Whether you’re a founder running your CPG startup on your own, or a marketer who’s part of a lean team, technology can enable you to run your marketing efforts a lot more efficiently. Check out the tools below to better plan, execute on, and manage your marketing initiatives and campaigns.

1. Planoly

Planoly is an amazing tool for planning and scheduling your Instagram posts. In fact, we use it here at Julee Ho Media! On Planoly, you can upload photos and videos you plan to post, write the captions, add the hashtags, schedule them to be automatically posted in the future, and see how they’ll look in your grid. They even have some analytics built in!

2. Canva

Canva is the one-stop shop for all of your graphic design needs! Want to create a beautiful Instagram story post about your new product launch? A simple infographic about how to prepare your product? A banner graphic for your website? Canva can do it all! And better yet, it can do it all for free! Of course, there are some paid options that will allow you access to more premium features but their paid plan is still fairly inexpensive and you can do just fine without them!

3. Storyblocks

While we believe that every CPG should have custom, unique visuals produced specifically for their brand (we are a photography and videography company afterall!), we understand that there are scenarios where stock assets are the best fit. In those cases, we recommend sites like Storyblocks where you can pay a monthly subscription fee and get access to unlimited, royalty-free assets that you can use in perpetuity.

There are also free options available like Pexels and Pixabay, but keep in mind that their bank of assets is less expansive and typically lower quality.

4. Flaticon

Sometimes it’s good to mix up the photography and videos on your website with some fun illustrated icons to pair with your messaging. For example, you might have an area on your website that talks about your product differentiators – locally sourced, certified organic, and non-GMO. You can make those differentiators “pop” even more by placing relevant icons above or next to each. Thanks to Flaticon, you need not be a design guru to make this happen! Flaticon offers millions of pre-designed icons that you can customize to your brand’s color palette – all for a monthly subscription fee and you can cancel at any time.

5. MailChimp

If you’re not collecting emails from potential customers, you are doing both you and your audience a disservice! Be sure to have some sort of offer on your website that incentivizes visitors to give you their email address (e.g., Sign up for 10% off your first order). This will allow you to build an email list that you can use to send out offers, promotions, or simply inform folks of new products and happenings in your company. Free newsletter tools like MailChimp are perfect for sending these email blasts. Remember, in order for someone to buy from you, your brand must be top-of-mind. And to stay top-of-mind, you need to keep in touch regularly!

6. Hotjar

Have you ever wondered how people interact with your website? Hotjar allows you to record site visitors so you can see all of their interactions with your site pages. This information is tremendously helpful in determining things like:

Where you might have broken links or poor navigation
The parts of your site that are getting the most attention
Where people are bouncing (leaving your site / losing interest)

7. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great tool for managing all of your social media accounts across platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and more. And while we prefer Planoly’s interface for Instagram planning much more, Hootsuite is great for comprehensive management of your social media presence.

8. Trello

While Trello isn’t a marketing tool per se, it is great for managing your marketing projects. Whether that’s just you working on various marketing tasks and strategies, or an entire team working on multiple projects simultaneously – Trello offers an extremely easy way to manage those projects through a platform that is user-friendly and free! For example, when we’re managing projects here at Julee Ho Media, we’ll use Trello to create a “list” from left to right, each labeled as a step in our process, such as: Idea, Prioritized, In-Progress, and Complete. Within each list is a “card” which details a specific idea, task or project. We can then drag each respective card through the lanes as the work progresses. It’s as easy as that!

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We hope these tools help you in better understanding, organizing, and implementing your marketing initiatives. We can whole-heartedly recommend them because we’ve used each and every one of them first-hand (and, for the most part, still do)!

Julee Ho Media is a boutique photography company specializing in CPG, food and beverage brands. Click here to get a quote and discover how we can help elevate your brand.