Crystal Bristow
Jenkins Electric Co. Charlotte
and
Kelley Fujino
Lubbock Electric Co.
Members of EASA's Marketing & Industry Awareness Committee
Marketing programs are essential to winning new business and increasing revenue from existing customers. However, two major barriers often stand in the way: limited budget and lack of specialized knowledge. We feel the crunch too. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a skillful graphic designer or expert online advertiser to improve your company’s marketing strategy. Many times, you don’t have to pay a dime either. Below are our favorite tools that we use every day in developing marketing programs, and they’re all FREE or have free versions.
Social Media Tools
Crystal Loves Landscape by Sprout Social
Landscape is a free social media image resizer at sproutsocial.com/landscape. This tool makes it easy to optimize your images for the specific social platform you are posting on, driving higher engagement and attention to your posts. Simply drop your image and select your social platform. The tool will resize and allow you to make edits and dow nload a new perfectly sized image.
Kelley Loves Buffer
Buffer is a web and mobile application that helps businesses manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. Their free plan includes posting for up to three social media accounts. I love the post scheduling feature, because it allows me to create content in advance so that it posts to social media when it’s timely (e.g., holidays) or when users are the most active. Recently, I used post scheduling while exhibiting at a trade show to create multiple posts for each channel during the first hour, which freed me to focus on interacting with customers. The Meta (Facebook) Business Suite application allows businesses to manage content and schedule posts to Facebook and Instagram for free, but LinkedIn and Twitter do not offer post scheduling from their own apps. I use Buffer to handle those channels.
Google Tools
Kelley Loves Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you analyze your website traffic for the purpose of tracking conversions, advertising return on investment (ROI) and customer browsing behavior. Its robust reporting and in-depth information give you a bird’s eye view of your website visitors, their geography and your most popular pages. Google Analytics helps us determine how advertising campaigns impact website traffic and which sources of traffic and web pages lead to more conversions. I have configured our website and our Google Analytics account to track contact form submissions, click-to-call actions and click-to-email actions. Also, I can see what pages on our site need work based on user engagement and visit time. For proper implementation and reporting, you may need to work with a web developer to make sure it’s set up properly, but once it is you’ll have a wealth of knowledge.
Crystal Loves Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile is free real estate right on Google’s search results page and in Google Maps, allowing your business to appear the moment people are searching for services. When customers find your business on Google Search or Maps, you want them to see accurate business hours, descriptions, photos and more. Plus, claiming your profile adds legitimacy and relevance to your business. The analytics tools are great too. Google Business Profile will tell you how many people searched for your business, clicked on the call button and requested directions to your location. Get started by searching for your business and clicking “claim profile.”
Crystal Loves Google Drive
Google Drive offers free tools like shared documents, folders and the equivalent of Microsoft Office Suite all for free. Google Drive is free with a Gmail address and offers the ability for in-office and remote or field employees to collaborate on the same document in real time. Also, included is Google Forms for easy surveys and data gathering.
What’s more, you can use Google Drive to maintain a folder of marketing materials that salespeople can access to send job-related documents to customers when they are too large to attach to an email.
Kelley Loves Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a tool that notifies you when Google finds new results, such as web pages, newspaper articles or blog posts that mention your desired search term. You can set up alerts for your name and your company’s name. Be sure to put quotation marks around your search term. Anyone can publish content about your company online, so managing your online reputation is vital. Google Alerts is a useful tool to discovering what people are saying about your company so that you can respond promptly. I also suggest that salespeople create alerts for their biggest accounts and prospects so that they are the first to respond to news.
Email Marketing
Kelley Loves Benchmark Email and Mailchimp
Benchmark Email is an email marketing tool that helps you create and manage contact lists, send personalized emails at scale and build email marketing automation campaigns. Benchmark has a drag and drop editor that is easy to use. You can also create surveys and simple email automations, like welcome emails, birthday emails and service reminder emails. That said, the free plan currently offered is very limited, only allowing you to send 250 emails per month.
Another popular option with a free plan is Mailchimp, an all-in-one marketing platform that offers email marketing, CRM, social media advertising and even printed postcards. Like with Benchmark, it’s easy to create beautiful, personalized emails with Mailchimp. The free plan allows you to have up to 2,000 contacts and send 10,000 emails per month. However, not being able to schedule emails to send later in the free plan is a major drawback. Also, email automation is only available in a paid plan. I would recommend trying both services for free with internal emails to employees to learn the ropes and see which is a better fit.
Graphic Design & Photos
Kelley Loves Squoosh.app
Squoosh is an image resizing and compression web application that helps you optimize images for your website. Squoosh has an image slider to display the “before” and “after” results of compression before downloading. Fast loading speeds on your website are critical. First, customers do not want to wait five seconds for a website to load. Second, search engine algorithms will downgrade websites that have slow loading speeds. High resolution images are the No. 1 culprit to slowing down your website. Yet, users want to see pictures and graphics on websites. The solution is to reduce the size of your images down to the minimum required and compress the files using a program like Squoosh. I recommend the MozJPEG and OxiPNG compression methods for JPG and PNG files respectively.
Crystal Loves Canva
Canva is one of my favorites for creating flyers, postcards, data sheets and internal reporting. If you’re lacking inspiration or design skills or if you need a template to build from, Canva is the answer. With easy drag and drop functionality, Canva allows you to select a design you like, change colors to your brand palette, insert your own photos and download in multiple formats including with printer cut marks. There are templates, images and fonts that are paid, so watch out for the little “Pro” crown icon. The best part is all your designs are saved to your profile for future use or editing.
Kelley Loves Pixabay
Pixabay is a free stock media website that offers professional photographs, vector graphics and videos that are free for commercial use without attribution required. High-quality photos, videos and graphics enhance your marketing messages. Pixabay’s selection is very limited compared to paid stock media websites like Adobe Stock and iStock, but occasionally you can find exactly what you need for free!
Project Management
Crystal Loves Kanban Tool
Kanban Tool is a visual, card-based tool that allows an overview of workflow. Key advantages are the ability to customize the fields on your card to your specific application. You can also color code for different staff or equipment. It takes a little effort to set up, but its simplicity and drag and drop features are easy to use for any technology level.
Crystal Loves Click-up and Asana
Both Asana and Click-up are free modern project management tools, which provide multiple views (board, lists, timeline, etc.) and allow collaboration across team members. While the two are very similar and both offer free and paid versions, Click-up offers more features in their free version including a bar chart view, which can be hard to find in other free software. My favorite features in both include assigning due dates and team member responsibilities and the ease of moving tasks through the workflow in the board view.
Love It? Share It!
As you can see from this list, there are a variety of free tools available to meet almost any of your needs. The key to success with these tools is to use the free version first and for a good amount of time. If you find yourself or your team relying on it consistently and you need more access or features, then it might be worth the upgrade; however, you’ll likely get what you need from the free version.
The fun part in writing this article together is that we were both introduced to tools we weren’t currently using. So, if you find a tool that solves a problem or makes your day easier, don’t forget to share it on your social media pages or in your professional LinkedIn groups. The more we share with each other, the better our organizations will be.
Related Reference and Training Materials
Print