Digital marketing made easy

Moz Local

Moz.com/local

It’s important to ensure the information about your business is up to date and consistent across search engines and online directories. These citations are a strong ranking signal to search engines and positively impact your search rankings.

That said, adding your company to each directory is a pain. Aside from having to create a new account for each, for many, you also have to deal with a salesperson trying to upsell you a paid, premium listing that won’t be worth the cost.

Moz Local takes the hassle out of manually updating all of your listings by pushing accurate location data to all of the major data aggregators and several top-tier online directories. You can update your business information in one place. The Essential plan will cost you $99 per year.

GetFiveStars

Getfivestars.com

GetFiveStars is an app that helps you get customer feedback and online reviews. There are others like it. GetFiveStars just happens to be what we use with our clients at Landscape Leadership.

The GetFiveStars platform helps you automate the customer feedback process to capture your Net Promoter Score, testimonials and, ultimately, online reviews from your best customers.

We appreciate the “feedback first” approach to generating reviews and the automation makes the customer review process easy to implement at your company.

You know how important online reviews can be to your business. For $40 a month, GetFiveStars offers a platform and process that will deliver more positive customer reviews.

Buffer

Buffer.com

If your company is active on social media, Buffer can save you a great deal of time (and headaches) by offering an app and platform where you can schedule, publish and analyze all of your social media posts in one place.

Buffer makes it easy to select which of your social accounts you want to post to. You can post the same message to all of your social networks or add context by customizing each. The point is, you don’t have to bounce around between social networks to share your content.

Buffer is available for every social network your company is active on, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. The Individual Free plan or the Individual Awesome plan at $10 a month makes this app a no-brainer for companies investing in social media marketing.

HubSpot Marketing Free

Hubspot.com/pricing/marketing/free

The entry-level license for HubSpot’s software once started at $200 a month. That has changed with the release of HubSpot Marketing Free.

HubSpot Marketing Free provides easy to use, light-weight lead generation tools to convert more leads on your website and learn about their activity while on your site.

The Lead Flows tool is similar to Sumo’s List Builder in that it allows you to easily add a pop-up or slide-in form to your website.

It goes a little beyond Sumo, however, in offering insight about each of the visitors that converts on your website, like pages viewed, time on site and lead source.

HubSpot Marketing Free is a great next step for those of you interested in moving down the path toward marketing automation and inbound marketing but don’t yet have a significant budget for it.

Sumo

Sumo.com

Sumo arms you with a suite of tools to increase website traffic and generate more leads from your site.

Of the many tools and apps offered, the two that we think are most relevant to the green industry are List Builder and Smart Bar.

List Builder allows you to create and add pop-ups to your website. This is one of the easiest to use email capture tools available.

Smart Bar sits at the top of your website reminding your visitors to join your email list, check out your latest blog post or claim your special offer. This is a great way to make seasonal offers more visible and prominent.

You can get started with Sumo Basic for free.

The author is the founder and president of Landscape Leadership, a green industry marketing agency.