Small business owners around the world are always looking for new ways to connect with their target audience and grow their brand. Odds are, you’ve heard plenty of marketing advice that sounds good on paper. But you didn’t follow up because you weren’t sure how to get started.
Perhaps you’ve held brainstorming sessions with your team and come up with some brilliant ideas. However, you have no idea how to put your ideas into practice.
The surge in technological advances over the last decade has led to some exciting marketing opportunities, regardless of your industry. You can now connect with your customers, share information, spread brand awareness, and build trust like never before.
WordPress plugins can help you turn your marketing dreams into reality. They add a layer of flexibility to your website that allows you to interact with customers in new ways while generating more sales and traffic for your small business.
Today we are going to look at 8 plugins you can use to grow your business by diversifying your marketing strategy.
Let’s dive in!
1. SeedProd
The first plugin we are going to look at today is SeedProd, which is a coming soon page and maintenance mode design and marketing tool. Growing your business pre-launch through engagement efforts and ranking is crucial for rapid growth, and SeedProd makes this process simple.
Get a head start on your SEO efforts by using your valuable keywords on your landing page so you can build traction with Google before your official site goes live.
You can even start building your email list, or continue building your list if your website is going down for maintenance. The clean and easy to use interface allows you to make a customized, simple, and flexible landing page for users when they visit your URL. Add options for people to follow you on social media or subscribe for new updates in a couple of quick clicks.
After exploring all of the possibilities, you’ll see why SeedProd is known as the #1 coming soon page and maintenance mode plugin for WordPress.
2. Formidable Forms
Every good website needs a form builder to communicate quickly and effectively with their audience. Your contact form, lead magnet signup page, and comment section on your blog all rely on a high-quality form builder like Formidable Forms.
There are plenty of features to use and almost unlimited customization options. Use the conditional logic form builder to segment your leads and drive consumers down your various sales funnels.
Want to learn more about your target audience? Create a poll on your website with critical questions about pain points or goals and review the data in real-time. Formidable Forms allows you to break down the results over time so you can gather actionable data about your customers as well as then the performance of the content on your website.
Formidable Forms has a lite version that you can try before you upgrade to the premium software. See for yourself how much your business can grow when you have fully customized, actionable forms.
3. RafflePress
Do you want to spread brand awareness and encourage engagement on social media? If so, RafflePress is the perfect plugin for you. The intuitive drag and drop builder allows you to create contests on your website that you can share across all of your social media platforms.
There are plenty of things that make RafflePress different from other giveaway plugins, but the mobile responsive design is perhaps one of the most praiseworthy features. You don’t have to worry about creating a contest landing page that looks amazing on desktop, only to fall apart on mobile devices. You can rest easy knowing that all of your RafflePress giveaways will come mobile responsive out of the box.
The social media sharing features are also extremely effective for growing your audience. You can offer a prize, and encourage users to share your post with the viral sharing feature, which opens up an additional entry while automatically sharing your event.
4. Smash Balloon
Smash Balloon is another social media engagement plugin, but it allows you to connect your social media platforms and website uniquely. Four different products make up Smash Balloon, including tools for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Once you install the plugins from Smash Balloon you need, you can start posting your social media feed directly to your website. Not only does this help improve SEO, but it also streamlines conversations between users on your site, and those browsing social media.
For example, if there’s a big live event going on, if someone lands on your site, they may see the conversations on social media and join in. The result is you’ll keep people engaged with your website, which helps encourage the growth of your business.
5. All In One SEO
We all know that SEO is still one of the most essential strategies you need to consider when running a small business. Consumers expect to find your content on Google, and if they don’t, you can expect to lose money in sales and see a lower marketing ROI.
All in One SEO Pack is a plugin designed to help business owners make meaningful and actionable decisions when working on search engine optimization. You’ll find plenty of helpful features that will allow you to improve your SEO through tags, categories, social media, and images.
You can even create an XML Sitemap and send it to Google and Bing, which encourages crawling and a more advantageous search position. There are a variety of SEO plugins out there for WordPress, but All in One truly has all of the features you need for rapid growth and success.
6. TrustPulse
Do you want to build more social proof on your website? If you use TrustPulse, you can encourage visitors to spend more time on your website, increase sales, and boost your subscribers.
Social proof is a phenomenon where people are more likely to buy something if they see someone else enjoying that product or service. TrustPulse allows you to show these social cues on your website, which can encourage existing visitors to follow in the same path of the customer displayed on their screen.
For instance, someone might get a popup saying that an individual from Columbus, Ohio, recently subscribed to the email list. Even though the user doesn’t know the subscriber, the idea that someone else finds the brand’s content useful encourages the new person to join the mailing list.
7. ExactMetrics
Let’s be honest, you need actionable data if you want to grow your business. Most people use Google Analytics to review their website traffic, page views, bounce rate, and customer demographics. With ExactMetrics, you get the data-driven results of Google Analytics right to your WordPress dashboard.
In just a couple of clicks, you can add ExactMetrics to your website and view detailed reports showing you the stuff you need to know to improve engagement and your marketing results. You can see everything from your affiliate link clicks to your eCommerce tracking with this powerful analytics plugin.
Conclusion
Growing your business from the ground up is no easy feat. You’re going to have to spend plenty of time analyzing consumer behavior, split testing your promotions, and fine-tuning your marketing strategies across the board.
Luckily, WordPress is flexible and allows developers to create a ton of helpful plugins that help small business owners just like you reach your goal.
Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.