Starting up a small business inevitably means you don’t have much time or money spare. This is why marketing can often fall by the wayside.
However, establishing your brand is vital if you want to seriously compete with more long-standing companies and services. Luckily, there are plenty of online resources available to help small businesses manage their brand, marketing and PR.
Here are six tools well worth looking into:
SentiOne
A useful tool to monitor the conversation people are having about your fledgling brand. Every small business needs to be aware of how their company is being discussed so they can manage its reputation. SentiOne can track brand names, social profiles, specific topics and keywords across all major platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and more. It’s a ‘social listening’ tool that analyses mentions of your business in more than 26 separate languages.
Buffer
This tool makes it simple to manage multiple profiles across social media platforms. Buffer automates your brand’s social shares across everything from Twitter to Instagram.
You’ll receive comprehensive analytics that will help you determine how well your content is performing. Users can see the number of retweets, shares, clicks, reach, mentions and many more useful metrics.
Narrow
Another platform for small businesses, Narrow helps to build targeted audiences on Twitter. You need to enter keywords and hashtags that relate to the business or audience and Narrow will automatically follow accounts and like tweets connected to that data.
Over time the platform will give you analytics data that will help you work out how well certain keywords are performing. This allows you to hone your strategy based on real data.
Chattypeople
Although still a social platform orientated tool, Chattypeople works in a different way. It’s basically a platform that creates AI chatbots to work on Facebook. You don’t need to understand coding to use it and it integrates seamlessly with commerce options, helping you maximise revenue.
Small businesses that have limited employees can use Chattypeople to create chat bots to service customers, push promotions or simply answer questions.
Norbert
Many businesses want to appeal to a broad as possible audience. However, a more effective strategy for B2B brands is to create personalised outreach programmes for specific targets.
This inevitably needs major information gathering to find the contact details of key people. And this is where Norbert comes in. A fast and efficient email search engine, Norbert can find the corporate email address of anyone as long as you have their name and domain.
Portent
When you’re running an online business, you must publish regular, high-quality content. While this sound simple, it’s tricky to keep on top of during the early months and years of a new business.
To generate inspirational ideas for content, you can use Portent’s Content Idea Generator. You just enter a keyword and it will come up with lots of angles for content.
These are just some of the online tools available now to help you effectively market your brand. Many of them offer free trials so there’s nothing to lose in finding out whether they will work for you.
