Small businesses often have small marketing budgets and an even smaller marketing staff. However, as anyone will tell you, size doesn’t matter. For small businesses, it’s not the size of your marketing budget that’s important, it’s how you use it.

In the digital sphere, there are excellent tools that can have an outsized effect on your marketing results relative to their low, or non-existent cost. If you focus your efforts in these ten areas you can experience dramatic growth from even the smallest marketing staff.

That’s right. We’re not ashamed to go after the low-hanging humor fruit.

Reviews

Positive reviews are a critical part of any marketing plan. According to BrightLocal’s 2019 survey, 82% of respondents said they check online reviews for local businesses. 

Getting positive reviews is easier than you think. You just need to ask. Make it a practice at the end of every customer interaction to ask for a review. Include a link with each piece of collateral you send to customers. 

You can also take advantage of reputation management software like BrightLocal, Podium and BirdEye to automate review collection. Setting this process on autopilot can net you far more positive reviews than you would get without any intervention, and without any extra work.

Facebook Messenger

Live chat and chatbot support are extremely popular, and websites that feature this functionality enjoy considerably better visitor engagement over sites that lack it. 

The good news is that it doesn’t need to be difficult to add both to your WordPress website. All it takes is Messenger and the right WordPress plugin. You can build your own Messenger chatbot or take advantage of a number of chatbot templates that take care of a lot of the grunt work. These chatbots help answer common customer questions. 

Additionally, you can plug Messenger into your website to offer live chat. Or a combination of live chat and chatbot support. This service will help convert hard-won traffic into prospects.

A Mobile-Friendly Website

According to Statista, in 2018 52.2% of global web traffic was served to mobile devices. That means if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re missing out on half of your total possible market. That’s a big loss.

The good news is that adding mobile responsiveness will instantly double your potential reach for a relatively small investment.

The percentage of mobile web surfers increases year after year, and there’s no reason to think this trend will reverse, particularly as 5G brings blistering fast internet access to the masses. Having a responsive, mobile-friendly website will be increasingly crucial in the future.

And if that’s not enough to convince you, Google has said they index sites based on mobile-first.

Google My Business Listing

If you haven’t claimed your Google My Business listing yet, what are you waiting for? It’s free, and it’s extremely important to your local business search results.

Remember that Google loves good information and complete information, so don’t cut any corners. Fill out your My Business listing completely and add as much good, useful information as you can. 

When people search for businesses near them, My Business listings give Google critical information about your business. A complete, well-groomed listing can help land you on the first page of results, which can drive a significant amount of local business in your front door.

Another benefit of claiming your listing is that you’ll be able to respond to reviews.

Appointment Scheduling Calendar

Service-based businesses that operate via appointments can do well by automating their appointment scheduling process. Not only does this free up quite a bit of time for you and your staff, but it also makes your customers’ lives easier.

Appointment scheduling automation allows you to include convenient links for scheduling on your website, in marketing emails, customer response emails, on social media posts and everywhere else that you interact with current and potential customers. 

When someone’s ready to make an appointment with you, make it as painless and as fast as possible for them. We use Calendly for all our meetings. In fact, you can check that out and schedule a free strategy session here.

Email Automation

Email is a great way to nurture leads, build relationships, and eventually convert prospects into customers. Small business owners can use email automation to do much of the heavy lifting involved in keeping these relationships active.

Email automation and email marketing involve using customer interactions to trigger automatic emails that can be personalized using collected customer data. Automation can be simple or complex, depending on your needs.

Email automation makes sure that your prospects are looked after consistently and automatically. And personalization helps your automated emails feel less automated.

There’s no shortage of systems to use. You can go for something like Aweber which is strictly email or something more robust like Kartra, Keap or Hubspot that offers a wide variety of features.

File Sharing

In the process of nurturing leads, it’s sometimes necessary to send large files to your prospects. This might be a hefty PDF full of technical drawings and product specs. Or it might be a video demo or a VR architectural walkthrough.

Services like Google Drive, Dropbox, and more will let you share these large files in a convenient, cost-effective way that keeps your data secure while simplifying the delivery process. Don’t let clunky file-sharing stand in the way of a successful sale.

CRM Software

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management software is a must for any business. There are dozens of software packages available at different price points, which means there’s a good CRM solution for businesses of every size.

CRM software helps you track contacts, manage your interactions with them, document where they are in your sales pipeline, and automate response reminders so that you don’t lose track of your prospects. A good CRM package helps you nurture leads and makes certain you don’t forget to follow up when you need to.

Videos

People love to watch videos. It’s just a fact. Google it if you have to. You’re sure to find a video confirming what we’ve said. Video is passive, which means it requires little effort from your viewers, and yet it creates an immediate connection that is hard to create in other ways.

Testimonial videos are far more effective than written testimonials because viewers can tell that the people being interviewed are being genuine. 

Explainer videos take difficult concepts and processes and break them down into easily digestible animations. 

How-to videos are far easier for consumers to follow than written instructions because the visual component allows them to follow along.

And today video is less expensive to create than ever before. Try featuring a video on your homepage or sharing them on social media.

You can check out our video portfolio for some ideas.

Social Media Scheduling Tools

Last but certainly not least, social media scheduling tools help businesses keep up with the demands of social media posting. It’s very difficult to maintain an active presence on multiple social platforms simultaneously without it, and consistent posting is a must.

Tools like Hootsuite or Buffer help you to create and schedule content across multiple services and then measure your engagement results. These tools can also analyze customer interaction data across the platforms you post on to deliver useful insights.

For B2B, LinkedIn is a must. E-commerce businesses need a strong presence on Pinterest and Instagram, and every business can benefit from an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, both for advertising and engagement purposes. Social media tools help you manage all of these from a central command center.

Another great way to help your small business is by leveraging talented freelancers who can help take work off your plate, from small tasks to larger projects. Find out how.