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11 Simple Marketing Tools We Utilize and You Should Too

Small business marketing is anything but easy. It's hard keeping up with all of the changes in the digital marketing landscape, consumer preferences, technology, and the business we're marketing for.

At Mavidea, we rely on tools to make marketing easier and more effective. Here are 11 simple marketing tools that your business should consider:

Canva

Canva makes designing images easy. We use Canva to create simple marketing images when we don't have time to wait for a graphic designer or we need a basic image. Stock images are free or $1 and they have hundreds of easy-to-use tools and templates. If you need a header for a blog post or to create an image for Instagram, we highly recommend using Canva. If creating a marketing brochure or designing images for a complicated marketing campaign, we recommend working with a professional instead.

Tawk.to

Today's customers expect to be able to interact with a business. They will no longer settle for just submitting information on a form and waiting a couple of days for a response. Tawk.to offers free chat software for your website.

Mavidea uses the chat feature to give customers the answers they need when they need it. Since starting with Tawk.to, 75% of our leads come from our chat feature instead of standard online forms. Give your customers a better experience and increase your leads by using a chat service like Tawk.to.

ActiveCampaign

Automating marketing campaigns can save your business a significant amount of time. ActiveCampaign helps Mavidea automate campaigns to a level a step above of other platforms we've tried like MailChimp and Constant Contact. Our favorite aspect of ActiveCampaign is their chat support. When in need of help with a template, they jump right in to help. Plans start at $17/month.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a customer relationship management platform. It's comprehensive and complicated, but it can also help with more simple marketing-related tasks like tracking and qualifying prospects, which is what we use it for. They have an app that makes managing client profiles easy, and starter packages are inexpensive at around $25/month.

Grammarly

We all make errors when we write, but these errors give the wrong impression to our audience. Grammarly is a tool that helps you catch mistakes before publishing a post or sending an email. We use the Grammarly Chrome extension to catch spelling and grammatical errors. It has helped us limit mistakes and gives us peace of mind that we won't have any "oh no!" moments that reflect negatively on our brand.

LastPass

LastPass gives you easy access to all of your passwords. For Mavidea, it makes our daily marketing efforts simpler by saving time. Use LastPass to quickly login to all of your online accounts and manage passwords for your team.

Social Media Platforms

Social media is essential to every business, but it's important to focus your efforts on the platforms that will have the most impact on your business. For Mavidea, we focus on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Instagram is the most underutilized social network for small businesses. It can help showcase your work to potential customers, whether you're marketing to individuals or businesses. Create an Instagram account for your business and post high-quality photos of your team, business building (if you have one), and your work. This will allow current and future clients to tag you in posts, which gives your brand exposure to a new audience.

DropBox

Cloud storage services, like DropBox, allow you to store and share any electronic file, from marketing images to PDFs. As the most widely used cloud storage provider, Dropbox is a service we use frequently to send and receive files from clients. There are free options available to get started using Dropbox, which may help you organize and simplify your marketing efforts by giving your business a central hub to keep your digital assets. You can also give your entire team access to your account, so that they can access the folder at any time from anywhere.

Fiverr

Known as a marketplace where service-providers offer anything from writing to graphic design starting at $5, Mavidea uses Fiverr when we need simple marketing materials quickly. If we want a blog post turned into an infographic in a day or a Facebook Live video transcribed, we use Fiverr. Fiverr is a good place to find a variety of inexpensive services that can be accomplished quickly, not a substitute for a professional graphic designer or content writer,

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is lead generation software that helps us capture leads on our websites using pop-ups. It's fully customizable and has easy-to-use templates that we utilize for marketing campaigns.

SurveyMonkey

To better serve your customers in the future you have to understand how you're doing right now. Mavidea uses SurveyMonkey for quarterly surveys to help with customer retention. We track our Net Promoter Score to gauge customer loyalty and to understand in what areas we need to improve. SurveyMonkey is easy to use and inexpensive, and effective for sending surveys to your customers.

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