There are an incredible 5.9 Million Small Businesses in the UK and yet Small Business Marketing Resources that really help are quite difficult to find. We’ve opened our bookmarks to share with you our nine favourite Small Business Marketing resources – from search and social to web and content, hand curated by our very own. These little beauties cover a host of topics and tools that are normally reserved for big corporates or at least big marketing departments and we think it’s about time that Small Businesses got a slice of the action.
FYI – none of these sites are paying us to share this with you – we just genuinely find them useful and think you will too.
Billed by Google as “Insights. Ideas. Inspiration” (who doesn’t love a bit of alliteration) This is one of our MD’s favourite places for new thinking and sometimes leftfield opinion as well as Data, Trends and Strategy. A great place to start for Small Business owners looking to expand both their knowledge and their results.
Not so much of a traditional resource, more a great tool for fact checking and validating your hunches and ideas. Statista is used widely for trending data and deep industry analysis. The paid version has a host of in-depth reports but most topics will have good free statistics and good visual reports too.
Aside from the obvious fact that Hubspot want to attract Sales and Marketing professionals to them for their Marketing Automation Platform and CRM. The Hubspot blog is actually a really useful resource for Small Businesses with lots of good quality templates and walk-throughs on everything from Email marketing to Sales Qualification. For anyone that’s more advanced some of the content might feel a little basic but it’s a great place to start.
Moz describe their blog as “The industry’s top wizards, doctors, and other experts offer their best advice, research, how-tos, and insights—all in the name of helping you level-up your SEO and online marketing skills.” They’d be right – Moz are a great place to start with SEO and Search in general, opposite to Hubspot though you can find yourself lost in a rabbit hole of acronyms and SEO speak. If you do, just put the kettle on and come back to caffeine reality.
Aside from the blog Moz is a great place to explore Keywords, Domain. Authority and Links – again there’s a paid version but the free to use login has some great tools.
We love this site – it’s a bit tricky to explain how but essentially, they take all the auto-complete data from Search Engines (Google) and shows you pretty much every iteration of what people are looking for around your keyword(s). Think about it as a next level keyword searching tool – one that helps you really understand why and how people are searching. Combine it with your SEO team or Content writers and you’ve got an excellent start to optimising your website for what people really want. Not to mention including the PPC guys to help them enhance your keyword strategy.
If you’re running a small business chances are that you’re spinning at least 100 plates and managing well, everything. Workflow management Tools like Asana and Monday.com (and Trello etc) are normally reserved for much larger business but we ask ourselves why? Why do Small Business need organisation and/or management less than any other business? Using these tools can not only help you collaborate better across your team, however small but also give you a swift acceleration into higher productivity levels. Think less of note pads and scraps of paper with To Do Lists dotted about and more like a shared, delegated action plan that really lets you get on with it. Asana has a free version that has lots of functionality up to 15 users whereas Monday is pretty much paid after the free trial. Both have lots to offer but Asana is our personal favourite.
Can you believe we left it till now to include our own blog? Only kidding, the DGT blog always has and always will be dedicated to helping SME’s with Sales and Marketing – we’ll keep you informed on latest trends as well as in depth guides and walkthroughs on some of the critical Demand Generation functions. If you have a topic that you’d like us to discuss let us know…we’re happy to help.
It’s a biggie (we know) but Forbes has a monthly readership of 108 Million and publishes over 300 articles every day from some of the leading global minds. As well as creating and curating content specifically for Entrepreneurs and Business owners Forbes pride themselves on primary research and opinion which often means opinions and insight you hadn’t necessarily thought of. Be mindful though that Forbes have a host of content “sponsors” which can give you a slanted view on topics so worth reading with a pinch of salt but great for some inspiration on new areas.
Our final resource, Search Engine Land, isn’t as the name suggests purely about Search. The ever-popular platform actually covers a wealth of areas, including Digital Marketing, Advertising and Marketing Technology. As well as trending news and issues affecting Digital Marketing as a whole Search Engine Land includes (presumably paid) editorial content and success stories that can give you both new ideas and inspiration in your own marketing. One minor word of warning – as it’s mainly news and items the feed is stuffed with the latest news, great if you’re browsing but hit search for anything specific.
If you’ve got a great resource that you think that the SME Community should know about then let us know we’d love to hear it. In the mean-time if even the good Doctor Google can’t help give us a call here at The Demand Generation team. We’d love to help!
Posted by Helen Brookes on Wednesday 3rd February 2021
