Online marketing is one of the most effective and cost efficient ways to reach your customers.  Not all businesses have a large marketing team or a huge marketing budget.  Read below to learn about a few tools that may help your business accomplish their online marketing goals.  These tools are both free and relatively easy to use.

WordPress

A great way to to create useful content for your customers that will drive traffic to your website.  Creating a blog with unique and useful content will keep your customers coming back to your website to read your latest posts.  Blogging is also Google friendly and will keep your website current.  WordPress has become the go-to solution for blogging.  It is an open source solution that is free to download.  Additionally, WordPress has become extremely flexible and easy to customize.  You can style your WordPress blog to reflect your business’ brand and even use WordPress to drive your business’ website.  Lastly, WordPress has several plugins you can download (many of them for free) that will add functionality to your WordPress site.

Yelp!

Online reputation is extremely important to businesses.  Online reviews from customers have become increasingly more accessible thanks to platforms like Yelp!, Google and Facebook.  Yelp! has become the golden standard in online reviews.  While this is a great way to promote your business online, it can also hurt your business if the reviews are not favorable.  Providing excellent service along with a way for customers to find your Yelp! page will help your business get positive reviews.  Additionally, attempting to resolve negative reviews by reaching out to the customer directly can help reduce the amount of unwanted testimonials on your business’ Yelp! page.

Google Analytics

While Yelp! is the golden standard of online review sites, Google has taken the top spot of the Search Engine game for years.  To maximize your business’ presence on Google, take advantage of Google Analytics.  Google Analytics is a free tool provided by Google that will provide you with important information about your website.  Some of the important features in Analytics include: traffic sources, info on your viewers, and site performance.  These features can be useful when focusing on SEO due to the detailed breakdown of their reports.

IFTTT

An article about online advertising would be incomplete if social media was not mentioned somewhere in the post.  While social media can be an effective and inexpensive way to advertise to your customers, it can also be quite time consuming.  What if there was a free tool that would allow you to post to all of your social media outlets with a single action?  Luckily there is IFTTT (IF This Then That).  A solution that can connect your online advertising efforts and expedite the process of getting your message out to various social media outlets.  While it make take a little while to configure, IFTTT can be a big time saver in the long run.  Lastly, IFTTT is always growing and adding new features to their platform, so be sure to check back often to see what applets they have added to their solution.