Today there are more companies and brands than ever before. Everyone tries to constantly find new and creative ways to market their business as effectively as possible. But most companies have limited resources for marketing . Building and maintaining effective campaigns seems complicated, time-consuming and expensive .
What do I Even Need Marketing for?
Marketing is understood to mean strategies, methods and actions of a company in order to make a product visible to customers in the market. These include:
- Email Marketing
- Social media marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Offline marketing
All of these measures are essential for a business today. If done correctly, they will bring you satisfied customers and increasing profits! But many believe they don’t have enough time, money and knowledge for it. And most of them despair at the latest with the prices, the variety and the complexity of the necessary tools. Here, however, open source marketing comes to our aid.
What is Open Source?
Open source are all programs whose source code is made public and freely accessible and usable by everyone. This results in the great advantages of open source tools:
- Budget friendly
- Adaptable to individual needs
- All the data is yours
How can I use Open Source Marketing Successfully?
The first two steps in marketing are always business analysis and marketing strategy .
1. Business Analysis
As an entrepreneur, you ask yourself some important questions about your business, your products, your customers and the market:
- Who are your clients
- What problems do your customers have?
- How do you solve your customers’ problems?
- Where do you reach your customers?
2. Marketing Strategy
This is where you develop your marketing campaign and ask yourself the following questions:
- How do you generate traffic?
- How do you generate leads?
- How do you do lead nurturing?
- How do you sell
In order to successfully implement your marketing strategy now, you need the appropriate tools .
3. Marketing Tools
The common tools for marketing are mostly expensive, often cannot do everything and are difficult to link with one another.
Instead of concentrating on the essentials – offering our customers the best possible solution to their problems – we despair of the daily struggles with all the tools . Fortunately, there are now some good alternatives!
The Best Open Source Marketing Tools for your Business
Marketing and sales cover some areas. Depending on what you need for your business, the following open source tools are available to you :
WordPress
To build your website, WordPress is “the place to go”. 40% of all websites worldwide are built with this CMS.
Matomo
To do marketing properly, you need to track your website visitors and their behavior. A web analytics tool like Matomo is open source and GDPR safe.
Mautic
Mautic is the first Open Marketing Cloud worldwide and offers you everything you need to:
- Manage your subscribers and customers
- Send emails and newsletters
- Build sales pages
- To create fantastic sales funnels
- To link all marketing channels with one another (emails, websites, pop-ups, push notifications, WhatsApp, Facebook chatbot, LinkedIn, etc …)
With its functions and ease of use, Mautic goes hand in hand with such extensive tools as Hubspot. In addition, it’s flexible and budget-friendly!
Suite CRM
SuiteCRM is a classic CRM tool. Here you can save all relevant customer data and use it for selling and building customer loyalty.
SocioBoard
SocioBoard is a good alternative to programs like Buffer or Hootsuite. Here you can create, plan and analyze your social media posts.
Jitsy
With Jitsi you can hold online conferences, both on the desktop and mobile. It is therefore a wonderful alternative to programs like Zoom or Google Meet.
Do I need IT skills for Open Source Marketing?
You can download and install every program yourself , connect all the necessary services and then manage everything yourself . You need some IT skills for this.
Or: You decide on a managed version of the respective tool. That means someone else takes care of the installation, hosting and correct administration of the tool . These solutions cost a bit of money, of course, but they are far cheaper than other tool alternatives and above all save you valuable time.
