Digital marketing made easy

There are many inexpensive tools and apps that can provide a powerful punch to your marketing efforts.

Let’s look at five such tools to consider for your company’s marketing strategy.

Moz Local

https://moz.com/local

Having your business included in local search engines and online directories like Apple Maps, CitySearch and SuperPages.com is important. Even more important is ensuring the information about your business is up to date and consistent across each of these platforms. These citations across the web are a strong ranking signal to the search engines like Google and positively impact your search rankings.

Moz Local is a simple app that ensures your business listings are correct, consistent and visible across the web on the search engines, apps and directories that most impact local search results.

Moz Local takes the hassle out of manually updating all of your listings by pushing accurate location data to all the major data aggregators and several top-tier online directories.

Avoid the hassles and update your business information one time, in one place by using Moz Local. The Essential plan will cost you $99/year. It’s well worth the cost.

GetFiveStars

https://www.getfivestars.com/

GetFiveStars is a brilliant app that helps you get customer feedback and online reviews.

The GetFiveStars platform helps you automate the customer feedback process to capture your Net Promoter Score, testimonials and, ultimately, online reviews from your best customers.

We appreciate the “feedback first” approach to generating reviews and the automation makes the customer review process easy to implement in your company.

You know how important online reviews can be to your business. For $40/month, GetFiveStars offers the platform and process that will deliver more positive customer reviews.

Buffer

https://buffer.com/

If your company is active on social media, then Buffer can save you a great deal of time (and headaches) by offering an app and platform where you can schedule, publish and analyze all of your social media posts in one place.

Buffer makes it easy to select which of your social accounts you want to post to. You can post the same message to all your social networks or add context by customizing each. The point is, you don’t have to bounce around between social networks to share your content.

The Individual Free plan or the Individual Awesome plan at $10/month makes this app a no-brainer for those companies investing in social media marketing.

Sumo

https://sumo.com/

Sumo arms you with a suite of tools to increase website traffic and generate more leads from your site.

List Builder allows you to create and add professional-looking pop-ups to your website. This is one of the easiest to use email capture tools available.

Smart Bar sits beautifully at the top of your website reminding your visitors to join your email list, check out your latest blog post or claim your special offer. This is a great way to make seasonal offers more visible and prominent throughout your website.

You can get started with Sumo Basic for free.

HubSpot Marketing Free

https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/marketing/free

HubSpot Marketing Free provides easy to use, light-weight lead generation tools to convert more leads on your website and learn about their activity while on your site. The Lead Flows tool is similar to Sumo’s List Builder in that it allows you to easily add a pop-up or slide-in form to your website. It goes a little beyond Sumo, however, in offering insight about each of the visitors that converts on your website, like pages viewed, time on site and lead source.

HubSpot Marketing Free is a great next step for those of you interested in moving down the path toward marketing automation and inbound marketing but don’t yet have a significant budget for it.

The author is the founder and president of Landscape Leadership, a green industry marketing agency.