10 Marketing Tools We Are Grateful to Have in 2021 – Part 1
We’re almost two months into 2021 and things are starting to turn around. I say starting, hedging my best here. The vaccines are being distributed. We are supposed to be getting this herd immunity sometime in the summer. This COVID thing should soon be behind us.
There is a lot I’m sure we’re all happy to see in our rearview mirror, but one thing I wanted to harp on is some good marketing tools that are out there to fuel growth as we emerge from this mess. Some of these are new. Others are old ones that are still good one. Here’s a review of a list of tools that any small business owners should be considering for keeping their online marketing push strong.
#1: Clickflow
If you’ve ever spent time and money designing a landing page, an opt-in form, or anything else devised to drive conversions, you may be frustrated. It’s either too difficult to use or not good for producing exactly what you want. Clickflow is a marketing tool to consider. It’s robust, SEO-driven with an A/B testing feature, you can use to test every aspect of onsite SEO.
While Clickflow isn’t cheap – you’ll pay $109 per month – you can get a free trial version to check it out. Use it for a couple of months to get help improving your meta data, tags, and content for driving up your Google search ranking and get more conversions than ever before.
It’s definitely one to consider.
#2: Google Analytics
Google Analytics isn’t new but before you roll your eyes (yes I caught you) hear me out. A lot of small business owners don’t bother checking their Google Analytics and that’s a mistake. It’s probably costing them customers and revenue.
For a free tool, Google Analytics provides a ton of relevant (and actionable) information about your website visitors and their behavior. You can use it to determine which resources are sending you the most traffic and which content is driving conversions. You already have access to it – so start using it!
#3: Screaming Frog
What if you could chase Google’s spiders with a frog and spy on your competitors’ SEO? You can with the free version of Screaming Frog, an SEO crawler that can give you a leg up on your competitors.
Using Screaming Frog, you can scan up to 500 URLs and collect technical optimization data. It allows you to check tags, identify broken links, and find duplicate content. It’s a great way to audit your own site and spot holes in your competition’s SEO.
#4: Grammarly or just plain MS Word Grammar Checking
Really??? A spelling and grammar checker?
Yes.
If you do your own content writing and even if grammar is your strong suit, Grammarly or MS Word’s grammar checker is an indispensable tool. Grammarly’s free version should be robust enough for most small businesses.
I can’t tell you how easy it is to miss something obvious in your writing. Grammarly will not only spot spelling errors, but those pesky contextual errors that a lot of spellcheckers miss. It’ll correct your grammar and make suggestions to tighten up your content. You can also use it to flag duplicate content online – especially useful if you outsource your writing!
In part 2 of this article, I’ll be getting you give more of these to consider.
