Marketing is a big task and can mean that many of us at startups and small businesses find ourselves trying to cram three days of work into one. The good news is there are many tools out there to help with your marketing efforts, giving you more time to focus on strategy and new ideas. Here are nine of our favorites. 

A scheduling tool

Social media is an important part of any marketing strategy, but it can also become very time-consuming. If you aren’t careful, your channels could easily become inactive if you are pulled away to other tasks. A scheduling tool will make sure that your posts go out exactly when you want them to, additionally scheduling will allow you to create content in advance of posting when you have time to focus. There are a lot of tools available, here at Kuvio we prefer Hootsuite.

Google Optimize

Google Optimize is a website testing and experimentation platform. It enables quick and easy testing of page design and content changes. You can A/B test changes on your website to see what options perform best, and can set-up the variations with no knowledge of code. For example, you can easily change the color of a contact button. The platform also integrates with Google Analytics to help you analyze the testing results. 

Hotjar

A lot of your marketing efforts aim to bring visitors to your website, Hotjar lets you know what they do once they get there. You can see how users click, move and scroll across your website and the data is even sorted by device type. This can help you to restructure your site to lead users to the action you want them to take. 

Medium

If you write a company blog, you probably already have a page set up on your website. However, Medium provides another place to share your written work to expand your audience. You can easily share posts from your blog, be sure to add relevant tags so that it is recommended to users. You may find that publications within Medium choose to distribute your post or that it is featured in one of Medium’s daily digests, which will bring new readers to your work. The content that will do best is on Medium is should be creative and informative, pieces that are focused on promoting your company will do best on your own blog. 

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a great tool for email marketing because it combines a lot of functionality and can integrate with various other platforms. This tool provides templates for emails as well as customizable contact forms. Then you can store all of your email contacts in one place to make segmenting and sending easy. With the free plan, you can send up to 12,000 emails to 2,000 contacts per month which is great for startups. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides a full picture of your audience and is one of the most valuable tools you can use for free. You can see how many people are visiting your website and what they do once they arrive there. The platform also provides some demographic information about your audience. A few metrics we love to track are the session duration on our pages and our bounce rate. 

Trello

This is a great tool to help you keep your projects on track and can encourage collaboration between coworkers. This project management tool allows you to organize projects into checklists of tasks that can be assigned to users. It is a great way to keep your team up to speed on how work is progressing. 

HubSpot CRM

Customer relationship management helps you track your customers and prospects and your interactions with them so that you can provide personalized service. HubSpot’s CRM tool allows you to use a variety of features for free, we have been using it primarily to create a prospect and customer database so that our sales associate can help track leads and her interactions with them. 

Grammarly

Even the spelling bee champions among us sometimes need a little help with spelling and grammar. Grammarly has an online dashboard where you can upload or paste your text for an instant, advanced grammar review. Even better, there is a plug-in you can install that allows Grammarly to proofread everything you write, as you type it. The free version includes spelling check, basic grammar check, plagiarism check, and detailed explanations about the reasons why the error is a grammatical or spelling mistake.

We hope these tools help make your marketing efforts more efficient so that you can meet more customers and increase sales. Do you have a favorite marketing tool? Let us know on Twitter, @KuvioCreative. 

Kuvio Creative is a full-service web design and development company working to transform the agency-customer relationship. We seek to bring our expertise to your problems so you can spend time doing the work you love. Learn more: www.kuv.io