When it comes to utilising specific marketing tools, there are some that you will find come in handy more than others. Especially as a small business owner, you may not need all the fancy and expensive marketing tools, but it is always good to know you have options.
Let’s start with one of the best marketing tools, Canva, because without this guy, your visual marketing will probably suffer. Canva is a great platform, you can create visuals, logos, videos, buttons, stories, animations and much more. Essentially, you can use Canva to create images for all platforms. Now, Canva is great as they have both free and paid versions, when using the free version of Canva you have access to quite a lot of content, storage, and templates. When you are starting your marketing journey creating a solid logo and social media content is a good place to start and Canva free can help with that. However, once you have established a visual identity for your brand you may want to expand a little more and this is where the pro version of Canva comes into play. The pro version gives you access to more than double the assets that Canva free does, along with 1TB of cloud storage (compared to a sad 5GB with the free version), customer support, the ability to plan and schedule social media content and much more. Now, it may seem that the paid option is loads better (it is) but! That doesn’t mean you have to invest in that right away, see how you go with the free version and have a play before deciding to fork out some cash.
Next up we have google analytics vs google analytics 360. Not only does the price point set these two apart, but other differences lie in data sampling, limits of data, integrations, customisation and support. Google analytics is totally free and has a 14 month data retention, it tracks the traffic to your website as well as the engagement rate with your content. This info then allows you to have more data drive optimisation and user experience on your website leading to higher rates of conversion. Google analytics 360 starts off at a whopping $50,000 a year. If you’ve just started your small business, I doubt you have a spare $50,000 lying around. But just in case you do, google analytics 360 integrates offline and online data, stores data for up to 50 months, allows for advanced customisation, a higher data processing limit and also grants you access to highly skilled support specialists. As good as google analytics 360 sounds, I would once again suggest starting with the free version and assessing your need for a more robust option later down the track.
Lastly, we can discuss a marketing tool to use for all things social media. We will be comparing the free option Simply measured vs Sprout social. Simply measured is free and gives very comprehensive reports and analysis for X, Facebook, and Instagram, it also provides info on social traffic as well as the source of social traffic. Furthermore, it provides customer service reports, content analysis, competitive analysis, insight reports, user reports and page reports for the aforementioned social media platforms. Sprout social pricing starts at $249 a month, and offers more extensive analysis. You can use interactive data reports to view info from a new perspective, see the difference between paid and organic performance of content, be provided profile performance reports, tag reports, post performance reports, network reports, competitor reports, essentially providing quantitative as well as contextual data to improve your overall social media marketing. Sprout social does a lot more than this too so if you are interested I would suggest further independent research as this is one I would maybe dish out the cash for. Social media is king when it comes to increasing reach, conversion and ROI, so if the free marketing tools aren’t cutting it then it’s time to reassess your finances and see what you can do to be able to pay a little more for a much bigger return.
If this blog just gave you a massive headache and left you more confused than before about which marketing tools are the best to use for your small business, we got you. Our team at Creative Little Soul can handle the reporting and analytical side of things for you! Get in touch today to see how we can help your small business expand.
