15+ Best Marketing Tools Small Businesses Need

15+ Best Marketing Tools Small Businesses Need

Marketing is one of the most critical functions in growing a small business and making it succeed. The business environment is increasingly becoming more competitive. Small businesses must find ways to promote their offerings better to survive. They can't attract, nurture, and retain customers without doing so. This is where marketing tools come in handy.

Marketing tools help small businesses to maximise marketing efforts in many different ways. They make it easier for them to increase brand awareness, reach potential customers, grow sales revenue, and retain customers. Some software allows businesses to monitor customer behaviour and analyse customer data. Others help in streamlining marketing activities to realise a higher impact.

Small businesses utilising such tools can improve efficiency and apply data-driven decision-making in their marketing campaigns. The other ways software offers value to small businesses are:

• Lowering marketing budgets
• Boosting return on investment
• Completing crucial marketing tasks like lead capture, content development and link building
• Automating repetitive marketing activities like email marketing

Finding the Best Marketing Tools for Your Small Business

With so much marketing software available, finding tools that suit your needs can be an uphill task. Before you embark on a search for automation software, taking the following steps can give you a sense of what you need to power your activities:

1. Clarify your marketing goals: What do you want to achieve with your marketing campaigns? Do you want more brand visibility, higher sales revenue, or website traffic? Clarifying your objectives enables you to narrow your options to focus on tools that will allow you to achieve them.
2. Understand your target audience: What demographic do you want to target with your marketing campaigns? What are their preferences? Which platforms do they frequent? Answering these questions gives you the insights to find tools to engage, connect, and convert your audience better.
3. Consider your budget: How much will you spend on the software? How can you optimise your expenses and revenue? What factors affect the way you allocate money and prioritise spending? Clarity on your budget enables you to pick tools that fit your allocation and expectations.
4. Evaluate different options: Take time to research various marketing tools. A great way to do this is to read reviews, blogs, and social media posts to learn more about them. You could also listen to podcasts and attend webinars and forums. Get recommendations from experts and peers as well. Evaluating different options enables you to understand tools better. You learn about the benefits, features and drawbacks of each tool.
5. Test different automation tools: Explore demos and samples to see how the marketing tools you consider work before purchasing if they offer free trials, sign-up for them. Use data and analytics to track their performance. Testing allows you to find out which tool works best for your business.

In addition to considering the five things above, pay attention to the following features when buying marketing programs for your business:

• User-friendliness – how easy is it to use the tool?
• Automation features – how does it help you automate processes?
• Scalability potential – how flexible is the tool in accommodating the growth of your business?

15 Reliable Marketing Tools Every Small Business Needs

If you want to supercharge your demand generation strategies, here is a list of the 15+ best marketing tools for small businesses you should consider:

Canva for Graphic Design

Small businesses can use Canva to improve the visual appeal of their adverts. It makes it easy for them to create jaw-dropping marketing assets that captivate their audiences. Canva's user-friendly interface and simple drag-and-drop system empower any business owner to create attractive graphics without incurring high costs. It has a vast template library allowing users to turn their messages into professional marketing pieces that boost audience engagement.

Canva gives small businesses access to various assets like icons, fonts, and stock images. With these assets, small businesses can make marketing content that stands out. The tool's collaboration feature allows businesses to streamline the design process. Employees can collaborate in the creative process to ensure brand consistency. You can use Canva to grow your company's brand and build customer loyalty.

MailChimp for Email Marketing

One of the marketing tools every small business should have is MailChimp. This tool is excellent for entrepreneurs who want to connect with their clients better and grow their brands. With MailChimp, small companies can penetrate the noise and leave a lasting impression on their customers and prospects.

Its tools suite empowers small businesses to increase sales and build customer loyalty using compelling, highly personalised emails. As an all-in-one platform, MailChimp offers small businesses the features they need to grow to the next level. These features include:

• Visually appealing email designs
• Audience segmentation capabilities
• User-friendly email templates
• Email campaign automation features
• Performance tracking capabilities
• Opt-in forms and sign-up buttons features

Hubspot for Customer Relationship Management

Like big companies, small businesses need help managing customer relationships and mainstreaming their marketing efforts. Hubspot allows companies to optimise their sales pipelines for revenue growth through a cloud-based platform. It's among the most reliable marketing software companies can use to automate sales and marketing processes.

With Hubspot, small businesses can manage sales processes, capture leads, optimise campaigns for SEO, provide customer service and manage social marketing activities.

An all-inclusive marketing platform, this tool comes with a data analysis feature that gives small businesses an end-to-end view of their marketing efforts. The Insights from this data analytics feature increase the ability of enterprises to craft and implement marketing campaigns that deliver desired demand-generation outcomes for companies.

Small businesses can use this for website development, publishing blogs, and implementing email campaigns. With Hubspot, small businesses can:

1. Track their leads and clients by leveraging every step of the sales process easily
2. Maximise the inbound marketing process of attracting, engaging and delighting prospects throughout the sales funnel
3. Automate repetitive tasks so they can focus on strategic tasks
4. Utilise market research for demand generation by applying insights from data analysis

Nanos for Digit Ad Campaign Management

Another tool that small businesses need to excel in digital marketing is Nanos. With competition in the business space growing daily, it's becoming increasingly difficult for small businesses to increase product or service awareness online. Digital advertising helps to address this challenge.

Although it sounds easy, running digital ad campaigns using popular tools like Google Ads and Facebook Ads can be challenging for anyone needing technical skills. Nanos solves this problem. This tool makes creating and deploying digital ad campaigns on multiple channels from one platform easier.

Nanos also enables you to optimise your digital campaigns daily. If you're looking for a tool to power your demand generation advertising efforts but need more skills or resources to launch a campaign on big platforms, Nanos offers the best alternative.

Trello for Marketing Campaign Management

As small businesses strive to succeed in the highly dynamic marketing world, Trello comes in handy to streamline their teams. It serves as a linchpin for managing marketing activities by making it easier for businesses to streamline workflows. Additionally, Trello gives you a bird's eye view of your marketing projects, so tasks go smoothly. It does this by making it easier for small businesses to:

• Break marketing campaigns into bite-sized tasks through lists, boards, and cards
• Assign marketing tasks and track deadlines
• Track progress with marketing projects
• Integrate with other apps to bring your entire marketing stack to a single platform

Sender for Email Marketing

If your small business uses emails to connect with prospects and customers, Sender is one of the marketing tools you must have. Sender gives your business the tools to create email content that resonates with your target audience and drives sales. You can use it to make your business the go-to option for your target audience by increasing brand awareness.

As an email marketing tool, Sender offers businesses a range of features that make crafting attractive emails more straightforward and efficient. These include:

1. Professional designs that allow users to craft eye-catching emails
2. A drag-and-drop editor for easy drafting
3. Segmentation feature to allow for delivery of personalised emails
4. Email automation feature for efficiency and easy lead nurturing
5. Marketing performance to facilitate data-driven decisions and demand generation

Trustmary for Testimonial Management

Trustmary is another marketing tool that every small business should have. With this tool, you can harness the power of client testimonials to grow your business to the next level. It makes it easy for small businesses to capture authentic testimonials and use them to build customer trust, increase brand awareness and boost conversions.

Trustmary comes with unique features to help small businesses to market their offerings with reviews. These features include:

• Customisable forms for collecting customer feedback or reviews
• Video testimonial feature to allow satisfied customers to provide video snippets
• A display widget to show off reviews on the website and boost conversion
• Analytics feature with insightful data to enable you to optimise testimonials
• Seamless integration with other marketing tools

Wix for Website Design

Small businesses need websites to promote their offerings online. A website ensures potential buyers can find them easily and quickly through internet searches. This enhances their demand generation efforts. Wix is one of the intuitive web design tools that small businesses can use to create simple, attractive websites.

This marketing tool offers users a wide range of customisable website templates. Its drag-and-drop allows users to add design elements such as photos, text and videos to their websites for better engagement. Businesses may also add booking systems, member areas, and online stores to their website.

Wix optimises all websites for mobile devices. Considering that most buyers conduct mobile phone searches, this ensures that small businesses don't lose business due to poor website accessibility. Wix also offers small businesses SEO tools to ensure their websites rank high on search engines, which helps in increasing web traffic, leads, and, ultimately, revenue.

Calendly for Appointment Scheduling

Small businesses can utilise the unique features of Calendly to market their products and services. As a free appointment-setting solution, Calendly allows enterprises to schedule meetings with prospects and customers easily. It serves as a marketing tool for businesses that need to schedule marketing sessions, such as meetings or demo sessions with their teams or prospects.

Small businesses can use Calendly to understand prospects and customers through polls better. It also allows users to automate simple tasks like follow-up emails. A great way to use Calendly for appointments is to embed it on your website and enable prospects to book meetings. It's ideal for small businesses that want to save costs. Essential features that this tool offers include:

1. Automatic reminders
2. Confirmation texts
3. Meeting polls
4. Follow-up for post-call
5. Pre-call questionnaires

BuzzSumo for Content Marketing

If content marketing is at the heart of your small business's marketing strategy, BuzzSumo is a must-have marketing tool. With BuzzSumo, your small business can discover content opportunities by finding new keywords, customers' questions, and trending stories.

The tool powers demand generation activities by making it easy to find out what issues your target audience is most interested in. With these insights, you can create content that resonates with your target audience to attract organic traffic.

Buzzsumo also makes it easier for businesses to keep tabs on what matters most to their brand. Your company can use it to browse trends and topics. This enables you to identify ideas for blog posts and viral content. After identifying relevant issues, the tool provides tips on distributing the content for maximum benefits.

Besides helping businesses with content generation, BuzzSumo enables you to track competitors, industry updates, and brand mentions. Small companies can efficiently gather competitor intelligence by monitoring key metrics. This allows you to determine:

• Which content works and in what formats
• Who shares the content
• Which networks work well
• How your competitor's content compares to yours

Additionally, small businesses utilising influencer marketing find Buzzsumo invaluable when identifying influencers and assessing their value and strengths. This tool enables them to discover influencers with active and relevant accounts.

Buzzsumo also generates alerts that ensure your business does not out on important events. Essential features in BuzzSumo that your small business can use to power its marketing activities include:

1. Forum search to identify popular questions
2. Keyword generation
3. SEO insights
4. Backlink tracking
5. Influencer discovery and tracking

Salesforce Pardot for Lead Generation

Lead generation is a priority of any company. Pardot allows small businesses to automate the lead generation process to increase revenue and maximise returns. Small businesses can use it to improve cooperation between sales and marketing teams. Some tasks that these teams can perform together to maximise marketing ROI include:

• Finding new leads
• Lead nurturing
• Deal closure

Using automation and other tools, Pardot enables small businesses to generate leads and push them down the sales pipeline quickly, use personalised marketing campaigns to engage buyers, understand buyer behaviour, and capture actual marketing ROI.

HootSuite for Social Marketing Management

Social media marketing is integral to most small businesses' marketing strategies. But like any other form of marketing, companies must manage their social media activities well to realise their goals. This is where Hootsuite comes in. Hootsuite is one of the leading social media marketing tools that small businesses can use to manage their activities on social media platforms.

Hootsuite is designed to facilitate connection between businesses and their prospects and customers. It keeps them ahead of the competition by allowing them to respond to queries and criticisms. With this tool, small businesses can save time, achieve brand consistency on social media, and increase efficiency. Its ability to help companies to create accounts for specific streams and stay organised makes it stand out.

Using Hootsuite, small businesses can streamline their social media presence using various management tools. Its centralised hub offers businesses an integrated dashboard that allows them to interact with multiple social media accounts. The tool's content scheduling capabilities enable users to plan and schedule social media content in advance. This feature boosts small businesses' demand-generation activities by keeping their followers engaged.

Small businesses can use Hootsuite to track marketing conversations on social media. By following hashtags, brand mentions, and keywords, they can know what their target audience thinks and feels about them. The tool also has an analytics feature allowing users to monitor campaign performance. Insights from the analytics tool enable businesses to improve their social marketing strategies for better results.

Leadpages for Building Landing Pages

Small businesses run marketing campaigns to generate leads that they can convert into paying customers. They must design and use a website to create and capture information. Leadpages is one of the best marketing tools that make this possible.

As an online tool for building landing pages, this platform gives small businesses the tools to grow their email lists through website design, lead capture and nurturing. It comes with simple templates and a drag-and-drop builder, making it simple. Leadpages websites convert website traffic into leads before nurturing them to become buyers.

Small businesses can use this tool to access real-time analytics on website visitors and track email campaign open rates and conversion rates. The tool also offers users essential features to support lead generation. These include alert bars and pop-ups. Important features that make this marketing tool the go-to option for small businesses include:

• Landing page creation for varying uses, including sales, content and webinars
• Thank you page templates
• Website templates
• Lead magnets

Google Analytics for Web Traffic Analysis

Small businesses can make data-driven marketing decisions without breaking the bank. The free marketing tool – Google Analytics – allows businesses to understand website traffic. Companies can use this tool to get detailed insights about their traffic and conversions on social media.

Some of the insights that Google Analytics offers small businesses include:

• Visitor interactions with their websites
• Customer demographics
• How long do visitors stay on the website
• Backlinks that get the most clicks
• Pages that visitors view most
• Pages with high bounce rates

Small businesses can use these insights to optimise their marketing campaigns and websites to boost user engagement and increase conversions.

SemRush for SEO Marketing

SEO is an essential factor in small business marketing. Without it, businesses would experience challenges driving organic traffic to their web pages. SEMrush is one of the most effective SEO marketing tools that empower small companies to improve their search engine rankings.

As a keyword research tool, SEMrush makes it easy for small businesses to identify highly-targeted keywords, including long-tail phrases, to boost online traffic and lead conversions. It has a powerful, easy-to-use interface that helps users find target keywords quickly to fuel their content creation and SEO campaigns.

Its social media kit gives small businesses access to social media analytics. Insights from these analytics help companies improve their social marketing strategies for better outcomes. Small businesses can use SEMrush to increase organic traffic through:

• In-depth keyword research
• Content SEO audits
• Backlinking opportunities

Final Thoughts

Small businesses must promote their offerings to attract and retain buyers. While other business functions are critical, their growth depends on how well they convert leads into paying customers and their marketing strategies.

Marketing tools are instrumental in improving marketing efficiency for small businesses. They make it easier for them to streamline marketing efforts, generate leads and maximise marketing return on investment. If you're looking to boost marketing campaigns in your company, identify tools that suit your needs best from the list provided above.

Author Bio: Mayuri Bhoyar is an expert SEO link builder with vast experience generating Tier 1 backlinks. She views link-building as a relationship-building game, fueling organic growth. As a B2B SaaS marketing master, she empowers brands with top-tier SEO and content marketing strategies to boost leads. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.