Effective marketing requires a strong presence online, which takes an ongoing effort to achieve. It’s not enough to build a great website and post a blog every few months; you need to consistently post content, update your social pages, and stay connected with existing customers to keep your business relevant in the ever-changing internet landscape. Fortunately, there are many different tools and apps that can help you manage your online presence, automating elements of the process to save you time and money. Paired with a smart content strategy from Pennington Creative, the following apps and websites can ensure that your business doesn’t get lost among a sea of competitors.
Hootsuite
Social media has become integrated into daily life, so your business may be hurt by a lack of social updates. When you’re able to manage and schedule posts from a single dashboard for each of your social accounts, you can reduce the time you need to invest into this valuable practice. Hootsuite is a leading app to manage social profiles, schedule content, search existing posts, and track messages and mentions. This will allow you to see who is engaging with your brand and where, which can further refine your marketing strategy.
WordPress
A business cannot survive without a well-designed website, but not all businesses have the resources to hire a graphic designer and build a website from the ground up. WordPress offers a solution with website and blog templates, which can be customized with various widgets and add-ons to suit your needs. You’ll also have a custom domain that aligns with your brand message, so all customers will see is a finished, easy-to-navigate blog or website.
Facebook Ads
Though it is important to create and update social pages on major platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you may need to go a step further to gain followers and get the attention of your ideal audience. Facebook Ads can be a good place to start with social advertising, as Facebook is the most widely utilized social site and allows you to customize ads with demographic data that hones in on the right audience for your business’ services. The Facebook Ads app is designed with the average business owner in mind, so you don’t have to be a marketing expert to build effective ads that expand your reach.
Mailchimp
Email marketing has been used for years, and it is not likely to go out of style any time soon, especially as newsletter templates become better suited to a mobile layout. Mailchimp is designed to make email marketing easy for your business to manage, offering the ability to send monthly newsletters as well as automated emails that are triggered when a customer signs up for a new service, abandons a cart before making a purchase, or enters a certain geographical area. In addition, Mailchimp provides analytic data that will allow you to see where your email campaign is succeeding and where you might be losing the interest of your customers. Along with an intuitive website, Mailchimp offers an easy-to-use mobile app so you can manage your marketing emails on the go.
Quora
One of the reasons you might invest in content marketing with services like blogs and onsite copy is to establish yourself or your business as an authority within your field. You can reinforce this reputation using Quora. Quora is a question-and-answer website where anyone can pose questions, which are answered by a community of users. By becoming a reliable resource for people asking questions related to your area of expertise, you can access an audience of more than 100 million users.
Feedly
Every industry may experience new trends that can take over at a moment’s notice and completely change customer expectations. Even more minor trends can have a strong impact on what works for your marketing approach, so it’s helpful to have all of your industry-related news in one place. Feedly can give you just that with a central place to read and organize all the news that’s important to you and your business. This app can also make it easy to share pertinent news stories on your social channels or find inspiration for an upcoming blog series or infographic.
Google Drive
Particularly if you outsource content creation to seasoned professionals, you may be getting different types of content on a regular basis. Having a central, cloud-based storage system will ensure that you know exactly where all of your content is and provide you with the organizational tools you need to manage it effectively. Google Drive not only offers free options for your online storage, but is also easy for anyone to use, allowing you to encourage creative collaboration both within and outside of your organization.
Are you hoping to get noticed online? Pennington Creative can help by providing insight as well as content creation services that are available in customized bundles to fit your needs. To see what we can do for you, check out our blog copy and plug-and-play social media services or get in touch with us today.
