Digital marketing tools for small businesses

If you want your business to have a chance of being among the 20% who survive the second year, you need to implement a marketing strategy that finds, attracts, converts and retains your target audience. It’s not easy for a small business owner to keep up with all the marketing activities. They probably have a very busy schedule and don’t have the staff or budget to purchase many expensive marketing tools.

digital marketing tools for small businesses

Competition among small businesses

According to the World Bank, 90% of businesses are small, and according to statistics from the U.S. Small Business Administration, there are 28 million businesses in the U.S. alone, which is a scary number. Given these statistics, the failure rate of businesses is frightening. Ninety percent of new businesses fail, and according to Bloomberg, 80% of them fail within the first 18 months.

The good news is that you can create and manage a successful marketing strategy for your business. In fact, there are tools that cover all aspects of marketing to help you achieve your goals. There are many inexpensive and effective tools that allow you to optimize your marketing efforts and compete with the big companies.

What is a marketing tool?

Marketing tools vary in design and specific features to help you implement your marketing strategy. Marketing teams have so many tools at their disposal that they can quickly become overwhelmed when choosing which tools to include in their arsenal. Before you do it all at once, consider the following:

✔  Target audience

✔  Location of target audience

✔  Most useful and interesting materials for your audience

✔  Effective ways to reach materials

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can narrow down the list of tools your brand considers valuable marketing tools.

The best marketing tools for small businesses

Now that you’ve learned about the importance of various digital marketing tools, it’s time to take a closer look.

Hubspot

hubspot

Hubspot is available for free. If you want to use more features, you will have to pay up to $3,200 per month. HubSpot is a comprehensive growth software that includes marketing, sales, and customer service tools that improve all aspects of your business. HubSpot offers everything you need to grow your business and increase conversions.

Many of HubSpot’s products are free. You can create lead capture forms, send feedback emails, and get basic analytics reports for free. You can also track emails, schedule sales meetings, and live chat with visitors. You can even set up a help desk and ticket system in the free package, and then transfer everything to the free CRM system to get a complete view of your customers.

Google Analytics

google analytics

Google Analytics is completely free software that provides valuable information about who is visiting your website and how they are using it. It’s worth combining it with Google Search Console, another free digital marketing tool, to help you identify site issues and optimize traffic.

Information provided by Google Analytics includes :

✔  The number of visitors to your website per day, week, month or any period you choose.

✔  Where visitors come from: other websites, organic search, advertising, social media or directly.

✔  The keywords people use when searching for your website on Google.

✔  User demographics and interests

✔  How much time individual users spend on your website and which pages they visit.

Sprout Social

sprout social

Sprout Social is the perfect information hub for any business looking to turn their social media presence into tangible results. Sprout Social has the ability to help businesses in organizing their content calendar. Besides this, assets are also organized. It allows you to post and schedule content across multiple platforms based on when your followers are most active.

Sprout Social is one of the best digital marketing tools for social media. In addition to social media management features, Sprout makes it easy to collaborate with colleagues and clients. With our smart inbox, you can tag all your social media posts and respond to them in a thoughtful and timely manner.

KISSmetrics

KISSmetrics

The KISSmetrics platform is ideal for SaaS businesses because it allows you to see where your leads are coming from and map their journey from visitor to customer on your website. KISSmetrics provides the key data you need to optimize your marketing channels to attract and convert more customers once they arrive on your website.

SendPulse

sendpulse

SendPulse is constantly evolving, improving the functionality of existing marketing channels and adding new ways to engage customers. Currently, SendPulse allows users to automate marketing messages, SMS and web push notifications, as well as create chatbots for popular communication tools such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram. SendPulse also offers an email checking tool, a landing page creation tool, and a marketing and sales with a free CRM.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a paid app and its price starts at $79 per month. BuzzSumo connects influencers with businesses that want to work with them. This tool is great for businesses that don’t know how to reach their target audience. Users can search the database for the top influencers in their area and then connect with them to work with them. BuzzSumo also offers the ability to view past trends and mentions. The analytics feature provides information on what to look for and what needs to be improved.

Mailchimp

mailchimp

No matter how big or small your business is, e-marketing should be a part of your overall strategy. When customers subscribe to your mailing list, they are inviting you directly into their inbox. That’s why, on average, email marketing offers a higher ROI than any other marketing campaign.

To get started with email marketing, you need a service that allows you to collect emails, manage lists, send automated or scheduled emails, and analyze engagement. Mailchimp is an ideal choice if you are just starting out or running a small business. Mailchimp’s basic service is free until your list reaches 2,000 subscribers.

Loomly

loomly

Loomly is a brand success platform perfect for small community teams looking to organize and collaborate on content. Built-in calendars, schedules and workflows make content planning and brainstorming easy. As a bonus, Loomly gathers fresh content ideas for users based on trending topics and conversations on Twitter.

The clean and simple interface is easy to navigate and use, even for users who may not be the most tech-savvy. The affordability of the platform makes it attractive to freelancers and small agencies looking to organize their social media presence.

CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg’s heat map feature provides insight into what visitors are doing on your site. It shows you where they’re scrolling, what they’re clicking on, and more importantly, what they’re not clicking on. With CrazyEgg, you can optimize your landing pages, keep visitors engaged, and help increase sales.

Penji

penji

Sometimes you’re busy with project management tasks, writing and don’t have time to create your own infographics, images, logos or landing page elements. But there’s Penji. Used by big and small brands, Penji is like a designer’s day job. All you have to do is enter a project description and an experienced designer will get to work while you design, write or organize.

Moosend

moosend

The price of Moosend app is: $1.00: The app can be used without paying any money in the beginning but later the price increases from $8+ per month depending on the number of subscribers. Moosend is an email marketing and marketing automation platform that offers a number of features including marketing automation, signup forms, and landing pages.

Key features of the platform include:

✔  Email templates and a simple drag-and-drop editor with no code knowledge required.

✔  Advanced tracking and automation capabilities.

✔  Reporting and analytics for data-driven decision making.

Hootsuite

hootsuite

To stay competitive in the market you need a social presence. You probably already know that social media can be time consuming, even if you’re only using it for marketing purposes and not endless scrolling. Fortunately, you have digital marketing tools like Hootsuite to help you reduce this time shortage. Hootsuite is a centralized platform for managing all of your social media channels with pre-scheduled posts, so you can prepare all of your social media content in one fell swoop for the coming weeks or months.

Audiense

audiense

We’ve often talked about the importance of social audiences for identifying trends and leads. Tools like Audiense help companies identify and segment audiences on social media. This makes it easier to run targeted laser advertising campaigns and allows for a deeper understanding of customer personas. If you look at demographics, personality characteristics and more, you’d be surprised what you can learn just from social media.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a versatile analytics and heatmap tool that integrates with a wide range of tools like WordPress, Instapage, and Unbounce. Setting up Hotjar is extremely easy and you can track website visits to see where your customers are clicking and focusing on your site.

Wrapping Up

We know that there is a lot of competition between small businesses and they strive to outdo each other. If you too have a small business, you can use any of these tools to get ahead of your competitors. Some of the tools are free and others are paid but affordable.