Small Business Marketing Tools - Essential Items For Businesses Success

When I give a descriptive job spec to someone to work on, I like to use small business marketing tools like the Jing Project. I recently did on in Camtasia. It's a screen capture so that gives a very visual detailed brief of what I want. I mixed some drawings and some notes with a screen video of some web pages I wanted the site to be modeled off. So there is no confusion there for the developer or the designer what they need to have, it's very clear.

Audio communication, now this is another way that I communicate with my team very regularly. To those who email me, I often reply in the audio format. Rather than spending twenty minutes typing out an email, I'll grab my iPhone out and use the audio recorder, just voice memos which is on the front, I put on the Home page of my iPhone and I'll just hit record. Hey Sarah, I need you to do a, b. c, d. You'll find the file in the Dropbox folder, blah, blah this is what I need you to do, audio, audio, talk, talk. Hit stop on the iPhone app and then you can go into it and I can email, hit share on the iPhone app and then email that audio file straight through to a virtual assistant of mine using free business tools.

So I can, on the road, just be thinking of something and email it straight through to them. So I don't have to worry about, oh, I forgot it later. It's a quick tool that you can easily get some feedback to people on. I even use that for giving feedback on a particular email or a design feature or whatever it might be and choose that functionality of the iPHone to give some quick feedback.

I use a thing called Posterous as well. If you don't have Posterous, it's definitely something worth looking at. My Posterous account, I'll record little ideas and things in my car, then I'll email it to my Posterous account and this is not so much with communicating with assistants using small business marketing tools but the speed at which you can start to execute some of your ideas. Then it will get to my Posterous account and then I have a process where assistants will then take that and make a blog post out of it and it gets posted elsewhere and that type of thing as well. So using the audio recording, it's fantastic.

Wireframing. Particularly when it comes down to website development or anything graphical in using small business marketing tools, I think wireframing is a must do. There are a number of different ways you can wireframe. Wireframing is sketching out in effect what the site should roughly look like. It gives some guidance to these guys or girls who are out there doing work. You can do it in Word. Open up Word or Pages or whatever equivalent you might have and it can be very basic but you can grab shape and you can say, this is the browser window, take the color fill off and grab a text box and you can start drawing up roughly what you want the site to look like.