If you’re a lean, scrappy startup, you may have a marketing team of one, or even zero. I get it; when you’re focused on building, the idea of marketing your business can feel pretty overwhelming. But — and I talk more about this here — it’s critical to dedicate at least some focus on marketing from the beginning. And having the right tools in your toolkit can help make marketing your brand less daunting and more doable. Here are my top 5 marketing tools and platforms that every beginner should be sure to use when they don’t know where to start.
Bonus: all of these marketing tools are free to use!
1. Canva
Image via BananaAssaulter on Reddit
Assuming you aren’t a designer, Canva is the gold standard for being able to easily whip up “designed” images — whether they’re backgrounds, memes, or anything else your brand needs. Remember Kid Pix? I’m aging myself, but Canva is basically as easy as that. Everything is drag-and-drop, and you can even import your brand’s colors and fonts (laid out in your brand book) so you can make sure everything you create is on brand.
The rise of Canva has completely altered what’s possible as a marketer. If you have the time, you no longer need to wait on a designer and rounds of feedback. Canva isn’t meant for complex designs, but it gives marketers enough to be dangerous. I highly recommend signing up for a paid account, for which Canva provides several options depending on your team size. They’re incredibly reasonable (at the time of writing this, Canva Pro is just $100/year for one seat) and unlock many useful features and additional assets you may need.
If you’re already a Canva expert or want to teach yourself something with more robust design capabilities, check out Figma. Largely used across the design community, Figma is much more collaborative — so if you do enlist the help of some design support, it may be useful to familiarize yourself with the tool.
2. Unsplash
Utilizing photography within your marketing collateral is a great way to connect with your audiences on an emotional level. Ideally, your target audience (which is hopefully well-defined by this point) should see itself within your brand. Even if your creative is highly graphic, you may need to leverage photography at some point, and Unsplash is a great, free place to do just that.
Unsplash is a photography site with tons (millions?) of non-stock visuals available for download. All of Unsplash’s photos are royalty-free, so in other words, you won’t have to pay for them or even attribute them if you don’t want to, although photographers would obviously appreciate that. This puts Unsplash at a strong advantage to other stock photography sites, which could end up costing you thousands in royalty fees. And personally, I find Unsplash’s inventory pretty high quality with very little cheese factor that you might find elsewhere.
If you’re looking to source, say, images for your website, I’d recommend starting off by describing your target to see what pops up, and then refining your search from there.
Unsplash is also an incredibly helpful place to source images for your company blog, if you have one. For blog imagery, I’d recommend creating a bank of pre-approved images that you can plug and play as you see fit. Start with the above tactic to build a pool of “relatable” imagery, and expand upon it by searching for feelings, emotions, or different elements of subject matter that your blog may address. Even if the image is more abstract, less search optimized (let’s say, it’s an image of flowers), it may be okay to keep in the bank as an on-brand filler image to use if nothing else works.
You can upload these images into Canva and save them for future use, in addition to pulling from Canva’s own photography database, and then within Canva you can set cropping parameters to match those of your blog. Just be sure to somehow mark when an image has already been used on a post.
The only risk to consider with leveraging Unsplash is the same as its core benefit: that it’s free and open to the public. Therefore, don’t be surprised if you find an image that feels just perfect for your brand…only to see it being used somewhere by another company. Yes, this does happen, and I’ve actually experienced this. To me, it’s a solid trade-off. And if you want extra precaution, you can pay < $10/month (at the time of writing this) for Unsplash+, which provides select additional photography gated off from free users.
3. Google Surveys
You may have heard me talk ad nauseum about smart audience personas already, but that’s because they are seriously. so. important. It’s essential to have a rock solid understanding of your target audience before moving into the building phase, but it’s never too late. Google Surveys can be used for free in order to help refine who you should reach, and/or help you figure out how to effectively engage this audience.
Whether you’re in the early stages of standing up your company, you’re going after a new target audience, or you’re adding a new business vertical, Google Surveys can help you:
Decide on new market targets (in the absence of other data)
Learn what issues are important to your audience — which can help you refine marketing messaging
Understand relevant marketing channels so you can begin to plot out a media plan
Uncover opportunity areas for your business that you may not have previously considered
How to write a helpful Google Survey
If you want people to participate, keep the survey itself, and the questions within it, short. My advice is to structure the survey like this (NOTE: I wouldn’t recommend literally dividing the survey up into parts, but have laid it out for you in this way to consider survey structure):
Part I: basic demographic questions — these are easy answers that will hopefully get respondents thinking the survey is quick enough to commit to filling the rest out. But you also need this information so you have context for whatever the rest of your survey data tells you.
Part II: questions that get respondents thinking about relevant issues before talking/asking about your specific offering. For example, if you ask, “do you want kids someday?” before jumping into asking, “how much would you pay to freeze your eggs?” would likely yield a much more thoughtful answer for that second question. These questions are still incredibly important to understanding your target demographic, their headspace, and what matters to them.
Part III: questions specific to your business — around pricing, products, or anything else that you need feedback on.
Who should I share my Google Survey with?
The challenge with Google Surveys (or any survey) is distribution. You want to make sure you aren’t only floating the survey within a vacuum of participants that will skew your results and give an inaccurate picture of how you should move forward. And you want to make sure you’ve shared the survey with enough people to provide significance of the results.
Try your best to share your survey far and wide. Ask friends — especially influential ones — to share with their networks and, depending on the target audience, don’t be afraid to post the survey publicly. If you’re building in stealth, you can whitelabel your survey language a bit so as not to give too much away.
You can also consider incentivizing your survey, say, with a $25 Amazon gift card given to a random respondent. But keep in mind that this could skew your results slightly by only getting responses from those who are hoping to win a gift card. It could also lead to people providing somewhat incomplete responses that water down your data.
4. ChatGPT
There’s a whole world of AI (artificial intelligence) tools out there that can help your marketing efforts dramatically. More on that in another post. But at the very least, if you’re a beginner who is just dipping their toe into the world of AI, you need to familiarize yourself with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT can be a game-changer for marketers in numerous ways. First and foremost, it can assist marketers in crafting compelling and persuasive content. Whether it's writing engaging social media posts, creating attention-grabbing ad copy, or drafting blog articles optimized for search performance, ChatGPT can provide valuable insights and suggestions to enhance the effectiveness of the content. It can analyze target audience demographics, preferences, and trends to tailor messages that resonate with potential customers.
Another area where ChatGPT shines is in customer engagement and support. It can be integrated into chatbots or virtual assistants to provide instant responses to customer queries, offer personalized recommendations, and resolve issues efficiently. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also frees up human resources to focus on more complex tasks. If your business utilizes virtual customer care, ask whatever partner you’re working with about how they recommend integrating AI tools like ChatGPT.
Additionally, ChatGPT can assist marketers in optimizing their digital advertising campaigns. It can help in generating keyword ideas, refining ad targeting, and analyzing campaign performance metrics. By leveraging ChatGPT's insights, marketers can improve the ROI of their advertising efforts and achieve better results.
A word of caution when using ChatGPT: always, always double check whatever information it provides. While I do recommend paying for Chat GPT-4, it is not a search engine and the validity of the information it provides is not guaranteed. ChatGPT is best used as a starting point, but you will always need to provide a layer of human review for quality control.
5. Freelancer marketplaces
Assuming you’re reading this because your company does not have a fully stacked marketing team, odds are, you could really benefit from a rockstar freelancer or two. Of course, I’ll shamelessly plug myself first — I’d love to chat about your marketing challenges! — but if that’s not a fit, I recommend freelancer marketplaces and I’ve used them myself many times.
Freelancer marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr offer a plethora of benefits to marketers, particularly in terms of cost-effectiveness and flexibility. These platforms provide access to a global pool of talented professionals across various marketing disciplines, ranging from content creation and graphic design to SEO optimization and social media management. By tapping into these marketplaces, you can leverage the expertise of freelancers on a project-by-project basis, without the overhead costs associated with hiring full-time employees.
In my experience, the most time-consuming aspect of utilizing freelancer marketplaces is often the process of reviewing applicants and finding the right fit. As opposed to getting a personal referral to another consultant, which may make you feel more comfortable upfront, you’ll need to invest time in thoroughly evaluating freelancers' qualifications, past work samples, and communication skills to ensure a successful collaboration. However, part of this relies on the client to provide extremely clear project briefs and milestones. Expectations should be communicated upfront to avoid misunderstandings and ensure project success.
Despite these challenges, outsourcing certain tasks to skilled freelancers allows in-house marketers to focus on strategic initiatives, creative brainstorming, and overall campaign management, leading to increased productivity and efficiency. Overall, when used effectively, freelancer marketplaces can be valuable resources for marketers looking to maximize their budget and achieve impactful results.
Getting started
There are tons of helpful marketing tools out there. For beginners, this is just the tip of the iceberg. But it can be challenging when you don’t know what you don’t know, and even this handful of tools can feel overwhelming for some who may not be sure where to start.
If you’re one of those people, I encourage you to reach out. I’d be happy to chat with you to discuss your marketing challenges and how certain tools may or may not be useful to your business. Feel free to contact me here. Good luck!