As a small business owner, time is money! The last thing we want you to do is to spend hours of YOUR time on mundane content marketing tasks that suck up your time and energy.
As a service-based business, your time is much better spent on tasks like:
- Building and maintaining client relationships
- Lead generation
- Doing your work & in your zone of genius!
The biggest way to make an impact is when you do what YOU’RE best at, so your clients get the best transformation! If you feel like you’re spending waaaay too much time on soul-draining marketing tasks, we can help with that. These are our favorite content marketing tools to help save time for service-based small business owners
Content Marketing Tools to Save You Time
When you think marketing, what are the first things that come to your mind?
- Writing content?
- Scheduling content?
- Batching it?
- Repurposing content on different platforms?
- Engagement and being active?
- Planning content?
It’s a lot to do and we’ll be honest, it’s time-consuming, especially when you’re creating strategic content that follows your marketing strategy.
We know you’ve got a lot on your plate as a business owner who’s looking to make the most impact. That’s why content marketing needs to be as streamlined and automated as possible, so you can focus on other important tasks that move the needle forward!
Later: Instagram & Facebook Content Scheduling Platform
Our FAVORITE scheduling tool for Instagram is Later! The platform is extremely user-friendly, offers analytics and data for you to review the effectiveness of your content, and has a great blog on their website that shares the latest social media trends! You can choose from free or paid plans that offer a variety of features that fit best for your business.
We use the free plan for our own Instagram account and that of our content creation and management clients. To save you time, you can…
- Upload your gallery of images onto Later
- Schedule posts for the week or month
- Use their “link in bio” feature to redirect your audience to your link in bio with a clear call to action
On the paid plans you can also schedule out Instagram stories and more!
Buffer: Social Media Scheduling Platform
To save you time on content marketing, we suggest using Buffer for your social media. While Later is great for Instagram, specifically, Buffer is another wonderful platform for your other social media channels.
You can connect social media accounts like:
- Personal LinkedIn account
- Company’s business LinkedIn account
- Facebook Group
- Twitter account
We use Buffer for our own content marketing strategy to schedule and automate posts on The Quirky Pineapple Studio’s business LinkedIn page. Buffer allows us to include images, links, and even videos!
Our only problem with the platform is that when we tag people in a scheduled post, they won’t be tagged when they’re scheduled on LinkedIn. We’ve had to go into the post on LinkedIn manually to make the edit.
The Quirky Pineapple Studio Editorial Calendar
If you want to really save time using content marketing tools, then you need to start with a plan. When you plan out your content, based on your marketing goals, you’ll be able to drive the RIGHT type of traffic to your services and attract your dream clients.
We might be a bit biased, but the TQP Studio Editorial Calendar is a great digital content planning system to keep track of your content marketing!
We’ve built the digital calendar to keep track of:
- Your revenue goals
- Specific launches or programs you plan on having throughout the year
- Important dates you’d like to keep track of
- Email marketing
- Social media
- And cornerstone content
Besides worrying about what you’ll be posting about today, tomorrow, or next week, you can use our editorial calendar template to plan out your content for a week to month’s time! You won’t have to stress about what you should share or write about, forget important promotional dates, and have everything prepared!
Tailwind: Pinterest Scheduling Tool
If you’re tired of dealing with social media algorithms, shadow banning, and bots skewing with your analytics… another great way to pursue content marketing is through Pinterest.
Fun fact: Pinterest is NOT another social media platform, it is actually a powerful search engine!
If you regularly post content on your blog that is informational and answers your clients’ questions, you can repurpose that content into pins for Pinterest to be shared. The platform can bring in high traffic to your website and get your ideal clients on your services and offers. It’s a much more *reliable* source for getting eyes to your website than focusing solely on social media.
The ONLY trusted platform for Pinterest scheduling is Tailwind! They are backed by Pinterest itself. With a free Tailwind plan, you can schedule up to 100 pins.
LEARN how to use SEO & content to rank on Google and reach more clients in our course with Julia Renee Consulting!
BONUS CONTENT MARKETING TOOL: The Content Planner
We’ll say it again – if you REALLY want to save time on content marketing, you need to create a plan to post! Another one of our favorite content marketing tools to save time is The Content Planner.
Besides all the digital tools and resources, The Content Planner is the ONLY physical content planner for your social media and digital content! It gives you space to plan out your marketing campaigns by month, week, and day. There’s also space to plan out your content goals, make a hashtag strategy, and one of my favorites is the holiday calendar included in the front of the planner.
Final thoughts
Saving time means being efficient, systemized, and utilizing automation to your advantage. When marketing becomes another systemized process in your business, you’re able to free up headspace and also time to do other tasks.
Here’s a recap of 4 content marketing tools to save time for small business owners:
- Later – for Instagram and Facebook
- Buffer – for all other social media channels
- The Quirky Pineapple Studio Editorial Calendar template
- Tailwind – for Pinterest
- BONUS: The Content Planner
What types of tools are you currently using in your content marketing? What’s the most time-sucking task? Share with us in the comments below!
*Wouldn’t it be amazing if you had more time on your hands to do what you actually loved in your business? It’s time to automate your content marketing and we’d love to help with that!
Schedule a Clarity Call with us to talk about how we can help you make marketing less of a chore and something exciting to share your business and impact!
Enjoyed this post? You might like these, too:
How Small Businesses Can do Market Research for their Content
How to Plan Your Content Strategy for More Visibility
How to Incorporate Video Content in your Brand Strategy
4 Steps to Plan a Marketing Strategy
Want more content goodness?DOWNLOAD your very own Content Generating Machine to help you go from idea, to content, to community, and clients!
