Top 5 Do-It-Yourself Marketing Tools for Entrepreneurs and Startup Businesses

If you are starting a new business, there are so many choices to promote your business that sifting through the tools and vendors may turn into a time-consuming and frustrating chore. To help you become successful with minimal disruption, we will share some of our favorite marketing essentials. In addition, we will call out some of the free tools that even large and profitable corporations use for their marketing efforts. 

Here are some marketing fundamentals and recommended tools to help launch your marketing campaigns. 

Marketing must-haves: 

• Market research tool

• Email marketing tool

• Business address 

• Design tool

• Analytics tool

• Social media presence

Market Research Tools:

Before you start marketing your products and services to prospective buyers, you must understand who they are, where they are, and how your product benefits them. There is more than one way to find all the buyer data you need — both paid and free; however, market research starts with your products, services, and solutions.  

First, formulate a complete list of your product's benefits and the problems it solves. Find companies or customers — your target audience — that need your product and solve their pain points. According to Timo Rein, CEO of Pipedrive: 

"The ideal customer is one with whom you have the best possible strategic fit across the board."

Next, test your theory to verify that your product fits your selected target audience. The easiest and most effective method to determine product fit is to speak directly to your intended target audience using a customer survey. 

Customers love to share their experiences and are most willing when they feel that they are in control of the conversation. Therefore, simple surveys with less than ten easy-to-understand questions and lots of open text boxes provide the best feedback. I like to include one survey question that invites participants to a virtual cup of coffee for a few minutes of their time on the phone. It's always good to offer some small incentive to show your appreciation for their time and effort, so send an email gift card in advance of the call. If you determine they are not a fit for your product, all is not lost. Listening to a customer express their needs and pain points fosters business relationships and will help you create more customer-focused products in the future. 

🧰 Free tooltip for customer surveys:Google Forms is easy to set up and analyzes your survey responses in real-time.

Once you feel confident that you understand your intended target audience and that your product fits their needs, expand your reach with customer lists. 

🧰 Free tooltip for finding customers:LinkedIn will help you find potential business targets, people, job roles, etc.  

Email Marketing Tool

Once you have your target market in line (and maybe even a few customers!), you can get down to building an email list to send out marketing materials via email.  Email marketing can seem daunting or costly, but it doesn't have to be! 

🧰 Free tooltip for email marketing:Hubspot offers a robust version for free.  

Widely known CRM software provider Hubspot offers a free marketing solution to kickstart your email campaigns with professional templates. The free version of Hubspot is quite agile, letting you send up to 2,000 emails per month, access post-send analytics, and see if specific contacts are opening your emails. The free version includes some Hubspot branding; however, it is well worth the referrals to start building your contact list and your email marketing skillset. 

A Top Performing Business Address

Remote businesses boost productivity, decrease costs, and eliminate the need for a brick-and-mortar office. Still, they need a mailing address to list on legal paperwork, business banking accounts, business cards, and marketing emails and materials. Many new business owners use their home addresses for their business. But should you? When you use your home address as your business address, it becomes publicly associated with your company, jeopardizing your privacy and safety. Your mailing address becomes part of the information related to your company. 🧰 Tooltip for a virtual business address:Earth Class Mail offers over 80+ virtual addresses.

Your business address is the number one tool that manages the face of your marketing and your mail services as well! As an added benefit, your home address remains safe from spam or junk mail when you register your business with a virtual address. Boost your business image with one of our prestigious addresses to use on your website, business cards, email signature, and marketing materials without the cost of leasing office space. Make your brand look bigger while you work on scaling your business with multiple virtual addresses. So, if you want to place your business on Santa Monica Blvd or in the mountains of Denver, Earth Class Mail makes it easy to customize your virtual business address. 

In addition to the safety and recognition of a virtual address, Earth Class Mail also offers business mail services like unlimited high-quality PDF scans of your mail, check deposit services, junk mail filtering and shredding on-demand mail forwarding, and unlimited online storage for your digitized mail, and recycling.

Design Tools

Digital Marketing means that your customers will expect engaging visuals alongside great information about your business. Many think that a degree in graphic design is needed to create content effectively, but there are some tools that allow you to build out great graphics precisely the way you want. 

Some things you can build on your own are logos, social media posts, presentation decks, and flyers. Start with your business colors in mind and pull the hex codes from online, and if you're still unsure of what goes together, you can use a color palette generator to create a perfect color family. You can determine what you want to use in your graphic content. A good rule of thumb for putting out any visual form is aiming for the "80/20" marketing rule: 80% should be engaging and fun, and 20% should be informative. 

🧰 Free Tooltip: Canva has been a giant in DIY design for a few years now and has evolved into a powerful brand tool where you can generate logos, customize templates, and create consistency across social channels. 

Analytics 

Finally, to ensure your digital marketing is working, use analytics to gain insight into your target audience. Specifically, in digital marketing, you will want to start by running some simple online ads with keywords that ideally match your landing page. 

The internet is also packed with free courses and YouTube videos to get you started on popular platforms like SemRush for SEO and Google ads. Taking free certification courses to test your knowledge will also save you time and money in the long run, as you can rely on your skills to run great ads instead of spending on an agency. 

🧰 Free tooltip: Google Analytics can cost companies in the thousands, but they also offer a free DIY platform for small business owners to learn how to set up successful ads and track performance. 

For more business tips, visit our library of business blogs.  

About Earth Class Mail  Earth Class Mail offers virtual addresses, virtual mailboxes, check depositing, and more for your business needs.  The Earth Class Mail product offerings and integrations will give you more options as your business grows.  Since its inception in 2004, our customers have trusted us with over 18 million pieces of mail and more than $2.4 billion in checks. 

Are you ready to learn more about how our products can assist your business? Contact us today for a free demo.