As a small business owner, you may find it overwhelming to navigate the world of digital marketing. Fortunately, there are a plethora of digital marketing tools available that can help you make informed decisions about promoting your business online. Investing in these tools can provide invaluable knowledge for minimal time and effort, making them essential for every small business. In this article, we will explore some of the top digital marketing tools for small businesses.
Hootsuite: Social Media Management Made Easy
Hootsuite is a free online tool that allows you to manage multiple social media accounts in one place. With over 16 million users, it’s ideal for small businesses and start-ups. Hootsuite supports Twitter, Facebook, Pages, LinkedIn, WordPress blogs, Instagram, and YouTube. Its most powerful application is organizing Twitter more effectively. By splitting the Twitter home feed into individual streams, you can focus on mentions of your brand, replies to your tweets, and mentions of your products. Hootsuite also offers an analytics function that lets you track how posts have performed and how much engagement they generated. Additionally, you can use Hootsuite as a digital PR tool by responding to journalists’ requests for information and comments. By doing so, you can earn your business some free coverage and new links to your website, which benefits your overall SEO strategy. Hootsuite Professional is available to try free for 30 days, after which the subscription costs £39 a month for just one user and 10 social profiles.
Moz Link Explorer: Access Backlink Data for Your Website and Competitors
Moz offers a range of digital marketing tools that are useful for small business owners. Moz Link Explorer is one of them, providing access to backlink data for your website and those of your competitors. Earning links to your website is crucial for developing your search visibility, and Moz Link Explorer shows you what links your website currently has and who is linking to your competitors’ websites. This information can inspire new link-building ideas. This free tool searches 41 trillion links, 718 million domains, and seven trillion pages to find backlinks, anchor text, and calculate domain authority and spam score.
SEMrush: Analyze Your Competitors’ Digital Marketing Activities
SEMrush is a favorite among small business owners who use it to better understand their competitors’ digital marketing activities. It offers a backlink analysis tool similar to Moz Link Explorer, allowing you to monitor your keyword rankings and research new keywords to target. SEMrush also enables you to analyze your competitors’ websites to see how many visitors they get, whether or not they’re paying to advertise, and for what key search terms their websites rank. You can compare your business’s website directly against a competitor’s, and SEMrush will give you all the metrics you need to see how you stack up against the competition. This powerful tool allows you to gain a thorough keyword and competitor analysis, and you are allowed up to 10 link queries and 50 rows of data per query for free every month. For more in-depth analysis, you would need the Pro version, costing $179 (£144) a month plus VAT.
Answer the Public: Get Content Ideas for Your Website
Answer the Public is a website that provides content ideas for blogs and publications. By inputting your topic or area of interest, the tool shows you all the questions people ask about it, helping to inspire new keyword targeting ideas or blogging themes for your website. Answers are split into “why,” “what,” “how,” “where,” and “are.” This tool is very useful and can spark further content thoughts for your next creation.
YouGov Ratings: Understand Your Audience
YouGov Ratings is a vox pop service that helps companies question the demographic they want to reach. You can type in a product or industry, TV show, or public figure, and YouGov Ratings will show you demographic trends of fans of that search term. This tool uses data to identify trends and can surface these trends to help you better understand your audience. It will show metrics including age range, location, socio-demographic breakdown, and lifestyle, such as other products/topics of interest to that audience group. This can help you target content to specific audiences and gain insight into your target market, revealing demographics you never would have thought of otherwise.
Google Analytics 4: Measure the Impact of Your Digital Marketing Efforts
Google Analytics is a tool that sits behind your website, gathering data about people who visit. It allows you to track traffic, demographics such as location, device information, on-site behaviors such as how many pages people view per visit and which pages are most popular, how many purchases are being made on your website, and more. This data is invaluable in proving the value of the investments you’re making and the effects they’re having on your business. As of July 1, 2023, standard “universal” analytics and Google Analytics 4 will become the de facto Google analytics platform. Google Analytics 4 offers a more customizable dashboard, customizable reporting, more detailed reporting, better real-time data, the ability to track actions people take on your website, better data exporting, and more. It is important to note that Google Analytics 4 can be a bit of a head-scratcher if you’re used to classic Google Analytics, so it’s recommended to run both Google analytics platforms in parallel before Google switches off the classic dashboard in July.
Conclusion
Digital marketing tools can help small businesses make informed decisions about promoting their businesses online. Hootsuite, Moz Link Explorer, SEMrush, Answer the Public, YouGov Ratings, and Google Analytics 4 are just a few of the tools available. By investing in these tools, small business owners can gain invaluable knowledge for minimal time and effort, making them essential for every small business.
