Marketing can easily feel overwhelming, and - not to be a snitch - but I blame the marketers.

There are so many articles and videos online with ‘best of’ lists. “Marketing experts” who tell you you’d transform your business if you use their hashtag formula or “SEO gurus” who claim they can get you onto the first page of Google for your keywords.

I call bullshit.

Marketing isn’t some sort of enigma to be cracked. There is no secret society of marketing illuminati who can unlock six-figure earnings through magic formulas.

Good marketing takes work and time. If you want to do your marketing well, you need to invest the time to work out your purpose so your messaging can be clear. You need to work out who you want to reach with your marketing, and then spend time serving them rather than just shouting at them to buy from you.

Complicated? Not really. Time consuming though? Yes. Fortunately, there are some tools and apps that make your marketing simpler, easier and more effective, and will let you get things done more quickly. It’s about working smarter, not harder.

The below is a summary of this week’s Instagram Live with Instagram coach Katya Willems, during which we shared our favourite apps and tools.

Here are some of mine.

Free stock photos

Stock photos have a bad reputation, and with good reason. Historically, they were unimaginative and homogeneous: just look at this selection of women in snappy suits, pointing, looking fierce, or inexplicably hugging their laptops. They look nothing like the image I have in my head of a businesswoman!

Fortunately, we no longer have to pay big bucks to use crappy stock photos. Instead, there are sites like the below which have a vast selection of great photos, and they are free to use.

Unsplash

If you download photos to use from here, you can cite the photographer (and you can follow them on the platform so you can go back to their work). You can also see how many times a photo has been downloaded, which is helpful if you don’t want to choose something that is already prolific on the internet.

Pixabay and Pexels

A similar setup to Unsplash, and you can buy a virtual coffee, make a donation or give a social media shout-out to thank the photographer.

Make your own images

One way to stand out from the competition is to create your own images. My favourite tool to do this is Canva, which is an online design tool for non-designers. It is very intuitive to use and packed with ready-to-use templates where you can swap out the imagery for your own and change fonts and colours to match your branding. It has a free and paid option, and while I have the paid-for version, the free version has plenty of useful features for the light user.

To edit pictures for Instagram, my favourite smartphone apps are PicsArt, A Color Story and Retouch (I am on Android).

BONUS TIP! Use tinyPNG to compress your images for your website without compromising on quality. This makes them faster to load which is good for your users and for SEO (hat-tip to SEO expert and page speed king Paul Jardine for telling me about this!).

Video skills

There’s no denying people love watching videos. Many people don’t have the time or inclination to read a whole blog post, but would watch a video explaining concepts to them.

Being able to create videos also means that you can repurpose your content into yet another format; for example, I turn most of my blog posts into IGTV videos, which I cross-post to Facebook.

My favourite app to use with this is Quik, I use it mainly to make videos of my kids rather than for business, but because it is super easy to use you can easily make something that looks very professional. You can mix photos and video clips and you can choose from songs in an extensive music library.

Then there’s also InShot, which has a lot of bells and whistles, though I use hardly any of them. If you want something quick and simple though to add clips together, then I would recommend this app.

Fail to plan and plan to fail

How do you keep track of your marketing activities? My go-to tool for planning is Trello, which allows me to create different boards for all my separate projects, and then create lists and tasks with deadlines to help me get everything done.

It’s easy to keep things separate to allow you to track different projects in a way that makes sense, but it is also really useful for collaborating if you have a team who need visibility on your marketing activities.

Never stop learning

We all need to make time to learn new things, to expand our horizons and to be exposed to thinking outside of our bubble.

For me, one of the best ways of doing this is through consuming lots of information. Quite often I choose things that are not t to do specifically with marketing or even running a business, but more to do with imagination, creativity, problem solving and so forth.

I love podcasts that interview entrepreneurs about their stories and approaches to life (maybe I’ll write about my favourites in a future blog). I find I learn so much from people who have been on different journeys to me and that it inspires me to carve out my niche. I tend to use the Google Podcasts and Spotify apps for my podcasts.

For some reason at the moment I’m struggling to find the chance to read physical books, but I love listening to audiobooks while I run. I tend to speed the narration up to about 1.4x, mainly because I’m so impatient, and find I still follow along ok even at this speed.

In the past I’ve also used a handy app and Chrome extension called Pocket to save things I come across that I’d like to read or watch later. I no longer use it purely because I never did find the time to read everything that I was saving to Pocket, and it was stressing me out that I never got round to it! But if you can be more disciplined then it is a great tool which I’d recommend.

I hope these tools and apps will save you some time and make your marketing and running of your small business simpler. Let me know your favourites, and I’ll also update this post to link to Katya’s apps and tools soon.