Marketing, Online Marketing, & Social Media: Lesson 13

Resources for Website and Social Media

Kelly Allen, the Managing Director at Q Strategies, will be sharing some low cost and free tools, that you can use to make your social media and website more effective. 

Topics:

Test Your Knowledge

To receive credit for taking this course through TSBDC, watch the video and take the quiz that will appear below to demonstrate your knowledge.

Video Lesson Topics

- Website Search Engine Optimization

A free tool called HubSpot Website Grader: SEO edition allows you type in your own website and have feedback given to you about the image size, links, and broken pages in the website in order to improve the functionality of your page. This service is free but there is a low cost version with more advanced services, if needed. This tool will give you an overview of your website and allow you to see things that need improving. 

- Business Listings

For small businesses it is important that customers can find you easily. The service Moz.com has the ability to search for small businesses and find all the listings on the internet. As the business owner, you can check these and make sure they are correct, and have your current address and hours of operation. This tool is free and can even show you businesses with similar names if you would like to eliminate some of that confusion. However, there is also a charged service that can go in and update all of the listings with your current information for you. This can be helpful if there are several discrepancies but you can also create an account and correct the listings yourself. 

- Professional Look

As a small business owner, who is passionate about their business, website design and layout may not be a passion or talent you obtain. Canva.com is here to help with this issue. There a many templates for free and a free editing tool as well. Canva is easy, approachable, and time saving even for people experienced with website design. If you choose to pay for one of their advanced packages, you can get access to many stock photos for your website. 

- Social Media Posting

Posting to social media is not always at the top of the priority list for business owners, but sites like Buffer.com and Hootsuite can help with that. These sites can post for you on a schedule, that you determine, depending on your clientele. A B to B business might have customers more available mid-morning while they sip their morning coffee. A B to C business might have customers more available in the evening time after work hours. 

If you have ever gotten the sinking feeling that there is a typo in a post, that you have already published hours ago, you are not alone. There is a plugin called Grammarly that you can use on Chrome or Safari that will be checking for spelling errors even when you are not in a Word document. Grammarly goes beyond simply spell-checking and can also suggest different versions of a word, that there is a word missing, or that phrasing a post differently may be easier to understand or customers. 

- Photography

Invest in professional photography for promotional items, your website, and social media posts. This will improve the look of your business. You can also find professional photographs to use for free through Pixels.com and UpSplash. These platforms have photographers pictures that they have allowed to be used for free in a professional setting, but there are certain requirements on how the photos can be used. Some can be used in an advertisement but some can not, so be sure to be mindful of that. 

- Website Builders

There are several user friendly services to build your website including Weebly, Wix, SquareSpace. These are plug and play sites that allow you to move things around, in an already created template, without any coding. Most of these programs also have a suite of tools that can help with SEO, page descriptions, great templates, and even stock photography to use. Starting out as a small business does not mean you have to spend thousands on your website, you can use one of these low cost programs or even higher a freelancer or artist to help with some of the content. 

There are also several tools in the background that can help you measure where the traffic is coming from on your website. It is a way for you to measure the most effective ways that you are promoting your business such as social media or Etsy. 

- Most Importantly

The most important thing to do is keep your website up to date and continue monitoring them. It’s much better to have fewer social media platforms that you truly engage with your customers on, than several platforms that you never do anything with. Choose the platforms that are bringing the most traffic to your business. 

Topics & Lessons

Each Below Topic Contains a Video Lesson and Helpful Downloadable Information

4:47

How to Talk to Your Customer – What are my Options?

4:02

How to Tell Your Business’s Story

6:14

What do Your Customers Need?

6:02

4 Cs of Marketing

3:31

Market Research and Segmentation

12:45

Is my Marketing Working?

4:43

Hiring Digital Marketing Professionals

3:02

Social Media Management Platforms

4:25

Designing Your Own Website

6:29

SEO

5:40

Developing an Online Marketing Strategy

4:16

Responding to Online Customer Feedback

12:53

Resources for Website and Social Media

2:13

Social Media

4:25

Measuring and Understanding Analytics

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