Name: Bare Bones Marketing
Area: Middlewich
Website: www.bbmarketing.co.uk
As a marketing agency helping businesses with limited marketing budgets, Bare Bones Marketing has become adept at finding ways of working smarter and more effectively. We rarely recommend anything to clients that we haven't used ourselves and we're always on the look out for new technologies, applications or cloud services that help us work smarter.
We've implemented a low cost customer database (CRM), which is cloud-based so the whole team can update it with notes, new contacts, customer information and potential leads. We've linked this to a free email marketing system (MailChimp) for our newsletters and promotions, and this means that we only have to enter the information once, saving us valuable time (and our clients love this too). Social media is critical to our business, but it can be really time consuming, so we use another free tool (Hootsuite) to manage and schedule our social media messages. Their mobile phone app means easy access when we're out and about.
As we also do a lot of talks, training and presentations (both for ourselves and clients), we've been using Prezi for over a year now. It has great impact and we've had fantastic feedback from our customers and audiences - and it's free too! Even our bookkeeping and accounting system is in the cloud, which is great as our bookkeeper is based overseas and our accountant can access it online, really keeping our costs down. We love that we can work smarter and save money too.
Emma Dalzell is director of Bare Bones Marketing