9 Free Social Media Marketing Tools For Small Businesses
If you've been using social media marketing for your brand for a while, you may have started to realize that using only native apps is limiting. When you add a new platform or team member, your workflow starts to slow down.
Marketers have a long list of responsibilities that keeps getting longer. It can be hard to keep up with everything, from social media marketing to customer service to advertising.
As you know, social media can take up a lot of time. It also includes a wide range of different jobs, from data-based ones like tracking analytics to creative ones like making graphics.
Small businesses can't reach their marketing goals without the help of social media tools. You can use these tools to make your job easier, whether you want to edit photos or schedule posts across multiple networks.
There are a lot of marketing tools out there, so you should be able to find a few that work for you and your budget. All of the social media tools below have free trials, so you can try them out.
In this blog post, we'll look at how these 9 free social media marketing tools can help small businesses get more customers and sales, both online and off.
Do Social Media Marketing Tools Only Work For Online Businesses?
It's possible that some people believe that online businesses are the only ones who need to use social media, but this could not be further from the truth. People in the surrounding area can be informed about what's going on at brick-and-mortar businesses by using social media.
This contributes to the development of a sense of community, provides customers with an outlet for the expression of their thoughts and opinions, and opens up new opportunities to entice customers with special deals or other offerings.
This can be accomplished in a variety of ways for traditional stores that use brick and mortar, including the following: Add a location map to your social media profiles so that people know what's nearby, and then market the location as a perk for those who spend some time browsing and shopping.
Use your marketing team to post promotional messages in order to increase store traffic. Add a location map to your social media profiles so that people know what's nearby.
So, to summarize this section: social media marketing works for online and offline businesses to acquire more customers and more sales.
What Social Media Marketing Tools Should A Small Business Start With?
Every small business should start with easy-to-use social media marketing tools to test what is working and what is not working. The success of a small business is measured by the KPI (key performance indicator) numbers and not by having fancy and expensive marketing tools.
This is why I want to show you what is working for me because I also consider myself a small business online and these following tools have cut my time in half, giving me more time to focus on other areas of my business. I recommend trying their free plan out before upgrading.
Canva
Price: Free And Starts At $12.95/Month
Canva is a user-friendly online tool for making professional-looking graphics in minutes, perfect for sharing on your business's various social media channels. If making social graphics from scratch seems like too daunting a task, you can use one of the website's dozens of templates instead.
You don’t need to hire expensive logo designers, graphic designers, or print designers who will charge an arm and a leg to do something you can do (or one of your employees) in under an hour.
The best thing about Canva is that it has many templates for the stuff you want to create. All you have to do is click on it, make a few edits and tweaks, and you have something that is 100% yours to download and post on social media or print it to post it inside of Starbucks community boards.
Overall, I use Canva every time before publishing a new GrooveBlog post, and all the images you see below the subheadings were created by this easy-to-use graphic designer tool!
GrooveBlog
Price: Free And Starts At $39.95/Month
GrooveBlog is a platform that allows you to blog about your business to reach more customers online who use the power of search engines (like Google, Bing, or Yahoo) to find solutions to their wants and needs.
An example could be if your business offers water pressure cleaning services in the area of San Diego, California and a user is trying to find the nearest business who can help them clean their house property.
Your GrooveBlog post can appear on the top pages of Google, providing information through a blog about: the tools you use to clean the house walls; the before and after of driveway pavement; customer testimonials; etc.
The more content your website has when it comes to blogs, the wider the "virtual" reach you have on the internet to bring awareness to your customers about what you provide to them as well as the benefits they can get if they go with you instead of your competitors.
QR.io
Price: Free And Starts At $35/Month
QR.io is a bar code generator and marketing platform that creates unique custom codes to track how many potential prospects or buyers have scanned them.
In other words, you can create a link redirecting to any website you want people to go to by embedding it into the bar code (very easy to do) and then printing it out and posting it up at a store location that will grant you permission to place your stuff on their walls.
Businesses can offer discounts, quiz games, business map locations, and anything else they want to be honest about, as long as they can convert it into a link and embed it in the bar code.
Here is another blog of mine on how to use QR bar codes with NFC stickers to take this social media marketing tool to the next level.
KonnectzIt
Price: Free And Starts At $12/Month
KonnectzIt allows small businesses to automate small and large tasks on autopilot.
Let’s say the manager of the local business wants to stay updated on every new activation and upgrade his wireless mobile store is doing. Instead of sending the information manually every time, with a few clicks, this mundane but important task can be automated and resolved.
You can also set it up to say which customers got a new activation on their mobile plan as well as which ones upgraded their old devices to newer ones, with all their details, of course!
To make KonnectzIt simple, it’s used for passing information from one app to another to team members, updating Google Sheets, adding people to your contact list, informing you about deposits made to your PayPal account, etc.
In my personal use, I have it to add leads to a specific email list to keep track of those who are interested in the thing they opted in for! Click here to read the review.
Jasper AI
Price: Free And Starts At $29.95/Month
Jasper is an artificial intelligence marketing tool that assists small businesses by writing new or more content such as: website copy, sales copy, Facebook ad copy, product descriptions, article introductions, outlining blogs and so much more.
The way this marketing tool can help small businesses is by brainstorming ideas around one subject or keywords to create new and fresh ideas to publish on the internet, like when it comes to blogging or writing a sales script with copywriting formulas like: A.I.D.A or P.A.S.
One of my personal hacks to answer millions of questions under an hour to establish authority on Quora is to copy and paste them into Jasper AI, then copy the answer from Jasper AI and paste it to the user who asked on Quora.
At this point, it is all about how to use this software with creativity to get the most out of it to benefit you and your business the most!
Printful
Price: Completely Free
Printful is a print on demand business that allows you to sell products without having an inventory. They have a wide range of selections you can choose from and customize.
Sell it as if it were your own product and make a profit from it as long as you are selling it over the cost price.
If you already have an e-commerce website, most likely it will have an integration app to allow you to add the items to your store to sell them under your brand. You can also sell it by using a website that Printful allows you to use with their platform.
This would be an extra way to make an extra income for small businesses by selling: shirts, hats, shoes, keychains, backpacks, phone cases, posters, blankets, laptop cases, leggings, and so much more under your brand.
I have an anime online store where I sell tons of gear dedicated to anime fans who can’t stop binge-watching their favorite anime shows. The only time I remember about my online store is when my phone notifies me about a purchase made. Ha! I love this passive income idea!
Linguix
Price: Free And Starts At $10/Month
This tool is more to help small businesses or those who have millions of grammar mistakes when writing an email letter, proposal letter, social media content, etc.
Without this tool, you’ll find tons of errors on my blogs. Just go to my very first one, and you will catch me making mistake after mistake. Hopefully, I can fix them before you read them. Ha!
KeywordSearch
Price: Free And Starts At $99/Month
KeywordSearch is the best YouTube keyword discovery and search marketing tool to help grow small businesses' YouTube channels with laser-targeted words! You can even spy on what your competitors are doing to rank their videos on the top pages of YouTube!
If you are an online business selling “affiliate marketing courses” to promote your software platform, you need to tell and show your viewers why your program is better than the competition through benefits, case studies, and even interviews with the people interviewing you!
I’d suggest going after high keyword volume and low competition to rank your videos for that keyword phrase, so your dream customer can click on your video and learn more about your business solutions.
The more content you have on specific laser-down keywords, the more “virtual” real estate property around these keywords you will own on YouTube. In other words, you’ll have more reach potential versus your competitors to acquire customers for leads and sales.
GetResponse
Price: Free And Starts At $19/Month
GetResponse is a powerful email marketing tool that allows you to send messages to leads and buyers' email addresses.
Small business owners can exchange something of value, like a lead magnet or a discount code, that provides usefulness to the website visitor or the walk-in traffic to a local business store.
Once the business has acquired the contact information to get in touch with a customer via email, the business owner or the team can forever send exclusive promotions to get the same lead back to the local business store or website to win an easy sale by making “sexy offers”.
A sexy offer can be: getting different products at a special price, getting first dibs on merchandise before anyone else, accessing behind-the-scenes content that is meant for only buyers, etc.
Overall, the higher the business builds their list, the higher their income will be!
Conclusion: Online And Local Businesses Can Boost Their Bottom Line To Generate More Sales By Spending Less Time With These Social Media Marketing Tools
These tools can help with content creation, email marketing, spying on competitors, and more for a fraction of the cost.
Choose one and “master” it before jumping into another social media marketing tool, because multitasking will cause very slow growth for a business. We want fast but smart progress!
Time is the most valuable asset everyone has, and by spending the time smarter instead of working harder, these social media marketing tools can help boost sales without having to do much of the manual work to increase monthly revenue.
All these social media marketing tools also have tutorial training to understand their functions and how to make the most out of them.
At the end of the day, go with your intuition and what you think will benefit you in the long run to see more success with any of these marketing tools!
