9 Free Digital Marketing Tools for Home-Based Business Owners - Relevance

• Updated on: 2019-06-23
• Read original article here

When your business is well-established, you can buy and try all sorts of expensive software. You have so many computers and mobile devices spread over so many departments that you need a dozen or more tools just to keep your business moving. A successful business presents all sorts of unique marketing challenges, prime among them organization.

Yet, home-based businesses enjoy their share of marketing challenges, as well. Instead of trying to wrangle different departments and integrate various software, many home-based entrepreneurs are desperate for any digital tools that will help them accomplish their marketing goals. Fortunately, not only do these tools exist, but many of them are free.

All businesses rely on technology, but home-based businesses are more dependent on computers and internet services than most. Therefore, before even accepting your first client, you need to ensure your tech is safe — both so you can continue working and so your clients feel secure. You can find free anti-virus tools from reputable security firms to keep your data and devices protected.

Email remains the most flexible, the most ubiquitous, and ultimately the best communication tool on the web. It is almost guaranteed that every potential client of yours has an email address, which means you can and should leverage email into a marketing tool for your business. Most email clients include services like documents and file storage, but free email marketing tools are rare and valuable.

If your small, home-based business sells to other businesses, big or small, you undoubtedly put untold amounts of time into researching your market and understanding your audience. Market research is a necessary chore for every industry, but you can have an easier time at it by using free market research tools. You can shave hours off your goal of understanding your market’s size and scope if you don’t research the hard way.

When you don’t have the budget for a big staff or office, you probably don’t have the budget for a big website. Fortunately, you don’t need one; as long as your site effectively directs visitors where you want them to go — usually your contact page — your website is working well. If you aren’t an expert in website optimization, you can use free basic SEO tools to get high rankings for your site and help visitors understand your business’s purpose.

Just because your website is optimized now doesn’t mean it will be in the future. If your business relies on social media to gain visibility, you must ensure those pages remain optimized, as well. You should keep tabs on all your web assets by using any of the free analytics tools at your disposal — and there are several. To name a few:

How you present yourself to your clients matters, but if you work from home, most of your communications with clients will be through text-based media. That means you need to refine your written materials, including your invoices and project cost sheets as well as any documents you might use to stay organized and on-schedule. You can find all sorts of free document templates online to guide you to professional-looking papers.

You might work from home today, but if you are traveling tomorrow, you should be able to access the data and materials you need to keep your business running. Fortunately, you don’t need a complex computer network to have a remote desktop. In fact, all you need is a free remote desktop tool.

Few home-based workers have more than a couple people on their team, but you probably often find yourself working alongside contractors and freelancers. To keep your project on the same page, you can use free collaboration tools, which include services like messaging, idea boards, and calendars. Then, you’ll find it much easier to wrangle fellow non-standard workers and get paid sooner.

Getting noticed online is all about publishing quality content, but if you aren’t a writer or marketer by trade, it isn’t obvious how to generate the content your audience wants. Because content creation is such a hot topic, there are several free content tools available, including a free topic generator that will produce ideas for your next great post.