Marketing Solutions for Small Businesses

We’ve comfortably cruised right on into the new year and if you’re looking to level up your marketing efforts for your small business, you’ve come to the right place!

The specifics of your marketing plan are unique to you and your business, but compared to a large marketing firm or a large business, the needs of your small business are probably a little bit more nuanced. Maybe you have a clear plan on how to achieve your business goals for this quarter, or maybe not, either way you need the best small business marketing software. 

Here’s the thing about choosing small business marketing software: it’s really about more than just the tech. Yes, don’t get us wrong, the tech piece is important, so important that we’ve made it our business to provide this for other business owners. What’s equally as important, though, is the implementation of that tech. 

Starting with a new small business marketing software can be overwhelming, especially when you are left to fend for yourself. It’s like you’ve just walked into a maze and you know that at the center is an optimized marketing system that’s bringing in and converting leads for your business, but you have no way to figure out how to get there quickly. You’re left wandering around the maze for months, troubleshooting functionality and hoping something works. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way! There is small business marketing software out there that provides not only the tech, but the implementation, and the business coaching to go along with it [ahem, namely, Social Fox]!

Implementation aside, there are several reasons why, in particular, digital marketing focused software is ideal for any small business. Firstly, building your brand awareness. 

Brand awareness is a vital aspect of your business. If people don’t already know who you are or what your business is about, they are much less likely to purchase from you. This is where small business marketing software focused on digital solutions comes in. Utilizing a software that has the functionality to manage your social media presence, bring in reviews for your business to provide social proof, and provide data on your ad campaigns can easily be used to increase your brand awareness. 

While this small business marketing software is building your awareness, it’s also optimized to bring in more leads. You’ve now got the ability to collect contact information from potential customers and store it in one place while also following up with these new leads through varied communication routes, with all this ultimately leading to…

Increased sales! 

When you have the best small business marketing software that is optimized for bringing in, nurturing, and converting leads you have the ability to scale your business with ease. 

At this point, we’ve covered why you need small business marketing software to take your business to the next level but what specifically should that software do for you? Read on to find out which functions are non-negotiable!

The 8 Functions Your Small Business Marketing Software Needs to Have

If you’ve been dabbling in the small business marketing software realm, it’s possible that you’ve experienced our worst nightmare: duct taping a marketing system together.

You use a different software for SMS messaging, emailing, forms software for lead capturing, website hosting, the list could go on for days. And just when you think you have it all set up exactly how you want… one of the 10 programs that you use puts out a software update and everything falls out of sync again. 

To simplify this process for you, let’s cover what functionality the best small business marketing software should have, but most importantly, should have all in one place, provided by one marketing software. 

1. Business Automations

If you haven’t yet taken advantage of automations in your small business marketing software, your life is about to change. Take a moment to imagine having a system that works for you 24 hours a day. This system automatically sends out your newsletter, delivers your lead magnet, and sends your marketing email a second time if your contact didn’t open it on the first try, the possibilities are truly endless. 

Just adding automations to your business alone can free up so much of your valuable time and put a large portion of your customer nurturing and follow up on auto-pilot. Imagine what you could get done if you had those repetitive actions off your plate. 

We’ve even provided you a list of the top five email automations that we believe every business should have. 

2. Web Hosting for Your Website, Landing Pages, and Courses

Gone are the days where you need a separate web hosting or online course platform. Functionality like this is now provided through small business marketing software and the capabilities are exponentially increased by having your marketing tools and website under the same login. 

You now have the ability to track the engagement of your contacts through the different areas of your website. This includes the course creators out there! You can have your course materials and email marketing in the same place so you can provide personalized [and automated] email support for your students by knowing when they’ve accessed the course materials and how much they’ve completed. 

3. Easy Lead Capturing with Forms, Surveys, and Quizzes

We’re officially past the time where we have to use Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to capture leads. Small business marketing platforms, like Social Fox, have integrated these actions and upped their functionality.

You can customize an unlimited amount of forms or surveys on your websites in order to seamlessly capture lead contact information. But that’s not even the best part…

You’ve got the ability [through those business automations we discussed] to then segment and provide specific support to your email list depending on how they answered the questions on your form. 

Say you have a health coaching business, when a new lead fills out your form you can have them answer what their biggest health concerns are. Based on their answers, you can then drop them into different email series’, speaking directly to their biggest concerns and customizing their nurture experience. 

Pretty great, right? We think so too.

4. Social Media Integration

We’d be remiss if we left social media integration out from our small business marketing software run down. Afterall, social media is the hot thing in marketing these days!

Social Fox integrates with all the major players: Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to allow you to easily bring your social media followers off of platforms you don’t own and get them onto your email list. If you’re not yet utilizing a lead magnet to achieve this, we covered everything you need to know about lead magnets here. 

5. Multiple Communication Channels via Website or App

As we’ve said there is so much benefit from utilizing automations in your small business marketing software, but not everything can be automated. You still need that person-to-person interaction to build trust. 

This is where on-the-go access to your small business marketing software communication portal comes in handy. Through either the web application, or a companion mobile app [like our Social Fox app], you can easily be in contact with leads or customers when they have questions. 

With social media integration, you can even add Messenger or Instagram DMs to your list of ways to follow up with leads. The Social Fox app functionality goes beyond just text messaging and email though. You can send video messages, make phone calls [through additional integration], view your sales pipelines, and even send invoices so you don’t have to be chained to your computer all day. 

6. Calendar and Appointment Management

Calendar integrations are a must with your small business marketing software. As with many of the other functions we’ve discussed, the real value comes from the way your calendar appointments can be integrated with the rest of your small business marketing system.

What this looks like in practice is: control over your appointment availability and appointment length, setting up free or paid appointments, additional appointment  information gathering through forms, and automatically sending confirmation emails [to name a few 😅]. 

Not a solopreneur and have a team that takes appointments on your behalf? No problem, appointments can be scheduled between a group of people based on individual availability or in a round robin style rotating schedule.

7. Customer Relationship Management

Keeping tabs on your customer [or potential customer] base can increase conversions in your business. With small business marketing software, you want to make sure that your system is optimized to gather all the customer data in one place and present it in a way that’s easy to navigate. In addition to this, the ability to segment your list in order to provide personalized support can’t be understated.

For Social Fox, this is done through our Contacts and Smartlists functionality. The contact area houses all your customer’s information including any forms they’ve filled out, web pages or landing pages they’ve visited, email automations they’ve received, as well as a running string of all your communication with them.

This allows you to get the full picture of their experience inside your small business marketing platform and see what they’ve been up to. You also have the ability to make notes on each contact with specifics that you might have learned through your conversations. 

Simply put, this provides you a snapshot of your customer so you can better provide individualized follow up and close the sale. Combine this with the Smartlist functionality that allows you to easily segment your list based on customer responses and you’ll be able to optimize your customer interactions even further. 

8. Reputation Management

Your small business marketing software should help you keep an eye on your business reputation across the web. This is easily done through integrations with Google My Business and Facebook so you can keep track of your business’ reviews across multiple platforms. 

You even have the ability, through automation, to reach out to your current customer base and facilitate the review process to further build your reputation online.

How to Choose the Best Small Business Marketing Software for Your Needs?

It’s probably obvious at this point that with the best small business marketing platform the possibilities and scalability for your business are wide open. But like we mentioned earlier, what you don’t want to do is enter the marketing maze with no direction. The implementation is frequently where people get hung up but luckily for you, at Social Fox you don’t just get the software, you get the high-ticket business coaching to go along with it. 

Now I know what you’re thinking… that sounds expensive. In reality, it should be! But here’s the thing: as a company, Social Fox is focused on you. The person behind the business. We want to relieve some of your stress so that in return you gain back time in your day and, hopefully, gain back some sanity! 

This is why we provide you not only with free templates for your website and landing pages, but also provide you with a free set of business automation templates so that you can hit the ground running [more like sprinting, really].

If you thought that sounded great, just wait! We also provide weekly calls where we help our clients build and troubleshoot the different functions of their Social Fox account. 

Feel like your email marketing skills could use a little polishing? You’ll also get access to an entire library of trainings on how to increase the deliverability of your emails.   

If you ask us, it’s really a no-brainer but we understand that if you want to see what the platform looks like and how it runs, so feel free to book a live demo call with us so we can show you exactly how Social Fox can streamline and accelerate your business.