Investing a little bit in advice and education to help you set your positioning, come up with key messages and put together a basic marketing plan is a sensible idea, and then any energy you put in to marketing is going to focused and effective.
Being in the business of marketing consulting it makes sense for me to say that everyone should engage an experienced marketing consultant to help. The reality is though, when you run your own show you sometimes struggle to pay yourself let alone an external consultant.
So, I’ve put together my top 10 list of DIY Marketing tools to help savvy, entrepreneurial business owners with a lean team DIY.
1. Search Engine Optimisation tool – A great basic FREE SEO tool is Grader.com. Developed by US Web consulting business hub spot. You can plug your web site address into this free tool and it will spit out a free SEO report (giving you a grade on how good your SEO site is) and a list of recommendations to improve.
2. Outsourced freelancers – Source skilled freelancers to help with web development, copy writing, application development and graphic design from all around the world. Simply put up the brief and how much you are willing to pay at Elance.com or guru.com to source design and development skills from all around the world.
3. Crowdsource Creative Work – 99Designs allows you to crowd source creative design services from all around the world. You put up your brief, the price you are willing to pay and designers will submit designs for logos, web sites, stationary, icons, advertising you name it. You only pay for the design you like with any changes you want.
4. Copy Editing – Wordy is a new copy editing service setup by some Danish copy gurus. They have over 200 copywriters and editors on their books. You can submit your copy, get a quote and have the job completed all within a couple of hours.
5. Copy Writing - Copyblogger.com is an excellent blog to help amateur copywriters you improve your own copywriting skills.
6. Online DIY PR - Handleyourownpr.com is an online DIY PR service for small business. They will help you write a release, buy a media list and distribute releases for a small fee.
7. Jump onto topical media opportunities – Source Bottle is an excellent online service that matches Journalists with sources for news stories. Subscribe and receive free updates every day on media calls that you can respond directly to journalists to via the source bottle web site. Great for jumping on top of media opportunities relevant to your business or service.
8. Email Marketing - Mail Chimp is a Web based email marketing platform that provides excellent email templates, tracking technology and lightweight CRM solutions.
9. Market Research – Survey Monkey is a great online surveying /market research tools allowing you to create distribute and analyse your own online surveys.
10. Marketing Planning and Message development - (disclaimer: this is a shameless plug) - At Marketing Angels we’ve created some very affordable DIY Marketing workshops designed for buisnesses who'd like the help of a Marketing consultant but can't afford one. You join a small group with other business owners to set business goals, brand strategy and positioning and define the right marketing tactics as well as a budget with the help of one of our consultants. Great for businesses who want to DIY but need help getting a marketing plan and messages created first.
So now you’ve got your toolkit packed with DIY Tools – get cracking and get your brand out there. But remember often it's not what you do but how you do it that makes all the difference. have a planned approach and make sure your messages are on target first. This is where asking an expert can really help.
I’d love to hear of any great DIY tools you know of that aren’t in my top 10. I’ve shown you mine – I’d love to see yours!
