5 Essential Tools For Small Business Marketing

Small Business Market

At VA Partners, we use a number of sales and marketing tools to help our small business clients grow their brands, find leads and land new customers.

The small business marketing projects and campaigns we plan and execute vary from client to client, but a number of tools serve as a foundation for many online sales and marketing activities.

Here are 5 types of marketing tools we think every startup or small business should have in place.

1. Website Analytics

Being able to track the activities on your company website is essential for understanding how prospective clients are finding your business and what content they interact with. Having website analytics means you can track the effectiveness of sales or marketing campaigns that involving driving customers to certain pages or promotional offers on your website.

Using an analytics program such as Google Analytics, you can gain insights on:

  • Number of website visits, unique visitors and pages viewed
  • How long visitors stayed on the site and the number of pages they viewed
  • Demographics of visitors, including city and language
  • Traffic statistics and navigation flow for each individual website page

Getting Started

Login to Google Analytics with a Gmail account, add your website profile, and Google will generate a snippet of tracking code. Once you insert the code snippet into your website’s header or footer, Google will start tracking your website statistics. You can view the data any time by logging in to Google Analytics.

Google Analytics

2. Landing Pages

A landing page is a page on your company website that typical provides an offer to the visitor, such as a downloadable guide or promotion, in exchange for their contact information. These pages are useful for capturing visitors’ contact information that they normally would not leave behind from just browsing your website.

Getting started

To create landing pages such as this one, we created a regular webpage page and used Gravity forms ($39) to capture contact information. This plugin also allows us to track the conversion of the form.

Landing page

3. Email Signup Forms

Email newsletters are an effective way to build a relationship with a prospect and to stay at the top of their mind. Similar to landing pages, email sign up forms enable you to capture contact information of potential leads. However, instead of a full page dedicated to capturing contact information, email signup forms are frequently found on sidebars, footers or at the end of a blog post.

Getting started: Email newsletter services such as MailChimp (free) and Constant Contact ($15/month) include free signup forms you can embed on pages, sidebars or the footer of your website.

email signup form

4. Company Social Media Pages

Social media is an effective way to increase the awareness of your business’ brand and build your reputation as a thought leader. According to a study by Aberdeen, 84% of B2B marketers use social media and another study by Simply Measured found that 98% of the top 100 brands are active on Twitter.

For B2B businesses, we recommend focusing your social media efforts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook.

Getting started

Sign up for Twitter with your company email; to create a LinkedIn company page, Google+ company page or a Facebook page, you will first have to to login through your personal account.

5. Social Media Account Management

Actively using, monitoring and managing multiple social media accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ can become overwhelming, especially if your business doesn’t have a full-time or part-time resource dedicated to social media management. To make the process more efficient, we use a social media management dashboard to handle both VA Partners’ social media accounts and our clients’ social media accounts.

Using HootSuite, you can:

  • Schedule social media updates
  • Search for relevant conversations to participate
  • Arrange news feeds into different streams for less cluttered reading

Getting Started

Create a free account at HootSuite and then authorize your social media profiles for use with HootSuite. HootSuite currently supports Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook.

If you need assistance setting up any of these tools for your startup or small business, contact us at VA Partners.

5 Essential Tools For Small Business Marketing