For all those small marketing teams who have been forced to outsource a lot of their design work, social media or content marketing we are here to save the day… and a lot of money. We know what it is like for small teams where your marketers have to wear a lot of hats and not everyone can afford to keep on a full time graphic designer, pay for expensive stock photography or spend thousands on a social media professional. Try these tricks to see where you can cut corners without sacrificing quality work.
1. Hubspot
We’ll get this one out of the way first, as it’s going to be your most expensive trick. Hubspot is an awesome content marketing program that helps analyze and adjust your website’s SEO content, helps you develop content, create lead nurturing campaigns, track and qualify leads you capture online and report on the success of your SEO, social media and email marketing efforts. They do have some special pricing, but it’s a great tool to help you learn the ropes of SEO without outsourcing to an expensive SEO service provider.
2. Canva
Canva is a free, online application that helps you design graphics like Facebook ads, documents, business cards, posters etc. with no graphic design knowledge necessary. The drag-and-drop style program makes it beyond simple with customizable templates. You can upload your own images or pay for their $1 per image options, then download your creations.
3. Death to Stock Photo
This website sends you a zip-file of 10 creative “stock” photos each month that you can use free of charge. The images are unique and fun and much better than those expensive photos you’ve purchased in the past with the models in scrubs you see plastered all over healthcare marketing materials.
Click For: Death To Stock Photo
4. Squarespace
This is a great, inexpensive way to create an SEO and mobile optimized website. They have tons of customizable templates and they make designing your site super simple. The lowest level option only costs $16/month and you have 24-hour support if you ever have questions. Want to add a Youtube video to your Home Page? Easy peasy. Want to add an e-commerce section to your site? It’s a breeze. Think you need an appointment request form on your contact page? No sweat.
5. Syplur’s Healthcare Hashtag Project
If you are interested in what your industry is tweeting about but don’t have access to a robust social media platform to run reports, just check out Symplur’s website. They share insights on social influencers, trending topics related to healthcare and upcoming events like tweet-chats.
Click For: Symplur's Healthcare Hashtag Project
6. MailChimp
Gone are the days of paying too much for email marketing programs that require coded email templates. MailChimp is free, easy to use, easy to design and actually really fun to use too. Very cool company culture. Oh yeah, did we mention it’s free?
7. Snagit
Snagit is an application you can use to screenshot documents and websites then annotate and edit. You can do some minimal design work in the program too. It’s free for the first 30 days then you have to pay a whopping $49.95 and it’s yours for.ev.er. (Bonus: If you’re only snagging website images and annotating you can download the FREE Chrome extension Awesome Screenshot.)
8. Intern Match
Looking to bring some fresh insight to your team but not sure where to start? Your communities local universities or colleges are great resources, but if you also want to post online, don’t pay for a subscription on Monster.com. Create a free account with Intern Match and your first few job postings are FREE. Bonus: You’ll get some AWESOME applicants from far and wide.
9. Tweetdeck
This is a free and very intuitive application provided to you by Twitter. You can schedule tweets to go out throughout the week, track keywords and lists of users all in one place. No expensive social media monitoring software necessary.
10. Woobox
Some social media campaign programs can cost up to $150 for a simple, one month campaign, even if you only have 100 followers. Woobox makes it easy and cheap to create photo contests, caption contests and even Pin-It to Win-It campaigns starting at just $15 per month.