20+ Best Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Small companies have lots of things to handle, particularly when they’re just starting out. To get the message out they need a high-quality marketing team to invest the time and money needed to spread the brand name among customers. The best way to do this is to have the best marketing resources at your team’s disposal from the start.

Marketing tools come in a variety of ways which in the technological era, include social media campaigns, automated email marketing campaigns and more. On average, automated email messages have a 70.5 per cent higher open rate and a 152 per cent higher click-through rate than other types of marketing messages. It’s important to sit down with your small business marketing team and figure out what marketing tools will help you improve your benchmark average across all your digital marketing platforms.In this article, I’ll introduce to you the best marketing tools on the market for small businesses. Let’s jump right into the details!

What is a marketing tool?

Marketing tools differ in type and cater to particular needs to help you execute your marketing strategy. With so many tools out there, marketing departments will easily become confused when deciding what they should have in their arsenal. Before going into the deep end and doing all at once, consider the following:

• Who’s the audience?
• Where’s your audience most likely to be?
• What products would your audience find most useful/involved?
• How do you distribute the materials to them in the most effective way possible?

When you’ve got answers to these questions, you’ll be able to narrow down the list of what marketing resources your brand should invest in.

What are the best marketing tools for small businesses?

Small business marketing tools come in all shapes and sizes, but choosing the best solutions for your business can seem like a daunting challenge. I’ve put together a list of marketing tools that should be included in every marketing toolbox.

Marketing tools are important because they are the keys to your overall operations. Tools keep the process running smoothly so that the team doesn’t encounter too many bumps on the road. An outstanding marketing campaign means nothing if you don’t have the right resources to keep the wheel spinning.

AVADA Email Marketing

Price: Free

AVADA Email Marketing is a popular email marketing tool on the market and offers lots of essential features:

• Abandoned Cart Email / Abandoned Cart Recovery
• Welcome email for subscribers
• Cross-sell, Upsell Emails
• Segmentation
• Smart email builder: just drag and drop everything!
• Ready-to-use email templates
• Newsletter Popup/Spin to Win
• Track ROI by advanced reports
• Auto-sync customers data

AVADA Email Marketing can automate emails and make email campaign creation a breeze. It’s an easy tool to use, although some of its marketing automation features are a bit limited. If you want something more advanced, you may want to consider a more expensive tool like HubSpot. But if you’re just starting out, AVADA Email Marketing is a great choice.

HubSpot

Price: Free, or up to $3,200 a month for enterprise solutions; depending on your needs.

HubSpot is a full-stack growth software that provides marketing, sales and customer support resources to enhance all aspects of your marketing efforts. With HubSpot, you’re going to have everything you need to expand your company and increase conversion rates.

Several of HubSpot’s products start free of charge. You can create lead capture forms, send automated follow-up emails, and have access to analytics reports for free. You can also monitor emails, schedule sales meetings, and talk live with visitors. You can also set up a freemium plan support desk and ticketing system, and then pipe it all into a free CRM to get a full view of your customer.

Of course things get more and more sophisticated with its Starter, Professional, and Enterprise plans. And if you’re working with other marketing technology items (such as those on this list), you’re likely to be able to incorporate and use them with HubSpot.

Google Analytics

Price: Free.

Google Analytics is a free service provided by Google that allows you to monitor and analyze website visitor data. It’s the most ubiquitous web analytics tool, and for good reason — easy it’s to use, but it’s also effective and highly customizable.

Although all you need to get started is a simple javascript snippet (best implemented via Google Tag Manager), what you can do with the tool is actually restricted by your imagination (and probably your developer’s time). I don’t know a lot of marketers who don’t at least have a basic understanding of Google Analytics traffic reports.

Trello

Price: starts free and goes up to $42+ a month for enterprise solutions.

Trello is a content brainstorming and project management service that allows you to work together to build and exchange ideas through various individuals and teams. It functions more as a content manager than a content scheduler—you can create notecards for posts, marketing strategies, or other topics that your team can concentrate on. Users can take notes, record guidelines, update the status of the project, and assign takes to certain individuals. Trello is a robust platform for content strategists who just want to prepare their editorial calendar.

BuzzSumo

Price: Paid plans start at $79 a month

BuzzSumo connects influencers with businesses who want to implement influencer marketing. This tool is great for businesses who are not sure how to achieve their demographic goal. The user will scan the database of the top influencers in their field of expertise and then reach out to establish an affiliation.

BuzzSumo also offers you the opportunity to see past patterns and comparisons. The analytics feature will give you a snapshot of what you need to track, as well as places you can make improvements.

Finally, you can use the tool to evaluate the most viewed and referenced content. Who’s going to connect to it and post it, what do their followers look like, and how do you get on their radar? BuzzSumo can help you answer this question.

Proof

Price: based on the volume of your website traffic; starting at $24 a month

Proof is built to help you show your social proof on your website in the most powerful and compelling manner possible. It’s very easy to download—all you need to do is copy and paste your pixel to your web source code. Once you paste the pixel, it will sync with your site (or CRM) and show your target customers:

• Social media posts
• Video testimonials
• Reviews
• Live Visitor counts
• Hot streak notifications

In addition, you can know the demographics of your customer by looking at their Visitor ID information.

Survey Anyplace

Price: Starts free and moves up to $42+ a month for enterprise

Survey Anyplace has simplified the survey experience by enabling you to create your own surveys and tailor them to the unique needs of your brand. Far from being a classic survey maker, they simplified the mobile survey experience and optimized the survey experience to make it fast and easy, with a strong visual focus. The more reliable feedback you receive from your customers, the better insights you will have - the end of the day, surveys are one step in the direction of increasing your conversions.

Canva

Price: start free, $12.95 a month for teams, or custom pricing for enterprise solutions.

Canva is a subscription service for those who need designing to be easy and do not have a budget for a full-time graphic designer. Optimized for mobile devices, Canva makes design a piece of cake for amateurs with its visually enticing drag-and-drop features.

You can build shapes, icons, maps, graphics and your own custom font presentations using the design tools available in Canva. If you are an employer, you can also check the status of the tasks assigned to your employees by the deadline. It has millions of pictures in its library, and you have access to them right at your fingertips.

Moosend

Price: Start free and move up from $8+ a month, based on your number of subscribers.

Moosend is an email marketing automation platform that provides a wide range of features such as marketing automation, subscription and landing pages.

The key features of the platform include:

• Email templates and a simple drag-and-drop editor requiring zero coding skills.
• Advanced options for monitoring and automation.
• Reporting and review of more data-driven decisions.

There are more than 80 integrations with CMS, CRM, eCommerce, lead generation, and list validation tools for users who would prefer not to move from one tool to another. Salesforce, Zapier, Facebook Lead Advertising, and WooCommerce integrations are among the most common.

All in all, Moosend’s email marketing and marketing automation options enable users to create email newsletters, landing pages or subscription forms while providing them with data to make meaningful choices.

Screaming Frog

Price: Two options are available - one is free, and the other is a one-time payment of $194.33 (USD)

Screaming Frog is a web crawler designed to help you find your SEO issues in URLs and web pages. It’s going to flag site problems like:

• Broken links
• Redirects
• Duplicate content
• Metadata
• Page titles

This is one of the best SEO tools on the market and a perfect way to evaluate the technological components of your website to ensure that you are well designed for search engines. Even in a basic use case, it’s awesome to find broken links and website errors.

Sniply

Price: starts from $29 a month to $299 a month

Sniply creates unique links to your content so that you can better track and evaluate traffic sources. These links lead directly to your content and provide a call-to-action on every page you need. Sniply also offers analytics so that you can track visitors, bounce rates, conversions, or any other related data you may need.

Crazy Egg

Price: ranges from $24 a month to $249 a month

Crazy Egg is a data collection tool that enables you to gain insight into your customers via testing. The service provides a variety of resources, including:

• Click reports
• User session recordings
• A/B testing tools
• Heat maps
• Scroll maps

Each of these tools will help you gain insight into how your customers navigate your website, what they look at and for how long, and the friction areas that are hurting conversion. This will boost the usability of your site and as a result, will possibly increase conversions.

HotJar

Price: Starts free and moves up based on your traffic and data collection needs

HotJar is a world-class tool for analysis of customer experience. They offer many features to help you better understand the behavior of your website users, including:

• Heatmaps
• Form analytics
• Session replays
• Surveys
• On-site polls

I like the product since it is easy to install—all you need is a simple script to set up all the features on your web. Plus, it’s extremely affordable, and it can be free, depending on your needs. If you’re doing some kind of conversion optimization, it’s a strong testing tool for you to try out.

Slack

Price: starts from free to $12.50 per month

Slack is the perfect collaborative networking platform for small teams. “#channels run, which can be divided by subject so that important conversations on business issues are not disrupted by team building discussions. Themed slack groups are perfect for networking and sharing new content with strong important players in your industry.

Slack is another online marketing tool that is easy to use but ultimately provides advanced features. For example, because Slack’s developer network is so powerful, you’re likely to find a Slack app for everything you want to do. It’s also not too hard to develop your own Slack apps—if you want to let your teams know about transactions, anomaly detection, or findings from online tests, creating a Slack app could be a good solution for you.

Followerwonk

Price: starts from free to $79 per month

Followerwonk is built to mine your Twitter Analytics, so if Twitter is one of your strongest marketing channels, this is probably a worthwhile investment. You can identify relevant Twitter accounts that you want to reach, build content and posting strategies, and find out the demographics of your followers to make sure you deliver quality content.

Optimizely

Price: Custom pricing

Optimizely is the gold standard for online experimentation at this point in time. If you are doing conversion rate optimization (which you should be doing), this is the tool you need to have in your toolbox. Optimizely helps you to constantly run A/B tests and multivariate tests on your platform to maximize conversion rates and revenues. They have also extended their feature set and run under the banner of “experiment everywhere” enabling server-side product experiments and deep personalization capabilities.

Finally, with the acquisition of Experiment Engine, they have a strong workflow and knowledge management solution that facilitates insight sharing and documentation. It’s an expensive solution, so it’s better left for corporate systems or those that are really serious about conversion optimization—but it’s a decent one if you can afford it.

Convert.com

If you’re looking for a more affordable experimentation tool, Convert.com is the way to go. In most instances, they have a function parity with Optimizely. The vast majority of advertisers would never hit the outer limits of the Convert feature set, and this is a more economical alternative than Optimizely. The user interface is fantastic, and the efficiency is top notch.

Hootsuite

Price: starts at $29 a month and moves up to $599+ a month for enterprise solutions.

Hootsuite is a MeetEdgar and Buffer social media scheduling platform that helps you to schedule and pre-plan your social media status posts. This helps you to post for foreign audiences whenever you want on a 24/7 cycle. All social interaction functions work inside the platform’s dashboard, so you can remain in Hootsuite without going back and forth between services.

Buffer

Price: Starts free and moves up to $199 per month

Buffer is my favorite social media tool, and it’s extremely easy to use. It’s more suitable for big companies, but I think it’s great for start-up or small business marketing teams who want to start automating and optimizing their social strategy. They make a range of different items that help with this, including their social media networking website widgets and their social status scheduler.

Pepipost

Price: Starts free with tiered pricing based on email volumes from $25 per month for 150,000 emails.

Pepipost is a cloud-based email delivery service that enables companies to quickly send important emails including reminders, newsletters, and updates. Their average delivery time is less than five seconds. You can send billions of emails per hour with your scalable servers and get the maximum possible inbox powered by your AI-optimized inbox.

The features of the tool include:

• Quick email delivery and inboxing that easily integrates with your custom applications like open source email marketing platforms such as Mautic and Mailtrain.
• Multi-user rights management so that you can share access to the dashboard without having to worry about your data
• Subaccounts to handle billing and quotas for several domains from a single location.
• An AI-optimized backend that helps users to recognize who is most likely to engage, the best time to send, and the optimal throughput to enter inboxes without overloading recipient servers.

If you migrate from an existing email delivery service, the APIs are easy to set up and their dedicated support team can assist you with full onboarding.

Social Bee

Price: Starting at $29 per month with a 14-day free trial.

SocialBee is a social media management software that allows you to create effective marketing strategies with a reduced budget. The tool is a great solution for small businesses that want a single tool for multiple needs. With SocialBee, you can create content, build a content calendar, publish your posts across multiple platforms, track your account and content performance, and engage with your community via the social inbox.

Final Words

These are my favorite online marketing tools that are important for small businesses. From lead capture to SEO analysis to analytics, these tools will help you develop a fully integrated and effective long-term marketing plan. If you’re searching for an easy but powerful stack to get up and running, these tools will help you get there. I hope that this article has provided you with valuable information about the best marketing tools for small businesses. Please feel free to leave comments below for further recommendations. :-)