By Jock Purtle
Just because you don’t have a big business, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have a powerful marketing strategy. A lot of companies assume that their one-person marketing department stops them from doing much with their promotional messages. However, the truth is that you can have just as big of an impact on your followers, clients, and even potential business buyers with one person, as you could with an entire marketing team.
The key to attracting, informing and delighting your customers online isn’t having the right amount of workforce – it’s ensuring that you have the resources available to manage the marketing avenues available to you.
Here, we’re going to take a look at just five of the top tools that a one-person marketing team can use, to access all the potential of a gigantic advertising department.
1. HootSuite
It’s impossible to ignore the impact that social media has had on the digital marketing world. In fact, many smaller businesses actually start building their web presence on social media – before they’ve ever had a chance to invest in a website. With 22% of the world’s population on Facebook, it pays to make sure that you have a social strategy for your brand. The only problem is figuring out how to find the time for social media when you’re working on countless other marketing campaigns too.
The benefit of social media is that it allows you to have a conversation with your audience – but that conversation is constantly ongoing, making it very difficult for one-person marketing teams to stay on top of the trends. The good news is that tools like Hootsuite can help you to get on top of your social media strategies in a number of ways. With Hootsuite, you can:
- ~ Automate social media posts
- ~ Organize multi-channel campaigns
- ~ Find influencers to support your brand
- ~ Track performance on different profiles.
With the power to enjoy more control over social presence, you can spend less time worrying about the messages you send, and more time enjoying your connections with new customers.
2. Google Analytics
Sometimes, the best way to ensure that all your one-person marketing efforts are going according to plan is to measure and track your performance. Google Analytics is one of the most popular free tools available from the world’s biggest search engine. It’s easy to set up, and even easier to use, so you can begin reaping the benefits from the moment you launch your online business.
While Google Analytics is particularly good at tracking traffic – that isn’t all it does. You can also use Google to see where your traffic comes from – which can be a handy insight into how you should use your marketing resources. If you know that your social media campaign is driving a lot of traffic for instance, but you’re not getting much from PPC, then you’ll know where to adjust your budget in future.
On the other hand, you might notice that one keyword is giving you lots of conversions, but another one isn’t seeing any love at all. Google analytics isn’t one of the most advanced digital marketing tools on the web today, but it’s one that should form the foundations of just about every advertising strategy. The more data you collect, the more insightful your campaigns will be.
3. Ahrefs and Ahrefs Keywords
If you want to launch the very best company in your industry, then you need to know who you’re up against. Ahrefs is a portfolio of tools intended to help you get a better overview of the competitors in your field. You’ll learn where other people in your niche are getting the most traffic, and gather information about their content, backlinks, and even ranking keywords.
Ahrefs gives a one-person marketing team the opportunity to understand their competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, so you can potentially get ahead of the curve. The Ahrefs portfolio also comes with a particularly useful keyword tool, which can be crucial to your marketing strategy. The Keyword Explorer database comes with access to more than 3 billion keywords, and it’s updated on a monthly basis too.
As well as giving you the inspiration you need for your keyword strategy, Ahrefs can also provide additional details too, like a keyword difficulty score which indicates how easy it is to rank for your chosen keyword and a “Clicks” metric which shows important data about how many clicks keywords get.
4. BuzzSumo
When you don’t have anyone else in your marketing team to bounce your ideas off, it can be difficult to come up with ways to really get ahead in your space. If you’re suffering from a lack of inspiration, or you’ve hit a block with your content, then BuzzSumo might be able to help.
BuzzSumo is a tool you can use to learn more about your industry, and the competition in your space. If you want to find out what kind of content performs best in the search engines, and how your competitors are getting ahead of you, then BuzzSumo can help with that. You can also search for keywords and phrases and use the results you get as insights into what kind of content you should be writing to attract your audience.
If you’re struggling to earn the attention of your customers, or you want to boost your SEO strategy and need the right content to do that, then the information available from BuzzSumo will definitely come in handy.
5. The All-In-One SEO Pack
The chances are, if you’re a one-person marketing department, you’ll be using some kind of content management system to assist you in your promotional strategies. For most companies, this will be “WordPress” – the most popular CMS on the market. If that’s the case for you, then it’s worth downloading the “All in One SEO pack” for WordPress directly onto your CMS.
A big part of most online marketing strategies involves making sure that your company has what it takes to shop up at the top of the search engines. This plugin can help you to accomplish that organic marketing goal, by providing you with solutions like:
- Automatic META tag generation
- XML sitemap support
- Advanced Canonical URLs
- Compatibility with most plugins
- Automatic notification to search engines when you make site changes
One of the things that makes this plugin the most popular accessory for WordPress users is the fact that it’s so easy to use. If you don’t want extra tools to take up too much of your time as a one-person marketing team, then you’ll love this handy resource. You don’t need to do much to get started, and help is at hand if you need it too.
Making the Most of Your Time as a One-Person Marketer
Succeeding in a competitive business world with nothing but a one-person marketing team can seem like quite the challenge. However, it’s worth remembering that it’s not the size of your department that counts – it’s how you empower them with the right tools.
A one-person marketing team can accomplish everything with the right support from the latest online resources. Make sure that you consider at least some of the options above when you’re setting yourself up for promotional success.
Bio: Jock is the Founder of DigitalExits.com and is an industry leader when it comes to valuing high-performance internet companies. Jock is also an accomplished entrepreneur in his own right. He acquired his first business when he was only 19 and has been developing his skills ever since.
