Choosing the right digital marketing tools can feel incredibly overwhelming as a small business owner. HOW do you navigate this ever-changing web landscape on your own? Do you absolutely need to hire a full-time digital marketing specialist? What about a marketing agency? The good news is - there is no wrong answer, and there are a ton of resources at your disposal. To help you determine the best strategy, these are our top five recommended tools to jumpstart your digital marketing strategy. You can choose to leverage these on your own. Alternatively, you can partner with an agency to grow bigger, faster.

Google analytics:

Google analytics is a simple, effective tool to help you track your online traffic, discover trends, and pinpoint behavioral patterns. It's fairly user friendly after a few online tutorials, so don't be afraid to dig in and try this one on your own. It's especially important to feel comfortable reading and gathering data as a small business owner so you can digest and validate any information regarding the health of your business. If you only dedicate time to learning one digital marketing skill this year, Google Analytics gets our vote.

GoToWebinar:

Increase your reach and get the word out by using GoToWebinar. This platform allows you to broadcast sales calls, product and service releases, announcements, and speeches to hundreds of people at once. It encourages viral integration, so it will help generate buzz for your business. If you're comfortable speaking in public and want to unleash your creative side, GoToWebinar is a straightforward, powerful platform. However, crafting webinars that will generate leads and reel in ROI can be time consuming, so this is a good opportunity to partner with an agency or take a hybrid approach (i.e., an agency creates the content, you present it) if your team is too small for this type of indirect marketing.

SEO support:

SEO support is probably the best place to splurge and hire a digital marketing agency. SEO rankings are one-part science and one-part art. High rankings require blending content marketing, tagging, and back-linking to boost your search engine results. If you are already tech savvy, the actual work isn't as difficult as you think; but if the thought of a meta tag makes you want to break out in hives, it's best to leave this critical piece of the puzzle to the pros. A strong content marketing agency will guide you in choosing the right keywords to target, help you craft content that will rank around those terms, and ensure your site is optimized for search engine crawlers.

HootSuite:

It's common knowledge that social media is a key to engaging with your audience. Use a tool like HootSuite to schedule your posts in advance and aggregate multiple social accounts and platforms into one easy-to-access place. HootSuite is easy to set up and use, so this is another great place to begin playing in the online space on your own. Not only can you use this platform to schedule posts weeks in advance on multiple channels, but you can also respond to feedback about your brand. This gives you a great opportunity to showcase your true, authentic brand voice.

WordPress:

Building a blog on WordPress takes the power of social media one step farther. Well written blogs can significantly boost SEO, drive traffic to your site and build credibility in your industry. Plus, WordPress is an incredibly easy platform to build your blog on. If you like writing, blogging can be a fun and cathartic way to express your professional passions. However, hiring a content marketing agency to work with you on blog topics or keywords will ensure your blog gets the most mileage and supports your SEO needs at the same time. With these five tools, you're practically a digital marketing pro already. So what are you waiting for? Start exploring! To learn more about our Digital Marketing services, click here.