Which Tools for Marketing a Small Business Should You Use?
Marketing a small business is challenging when it has to compete with large organizations who already have thousands or even millions of loyal customers. But with the proper tools, you can make sure your business is noticed.
Statistics show that “50% of small businesses will survive 5 years or more. Approximately one-third will survive 10 years or more.” And so, not every small business will be successful. That’s because only some of them are able to adjust to the changes that happen in the industry and the market. We live in an era of massive digitization and progress. While large, popular organizations have it easy to stay on top of the business thanks to loyal customers and large amounts of money invested in marketing, small businesses may find it difficult to break through all those corporate giants.
Hence, to be successful, you need to properly market your small business. You have to be open to changes on the market, to social media, and contact potential clients. And the best way to do is to implement the right tools and applying marketing strategies that correspond to your business model.
We’ve prepared a list of 10 best tools for marketing a small business to help you reach out to people and help your organization become successful.
1. HeySpace
HeySpace is a combination of Slack and Trello. It’s an innovative task management software with chat features. But above all, it’s a convenient way to organize your small business communication and project management system in one place. HeySpace is a great tool for marketing a small business because it helps you to coordinate all processes:
- Thanks to its design you can see three boards in one place – your team and spaces (different channels), chat, list of cards with tasks.
- You can easily convert part of your conversation into a task.
- The board with tasks allows you to see all projects in one place.
- Every task can be adjusted – you can set date, assign people to it, add tags, description, files, comment on it. All to keep you updated on task progress.
- The feature of workspaces allows you to create many spaces, if, for example, you work for various organizations or have different clients.
- Pleasant and intuitive interface.
HeySpace can help save time, systematize work, and gather your team in one place to make sure all the marketing efforts are going in the right direction. It also gives you space to freely and smoothly collaborate with your teams and clients. No more switching between apps and tabs. You have everything in one place!
Sign up for HeySpace to make sure things are working fine in your small business’ marketing endeavors!
2. TimeCamp
TimeCamp is a time tracking software with many useful features. The reason for which you should use it is to monitor all the processes taking place in your company. Not only in terms of time but also resources such as budget, employees and their availability or efficiency of work. The tool offers various options:
- Tracking time with desktop app working in the background automates work of your employees and contributes to their productivity.
- Your employees track all their projects and tasks so you can see how much time they spend on each activity.
- The feature of budgeting allows you to control spendings and monitor all financial aspects of your small business. It’s an important feature since knowing how much money you can allocate on marketing allows you to properly create marketing campaigns.
- Integrations make it possible to connect TimeCamp to other marketing tools for more effective work and marketing outcomes.
- GPS tracking
TimeCamp helps to optimize the processes of your small business and by that, you can be sure that you’re doing everything you can to help your business. Because investing in all areas of your company can help you perform better in marketing. Things are coherent and people work seamlessly.
Use TimeCamp to optimize the marketing processes of your small business.
⇓ Watch the video tutorial to see how TimeCamp works ⇓
3. MailChimp
It’s known that “email marketing technology is used by more than 80% of B2B and B2C companies.” And so, MailChimp is a great software for marketing automation. You can use to automate all e-mail-related activities and organize them.
Thanks to MailChimp you can reach all your clients and gain even more. It also works great if you’re managing a website or a blog with many subscribers. The tool allows you to create campaigns which you can adjust to your needs – it has many features and templates you can either choose from or create your own. You can also easily optimize
What’s more, thanks to MailChimp you can gain insight into your readers/customers, get to know their preferences, and learn from your e-mail marketing actions.
4. KISSmetrics
The list of best tools for marketing a small business wouldn’t be complete if it didn’t include an analytics tool. It’s the best way to know your clients, their needs, and expectations. KISSmetrics helps you analyze your clients by providing you with the data on their activity and behavior. That allows you to understand your customers and better engage them in the buying experience.
This type of data is great to create targeted campaigns to create a better, customized experience for your customers.
5. BuzzSumo
Part of your marketing strategy should be monitoring the industry and your own brand. BuzzSumo helps you in that. Whenever someone mentions your brand, BuzzSumo informs you about it.
It’s a fantastic tool not only because it works as your personal informator about what’s happening with the competition but you can also find such information as top influencers in your industry, the latest content, and all the information in social media.
6. Google Analytics
This tool from Google is free but very powerful. It doesn’t take much time to set it up and the results help you in marketing your small business. It may seem like a small tool but the data it can give has a lot of value.
With Google Analytics you can learn where your traffic comes from, which keywords are popular, track campaigns or ROI for online marketing of your business. It basically gives a valuable insight into how people find your website.
With no doubt, it’s one of the best tools for marketing a small business and you should implement it in your organization immediately.
7. HubSpot
“HubSpot is inbound marketing and sales software that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.” The tool can help you with optimizing such aspect of inbound marketing as e-mail, sites, SEO, email marketing automation, landing pages, analytics, social media, and blogging. If you want to have everything in one place, HubSpot is a good choice.
8. Hootsuite
Establishing social media accounts on popular platforms, you also need to consider their proper management. Since it may be difficult to control them by yourself or you may not afford a social media manager, Hootsuite will do the job. Thanks to this tool you can manage all content, schedule when you want it to be published, track the impact of your social media, etc. You can “filter social conversations by keyword, hashtag, and location—in multiple languages—to hear what people are saying about your brand, competitors, and industry.”
Hootsuite can help you stay active in social media. Remember, the more active you are, the bigger is the chance of gaining new customers.
9. Crazy Egg
Thanks to CrazyEgg you can see what visitors of your website do while they’re here. Do you ever wonder what makes them leave or what are they interested in? If yes, check this software out and you will learn all the secrets.
It shows all the hot spots which people usually click and those that people avoid. It shows you what people are interested in and what doesn’t catch their attention.
10. Followerwonk
If your marketing strategy involves using Twitter on a regular basis, you should use followerwonk. This tool helps to get all the information that you might need when using Twitter. It will do 3 things for you:
- Find people’s bio and users so you can connect with people and compare them for new audience.
- Analyze the information about followers s you can get metrics and statistics about your users.
- Optimize your content so your followers are getting what they like most.
Bonus tools:
Crello
Business, that you are so devoted to the building will surely win from prolific and modern design. Crello is an online design creator that makes it real for your brand to be smartly presented to your targeted market in terms of eye-captivating visual elements. You are not expected to have brilliant design skills.
Crello’s user-friendly interface, comprehensible set of tools along with a stunning collection of photos are developed to generate designs of different kinds and purposes. Just choose the one that best suits your platform. The tool will be able to liven up your Instagram stories, design winning logos, produce remarkable business cards, and many more. Just go and check for yourself. Design solutions provided by Crello will never have your clients go uninvolved.
Omnisend
It’s a marketing automation platform built for ecommerce brands that allows you to automate your emails, SMS, and push notification messages. From sign-up forms and pop-ups to smart segmentation and targeted automation workflows, this platform can handle your marketing needs from A to Z. Omnisend comes packed with a ton of features that are built to increase the revenue you earn from email, without increasing your workload.
- All features are easy-to-use and intuitive, employing a drag-and-drop builder for anything you might need to create (emails, SMS messages, push notifications, sign-up forms, landing pages, etc).
- You can create both stand-alone campaigns and sophisticated automation workflows with a ton of templates to help you get started.
- Automation workflows aren’t limited to email: you can add SMS and push notifications alongside those email messages to pack an extra punch.
- Your automation workflows can be targeted to your customers’ behavior in real time with conditional splits.
- Sales performance data so you know exactly how your campaigns are performing and how they influence your revenue earnings.
Omnisend is robust enough for larger businesses, but its user-friendly platform and features make it accessible for small businesses too. With easy automation workflows, you’ll be earning more revenue on autopilot.
Planable
Planable is a social media collaboration tool that helps teams plan, schedule and collaborate on social media content with ease. Its collaboration-centric design makes it the ideal tool for multi-layered social media teams that have to push content on a regular basis.
Firstly, Planable comes with a feature tailor-made for feedback sharing. Through it, teams can share ideas and feedback through comments and replies right next to the post. On top of that, Planable’s dedicated approval system ensures that no piece of content goes live without being vetted by the relevant team members. Planable’s approval system has 4 levels of security, which gives social media teams a lot of wiggle room in terms of customizing approval workflows according to their specific needs.
Planable also comes with publishing and scheduling features that eliminate the logistics of social media management — for instance, the 4 ways to view content. Calendar view offers a helicopter view of campaigns and allows users to plan and schedule content by simply dragging and dropping a piece of content to its time slot. Grid view is ideal for planning Instagram grids. Feed view shows your posts exactly as they would appear on people’s feeds. Add an intuitive design that mimics the feel and flow of social media in the mix, and you can see why Planable is great for collaboration-heavy teams.
Planable has integrations with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google My Business, and TikTok.
Colorcinch
You’ll need engaging visuals to connect better with your clients. This is where Colorcinch would come in handy.
Colorcinch is an all-in-one creative platform that allows you to resize, crop, enhance your photos, and fine-tune clarity and details. You can compress and convert your images into different formats. And play around with different blend modes to give your photos a special look and feel.
It features hundreds of AI-powered photo effects and comes with a vast collection of hand-picked creative assets -masks & overlays, vectors & icons. With its very intuitive interface, you don’t have to be a pro to achieve stunning results. Designing banners, social media graphics, and blog visuals can be done with just a few clicks. It’s available online and offline.
FS Poster
FS Poster is one of the top plugins for automatically posting to social media from WordPress. You can publish your article on as many as fifteen different social networks at the same time with the assistance of FS-Poster. Facebook, Vkontakte, Reddit, Telegram, Plurk, Medium, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google My Business, Medium, WordPress, and Ok.ru are the websites included in this list. With its extensive feature set, FS Poster enables you to save time and complete all of your post-production automation processes with only a single plugin.
123FormBuilder
123FormBuilder is an incredible source of various inbuilt form templates to present to the people to fill in for any particular task. It has countless easy-to-use form templates to choose from. You can use these form templates for an effective call to action including orders, registrations, surveys, donations, bookings, applications, contact, event registrations, etc.
123FormBuilder provides more than 4,000 tools to create a form template of your choice. It also has how-to-use resources to browse the methods and tools to create your template. From creating email templates to publishing online forms, 123FormBuilder has every option you can think of.
