When you run your own business, are a member of a small team, or simply have a to-do list half a mile long and no free time until Autumn 2029, anything that can save you valuable hours is worth celebrating! I know that for many businesses, marketing can be low on the priority list, which is fine when work is flooding through the door, but it really can help to keep your name out there in the world should you decide to take on additional clients or find yourself with a quiet spell in your business. As a result, I’ve put together my list of top 5 quick and simple marketing tools this month to share with you – I hope you find it useful!
Canva – https://www.canva.com/en_gb/
If you want to create images for customer emails, social media posts, your business website or simple printed marketing materials, and want images that look good and are reasonably professional, Canva is a great option. There’s no replacement for a professional graphic designer if you are looking for unique branding and slick imagery, but Canva is simple to use and has a free version – another benefit!
Lumen5 – https://lumen5.com/
Another free tool – this one allows you to cut and paste written content into it (a blog or a couple of informative paragraphs about your business from your website, for example), and it will create a video for you with AI populated slides and graphics. Even if the video isn’t quite right, you can easily incorporate royalty-free images, videos and music using a simple drag-and-drop builder, and create interesting video content within a few short minutes!
Unsplash – https://unsplash.com/
Need some professional imagery for any of your marketing materials? Unsplash provides thousands of professionally created, free images and photos that you can download and use for any project.
Answer the Public – https://answerthepublic.com/
Want to write a blog or social media post but have no idea where to start? Why not use Answer the public – another free tool – and enter a description of the product or service that you want to write about into this search tool? It provides a list of questions that real people have typed into the search engines about your product/service – questions that you could easily answer as an expert in the field! For example, if you make handmade chocolates, you could enter that into the tool and it would provide a list of blog topics you could write about, including: “How long do handmade chocolates last?”, “Types of handmade chocolates”, and “How to store handmade chocolates”.
Tags Finder – https://www.tagsfinder.com/en-gb/
Whichever social media accounts you are posting to, it’s worth considering using hashtags to help increase the visibility of your social media posts online. People can search for posts using hashtags, so you need to make sure that yours are relevant. Hashtag research tools like Tags Finder will provide a list of relevant hashtags for the products and services you deliver, or for the kind of post that you are writing about, and you can easily copy and paste them into a social media post.
Each of these tools is free, quick, and simple to use, so if you want to spend a little bit of time this week on your business marketing, why not take a quick look? Happy marketing!