When considering how to boost the visibility of your SME, you’ll likely think about how digital marketing and social media can help you reach new and existing customers.

With fewer resources than large businesses, you will need to be clever in how you distribute your budget and the channels you choose to utilise. That’s why we believe that implementing tools is the best option for SMEs to preserve your time and resources and streamline the process.

Email marketing

Management tools

MailChimp is by far one of the most popular and reliable email management systems available. Allowing you to build, schedule, send and evaluate your email performance – this tool is essential to ensuring your email campaigns are effective. You can even import lists, create surveys and segment your lists to ensure that you’re sending the right content to the right people at the right times.

User journey

Understanding how your mailing list interacts with your email content is important to designing better user journeys. Force24 allows you to build bespoke marketing automation processes in line with your email campaigns. Through key learnings gathered from your email marketing efforts, you can learn more about your customers and use this information to nurture and convert your leads.

Testing

Litmus is a great tool for testing if your email is optimised for a range of devices. With the option to test across more than 40 clients, you can generate a test email which will allow you to amend your layout or any other features to ensure that everyone can view it effectively.

Social media

Research

Buzzsumo is ideal for researching content topics, the best times of the day/week to post your content, suggest the length of content and even identify which types of content works best on your feeds. It allows you to find popular shared content on social media channels which can inspire your social strategy.

Management tools

If you’re going to get serious about using social media for your SME then you should invest in a social media scheduler. Popular options include Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout Social, which allow you to manage your social channels from one place.

Each offer different functionalities but the majority include the capability to schedule and publish content from one place to your social channels, RSS which allow you to view feeds, social engagement monitoring to determine your effectiveness and a range of other features which allow you to be more effective on social media.

Influencer

For SMEs, an influencer can dramatically boost your visibility, by exposing their following to your brand or product. For SMEs, micro influencers are often much more accessible and affordable. To discover influencers within your industry, there is a range of tools at your disposal including Buzzsumo, Tweetdeck and Klear. These tools offer SMEs like you to find influencers, create lists and segments and keep track of the people you want to contact, to retain order.

PR

Project management

If you choose to utilise PR to boost your visibility, you’ll need to be able to track your activities and plan out the content you want to create and when this should be distributed.

You can create a calendar for each of your projects and track your progress and milestones more easily. You can use software such as Asana or Trello to plan and track effectively and keep track of your content creation and outreach efforts.

Journalist database

There is a wide range of journalist databases available, which will allow you to get your press release or article in front of the right people.

Across a range of mediums, such as print, online, radio and television, you can source and contact media contact using tools such as Media.Info, PressRush, Response Source, and GorkanaCision – which range in cost and capabilities. You can also use resources such as JournoRequests, HARO, and PitchRate to find journalists who are asking for information on specific topics.

Press release distribution

You can distribute your press release simply by sending an email to your list of contacts, but there are also tools that can alleviate the process of doing this and allow you to better track and follow-up.

JournoLink and Response Source allow you to easily distribute your press release to a database of thousands of bloggers, broadcasters and journalists, with relative ease.

Organic search

Tracking and measuring

One of the most important pieces of software you will use in relation to your website is Google Analytics. There are also a number of other tools you can use to analyse and audit your website to make changes, such as SEMRush. Using these tools, you can routinely monitor your traffic and track if you need to make any changes to improve your performance.

Optimisation

Yoast is a useful tool that you can easily install as a plugin on your site. You can use it to easily input meta description and title tags and it also gives you an overview of your ranking capability based on the data you’ve input into the page. Particularly useful for those just starting out with SEO, you can easily analyse your site on a page by page basis and amend as appropriate.

Site speed

The user experience should form the core of any SEO strategy. Your site should be quick to load and easy to navigate. You can test your site speed using Google Page Speed or Pingdom Tools, for example, and gain an insight into how quickly your site loads and reveal any elements which might be slowing it down.

It will even spit out some recommendations for improving the user experience and what you can do to improve your site load speed.

Research

SEO is all about research, implementation, measurement and more research. You should aim to view your backlink profile, analyse it and make plans to improve it.

Equally, with your keyword strategy, you should understand what is driving the most traffic, how do you hold up against your competitors and how can you improve.

You can do this through the likes of SEMRush and Ahrefs, which allow you to view, track and analyse your backlink profile and keywords and create a more informed strategy.

Marketing for SMEs

For SMEs balancing the marketing budget can be tricky. If you’re unsure of which channels you should be focussing on we’re here to offer advice and guidance on how to make your budget go further.

We’ll work closely with you to determine the areas of your marketing where you may be falling short and create an action plan which considers your budget restrictions and objectives. Get in touch with Favoured for a free site and social media evaluation today.