Best Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

As a small business owner, your focus is entirely on boosting brand awareness, finding leads, converting prospects, and boosting website traffic. This is where the role of marketing tools becomes crucial.

Marketing tools help you to achieve all your small business goals in a budget-friendly manner. However, selecting the best tool depending on your exact business needs might be a problem. There are so many tools available in the market and all claim to be the best.

Hence, I have helped to share only the best tools that will definitely help your small business to reach another level.

Let’s begin!

1 – WordPress (Website Management)

WordPress is an incredible website builder that helps you create a site without any coding or manual. It offers the unlimited possibility to be creative, keeping your site look professional.

WordPress is perfect for any small business as it offers a free plan with impressive features. Also, the paid plans are affordable with powerful functionality.

Features of WordPress

WordPress allows you to build a blog, a full website, or both.
It has thousands of easy to install add ons.
You can be creative with drag and drop features and by embedding audio, video, documents, etc.
It has built-in Jetpack with essential features like site statistics, basic SEO, and social media sharing.
It enables you to update your site from mobile and desktop apps for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux systems.

Pricing

Free: You get Jetpack essential features, pre-installed SSL features, 3GB storage, and dozens of free themes.
Personal: You get everything in Free plan plus a free domain for 1 year, email and basic live chat support, 6GB storage, few site customization features, and few marketing & monetizing tools. It costs $4/month.
Premium: You get everything in Personal plan plus 13GB storage, all site customization features, and marketing tools. It costs $8/month.
Business: You get everything in Premium plan plus 200GB storage, 24/7 priority live chat support, entire marketing & monetizing tools, and all Business Class features. It costs $25/month.
Ecommerce: You get everything in the Business plan plus advanced ecommerce features. It costs $45/month.

2 – Mailrelay (Email Marketing)

Mailrelay is a sophisticated email marketing platform with powerful features. It allows you to create, send, and manage your newsletters, providing complete subscriber behavior statistics. This is an apt choice for small businesses as it offers the biggest free account in the market and includes customized support.

Features of Mailrelay

Mailrelay has a proprietary technology to track subscriber views and clicks in your newsletters.
It has its own IP Ranges and expert consultants to improve the delivery rate.
It offers an automatic tool to block suspicious emails, and has an automated system for detecting spammers.
It provides professional HTML newsletters templates to prepare your emails without writing codes.
It provides a dedicated SMTP server allowing you to send directly from your mail client.

Pricing

Monthly Plan: You get 75000 emails and 15000 subscribers for free under Enterprise pricing. If you need a different plan, you can check their prices online.
Prepaid plan: There is no free package offered, but you can purchase credits and pay as you go without any commitment.

3 – BuzzSumo (Research And Monitoring)

BuzzSumo is a research and monitoring platform that works as a content trend analyzer and key influencer finder. It can be a magical tool for small businesses to find leads. It doesn’t have a free plan but offers a seven days trial, and paid plans have a lot to offer. Besides, it has a range of plans designed to suit all businesses. You can pay monthly or yearly.

Features of BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo enables you to discover content by generating thousands of relevant keywords, knowing trends for any topic, domain, or location, and searching millions of forum posts.
It enables you to find the most popular content in any niche and get you the websites linking to key domains and competitor sites.
It helps you find influencers on Instagram, Twitter, and the web.
It monitors your competitors, brand mentions, and industry updates.
It can help you to integrate, automate, build, and develop reporting tools, dashboards, and analytics, using its APIs.

Pricing

Pro: You get unlimited monthly searches, 1 year of data, 5 users, 5 alerts, 50 exports, 5 projects, 1K items, 10 trending feeds, and more. It costs $99/month.
Plus: You get everything in Pro plus 10 users, 10 alerts, 150 exports, 10 projects, 10K items, 50 trending feeds, and more. It costs $179/month.
Large: You get everything in Plus, and 2 year of data, 15 users, 30 alerts, 200 exports, 30 projects, 50 trending feeds, and more. It costs $299/month.
Enterprise: You get everything in Large plus 5 year of data, 30 users, 50 alerts, 400 exports, 40K items, 150 trending feeds, and more. It costs $$499/month.

4 – Ubersuggest (SEO)

Ubersuggest is an all-in-one tool for SEO needs. It incorporates training and support, rank tracking, site audit, keyword research, competitive analysis, and backlinking.

Its price is incredibly lower than any leading SEO platform. It claims to have a cheaper lifetime plan and more affordable monthly plan than its competitors.

Features of Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest allows you to get the complete details about any website URL you enter, including organic keywords, monthly traffic, domain score, and backlinks.
It lets you know the top-ranking pages of any website you want.
With Ubersuggest, you can know about the backlinks and referring domains to plan out your strategy.
With the keywords feature, you can know about the ranking keywords for a particular domain. The result includes the volume, ranking position, estimated visits, as well as search difficulty.

Pricing

Individual: You get SEO training and support, 100 reports/day, 3 projects, rank-tracking, 1000 pages crawl/day, keyword research, and backlinking features. It costs $12/month.
Business: You get SEO training and support, 300 reports/day, 7 projects, more rank-tracking features, 5000 pages crawl/day, more keyword research, and more backlinking features. It costs $20/month.
Enterprise/Agency: You get SEO training and support, 900 reports/day, 15 projects, even more rank-tracking features, 10,000 pages crawl/day, even more keyword research, and even more backlinking features. It costs $40/month.

5 – NordVPN (Security)

NordVPN is a provider of virtual private network services. It keeps your network safe and secure whether you are working in the office or practice remote working style. It is often well-reviewed by users thanks to its no-logging policy, free SSL and AES-256 encryption security.

By creating an encrypted tunnel, it restricts any unauthorized access to your internet data. NordVPN works the best even if you use public Wi-Fi or want to keep your access to personal and work accounts safe while on the move. You can also keep your browsing history to yourself.

With NordVPN, you can be assured that any detail of yours will not be shared with third parties, even if they want. This is because they never log what you do online.

NordVPN can be the best choice for your small business as you can secure up to 6 devices, all at a time, that too without buying a separate VPN connection.

Features of NordVPN

NordVPN offers 5400 NordVPN servers in 59 countries to choose from to enjoy the fastest VPN experience.
It supports Windows, macOS, and Linux, mobile apps for Android and iOS, and Android TV.
There is a manual setup for wireless routers, NAS devices, and other platforms.
NordVPN has encrypted proxy extensions for Chrome and Firefox.
It allows you to secure up to 6 devices at the same time.
It has a strict no-log policy.

Pricing

1–Month Plan: When you go for a monthly plan, you have to pay $11.95/month.
6–Month Plan: When you buy a subscription for 6 months at once, it costs $9/month.
2–Year Plan: When you get a subscription for a 2 years plan at once, it costs $3.71/month.

6 – Trello (Content Management)

Trello is an intuitive tool to plan content calendars, manage teams, and track content promotion progress. It keeps everything on one platform and allows you to communicate with your team with ease.

Trello is a fantastic option for small businesses or startups because it offers a free plan with plenty of features you cannot ignore.

Features of Trello

Trello helps you to collaborate with your team and share files.
It helps you manage projects with a drag-and-drop function.
It can sync your actions and messages in real-time with all the team members
It allows you to monitor your team, assign tasks, and progress through a single dashboard.
It sends notifications and updates instantly across devices, browsers, and email.
It empowers you to invite as many members as you want.
It has features to help you to add labels, set due dates, post comments, build checklists, etc
It also allows you to integrate productivity apps that you are using presently.

Pricing

Free: You get unlimited personal boards, unlimited cards, unlimited lists, 10MB/file attachment, 10 team boards, 1 power backup board, and few more features.
Business Class: You get everything of Free plan plus 250MB/file attachment, advanced checklist, priority support, observers, unlimited team boards, and few extra features than Free. It costs $999 annually.
Enterprise: You get everything of Business Class, plus more admin and surety features than Business Class. It costs $1750 annually for 20 users.

7 – Flock (Team Management)

Flock is an efficient communication and collaboration tool for any business. It is designed to streamline internal team communication. It helps you and your team save time by eliminating the need for too many apps.

Flock is a fabulous tool for small business or startups as apart from its jaw-dropping features, it has a free plan with useful features. It offers a 30 days trial, and paid plans are also incredibly low in price.

Features of Flock

Flock allows you to collaborate with your team to get work done in real time.
It enables you to start a chat with anyone or create a channel and begin a group chat.
It enables you to share files instantly.
It can integrate with popular external apps like Google, MailChimp, Dropbox, Jira, Trello, etc.
It incorporates few built-in features like Shared To-Dos, Reminders, Notes, Polls, and more.
Its video calling features allow you to start calling directly from within a chat or channel, then share your screen to get into details.
With auto-generated mailing lists, you can send email to the entire channel at once.

Pricing

Free: You get unlimited 1-1 and group messages, 10,000 searchable messages, 10 public channels, 5GB total per team, single team admin, and 1-1 Video calls.
Pro: You get everything in Free plus unlimited searchable messages and private and public channels, 10GB per team member, multiple team admins, group video calls, screen-sharing, and 24/7 priority support. It costs $4.50 per licensed user per month.
Enterprises: You get everything in Pro plus, 20GB per team member, active directory sync, single sign-on, and 24/7 dedicated support. For the price, contact sales.

8 – Crazy Egg (Data Collection)

Crazy Egg is a feature-packed website optimization tool to increase your sales, subscriptions, or get you more page views. This tool optimizes your website using heatmaps, scroll maps, and other visual reports. The analytics shows how your customers are responding to specific components on your site.

Crazy Egg is a necessity for small businesses to track their performance and boost website traffic.

Features of Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg allows you to add an extra layer of insights to your Google Analytics data.
It helps you know how your visitors are behaving on-site when they come through email and ad campaigns.
It ensures your CTAs are visible, and content is placed in the right order.
It can track the actions at the back of pop up forms or login screens.
It can spot the areas of customer dissatisfaction, like form glitches or confusing net asset value.
It can show how consumers interact with your product pages or checkout pages in real-time.
With A/B Test interface, you can get as many conversions as possible without wasting any traffic.

Pricing

Basic: You get 30,000 tracked pageviews/month, 100 recordings/month, unlimited websites, unlimited A/B Tests and edits, and 3 months recordings storage. It costs $24/month.
Standard: You get 75,000 tracked pageviews/month, 500 recordings/month,1-year recordings storage, and rest the same as Basic. It costs $49/month.
Plus: You get 150,000 tracked pageviews/month, 1000 recordings/month, and 2 years of recordings storage, and rest the same as Standard. It costs $99/month
Pro: You get 500,000 tracked pageviews/month, 1000 recordings/month, priority support, and rest the same as Plus. It costs $249/month
Custom: You get custom-build tracked page views, unlimited recordings/month, and rest the same as Pro. For the cost, contact sales.

9 – Monday (Project Management)

Monday is a useful project management tool to manage teamwork in a better way. This highly efficient cloud-based project management software is ideal for communication as well as managing tasks, projects, and collaboration.

As it is affordable, effective, and easy to use, it makes a perfect choice for small businesses and startups.

Features of Monday.com

com allows you to plan, track, and deliver your team’s work by automating all actions.
It allows you to know your team’s adaptability to deadlines and their performance.
It lets you add over 50 integrations to streamline your workflows.
It enables you to create and package custom apps and integrations.
It empowers you to switch between mobile apps and desktop.

Pricing

Basic: You get all essential features with 5GB storage and 1-week activity log, 2 features of remote work, 2 of advanced, 1 security control, and 2 of support. It costs $8/user/month.
Standard: You get all essential features with 20GB storage and 6 months activity log, all features of remote work, 5 of advanced, 1 of security control, and 2 of support. It costs $10/user/month.
Pro: You get everything as Standard plus, 100GB storage and 1-year activity log, all features of advanced, and 2 of security control. It costs $16/user/month.
Enterprise: You get everything in Pro, plus 1000GB storage and 5-year activity log, all security control features, advanced reporting and analysis, and all support features. For the price, contact sales.

Final Thoughts

Marketing tools help you to manage your tasks easily and more efficiently. As a small business owner, you need access to tools that are budget-friendly and help your team to improve its productivity. Make use of the small business marketing tools suggested in this article and take your business to the next level.

About the Author

Joydeep Bhattacharya is a digital marketing evangelist and the author of SEOsandwitch.com. He has helped numerous brands improve their presence online. His articles have been published on sites like Search Engine Watch, SEMrush, Smartinsights, Hubspot and several others. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

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