10 Best Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Email Marketing Google Analytics Marketing Tools Social Media Marketing Tools

With everything going digital in today’s world, it’s important for small business owners to keep up with the newest trends and changes or risk being left behind. This includes establishing a consistent digital marketing strategy to increase your audience reach and maintain customers.

If you’re just starting out in your business and aren’t sure how to move forward, look no further. Here are 10 of the best marketing tools you can use to further help your digital marketing strategies.

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With everything going digital in today’s world, it’s important for small business owners to keep up with the newest trends and changes or risk being left behind. This includes establishing a consistent digital marketing strategy to increase your audience reach and maintain customers.

If you’re just starting out in your business and aren’t sure how to move forward, look no further. Here are 10 of the best marketing tools you can use to further help your digital marketing strategies.

1. Brandwatch

In order to have an effective social media presence, it’s important to keep track of your business’s influence, impact, and engagement. This helps give you an idea of where your strategies are lacking and what conversations your consumers are having about your business.

An effective marketing tool to measure your social media presence is Brandwatch. Using web crawler technology, this analytical tool tracks billions of conversations across the Internet on a daily basis. It checks not just social media platforms but also blogs, news, forums, videos, and reviews, images, and other web content.

Crawling different sites and content from the Internet allows companies to view their customer behavior, their insights on your brand, trends, and other useful factors for your marketing strategy.

2. Mailchimp

Email marketing should be implemented into your strategy the day you start your business. Mailchimp is a great email marketing tool that can help you achieve your business goals. Currently, the platform has more than 12 million customers and is popular for various reasons including:

  • Long-time email marketing provider since 2001
  • Easy and simple support options that allow you to find the answers to your questions in a timely manner
  • Has a free plan for those with less than 2,000 subscribers and for those who don’t send more than 12,000 emails per month.

While there are other email marketing platforms to choose from, MailChimp allows you to get started in a quick and affordable way.

3. Sharethrough

When it comes to content writing, the most crucial aspect of a blog or article is the headline. ClickGiant reports that the average Internet user will read 80% of headlines, but only 20% will actually click on to read the content.

Therefore, it’s important for business owners to create headlines that will attract readers to check out the blog. A marketing tool like Sharethrough Headline tool really helps with making sure your headline is interesting and engaging. This platform analyzes and measures the effectiveness of your headline, and provides a score based on an algorithm that best attracts online readers (and potential customers!)

4. Hootsuite

In this day and age, social media is a must have for a company’s growth and reach. An effective social media strategy is needed to create engaging online content across all platforms.

While there are many social media marketing tools that can help you achieve this success, Hootsuite stands out against its competitors. With Hootsuite, you can schedule a number of posts in advance, giving you time to plan out your content and choose the best times for posting.

You can also engage your audience through the platform by identifying influencers and leads, answering back any comments or mentions about your business, and managing multiple platforms at the same time.

5. Google Analytics

Known for being one of the top free marketing tools, Google Analytics is another must-have in your marketing strategy. It is a simple tool that only takes a few minutes to set up and allows you to track the actions of your website visitors. By knowing the kind of traffic you receive and where it comes from, you can alter and improve your campaign strategies to achieve better results.

This information can also come in handy when creating content for your website or even searching for the best keywords for website optimization—it all helps add fuel to your strategy!

Checking out our Guide to Google Ads and Analytics in 2019 to learn more about what Google Analytics offers to users.

6. BuzzSumo

If you want to learn more about your market, BuzzSumo is the place to go to. You may already have some knowledge about your industry, competitors, and target consumers, but it’s important for small business owners to dig deeper.

BuzzSumo is a marketing tool that helps you accomplish this by providing you with data on the amount of engagement and performance you receive on every platform. It also searches through multiple websites to find what people are having conversations about, and analyzes the amount of attention each topic is receiving from each platform.

To use it, all you need to do is enter some keywords that you are interested in creating content about and the BuzzSumo will crawl various websites across the web to find out what the most shared content is with these keywords.

By finding out what content is receiving the most attention with your keywords, you can create content that is more detailed and up-to-date. You will also have greater insight on your competition and what to strive for in future posts.

7. KISSMetrics

You can make decisions that have an actual impact on your small business with a special marketing tool called KISSMetrics. This tool allows you to track, measure and analyze your web traffic, giving you insight on the impact of your marketing strategies.

Unlike other analytics service tools that usually focus on page views and button clicks, KISSMetrics builds an anonymous profile for any user that visits a website, regardless of whether they’ve signed up or made a purchase from it. If a user returns to the website, this tool will continue to track their behavior.

It will later combine the user’s anonymous history with any new information provided if the user signs up or makes a purchase, giving you the full picture on who, what, when, how, and why the user converted.

It isn’t exactly the cheapest tool in the bunch—costs for the service starts at $120/month—but its insights and analytics features are priceless.

8. Trello

If you’re new to the content side of marketing, you may become overwhelmed at times by projects and other content material. With Trello, projects, managing content, and other material becomes much easier. This online marketing tool lets you and your team members stay on the same page without wasting any time or energy.

On this tool, you can share blog posts with other team members before you publish them. You are also able to prioritize certain projects, add comments, attachments, due dates, and plan out the next projects for your small business.

It’s simple and quick structure allows for easy collaboration among teams, making it one of the easiest online project management tools to use.

9. TubeBuddy

We can’t leave out video as one of the crucial aspects of digital marketing. Platforms like YouTube allow for users to constantly consume video for entertainment or information. With video content being so popular amongst users, it’s important for small business owners to take advantage of this trend and optimize their video content.

TubeBuddy is a free online marketing extension that lends a helping hand with video optimization. Available on Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, Tubebuddy works by integrating into your business’s YouTube channel and helping you perform the tedious little tasks required to optimize your video content.

These tasks include adding annotations or cards to the videos, creating an engaging and professional-looking thumbnail, sharing your video on all social media platforms, and optimizing the video’s description, title, and tags—all of which can take hours of research and completion.

Whether you need to rank higher in search results or want more traffic to your videos, any of TubeBuddy’s tools can help with optimizing your content, updating titles, tags, and thumbnails across multiple videos, and analyzing your content and your competitors.

This allows you to save time as you can focus on brainstorming video content ideas and creating videos that engage your consumers.

10. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is another helpful marketing tool that can send traffic to your website, and boost audience engagement—all from Twitter. It works by digging into Twitter data to track gains and losses in your follower count, perform a global search in Twitter bios, find influencers in your business niche, and compare your account to your competitors.

When analyzing your metrics, this tool separates your followers by location, the accounts they follow, their bios and contrasts your relationship with them compared to your competitors.

Followerwonk provides all data through simple reports and social graphs that you can share with your followers. Unfortunately, it cannot be used for other social media platforms, like Facebook or Instagram but if you’re particularly active on Twitter, it can be incredibly useful.

It is absolutely crucial for small businesses to have the right tools that help them create effective marketing strategies. The best tools allow marketers and small business owners see their potential and gives them the ability to reach their target. With these online tools, you will surely hit your reach and numbers in no time!

If you aren’t sure how to grow your social media presence, be sure to check out our blog, 10 Best Free Social Media Monitoring Tools for the best tools to use on social media.