If you own an online business, you know marketing is the most crucial step while setting up your online business. To assist you with your efforts and make your life easier, you are going to want to make sure you have the best marketing tools for small business owners.
Along with the right strategy, you are going to need a bunch of tools (aka software) to help you successfully market your product online.
There can be hundreds and thousands of tools claiming to help you with marketing but not all of them will be equally useful.
You do not have the time to test all of them and then choose one, so I have made a list of foolproof tools recommended by most professionals.
Here is a list of the top 10 best marketing tools for small business owners to help you market their products easily and successfully.
1. Mailchimp
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your brand and services today.
If your marketing strategy includes emailing, Mailchimp is a highly recommended software. It helps in designing your emails and makes sending them to many people at one time very easy.
The best thing is, most Mailchimp features are free under their “Forever free” account. This free account is free forever but with some limitations.
It allows you to send 12,000 emails a month for free and lets you have 2000 subscribers. Above 2000 subscribers, you have to pay Mailchimp.
So you can start with a free account. If you feel like it, you can move to paid packages later.
If you are wondering why not Gmail and Outlook can serve your purpose, you may like to know what Mailchimp additionally do for you along with sending emails.
- It tells you the number of times the email was opened by someone.
- Tells which links from your email were clicked.
- Number and quantity of sales generated through your email
2. Hubspot
HubSpot is an all-in-one inbound marketing service. It offers a complete CRM platform. with all the tools and integrations it offers, it can help you in:
- running complete inbound marketing campaigns
- increasing leads
- accelerating sales and close more deals faster
- analytics of your campaigns
- smooth customer service
- building a powerful website with SEO recommendations
HubSpot also offers free CRM service but with limitations in allowed features. Even for paid versions, it is a very useful and recommended tool.
3. Buffer
Social media is the new superpower in the marketing world. Buffer works as your social media handle. Primarily it was developed for scheduling Twitter posts in 2010 but now it can be used for Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, and Pinterest too.
This software lets you manage multiple social media accounts and posts at one place and offers three tools
- Buffer Publish for social media scheduling
- Buffer Reply for social media monitoring, replying, and messaging
- Buffer Analyze for your social media analytics
It also offers free services but, (you can predict by now) with limitations!
4. Sprout Social
It is an even better social media handling software that offers helping in:
- Automated Publishing
- Content Management
- Tracking Conversions
- Targeting Customers
- Keyword Filteration and suggestions
- Management for multiple accounts
- Pre-scheduling posts
- Analytics and Monitoring for your social media accounts
It has no free plans to offer as it seems to target much bigger organizations. But you know, it is better than most of the competitors with free options. It is paid but simpler, easier, and worth it!
5. Google Analytics
This is a part of Google’s marketing platform which allows websites to keep an eye on their traffic. It is the most widely used statistics and analytics service by website owners. It is used by at least 28,832,505 websites on the Internet till January 2021.
It allows you to analyze and report your traffic along with pointing the source of your web traffic. Google Analytics helps you in creating strong marketing strategy by making you aware of:
- How visitors are interacting with your content
- The impact of your digital marketing
- Measuring revenue and bounce rate etc.
It is also free and not free at a time. But at present, it is the best and a must-have tool to analyze your web statistics.
6. Google Ads
Google Ads is a core advertising channel for any business. With Google Ads you can bid to display your
- Brief advertisements
- Service offerings/Banners
- Videos
to website users every time they search for something relevant to your business. Google Ads can show advertisements on both SERPs and other websites connected to Google AdSense program.
In simple words, your advertisements can be shown on Google search result pages as well as on selected areas of third-party websites if they are working under the AdSense program.
Google Ads is best to design your advertisement campaigns, because if 2.3 million searches are performed on Google every second, who will know better, that where you can get potential customers from?
7. SEMrush
SEMrush is an all in one SEO software. It provides you with both data and strategy. It helps in generating better traffic, ranking, and visibility for SERPs. What it do for you is:
- Identifying and fixing technical SEO issues
- Finding relevant and effective keywords with help of 20 billion KW database
- Competitor research and SERPs analysis for your website
- Analyzes backlinks, domain authority, most valuable pages, linking domains, etc for any website
- Draft and schedule content for social media
- Helps in advertisement campaigns
8. Ahrefs
It is another good SEO and competitor research software that provides you with a complete SEO tool kit. It comes with a $7 trial offer for a week.
It is one of the best SEO tools on market with a blueprint score of 8 out of 10. Provides more or less the same things as SEMrush with a score of 7.8 out of 10 with a good user experience. Some prominent features are:
- Complete Backlink analysis
- Keyword research
- In-depth site audit
- Complete technical SEO improvement suggestions
- Helps generate site traffic
9. Canva
Your quality content needs to look attractive and charismatic as well. You can use this totally free tool for making amazing graphics and visuals like social media posts, videos, animations, and many more.
It offers thousands of free templates. You do not have to hire a designer, it is very easy to use that you can make professional-looking graphics all by yourself.
They provide some extra paid features too which you can buy if you need. But they offer so much for free already. They provide thousands of templates for:
- Social media posts
- Presentations
- Videos
- Animations
- Logos
- Posters
- Thumbnails
- Flyers
- A4 documents and much more
10. Survey Monkey
When you are making an advertisement campaign, why not ask the audience themselves what they want from you. To find out if your product is a hit or fail, you can do an online survey with help of this amazing survey tool.
This tool allows you to launch:
- Any kind of online survey project
- Any kind of market research
- Quick polls
- Competitive analysis
- Customer or the employee feedback
This is an easy-to-use platform that allows you to tailor your surveys according to your target audience.
It is one of the top 5 survey software over the market which is free to download. They provide a free trial, as well as their Basic plan, free.
