10 Digital Marketing Tools For Small Businesses

Breaking into any market and establishing a well-known brand name for oneself is no easy task, and small businesses require all the assistance they can obtain.

While word-of-mouth advertising is an effective and highly regarded marketing strategy, brands cannot rely solely on satisfied customers to spontaneously spread the word about their products or services.

From the start, it is important for them to actively promote their product on various platforms. In order to establish a strong online presence, they must have a website and social media profiles, at the minimum. Afterwards, they should focus on search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that these online assets function effectively and consistently produce valuable content.

Being upfront, we must say that it requires a significant amount of effort. Every business needs a proper assortment of digital marketing tools to handle digital marketing effectively. From website builders to email tools to marketing automation tools, these are the leading online tools that small businesses can utilize to simplify their marketing endeavors.

Due to their limited budgets, small businesses often utilize business tools that provide a free plan or trial. Alternatively, their pricing is reasonable compared to other market-available tools.

Digital marketing tools for small businesses

1. Squarespace

If you’re looking for another website builder, consider Squarespace. It is suitable for both startups and established brands, making it a valuable tool if you have plans to scale rapidly.

You have the option to select from a variety of award-winning templates that are simple to personalize and organized by industry. These templates can be utilized to showcase your work or products. Additionally, if you are considering starting a blog (which we suggest you include in your digital marketing strategy), the platform provides potent blogging tools to assist you in getting started. Notable features include:

Templates
100s of layouts, fonts, stock photos, and colors
Built-in SEO tools
Analytics

The cost for a personal website is $19 per month, but if you want eCommerce features, you must select a Business, Basic Commerce, or Advanced Commerce plan, which starts at $33 per month.

2. Buffer

Buffer is also a social media marketing tool that you can explore. By utilizing our recently launched Software Comparison Tool and contrasting Buffer with Hootsuite, you will notice that Hootsuite has been awarded a slightly higher overall rating, albeit only marginally.

Similar to Hootsuite, it provides a free option, which is advantageous for smaller brands. It provides a diverse set of tools for arranging, interacting, and analyzing. However, its analytics might be insufficient for your requirements. Nonetheless, it is an excellent all-around tool that even incorporates a landing page creator and an image editor. Notable features:

Twitter hashtag suggestions
An image editor
A landing page builder
Post scheduling

The pricing for this service begins at just $6 per month per social channel and it includes a Free plan as well as two paid plans.

3. Wix.com

Wix is a website builder that is likely one of the most intuitive options for creating a beautiful website without any coding knowledge. It offers hundreds of customizable templates and with its easy-to-use, drag-and-drop editor, you can add various design elements like text, photo galleries, and videos. Therefore, every small business needs a website and Wix is a great choice for achieving this.

Depending on the nature of your business, you have the option to incorporate a members’ area, booking system, or online store into your website. Additionally, the website automatically includes a mobile-optimized version, and if necessary, you can utilize its mobile editor to customize it for smaller screens. The website boasts user-friendly features throughout its entirety.

500+ website templates
Powerful SEO tools
Built-in eCommerce features
Mobile editor

Website plans begin at a mere $4.50 per month.

4. Canva

A good design tool is essential for every business, and Canva satisfies many requirements. Even its free plan provides a range of features such as templates, stock photography, fonts, and illustrations. Although the free plan offers ample resources to begin with, upgrading to a paid subscription allows you to access additional benefits such as creating a brand kit. This feature is especially valuable for ensuring consistency across all your digital assets.

Canva also offers a logo maker as another tool that may attract small businesses. Although it is simple in nature, it is both cost-free and user-friendly. Hence, if you are currently lacking a logo, Canva can address a significant number of your concerns. Noteworthy characteristics include:

Thousands of social media templates
Text animations
Audio clips
A video-to-mp4 converter tool
Photo borders

The pricing for this service begins at approximately $7 per month and includes a Free plan as well as two paid subscriptions. The Free plan and paid subscriptions cater to a maximum of five individuals.

5. Google analytics

Google Analytics is a completely free software that offers valuable insights into the visitors and their engagement on your website. It is recommended to use it in conjunction with Google Search Console, another free digital marketing tool that helps identify and optimize any site issues for better traffic.

Google Analytics provides various data points to users.

The number of visitors to your site by day, week, month, or any time period you choose
Where these visitors are coming from – referrals from other website, organic search, ads, social, or direct
The keywords people are using in Google to find your site
The demographics and interests of your users
How long each user spends on your site and which pages they visit

Not only is all this information interesting, but it is also crucial knowledge that can assist you in optimizing your website and marketing campaigns without incurring high SEO expenses.

By going through the thought process step by step, you may realize, either by using Search Console or Analytics, that you are receiving a high amount of traffic from a specific keyword for which you do not have relevant content. In this case, it would be beneficial to create a blog post that is optimized for that keyword. By doing so, you will likely observe a significant increase in your traffic and engagement levels.

If you are receiving many visitors from Facebook but none from Twitter, it could indicate that you should focus your marketing efforts on your primary channel. The crucial aspect lies in the insights rather than just the analytics.

6. Mailchimp

Email marketing should be included in your overall strategy, regardless of the size of your business. When a customer joins your mailing list, they are granting you access to their inbox. Therefore, email marketing typically yields a higher return on investment compared to other marketing activities.

In order to commence email marketing, you will require a service that provides the capability to gather emails, oversee your lists, automate or schedule email dispatch, and assess engagement.

Mailchimp is a great option for those who are new to email marketing or have a small business. Until you reach 2,000 subscribers, Mailchimp’s basic service is free. It provides all the necessary features for effective email marketing without overwhelming complexity.

Additionally, Mailchimp currently provides a wide array of features and digital marketing tools, some of which are available under paid plans.

Segmentation and personalization
Landing page builders
Form builders
Audience insights
CRM tools
Predictive insights

7. Hootsuite

Without a doubt, it is imperative to have an active presence on social media in order to stay competitive in the marketplace. Additionally, it is likely that you are aware of the fact that social media, even when utilized solely for marketing purposes rather than mindlessly browsing, can consume a significant amount of time.

It is fortunate that you have digital marketing tools such as Hootsuite that can help reduce this time inefficiency.

Hootsuite offers a centralized platform for managing all of your social media channels. It enables you to schedule posts ahead of time, allowing you to prepare all of your social media content for future weeks or months in a single session.

Additionally, you will receive advanced reporting tools that enable you to assess the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and utilize this information to determine your return on investment. Furthermore, you can monitor references to your brand and handle responses, all conveniently accessible on a single dashboard.

In addition, Hootsuite now provides tools for promoting your social media posts using the platform.

8. BuzzSumo

Having a well-planned content strategy is crucial, instead of randomly selecting topics based on what you think your audience will like. This is emphasized by the fact that 60% of the top-performing B2B brands in content marketing have a clearly documented strategy. In contrast, only 21% of the lowest-performing brands claim to have a documented strategy.

BuzzSumo is one of my favorite content marketing tools because doing proper research is crucial to being successful in content marketing.

After conducting a search on BuzzSumo, you can explore the trending content on social media related to your searched topics. By analyzing the returned results, you can gain insights into their attractiveness and gather inspiration for writing topics.

In addition to basic content research and viral posts, BuzzSumo now provides a wide range of digital marketing tools.

Keyword research
Influencer search
Topic-based social media feeds
Content analysis
Crisis management
Brand monitoring tools

9. KWFinder

SEO is crucial for online marketing and it is imperative to ensure its accuracy. In addition to correctly structuring and optimizing your website for mobile users, the content you create must also incorporate appropriate keywords that have a high likelihood of ranking well in search results.

To commence your search, it is essential to utilize a specific digital marketing tool that can identify pertinent keywords. Various options are at your disposal, including the free Google Keyword Planner or more intricate tool sets like SECockpit.

The more advanced digital marketing tools can be quite costly, requiring a monthly subscription fee of $100 or higher. Nevertheless, alternatives such as KWFinder provide small businesses with affordable and precise insights that are incredibly useful at an ideal price point.

By following a step-by-step thought process, you can rephrase the given text while preserving its meaning. Simply input a relevant keyword into the tool and it will provide numerous suggestions, along with search volume data, trends, and a ranking difficulty score for each word or phrase. Mangools, the company responsible for KWFinder, provides both individual tool plans and a comprehensive suite that encompasses a backlink tool, website analysis, SERP watchers, and additional features within each tool. Additionally, Mangools offers a convenient browser extension.

10. Drip

Drip is an additional email marketing tool that small eCommerce businesses can consider. It aids in revenue growth through the creation of customized email marketing campaigns, eliminating the need to begin from scratch using their pre-built email templates and point-and-click visual editor.

One of the additional beneficial aspects provided is the incorporation of forms and pop-ups that aid in the expansion of your contact database. Even without any expertise in coding, you can utilize this feature to personalize all the form components and construct on-brand, responsive forms. The noteworthy features are: