4 Basic But Essential Digital Marketing Tools For Small Businesses & Startups

Essential Digital Marketing Tools For Small Businesses & Startups

Getting the most out of your website means you need to stay on top of optimising your site for the constant changes happening with Google’s algorithm and people’s engagement on your web pages.

Many clients and small business owners that we meet are not sure which the best digital marketing tools are and far too many of them don’t even have the basic analytics tools setup. To make sure you’re on top everything and you’re getting the most traffic to your website, we’ve put together the essential list of free tools for digital marketing.

If these are all too much to wrap your head around, check out our small business marketing solution where we take care of all of these things for you.

Google Analytics – www.google.com/analytics

Track all of your website visitors’ behaviour and your web traffic sources with this essential digital marketing analytics tool.

Google Analytics is the fundamental digital marketing tool. It should be installed on your site before you even go live so that you can capture the behaviour and interactions of your launch hype. Read more about Google Analytics here.

We often call Google Analytics your personal crystal ball as it gives you an insight into what’s going on with your website traffic. It lets you find out where people have come from, how long they hung around for and what they looked at during the time they spent on your site.

Over time these behaviours will develop into a number of trends that you should capitalise on.

Over time these behaviours will develop into a number of trends that you should identify and capitalise on by optimising your website around to ensure you’re converting as much traffic as possible.

Here’s a handy tip to maximise your Google Analytics:

1. Create A Thank You page on your website
2. Redirect your contact forms when they’re submitted to the thank you page
3. Create a Custom Goal with an event destination of your Thank You page’s URL
4. You’re now tracking conversions on your website, well done.

Google Analytics is an absolutely essential digital marketing tool when it comes to measuring the effectiveness, and your ROI, on advertising campaigns and other marketing efforts. Best of all, it is entirely free so make sure it’s installed and tracking on your site.

Get Google Analytics for your business, visit www.google.com/analytics

Google Webmaster Tools – www.google.com/webmasters

Real opportunities lie in keywords that aren’t getting you any site visitors yet.

While it is nice to see which keywords are getting you the website traffic, the real opportunity lies in the keywords that aren’t getting you any site visitors. Look at search phrases where your average position is hovering between 10 – 20, as this is page 2 of the search engine. With just a little bit of DIY search engine optimisation, you might just be able to slip onto page 1 for a few extra phrases to grab extra clicks.

Here’s a handy tip to maximise your Google Webmaster Tools:

1. Login to your Google Analytics
2. Navigate to Acquisition > Search Console
3. Follow the steps to link your Search Console with Google Analytics
4. You’ve combined Google tracking suites, well done!

Here you’ll also be able to determine if you’ve been under some form of hostile SEO attack, or if Google has placed any negative manual actions against your site.

Get Google Webmaster Tools for your business, visit www.google.com/webmaster

Facebook Business Manager – business.facebook.com

Facebook’s answer to Google Analytics also giving you access to the social media platforms powerhouse of an advertising suite.

Using your Facebook account to sign up for a free Facebook Business Manager and going through the setup of adding your page, and the infamous Facebook PIxel to your website will give you a glimpse into the Facebook world of your audience.

Learning to understand your audience’s behaviour is essential.

Using the tools available within this platform, such as Audience Insights, will allow you to research what your page followers like to do on social media. While this requires a little out of the box thinking, and less straightforward answers than Google Analytics, learning to understand your audience’s behaviour is essential if you want to place your goods or services in front of them.

Here’s a handy tip to maximise your Facebook Business Manager:

1. In your Facebook Business Manager go to Custom Conversions
2. Set up a new custom conversion and place your Thank You page’s URL in the field provided with the prefix “contains” selected
3. You’re now tracking contact form submissions as conversions. Awesome!

If you happen to have a few dollars spare in your monthly marketing budget, you can also utilise the power of the Facebook pixel by running remarketing adverts that are displayed to people who’ve visited your website previously.

Get Facebook Business Manager for your business – business.facebook.com

Mailchimp – www.mailchimp.com

The email address is one of the most valuable pieces of personal data that you can freely collect for your marketing purposes.

At an average opening rate, depending on niche, between 20-30% the humble email is still one of the most powerful assets you have at your disposal. You should be utilising emails to constantly keep in touch with your customer base, and if that is a big number you will need something like Mailchimp.

You can actually get yourself blacklisted off the internet.

Very few business owners know but if you try to send a mass email using your normal email address you can actually get yourself blacklisted off the internet and there’s no guarantee that your ISP will actually let you back on. In order to bypass this, you will need to use a registered mass mailing provider, like Mailchimp, to handle your big mailouts.

Mailchimp is a free service up until you collect 2000 email addresses in your database, and this is why it should be a part of your digital marketing toolkit. With just a few clicks and a bit of copy/pasting, you can easily embed a signup form on your website for people to join your mailing list. Just on our personal blog, we’re collecting roughly 5-10 email addresses per day.

Here’s a handy tip to maximise your Mailchimp experience:

1. Create a new campaign and select automation
2. Go through the process of setting up a welcome campaign for the list that your website subscribers go on
3. Provide them with a free guide, top tips or any other piece of free value that you can provide
4. Ask them to follow you on Facebook and/or Instagram
5. You’ve just started a conversation with a stranger and it was automated!

With these email addresses, you can, obviously, email these people to attempt to directly sell to them, but you can also upload this information to Facebook to target them, and people like them, with paid advertising. Email marketing should be a part of your marketing campaigns, and with Mailchimp’s pre-built and drag and drop templates, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using it for your business.

Get Mailchimp for your business – www.mailchimp.com

Wrapping Up on the Four Essential Digital Marketing Tools for Small Businesses & Startups

We hope you find these tools to be useful for your business. Understand that these are tools, and they will only ever work for you if you use them, and learn how to use them effectively. This set of tools should be a part of your digital marketing strategy if you want to keep up with your competition.

If you need some guidance with any of your small business digital marketing, we’d love to hear from you. Why not book in for one of our complimentary 1-hour discovery sessions?

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