Introduction
Running a small business involves many efforts, from managing inventory to dealing with customers. However, one of the most crucial components of a small business is marketing. Establishing a marketing plan and presence is crucial to attracting customers and growing your brand. With the world moving towards digitalization, it is necessary to keep up with modern marketing strategies that can get your small business seen by the right audience. Thankfully, there are many powerful and easy-to-use marketing tools that can help small businesses improve their digital marketing efforts. In this blog post, we will discuss 20 powerful tools that can help you take your small business marketing to the next level.
1. Google My Business
Google My Business is a free tool offered by Google that allows businesses to manage their online presence across Google. With Google My Business, businesses can manage their online information such as contact details, location, reviews, and more. this tool helps your business to appear on Google Maps and appear in the search results when people search for your business name or industry. optimizing your business for Google My Business can help improve your online presence, increase visibility and ultimately drive sales.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that simplifies the process of managing multiple social media accounts. This tool helps businesses to schedule posts on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. With Hootsuite, you can monitor and analyze your social media performance, track mentions and keywords, and manage multiple teams working on different social media accounts. Hootsuite offers a free plan that is suitable for small businesses.
3. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that assists businesses in optimizing their website for search engines. This plugin provides suggestions and tools to improve content and meta titles and descriptions, optimize images and URLs. With Yoast SEO, you can also verify your website with Google Search Console, create and submit a sitemap, and update your robots.txt file. All these features help to significantly improve your website’s visibility on search engines like Google.
4. Canva
Canva is a web-based graphic design tool that can help small businesses create stunning designs for social media or website content. This tool offers thousands of templates, graphics, and images that can be customized for your brand. You can use Canva to create social media graphics, infographics, presentations, flyers, posters, and much more. Canva offers a free and a paid plan, and the paid plan provides access to more advanced features.
5. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform that provides tools to create and send newsletters or campaigns to your subscribers. With Mailchimp, you can use pre-designed email templates or customize your own, schedule emails and track open and click-through rates. Additionally, Mailchimp integrates with many other marketing tools like Hootsuite and Google Analytics. Mailchimp offers a free plan for small businesses, and their paid plans are affordable.
6. SEMrush
SEMrush is a powerful marketing tool that provides a broad range of features to help businesses with their online presence. This tool helps you to track the performance of your website and keywords for search engine optimization (SEO), monitor competitors, and analyze social media growth, among others. With SEMrush, you can also conduct in-depth keyword research, backlink analysis and track rankings. Although this tool is paid, its features and capabilities make it a must-have for small businesses that want to grow.
7. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool provided by Google that helps businesses monitor and analyze website traffic. With Google Analytics, you can track the behavior of your website visitors, see what pages are the most popular and see where your visitors are coming from. Additionally, you can use Google Analytics to track e-commerce sales and conversion rates. Knowing this data helps you to make informed decisions about your website’s performance and make improvements.
8. Sumo
Sumo is a collection of free marketing tools that can help small businesses improve their website traffic and conversions. This tool provides features like customizable pop-ups, welcome mats, and exit overlays to capture your visitors’ attention and collect their email addresses. Additionally, Sumo offers an email marketing feature, a social sharing button, and a heat map tool to visualize a visitor’s behavior on your website.
9. Hotjar
Hotjar is a powerful and affordable tool that provides businesses with tools to visualize their website visitor’s behavior. This tool provides heat maps, session recorders, and feedback polls to help you understand how your visitors are interacting with your website. With Hotjar, you can make informed decisions about website design, layout, and functionality. Hotjar offers a free plan and affordable paid plans with more advanced features.
10. Moz
Moz is a popular SEO tool that can help small businesses to improve their website’s visibility on search engines. This tool provides features like website auditing, keyword research, backlink analysis, and page optimization suggestions. With Moz, you can track your website’s ranking on search engines, along with your competitors’. Moz is a paid tool, however, their free resources and guides are a great start for small businesses that are just getting started with SEO.
11. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a powerful tool that provides businesses with insights into which content is popular across social media platforms. With BuzzSumo, businesses can analyze topics and keywords, track new trends and influencers, and identify popular content formats. this helps small businesses to create engaging content that appeals to their target audience. BuzzSumo offers a free plan and affordable paid plans with more features.
12. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a popular social media management tool that provides businesses with the tools to monitor, schedule and analyze social media growth. With Sprout Social, businesses can track their social media performance on various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. This tool offers features like visual analytics, scheduling workflows and chatbots, making it easier to manage multiple social media accounts.
13. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool provided by Google that helps businesses find keywords suitable for their websites and ad campaigns. With Google Keyword Planner, businesses can identify related search terms, keyword ideas and analyze search volume and competition. Identifying the right keywords helps businesses to increase their online visibility on search engines.
14. Facebook Ads Manager
Facebook Ads Manager is a free and powerful tool for small businesses to promote their products and services to a broader audience on Facebook. With Facebook Ads Manager, businesses can create ad campaigns and target specific demographics, behaviors or interests. This tool provides insights into ad performance, giving businesses the ability to make changes to their ad campaigns as needed.
15. Trello
Trello is a visual collaboration tool that can help small businesses to manage their projects and workflows. With Trello, businesses can create boards and cards for different projects or tasks and assign them to team members, add labels, files and due dates. This tool provides a simple, easy-to-use interface that makes managing projects a breeze. Trello offers a free plan and paid plans with advanced features.
16. Animoto
Animoto is an online video creation tool that can help small businesses create stunning videos for their social media and marketing campaigns. With Animoto, businesses can use pre-designed templates or customize their own, add images, text, and soundtracks, and create impressive video content. This tool provides easy-to-use features and a simple interface that makes video creation accessible to anyone. Animoto offers a free plan and paid plans with more features.
17. Help A Reporter Out (HARO)
Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is a free platform that can help small businesses to get featured in publications and media outlets. With HARO, businesses can sign up to receive daily emails from journalists looking for sources for their articles. This provides small businesses with an opportunity for media exposure and to improve their credibility in their industries.
18. BrightLocal
BrightLocal is a marketing tool that helps businesses to grow their local search presence. This tool provides features like website auditing, citation building, reputation management, and local keyword tracking. With BrightLocal, businesses can improve their online presence in local search results, attract more quality leads, increase trust and credibility with customers. BrightLocal offers affordable paid plans.
19. Google Optimize
Google Optimize is a free A/B testing and personalization tool that can help businesses to improve their website’s performance. This tool provides businesses with the ability to test and optimize website layouts, text, images, and other elements. With Google Optimize, businesses can personalize their website for different audiences based on their behavior, preferences or characteristics. Improving website performance helps small businesses to drive more sales and leads.
20. Buffer
Buffer is a social media management tool that helps businesses to schedule and publish posts, track analytics, and monitor content performance. With Buffer, businesses can schedule and publish posts for different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. This tool provides insights into content performance, making it easy to see what works and what doesn’t. Buffer offers a free plan and affordable paid plans with advanced features.
Conclusion
Small business marketing can seem like an overwhelming task. However, with the right tools and strategies, it can be much simpler and effective. The tools discussed in this blog post can help businesses to improve their online presence, increase visibility and ultimately drive sales. While some of these tools are free, others will require investment. We advise that businesses identify their unique marketing needs and goals and choose the tools that best suit their objectives. By using these powerful tools, small businesses can stay ahead of the competition and grow their brands.