Digital Marketing Marketing & Sales Uncategorized

7 must-have tools to ramp up your DIY digital marketing

Written by Quentin Aisbett

Starting a new business, project, or campaign is expensive. Hiring a consultant or agency may be too pricey for many entrepreneurs.

If you’re on a tight budget, you don’t need to worry, there are affordable ways to market your business. With the right digital marketing tools, you can do your own graphic design, social media posts, source and promote content, and manage your marketing.

Keep reading to learn how to promote your business for free.

Graphic Design

Before you worry about engaging or reaching your audience, you need to be sure you have quality content. Canva is great to use for graphic design, and you can select a free plan. It offers interactive, intuitive design elements for free, and the pro features are worth the upgrade.

Your content can be interactive, animated, and captivating. With templates for events, announcements, and more, you won’t run out of ideas. Upgrading to Pro expands on your already expansive design and publishing features.

The pro option costs $17.99AUD a month, with features for a brand kit. You also gain access to collaboration, brand management, storage, security and support features.

Sourcing

Finding valid sources for content is important, too. Sourcebottle has you covered. Whether you’re a blogger or business, you can get the information you need.

Sourcing is helpful for any content producers who want to ensure they have the best, most accurate information possible. You post a query and expert sources respond. Using this feature is completely free.

Social Media

For your social media needs, consider MeetEdgar. The platform offers a variety of features to automate your marketing efforts. Its features include social media automation, management features, and real-live human support.

Social media automation includes suggested variations, post generation (by URL), category-based scheduling, and continuous posting. You’ll have access to an unlimited content library, and you can import your latest content. There’s even support for native photo and video.

Manage these tools with A/B testing, weekly email reports, trackable links. If you ever need help, you have access to live support and a coach.

Pricing for MeetEdgar starts at $19USD per month for freelancers and growing brands. For entrepreneurs and small businesses, you only have to pay $49 a month. There’s a free 7 day trial to test out this platform for yourself.

Marketing Automation and Integration

Your digital marketing tools cover more than social media automation. In fact, marketing automation tools often cover much more, including generating reports and automation for other content.

The right tool integrates the different platforms and services you use. The right tool to support your digital marketing strategy will save you time. Zapier does just that.

Zapier integrates over 2,000 apps to build workflows with an intuitive, simple design. You can pick between free and paid premium plans. The free plan offers one-to-one connections for your apps, basic automation tasks, and help from the support team.

The premium plans feature better workflows with more steps and conditions. You also receive priority support with the option to upgrade or downgrade whenever you want.

Search Engine Optimisation

Optimising your business for visibility in search engines can be easy. Your biggest investment will be your time. You need to make sure your content actually reaches your target audience. Once you learn the basics of SEO, you’ll be set.

One of the most reliable tools for SEO is Ahrefs. If you own a website, you can access their tools for free. Doing this gives you access to invaluable tools for your SEO. With an account, you can:

  •     Monitor SEO health: scan for common issues and get advice on how to fix them
  •     Understand backlinks: browse data and find helpful insights on inbound and outbound links
  •     Evaluate keywords: learn what keywords work for your site
  •     Access to other tools: search volume, keyword difficulty, and traffic value

Content Promotion

Your engaging content deserves to be seen. Part of increasing reach means engaging the right audience on social. With Quuu Promote, you can do just that. It’s a simple, affordable tool, too.

Add your RSS feed to the platform. Submit your content and track shares. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. The platform ensures your content will be seen by real people (and the right people, too). Your SEO on social will improve, too.

The platform starts at $50USD a month. With other platform boosting techniques easily costing more than this, it’s a worthwhile investment.

Reporting

Marketing reporting is just as critical as your marketing tactics – How else will you know what’s working?

Pocket Insights is a great solution if you’re not a fan of dashboards or you find Google Analytics a little intimidating.

With this platform, you can have your website analytics, search rankings, Google My Business performance and Facebook insights all delivered via email each week. It’s simple to understand, and your first two reports are free. Otherwise, plans start at $15 a month.

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About the author

Quentin Aisbett

Quentin Aisbett is the founder at Melbourne based digital agency OnQ Marketing. His favourite topics include SEO, PPC, content strategy and analytics.