Five tools to make you a small business marketing genius.

If you’re anything like me, you’re the managing director of your company and also the marketing assistant (and cleaner and receptionist).

Running my small copy writing business I do a lot with a little, but I’ve seen opportunities swoop past me because I don’t have the headspace to consistently do the things I know I should be doing.

It’s why over the last few years I’ve started gathering apps that make marketing and business development a bit more automated and easy for a small business like mine. You’ll see many of them are really more about great customer service or management — that’s not a mistake. In our business, our existing customers are our best, fastest and cheapest source of new business. It’s probably the same for you too.

Here goes.

Ask Nicely — make customers love you

If you’ve never heard of Net Promoter Score, brace yourself. It’s a super simple way of measuring the most important business metric ever — how much your clients love you. If they score you 1, you’ve got an issue; 10 and they’re actively recruiting clients on your behalf.

It’s all based on one question: “how likely are you to recommend us?” The value in that is immense. But… NPS software is generally heavy and dull, wrapped up in all sorts of add-ons that make people not want to answer — and it’s slow. You often have to wait until the end of the month to get your scores

Ask Nicely sends that simple little questions to your clients and lets them answer in the email. You also get real-time data, so you hear about the haters immediately. That can hurt your heart, but by god it’s useful — if you can get in touch with haters really quickly you have a pretty excellent shot at turning them into lovers. If a true lover crops up, that’s your cue to make them extra love you with a phone call or a gift.

An extra bonus is that Ask Nicely is NZ-made. Clever clogs.

Gmail canned messages — make a robot do the typing

If you’re anything like me, you feel like you’re writing the same email over and over again. I have stock text to go with proposals, first drafts, chase ups — you name it. Somewhere in my system I have a document called “standard wording” which I thought was a bit of revelation when I wrote. Sending a proposal? Open, cut and paste, send. Easy!

Imagine my joy when I stumbled across Gmail’s canned messages. Now I have that standard text stored in my system, so the next time I need one, there’s no searching, cutting or pasting. I just click the arrow button in the lower right-hand corner of window, choose the message, personalise and hit send.

You can set responses to go out automatically, based on things like who sent it, and if they’ve used a keyword, label or subject.

It goes without saying that if you’d like help penning these stock responses, we’re your copy writers.

Boomerang — email super powers

Boomerang is another Gmail add-on, and I love it. I use it like an ad-hoc CRM system.

It does two things:

1. Sends emails at a set time
2. Boomerangs emails back to you if your recipient hasn’t responded.

Here are some of the ways I use it:

Automatic proposal follow-ups

I Boomerang every proposal email, with a specific set of keywords. If they don’t respond in a day, I get the email back, which triggers an automatic Canned Message to follow them up. Genius! If that sounds too hard, a Boomeranged email will at least remind you not to let a hot lead get cold

Managing delivery

I schedule emails a lot. Here’s a secret: mostly things take me a while to write. But if I hit a stroke of inspiration, I get stuff done really, really quickly. When that happens, I don’t just send it back to the client. Why? Because people start to get used to turn around times that simply aren’t always achievable. So I schedule emails to go out later — still ahead of time, but not so much that I’m shooting future me in the foot. That way, I can get that project out of my head for a while.

Keeping warm leads on the burner

I also used scheduled emails to keep track of warm leads. If a client tells me they’ll be ready to talk in a week or two, I’ll say “great!” and then actually email them again in a week or two. It’s a genius move, I know. I used to put reminders in my diary. Now I write the email immediately and just schedule it in. You’ll be surprised at how many people genuinely do want to work with you.

Pxlr — stop stealing images

These days social media is visual. I’ve seen it in action. A post with a powerful, beautiful image will always outperform one with no image or a low-quality image.

So mostly people steal them from the net. Let me tell you now: you should stop doing that. Not only is it ethically questionable, it’s also bad for business. Creating your own images is often faster because you avoid those lost hours clicking through a search result. It will also give you the chance to start building a visual style so that people connect all your images together. OK! You’re sold!

But oh. Have you seen how expensive Photoshop is? Well, never fear, Pxlr is basically Photoshop for free. As long as you’re not trying to retouch Michael Jackson into your family photo, it’ll do everything you need: adjust colours, add stickers and type, free-hand draw, rotate, crop and resize, get rid of red-eye — you name it.

Squarespace — get a great website, free

Stop asking web developers to build you a single page website. It’s not worth their time and it’s not worth your money. Instead, roll up your sleeves and get onto Squarespace. So easy to use, so beautiful and free to design — you just pay them to host your site. As a side note, if you feel like you need a bit of hand-holding to help you set up the site, that’s what this company does.

My bag of tricks has made business development way easier, and simpler. Share them with your friends(or keep them secret so you look extra amazing).

Originally published at www.wordsforbreakfast.co.nz.