There are a lot of aspects to marketing that you want to cover, but that doesn’t mean you need to do all the heavy lifting yourself! There are a plethora of tools and services that can help you get the job done and allow you to focus on what you to best. While it’s tempting to keep all marketing and content efforts in-house when it comes to digital marketing, there can be great benefits to utilizing outside sources, especially if you are working with a small team. It can be daunting to consistently produce content when there are bigger projects in your place – and that’s exactly where these tools can help!
Social Media Scheduling
Tools like Hootsuite or Later can help you batch produce content and schedule your posts ahead of time. Whether you operate as a solo strategist or a large team, planning and scheduling your content ahead can be a huge gamechanger. Within the platforms you can also analyze the performance of your content and track your mentions on social media. Make posting a breeze and combine all your social networks in one place.
Keyword planners
If you’re looking to optimize your organic traffic and build SEO, keyword planners like SEMrush and Ubersuggest are a great tool to help you get started. They can help you find relevant keywords to create content that ranks and resonates with your audience. You can analyze your own content, as well as your competitors, to get ideas on what to focus on and where there are any keyword or backlink gaps. After your content is published, you can dive into reports that will help you improve your content based on current metrics and further optimize your SEO-friendly content.
Project planners
Project planners can help you keep all your to-do lists in one easily accessible place, where you can manage tasks, updates and progress. You can add multiple team members into your sheets so you can simultaneously keep track of all processes in your business. Many tools like Asana and Trello also have integrations with tools such as Google Docs and Sheets and calendars, making it even easier to manage everything in one central location that everyone can refer to and work off of.
Affiliate Link Placement Optimization
This is another tool that’s helpful for a lot more than just affiliate marketing. Crazy Egg allows you to create “heat maps” of different pages on your site to show you where people are clicking (and where they aren’t). On the heat map, red areas show where interaction is “hot”—where lots of clicks are happening, while green areas are where people are not engaging. This provides a great way to see at a glance where people are connecting with your page and where they’re not.
How does this come in handy for affiliate marketing? Think of it this way: if you want to increase the odds that people will click on your affiliate links, you want to put those links where people are already clicking.Crazy Egg’s heat maps are great because instead of having to sort through a bunch of data, you can see at a glance what parts of your page are drawing people to click. You can set it to run on pages where you already include affiliate links, or ones where you plan to.
Headline Analyzer
If you’re looking to get more traffic to your site, you need to grab the attention of the reader to encourage them to go there. So start with one of the first points of contact: your headline. If the title of your blog or video doesn’t draw them in, you’re never going to get them to view your content, no matter how great it is! If your title falls flat, you’re missing out on a massive audience.
That’s where a tool like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer comes in.
It’s simple to use—just enter your title, click Submit, and the tool analyzes it and gives you a score based on factors like word commonality, emotional and power words, title length, and sentiment of the headline it’s self. From there, you can optimize the headline or analyze a variety of them to find out what performs best. It’s like a friend you can bounce ideas off of who will tell you which headline will get you the most results.
Virtual Assistants
One of the key struggles of having a small marketing team is finding someone to help accomplish tasks you don’t have time for but are still important to your business. This is where virtual assistance comes in. They are low that the cost of hiring a new staff member, but can help you do the administrative and sometimes time-consuming tasks that are required to help your business operate and scale. That way you can focus on what you do best, and delegate the rest. These VA are low cost and can help you stay on top of all of your tasks.
By using a service that specializes in virtual assistants, such as iWorker, you can save yourself the headache of finding a worker on your own as well as handling payments for workers that are abroad. You can hand off the lower-end tasks and grow your business at a lower price than hiring someone to join your team.
Freelance Services
This is especially relevant if you have a one-off job that you don’t want to hire for, services such as Fiverr or Upwork can help you find remote professionals that can help. Depending on your budget, you can hire freelancers from beginner to export levels to help with all things from spreadsheets to graphic design.
Content Writers
Creating content for your business and your brand can be time consuming work. This is where content writing services such as Crowd Content can really help you. They match your writing projects with qualified writers on their platform. You write a description of exactly what you are looking for, and let them write it. You can get the content piece usually within a day, and can request edits to tailor the content to what you need. This allows you to generate high quality content at a faster pace than your team can sustain alone.