There are plenty of advertising tools and techniques, whether you’re a small business or a huge multi-national company. The right mix of marketing can help grow your small business and generate leads for your corporate clients.
Advertising tools are effective because they encourage potential customers to take an action that can ultimately benefit a company, such as visiting its website or purchasing a particular product. Those examples include search engine optimization, paid search and affiliate programs. The purpose of advertising campaigns will vary from business to business. But no matter what a company tries to accomplish with a campaign, the ultimate goal remains the same: to drive qualified visitors to a company’s website or store.
SEMrush
Advertising is tricky because you often don’t know what’s going to work before you start.
And yet you don’t want to blow through a ton of your budget on the front end, either, just trying to see what works.
SEMrush can help you avoid such a costly mistake.
For example, long-tail keywords are awesome for SEO. But not so much for paid campaigns, where there’s typically not enough search volume to ever net you any clicks.
So even if the CPC is OK, there’s simply not enough demand to ever make it worth your time.
And you can’t invent or create search demand for specific keywords. It either exists, or it doesn’t. All you can do is capitalize on it once it’s already there.
SEMrush also provides you with competitive insight.
So if you’re stumped and unable to find enough keywords to get started with, you can pull up some of your competition who may already be advertising to quickly pull down a list of their keywords and ad copy
It’ll also provide a CPC range for each keyword, too. That way you can start estimating potential results based on a few hypothetical assumptions.
For example:
- What’s your historical conversion rate?
- Determine how much traffic you might need now to see at least one conversion (e.g. 1% = ~100 visits).
- Multiply each visit by the CPC to figure out how much that traffic might cost.
- Determine the difference from that and your average sale value to quickly see if your campaign might be profitable or not.
That’s obviously a simplistic, 30-second assumption we’re making, but it at least puts you down the path of connecting some hard data with your ad budget.
Facebook Ads Manager
What better place to turn for advice, information, and guidance than Facebook itself?
Through Facebook Ads Manager, you have access to all of the marketing tools necessary to create targeted ads meant to reach your audience.
This is the most basic Facebook marketing tool, but that doesn’t mean it has nothing to offer. If you plan on advertising your small business on Facebook, you must understand how to use it as part of your media strategy.
There is a five-step approach to getting started with Facebook Ads:
- Create a Facebook page or use one that is already existing.
- Provide information on what you want to promote.
- Choose the appropriate audience for your ad.
- Set your budget.
- Track your results.
There are no two ways about it: this is the one advertising tool that you need to fully understand, if you plan on reaching your goals. Fortunately, Facebook makes it extremely simple to get started.
FACEBOOK INSIGHTS
Facebook Insights is Facebook’s native analytics tools, and it will give you amazing insight into your on-platform activity and how it’s affecting your overall marketing goals. You can even get detailed metrics on how you’re performing compared to your competitors and take a look at what content is performing best so you can apply that knowledge to your overall campaigns.
HASHTAGIFY
Hashtagify is the ultimate hashtag research tool. Enter in a potential hashtag term and see all possible associated terms that may perform well, along with that phrase’s current and past performance in different demographics. This should help you identify and find top-performing hashtags for both Twitter and Instagram.
ProofHub
ProofHub is a leading project management and team collaboration software that you can use to manage your marketing projects as well as your teams effectively. It combines all the essential tools that you need to plan, collaborate, organize, and deliver projects on time. Define workflows and break projects down into smaller, manageable tasks.
The Kanban boards in ProofHub let you track the progress of each task and see them moving through the different project stages. Moreover, you can attach files and add comments to a task. The integrated chat tool even makes it possible for you and your teammates to have quick conversations over text messages.
Key Features:
Being an all-in-one project management software, ProofHub comes loaded with a wide range of features with the most prominent ones as follows:
Online proofing allows you to review, proof, and approve designs & documents in real-time. To give feedback or suggestions while reviewing a file, all you need is to add comments to the design file or the document. Additionally, the markup tool makes it possible to highlight and add feedback to the specific regions of a file.
Gantt charts incorporated in ProofHub offer a visual representation of the overall project timeline. You can view task schedules, drag and drop tasks to modify their schedules, set task dependencies, and highlight the critical path of a project. In addition, Gantt charts in ProofHub also give you the flexibility to associate milestones with tasks and track the progress of each task.
With ProofHub, you will get cloud storage to bring all your project files to a single place and manage them with relative ease. You can upload files from your computer or from third-party file storage services, including Box, Dropbox, GoogleDrive, and OneDrive. You can store multiple versions of a file and attach files to tasks and share them in chats, discussions, etc.
Tracking time for each task that you are working on becomes convenient with the in-built timers in ProofHub. While timers offer automatic time tracking, you can also make manual time entries to keep an accurate record of your working hours. All the time data gets stored in timesheets that you can access whenever you want and use them for various purposes like payroll, client billing, time management, and much more.
Reporting is an essential part of project management and with ProofHub, creating detailed project reports is just a few clicks away. The software lets you create and customize both project and resource reports. It is quite easy to highlight specific data in reports by picking parameters of your choice. You can even download the reports and use them in meetings to discuss project progress and make plans for better utilization of resources.
Ups:
- Simple and easy-to-understand interface with little to no learning curve
- Activity logs make it easy to keep track of everything happening within projects
- Create custom roles and set different permissions for each role
- IP restriction helps to prevent unauthorized access to your ProofHub account
Downs:
- Limited app integrations
What’s ProofHub Best For?
ProofHub is the ideal tool to have ultimate control over all your projects, tasks, and teams.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using ProofHub?
ProofHub has two simple pricing plans:
- Essential – $45 per month (billed annually)
- Ultimate Control – $89 per month (billed annually)
Crowdfire
If you want to manage the social media of your business in a simple and effective way, Crowdfire is the ideal app that you need on your side. It is one of the best social media management platforms and offers best-in-class features to help you stay on top of your social media profiles and campaigns.
By using Crowdfire, it’ll become easier for you to boost your social media engagement and growth. Moreover, the platform allows you to publish content on blogs, and you can also interact with customers to provide them excellent customer service. You can also discover relevant content to share with your audience and even schedule posts to publish them automatically at different times.
Ups:
- Easy to learn and use
- You can curate articles as well as images to be used across your social media accounts
- Queue meter helps you ensure that your social profiles stay active
- Customizable reports simplify the way you measure, track and understand your business’s ROI
- Competitive pricing
Downs:
- Doesn’t work well with LinkedIn
- The free version comes with a limited set of features
What’s Crowdfire Best For?
Crowdfire is flexible enough to meet the social media management needs of individuals, agencies, and businesses.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Crowdfire?
Crowdfire has three pricing plans:
- Plus – $7.48 per month (5 social media accounts)
- Premium – $37.48 per month (10 social media accounts)
- VIP – $74.98 per month (25 social media accounts)
GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER
It’s not a huge surprise that Google’s own keyword tool is a strong one for PPC and organic research. The tool is free, and you can quickly see keyword suggestions matching your search, along with the search volume, competition level, and the range of what you can expect to spend per bid.
Conclusion
There are so many advertising and marketing tools and services nowadays and it can be hard to figure out what is useful and what isn’t. But we don’t have to worry because we’ve done all the digging for you.
You can’t be expected to do it all yourself or have all the answers. Thankfully, that’s where good tools come into the mix. And they can even help you see what your competition is doing (and how to outperform them)