We explore a fascinating trend in social media marketing, as well as celebrate the launch of our own social channels.
Instagram and Sweatpants: Social Media as Marketing Strategy
Over the past two years, we’ve noticed some non-clothing brands evolving into streetwear and fashion companies. This trend is partly due to COVID-19 and everyone being quarantined, but that isn’t the only reason…
Our Top 5 Paid Marketing Tools For Small Businesses
Check out our top 5 paid marketing tools for small businesses! These are just some of the tools we’ve used personally and found very effective and affordable. Enjoy this list of some of our favorite tools and why we like them.
1. Canva Pro
Canva Pro is the premium version of Canva’s design tools. They offer a very user-friendly design suite chock-full of templates, fonts, and graphics. If you upgrade to their pro plan, you get more complex graphic elements alongside a larger collection of stock photos, audio, and video. When you are working with specific branding guidelines, the pro account will also allow you to upload and use custom fonts!
Experienced graphic designers might still find Canva a little too restrictive due to a high level of user friendliness. For more complex designs Adobe Photoshop (seen above) is still our top pick. But the additional templates, stock photography/video, and 100GB of cloud storage for Canva Pro make the $9.99/mo price a great value. By comparison, Photoshop in its most basic form will also run you $9.99/mo, but without any of the extra templates, fonts, or stock photography, and has a considerably steeper learning curve. Either way, having a solid content creation tool is a must for small businesses.
2. Plausible Analytics
Plausible is an open-source, privacy-centric alternative to Google Analytics. Don’t get us wrong, Google Analytics is a MUCH more powerful tool when it comes to actually analyzing data. But for many clients and situations, the level of data provided by Plausible is perfectly useful.
Plausible provides a simple, clean dashboard that offers up the most common web analytics people are looking for. There is no need to create custom reports or dig through layers of navigation; consequently, the script that you add to the code of your websites is much smaller than Google Analytics. This means your page will load faster! As an open source, privacy-centric analytics tool, you and your user’s traffic data is not shared or sold, as with Google. The downside? It isn’t free like Google Analytics. Plausible starts at a quite affordable $6/mo for 10k views or less, which still makes it a great option for a small business or someone looking to have more control over their privacy.
3. RivalIQ
RivalIQ is a social media analytics tool. The service offers data insights to help you plan your social strategy. Their advantage is their “Competitive Landscapes,” dashboards that aggregate social media performance data and updates from your competitors in one spot. This allows you to benchmark your social media performance, pick up new tips and strategies, stay on top of social trends through social listening, and compare your posts and stories.
RivalIQ is a very powerful tool for social media managers looking to take their performance to the next level. The main value of the service is the power it gives you to strategize–being able to see your competition’s top posts, hashtags, bio updates, engagements, and more from a bird’s-eye view. This is a unique perspective that would normally take a ton of research. RivalIQ starts at $199/mo for 5 companies worth of tracking (which includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin analytics).
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a post scheduler and social media planner. It helps you save time by scheduling multiple posts on multiple social accounts simultaneously, as well as manage messages and engagement all from the same spot. Some of our favorite features are Hootsuite’s numerous learnings, webinars, and templates available. We also like that you can schedule unlimited posts. They truly are a one stop shop for developing a robust social media presence. Hootsuite starts at $49/mo (there is a limited, free account if you want to try it, though).
Depending on your needs, Buffer is an alternative we also recommend. It has a more robust free plan, along with a much less expensive $15/mo entry level offering. Buffer doesn’t offer the same level of education and support that Hootsuite does, but might be more appropriate for smaller or lower-volume social media needs.
5. Mailchimp (Essential plan)
Mailchimp has been around now for 20 years, so they must be doing something right. They are an e-mail marketing platform offering a nice variety of tools and automations. They offer a wysiwyg and/or code based editor so you can design your own e-mail templates, or choose from one of their ready-made designs. Their tools allow you to create newsletters, marketing e-mails, transactional/reminder e-mails, and more. You can even use their editor to create basic websites and landing pages! Mailchimp integrates with many tools and platforms. Since they have pedigree, we’ve personally found less of our e-mails hit the spam folders when sent through Mailchimp as opposed to some of the other options out there.
Mailchimp DOES have a free tier (you can check out our top FREE marketing tools list here), but unfortunately you aren’t able to schedule e-mails in advance so it isn’t all that helpful. Also, their advanced customer journey features are locked behind a second paywall. But overall, the features and reliability of their “Essentials” plan (starting at $9.99/mo) is our top pick for a small business marketing tool.
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed some insight into some of our favorite paid marketing tools for small businesses. If you are a small business or professional looking for marketing help, consider hiring a small business digital marketing agency like INGKY! We will leverage our tools and experience to do the marketing for you, so you can focus on running your business. Check out what we do, and if you’re interested in a free quote, contact us today!
If you’re a small business or individual looking for some top free marketing tools, read on! We’ve collected some of our favorite marketing and productivity tools to help you succeed without spending any money.
1. Canva
Canva is a user-friendly graphic design website that allows you to create all sorts of content. There are templates for things like: social media posts, invoices, resumes, business cards, media kits, posters, logos, merchandise, and more. A lot of the available templates, content, and fonts are free! When you are working with specific branding guidelines, the pro account will also allow you to upload and use custom fonts (learn more about our top paid/premium tools here!)
Advanced graphic designers might find the toolset a little too restrictive due to a high level of user friendliness, but overall Canva is a fantastic design tool.
2. Clockify
Clockify is a free, powerful time tracker. It’s easy to use to keep track of hours for multiple clients, projects, and team members. There are options for billable vs non-billable hours, along with the ability to set variable hourly rates. You’re able to run and save reports on your hours and rates as well. One of our favorite features is the choice of a running timer, a time-punch editor, or a calendar view. You can even integrate your time punches with your existing Google calendar!
3. Best-Hashtags
Best-hashtags.com is a search engine for social hashtags. It’s a quick and easy way to find new and trending hashtags. You can also search for topics to find relevant hashtags to add to your upcoming social posts. Finally, you can see rankings of related hashtags ranked by post volume, so you’re able to choose tags that are appropriate for your audience size.
Unfortunately, it’s unclear how their “Top 10” hashtags are ranked, as the data they serve is only basic (and isn’t always up to date). But for a free tool, best-hashtags is a fantastic way to add some data-driven direction to your hashtag choices.
4. Unsplash
Unsplash is a website that claims to have “beautiful, free images gifted by the world’s most generous community of photographers. Better than any royalty free or stock photos.” While the definition of “better” is subjective (we also use traditional stock photos from Adobe Stock and Shutterstock), it’s definitely true that you can find photos on Unsplash that look less posed. We often find that the photographers and models seem to be having more fun. The crowd-sourced, semi-professional photos also seem to come from a wider variety of locations outside the United States, adding some well-needed diversity to the stock photo world.
5. WordPress / Underscores.me
WordPress is a popular open source content management system that helps you build websites and blogs. It currently has the claim to fame of providing the back-end for 41% of the web. WordPress has a plethora of powerful plugins, a wysiwyg editor, and a whole industry of themes–both paid and free. If you are a developer or designer looking to build a custom theme yourself, we recommend starting with Underscores.me, another open source project that acts as a responsive “starter” theme. Hacking Underscores into your own custom theme gives you more control than relying on theme builders. Either way, WordPress has security and user management built right in, so you are free to focus on design and/or results!
WordPress is easy to recommend. Many clients already know or want it, it’s highly customizable, and it integrates well with many other tools. WordPress sites don’t have the greatest reputation for page-speed on mobile, but its many pros outweigh the cons. And it’s free!
Conclusion
We hope you found our top 5 free marketing tools online list helpful! Feel free to share it with any small businesses or entrepreneurs looking to step up their marketing efforts without spending a lot of money. Of course, free tools can only go so far. Check out the list of our top 5 paid/premium marketing tools to see what you can get by investing some money in your tools. Not looking to learn new tools, but still need results? Consider hiring INGKY for your digital marketing needs. You can see our services or contact us if you would like a free quote!
You’ve started a new site on Squarespace and it’s time for the next step: optimizing your design and SEO. Squarespace makes it very easy to create a great looking website. Their templates are intentionally restrictive, guiding even non-designers to make something that looks visually pleasing. But even within those templates there are steps you can take to maximize your design and SEO.
Leverage built-in Squarespace SEO tools
Google and other search engines will do their best to pull relevant information from your webpage, but it’s better to define it yourself. Manually set your SEO description and title for each of your pages. This makes it clear to both the algorithm and your potential customers what your page is about.
You can find this feature in page settings, then click on SEO.
Speaking of making your page clear, it’s important to use headings correctly. Choose accurate, searchable terms for your h1, h2, and h3 headers. Try to match your h1 header with the SEO title that you selected above. Following these steps will help Google (and your viewers) better understand and categorize your page.
Keep your page templates consistent
As visitors explore your website they want it to be easy to find the information they are looking for. Although there are multiple great looking page templates available from Squarespace, try to limit the number you use throughout the entirety of your website. Visitors shouldn’t have to deal with a new layout with each and every page on your website, that’s a great way to get them to get frustrated and leave.
Don’t neglect mobile view
While designing your pages, click on the Mobile Preview button to see how your page looks on a mobile device.
Over 50% of all internet traffic is now on mobile, so it’s worth it to take some extra care designing the mobile version of your site. Squarespace automatically scales your page down in a responsive way. However, there are still important design elements to consider:
Mobile logo max-height
You are able to change the size of your logo in the “Site Title and Logo” section while editing your site header. In the same section, change the Mobile Logo Max-Height to something appropriate for your logo. This ensures it doesn’t take up too much of your screen when your page is shrunk down to a mobile view.
Image focal point
Viewing your webpage in a portrait orientation or on a smaller resolution mobile screen will affect how your images display, potentially cropping some of the image off. Moving the Focal Point ensures that the subject of your image remains visible as the image is sized and cropped.
Following these tips will help optimize your Squarespace SEO and design. Leverage the templates, mobile view, and SEO tools Squarespace provides, and you’ll be climbing the Google ranks in no time. Or perhaps you’d like even more control over your design and SEO, and would prefer a custom website? Whether you’re starting fresh or have a stale website, INGKY provides both optimizing and developing services to take your website to the next level.
