THE MARKETING TOOLS applied in your business can help in making or breaking your business.  Many entrepreneurs have a misconception that effective marketing plans come at high prices—this isn’t necessarily true.  There are several tools available in the market that can be used to market your business both online and offline at affordable costs, and at other times, absolutely free. The following are some of the tools that can be used to make valuable contacts, spread the word about your investment, build a loyal audience, and connect with like-minded people.

Google offers a variety of tools that can help in marketing your business effectively.  For instance, Google Insights can help in analyzing customer trends while Google Analytics assists in analyzing traffic coming into the site.  You can also find other sites that your clients are visiting, apart from your own, with the help of an ads planner.  Google Alerts plays an important role of informing you whenever there is new content related to your niche that has been created.

There are several websites that provide templates and tools for creating a free blog.  Blogs provide an avenue where you can send updated content regarding your business that you would like your clients to know about.  Write informative posts regarding your business and how the clients can benefit from it.  This will keep them coming back for more information and updates about your business.  Maintaining a persistent flow of information on your site helps to increase visibility of your business.

The social media sites create a suitable platform where entrepreneurs are capable of connecting with their customers on a more personal level.  By creating a fan page on a social media site, customers are capable of following you and leaving testimonials that are essential for growing and understanding your customer base. With that said, it is imperative that you not treat your business’ social media page like it’s your own personal one. You are not your business, and vice versa. As such, sharing your own personal beliefs on politics, religion, professional sports (supporting the local team is fine), sexual orientation, etc. is a bad idea. If a business wants to attract as many customers as possible, it needs to be as neutral and bipartisan as possible so as not to offend or distance entire groups of people who may not share your sentiments on a given issue.

This strategy involves collection of several contacts that you can then send information directly to their email inbox.  When you have good quality list, it can help in positive development of your business. The simplest and most common method used to build lists is requesting the clients to sign up for the monthly newsletter.  The registered clients must have an interest in your business, hence, after reading the updates and offers you send, they are likely to respond well to your service.

Websites are important sources of information.  Your business needs to have a website where clients can find updates and information regarding services, products and deals.  It also acts as the center for online deals. In today’s business environment, a website can be as simple as a one-page contact sheet, or as monolithic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, interactive, comprehensive, merchant-account processing web-monster. Either way, today, having a website just proves that you actually have a business.