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It’s incredibly important to get your business or brand noticed online, especially in a world where digital is becoming increasingly important – however it can be difficult to set the time aside to implement your strategies.  

This can be particularly problematic if you are a one-man band so to speak or self-employed. Here, we have listed some of the best online tools we have found to make it much easier to apply your marketing efforts.

Trello

Trello is a fantastic system to use to plan out your strategies.  You can add others to the system if there is someone else in your team assisting with the marketing plans.  This allows full visibility and a real-time checking off system so you can see when tasks are completed.  This is particularly beneficial if there are people working from home.  You can create checklists of what you need to do for each week – assign the relevant people – and also set due dates if there are specific campaign dates you need to keep to.  Files and images can be attached, you can create teams, and you can also integrate with other communication systems.

Hootsuite

It could be that you simply don’t have enough time to hop on social media every day to post what you need to but are great at planning things out. Once you have your marketing plans in place – you can use scheduling tools such as Hootsuite to schedule your posts out across multiple channels.  This means you can simply set aside a block of time each week, or even each month and schedule everything in at the same time.  This won’t only work well with planning, but it means if you intend to take some time off you can schedule in your posts, so you don’t need to worry about being off. 

Email Autoresponder

If you have the correct automation in place, you can market to your customers in your sleep!  A free email autoresponder will allow you to keep your clients engaged no matter what you are doing.  This means that you can do what you do best which is running your business and let the software do what it needs to.  The free options are always great for start-up or small businesses as you can test it out and also allow you to scale up.  There are also great analytics that allow you to see which emails are most effective so you can optimise your campaigns and create the content that converts.

Canva

You don’t need to be a great graphic designer these days to make impactful images.  Canva is a fantastic tool that will allow you to create professional images with little to no experience.  They have templates that you can choose from such as cover photos for social media channels, leaflets, flyers, social media posts, slide decks etc so you don’t need to worry too much about sizing etc.  They also have design templates that you can use where all you need to do is add in your own text or logo, so it is branded.  There is a free version that you can check out to try it out for size, and if you are comfortable with it – there’s a premium version.  Once you have finished with your image, it will look like it’s been created by a specialist. 

Zubtitles

If you are creating your own videos for social media – in order to get best results, it’s a good idea to ensure there are captions added to the video.  That way if a user doesn’t have headphones in and  happen to be in a communal area – they can still engage with the video. Zubtitles will let you try out their software for free – and there are other tiered options if you want to continue to use them and have a lot of video content.  It’s incredibly easy to use.  All you need to do is upload the video, and it will automatically generate subtitles and add them to the video.  You can edit the captions in case they aren’t 100% aligned with what is being said in the video very easily.  You can also adjust the size of the subtitles and add a progress bar, so the user can see how much time they need to invest in the video.  You can even edit this bar to match the pantone of your brand to make it look even more professional. 

If you are looking to up your game in terms of marketing and want to make sure you are working in the smartest way possible – it’s definitely worthwhile checking out some of these tools.  Not only will they help you with planning and creating – they can be great time savers.

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