It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there for vegan businesses, and if you want to keep up with your competitors, you’ve got to have a good marketing strategy. Running a business is no walk in the park, and you can’t expect to do everything yourself without burning out. Luckily, you don’t have to, thanks to innovative software and tools that help you take care of one of the most complex parts of running a business: marketing.
If you’re running an online vegan business, here are ten invaluable tools that you can use to optimize your digital marketing.
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software and CRM platform with both free and paid versions. It offers over 75 different integrations, including Shopify, Hotjar, LiveChat, Unbounce and Zapier. It includes all the tools you’ll need to run a successful inbound marketing campaign, so you don’t have to deal with multiple tools. At the heart of HubSpot is its CRM, which is free to use. But the software also has a marketing hub that, when combined, helps you grow your traffic, build leads, and convert customers.
Within the marketing hub, you can create landing pages using their premade templates which you can easily customize through a drag-and-drop editor. As part of the landing page, you can add sign-up forms and auto-send lead magnets or emails in one smooth step.
Once you capture email addresses into HubSpot, you can segment them into lists based on various factors of your choosing, such as how often your leads engage with your emails or how frequently they visit your site.
On top of that, HubSpot also offers:
- Email workflows
- Social media management
- Analytics reporting dashboards
- Lead management
- Content management platform
Before you can even start marketing your vegan business, you need some marketing materials. Unless you happen to have a graphic design background, it’s tedious to create engaging and professional imagery for your marketing campaigns. And you likely end up with something you’re not happy with. Canva can help you create visuals that look like they were made by a professional graphic designer, whether it’s for paid ads, social media or email marketing.
There is both a free and paid version of the tool, but even the free option has many useful features.
Canva has thousands of templates for:
- Social media posts
- Website banners
- Infographics
- Email campaigns
- Presentations
- Brochures
- And more!
It’s straightforward to use, and nearly everything is drag-and-drop. Plus, you can input your brand colours, fonts, and logo, so it automatically applies them to your designs. The paid version gives you access to extra graphics, video and images, plus more template designs. You also get extra cloud storage and the ability to schedule social media posts to 8 different platforms.
Find out how to make the most of Canva here.
If you want your vegan business to be successful, then your audience needs to be able to find you. One of the best ways to get people onto your website is through search engine optimization or SEO. It involves ranking for relevant keywords so that your vegan business can be found on search engine results pages. You don’t just want to pick keywords willy-nilly and hope for the best. By choosing keywords effectively, you have a better chance to rank and also optimize your backlinks.
Ahrefs is an amazing SEO tool that allows you to analyze your competitors to see which keywords they are currently ranking for. This will enable you to find the best keyword options to rank for in your niche. Ahrefs also includes rank tracking, which shows your long-term keyword performance and creates a backlink profile where you can access all your backlinks.
The content explorer enables you to stay on top of new content and trends in your niche, and the tool even lets you know when a competitor loses a backlink.
SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool is another SEO tool that enables you to track relevant keywords and see how they rank based on:
- Keyword difficulty
- Search volume
- Competitive density
- Word count
- Cost per click
- And more.
With the free version, you can run ten keyword searches per day, instantly providing you with thousands of related keywords. There are tons of results that you can then use to come up with content ideas for your blog, website, or social media.
Email marketing is an essential tool to build and nurture relationships with your leads and current customers. You need to include email marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy and one of the best free tools you can use in Mailchimp. There’s a reason why Mailchimp has over 12 million customers, and it’s not just because of their cute mascot, Freddie.
Mailchimp is free to use with a subscriber list of up to 2000 people. You can send out up to 12000 emails per month on the free plan, and if you need more, you can upgrade to one of the paid versions. Even if you’re not “techy”, Mailchimp makes it easy to set up one-off email blasts or schedule longer email workflows.
You can create beautiful newsletters using their drag-and-drop templates, manage your subscribers and view reports on how your emails are doing within the interface. Best of all, MailChimp integrates with over 200 different applications like Squarespace, Typeform, Canva and Google Analytics.
Elementor is a page builder for WordPress that lets you design your website and web content like a pro. While WordPress offers some default templates and features, Elementor opens the door to more dynamic and cohesive design options. You can customize your website designs to look exactly how you want them, using pre-built templates as a base. You can also add plug-ins to your Elementor page, including your social feeds, Google Reviews, Form Builder, buttons, testimonials and more.
One of the most useful marketing features of the Elementor page builder is their easy-to-use pop-up builder, which works fantastic for lead magnets. Lead magnets are a great way to capture your audiences’ email addresses so you can continue to nurture them through email marketing. With the pop-up builder, you can create fun and engaging pop-ups without hassle, so you can start collecting those valuable leads!
Get an Elementor designed vegan website
Using marketing tools in your vegan business
Marketing doesn’t have to be scary, and in fact, it can be exciting to start seeing the benefits of your efforts pay off. Including this list of tools as part of your marketing strategy will help you execute your marketing campaigns seamlessly and cover all the bases. Whether you have a huge budget to allocate for marketing or no budget, you can use these tools to support the success of your vegan business.