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Funmi is fresh out of college. While in college, she bought and sold clothing accessories to students and made money out of it. Now that she’s out of school, she wants to take her accessories business to a whole new level.

Her primary concern is to market her accessories to a wide audience. And what better way to reach more people for less investment than marketing online? Here are 5 tools Funmi can use to market her business online, and for free.

Note: Each tool has a paid version that provides more features to the business owner.

Social Media

Social media marketing is word of mouth referral on steroids. You can reach 10,000 customers through one customer when you use social media channels. All that’s needed is a simple share or retweet for more people to learn about your business. However, social media marketing takes time to manage. Here are tools that can help with that.

HOOTSUITE: Funmi can use this social media management tool to manage 3 of her social media accounts and schedule posts way in advance. In an hour, she can schedule posts for a whole month. This tool helps business owners like Funmi, who are short on time to schedule their marketing posts weeks and even months in advance. The free version of this tool allows you to add up to 3 social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

BUFFER: This tool is a content publishing tool with some social media management features. This tool allows business owners publish and schedule content from their website, blog or other content platforms to their social media accounts. The tool also provides analytics on how well your content does.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is great for building relationships with your customers and keeping your brand in the mind of your customers through constant communication. With email marketing, you can easily convert prospects to customers. Here are some tools you can use.

VERTICAL RESPONSE: The free version allows you to add up to 1000 email contacts. This tool is great for building relationships with your prospects and customers, alerting your customers of new products and new information about your business and converting prospects to customers.

CONSTANT CONTACT: This tool has one of the best email automation features for businesses. This means you can automate email campaigns that will easily nurture your prospects to customers and let the campaigns run automatically. However, Constant Contact only comes with a limited time free trial.

Content Marketing

Funmi can use content to educate her audience on fashion tips and trends. Of course, she ties her products to each helpful content she publishes. That’s how content marketing works – engaging your customers with valuable content and tying your product/service with that information.

WORDPRESS: Today, content is the new search engine optimization. This means if you want your business to appear on search engines like Google and Bing, you need to publish relevant content on your business website. WordPress is a great tool for that. You can create a free account and access hundreds of other marketing plugins to make your job easier. Plugins like the Editorial Calendar helps you plan your content and there are countless of social media plugins that allows your readers share your content from your site.