a must-have, especially since you won’t need to pay a hefty fee for Photoshop for basic filters and effects.

Canva

Canva is a free graphic design platform with over 50 000 designed templates and an array of features.

It’s easy to upload your media; such as your logo, brand assets, videos and audio directly from your computer to incorporate into your design, ensuring your brand content is cohesive. From cropping images, adding textures and your brand colours to inserting text and creating your own animated post, the list of features gives you a competitive edge over the competition.

Sharing your design with your team is easy; share the link or add your colleagues’ email addresses and grant them access to view or edit. Seamless integration into your workflows with opportunities to publish your design directly to your social media platforms is a feature that makes this all-encompassing hub incomparable. 

If you’d like to reap the benefits of streamlining your workflow, their content planner may be the step in the right direction. Create, schedule and publish your social media posts directly from one platform and enjoy having access to their entire library, including stock footage. Canva is a game-changer for non-creatives and beginners wanting to put their best foot forward.

“Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed.” - Dan Zarella

Hotjar

Hotjar is an easy-to-use service that explores what is happening on your site, what your users care about, and what they have to say by giving you visual data points to help you get some context regarding their behaviour.

This powerful behaviour analytics platform reveals the online behaviour of your users by combining both analysis and feedback tools to help you turn more visitors into customers. The insight derived is very useful - especially if you’re experiencing an increase in traffic volume, but you’re finding that you’re not converting leads. The platform boasts several features, including heat maps, session recordings, and surveys.

HotJar

Hotjar, where user experience and analytics overlap to help ease your customers’ online pain points.

Google Analytics is a complementary traditional analytics tool that shows you an overview of the numbers, whereas Hotjar provides the missing pieces to the puzzle: the why. You will experience the website through the eyes of your visitors: where your users click or scroll, what they’re interested in and what elements of the page they interact with. Whilst heat maps show an aggregate of user behaviour on individual site pages, recordings allow you to watch anonymised user sessions across your website to see where they get stuck or abandon your page.

User experience is about empathising with your users so if you notice a recurring pattern where users are abandoning your page and it looks like they might be getting frustrated (for example when they are unsure of what to do next) you can validate your assumptions by using their on-page surveys. This is a little pop-up that lets you ask a quick question to the user, which is a great way to avoid making an amendment to their digital experience off the bat. Collecting ongoing feedback through surveys sent asynchronously provides in-depth insights regarding your users’ motivations, expectations and ultimately the outcomes of their experience with you.

You don’t need a degree in data science in order to interpret the colour gradients on the heat maps or to spot problematic interactions by watching several recordings and reading feedback regarding your visitors’ experience with your site. By using their basic plan, you will have access to limited reports, provide access to the entire team, store up to 300 recordings and keep your data for an entire year.

With many resources and tools available with functionality that will get the job done, there’s no reason to not get started, especially if your main concern is being strapped for funds. These five tools will be your tool kit to establish, reinvent and reposition your brand to your audience. The benefit of using digital marketing is that it allows for a two-way conversation, it’s imperative to any company whether you’re running a startup, a newly established business or have been in the industry for many years to prioritise your customer’s needs and ensure all your brand contact points have been exceptional to the point of being deemed unparalleled to steal and keep market share.

We hope this guide has been helpful to you! 

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30 November 2020
By: Mira
Expertise

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