Could you be doing this for £0?

When you’re ambitious but small, it can be tempting to spend money ‘investing’ in marketing tech and sales tools that will help you achieve your growth vision. Sometimes it’s valuable to do this, but most of the time it’s not. Often there is a great, free or low-cost alternative that’s hidden away that you can use, meaning you can focus your precious budget on something that’ll help you accelerate your growth goals, like coaching.

Here I’ve picked out a few of my favourite top tools, and explained how I’ve used them to streamline and supercharge marketing and new business in the design businesses I’ve worked with, so you can put them to best effect.

1. Evernote, from free - Capture, nurture and share your ideas across any device. When you’re a smaller size agency, marketing is often a shared task. I love Evernote for content creation, planning and sharing tasks with the team. And it works amazingly well at capturing thoughts on the fly, with a handy download for Mac desktop, phone, tablet and web access too. Check out the Blog Template for a great way to get your ideas down fast.

2. Screen Cast O Matic, free - creating routines (aka standard operating procedures or processes) for your business is key to delegation, whether it’s to another team member, onboarding a new employee or using a virtual assistant. And nothing is faster or simpler to create and use than a video recording of yourself doing that action, whilst narrating what you’re up to. Better still, it’s something that can be referred back to again and again. Delegation has always been a weak point for me, but this tool has single-handedly helped me to trust that those I work with are executing tasks at a standard I would expect of myself.

3. Streak, from free - If you want the new biz pipeline to run dry, put it in a spreadsheet. If you want it to thrive, reap profits fast, and be instantly viewable, use Streak. I’ve never found a better tool for an instant snapshot of how sales are going. You can automatically capture data from your contacts and emails and get notified as things progress through your pipeline by never forgetting a follow-up with tasks and reminders, plus so much more.

4. Calendly, from free - My most hated email exchange with clients is the meeting scheduler. You know the kind, where you to-and-fro on clunky old email to find a suitable 30 mins to speak, killing all the magic of the new business relationship along the way. That’s why I love Calendly. It syncs with your calendar, gives you a custom URL and provides a slick, fast scheduling option that you’ll be proud to share with contacts. And the above is available on the free option.

5. Canva, from free - it’s controversial to recommend a design app to design agencies. But in my role as an in-house marketer, the thing that slowed me down most was waiting for design time. And it only got worse the more successful I was at my job, because ‘house jobs’ are always last in the studio schedule after all the client work gets out of the door. More client work = less time for house design jobs. That’s why I’d recommend a designer setting up some simple templates in Canva, that your sales/marketing/new business person can adapt on the fly. I’d go so far as to say that this would make that person around 30% more effective at their job, based on my experience.

There you go! 5 ways to free up time and energy when doing marketing and new business for your design agency.

Of course, it takes energy to create new routines, so go easy on yourself, add one of these tools at a time. And being conscious of what you’ll do with the extra time and budget this frees up will keep you focussed on making them work for your business.