If you’re looking for the best marketing tools for small business that are both affordable and necessary for rapid-growth, you’re on the right page.
For small businesses, their tech stack is among the top 5 most cited success factors by entrepreneurs in 2020. And if you don’t want to be part of the 80% of companies that fail within 18 months, choose the tools that will give you a competitive edge.
You’re not going to succeed unless you have the right tools, but you also don’t want to stretch your budget with tools you don’t need. With that in mind, our team (which includes multiple serial entrepreneurs) concurs that this exhaustive list of small business marketing tools is about as good as it gets.
The 31 marketing tools in the post cover all of the major components of digital marketing, which have been broken down into the following categories:
- Lead Generation Tools for Small Business Marketing
- SEO Marketing Tools for Small Business
- Email Marketing Tools for Small Business
- Conversion Rate Optimization Marketing Tools for Small Business
- Marketing Automation Tools for Small Business
- Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Small Business
- Online Advertising Tools for Small Business Marketing
- Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Business
- Graphic Design Marketing Tools for Small Business
- Account-Based Marketing Tools for Small Business
- Viral Marketing Tools for Small Business
So, are you ready to grow your company with digital marketing? Let’s get started.
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Lead Generation Tools
#1. Lead Generation Marketing Tools for Small Business: Customers.ai
Customers.ai is an omnichannel chatbot marketing platform that instantly connects customers and prospects to brands through live chat, SMS text messaging, Facebook Messenger, and other popular messaging apps, all from one platform.
Adding Customers.ai to your digital marketing tools set is guaranteed to generate tons of quality leads for your small business, and fast.
Additionally, just like mass email marketing, Customers.ai has an automated, reliable method of sending mass content all at once to your audiences across multiple channels.
Here are some other great examples you can get started with today to generate leads using live chat:
- Proactive live chat
- Build a chatbot for sales
- Run click-to-Messenger ads on Facebook
- Set up Facebook autoresponders on all your posts
- Chatbot drip marketing campaigns
- Run a giveaway on Facebook
- Boost your social media posts and other content
#2. Lead Generation Marketing Tools for Small Business: GetEmails
Did you know you can get the email addresses of people that visit your website without a lead form?
GetEmails can identify up to 35% of your anonymous site traffic, and all you need to do is install a snippet of code on your site.
You can use the data you capture from GetEmails for:
- Email marketing and retargeting
- Creating Facebook ad lookalike audiences
- Triggering direct mail to be sent
SEO Tools
#3. SEO Marketing Tools for Small Business: SEMrush
SEMrush is one of the best SEO tools to make your brand visible online.
Use SEMrush to supercharge your content marketing, improve SEO across your websites, create PPC campaigns, and manage your social media presence.
Some of the most popular tools to use on SEMrush are:
- Technical SEO audit
- Social media tracker
- Backlink audit
- Ad builder
- Keyword position tracking
- On-page SEO checker
- PPC keyword tool
- Organic traffic insights
#4. SEO Marketing Tools for Small Business: Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is another great tool for SEO research and management. It was launched fairly recently by Neil Patel, one of the most recognized digital marketers in the world.
Ubersuggest allows you to get insight into the tactics that are working for others in your market so you can adopt them, improve them, and gain an edge.
From keywords to long-tail phrases, you’ll get hundreds of suggestions from Ubersuggest, as well as volume, competition, and seasonal trends.
Additionally, Ubersuggest generates a list of keywords for you based on what is working for your competitors and what people are typing into Google.
Using the Ubersuggest top SEO pages report, you can discover which of your competitor’s pages are ranking for popular organic keyword phrases and which ones are getting attention on social media.
This is a great SMB tool for content marketing, as you’ll no longer waste time writing content that people don’t want to read.
Email Marketing Tools
#5. Email Marketing Tools for Small Business: Woodpecker
Here at Customers.ai, after much trial and error with different cold email tools, we’ve had the best results with Woodpecker.
Woodpecker is the best small business marketing tool to contact prospects with highly personalized email drip campaigns.
The platform is specifically designed for cold emails and follow-ups that you can send directly from Gmail and other major email clients.
One of the most common issues with cold emails is getting blacklisted or ending up in spam folders. We have found Woodpecker to be the most secure email client for automated campaigns to mass email lists.
#6. Email Marketing Tools for Small Business: MailChimp
MailChimp is the most popular email marketing platform due to its ease of use and ability to create great-looking emails with a drag-and-drop user interface.
For small businesses just getting started, the free version of MailChimp allows up to 2K contacts, one audience dashboard, customer segmentation tools, basic email templates, and basic reporting.
Another reason to consider using MailChimp as a small business is that the platform is scalable as you grow and have the ability to afford more of its features and services.
#7. Email Marketing Tools for Small Business: Hunter Campaigns
Hunter Campaigns is the cold email tool by Hunter.io, the leading email lookup and email verification tool used by 3 million professionals.
Hunter Campaigns is a free tool that allows you to send personalized cold email campaigns directly from your Gmail account. You can use it to personalize emails at scale with custom attributes, schedule your follow-up emails, track your cold outreach campaign’s performance, and use a free library of hundreds of cold email templates to get insights for your email sequences.
This tool is free for those who use one Gmail account for email sending, and most of the features are available in the free plan of Hunter.io.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tools
#8. Conversion Rate Optimization Marketing Tools for Small Business: HotJar
Want to find out why your website visitors are not converting? Use HotJar.
HotJar uses heatmaps and video recordings of visitors on your website to set up and monitor conversion funnels. I personally have found great value in watching the visitor recordings to improve multiple website conversion rates.
Furthermore, HotJar is easy to install. With one copy and paste of script, you can start improving your marketing funnels and conversion rates quickly.
#9. Conversion Rate Optimization Marketing Tools for Small Business: Google Optimize
Google Optimize is free marketing software that allows your data to guide your decisions. Optimize is natively integrated with Google Analytics, which makes it quick and easy to understand how to improve your website.
You can use Google Optimize for the following:
- Run tests on your website’s content to learn what works best for your visitors, including A/B, multivariate, and redirect tests.
- Optimize your website experience to suit each type of audience.
- Create custom landing pages for Google and Facebook Ads, and convert more visitors into paying customers.
Marketing Automation Tools
#10. Marketing Automation Tools for Small Business: Customers.ai
Customers.ai is an omnichannel chatbot marketing platform that instantly connects customers and prospects to brands via live chat, SMS text messaging, Facebook Messenger, and other popular messaging apps, all from one platform.
Customers.ai’s many marketing automation tools include drip campaign features for web chat, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and other popular platforms that allow you to set up a sequence of messages delivered at specified intervals.
Additionally, just like mass email marketing, Customers.ai has an automated and reliable method of sending mass content all at once to your audiences across multiple channels.
Take a look at Customers.ai’s Messenger chat blast and text message blast features to see what we mean.
Customers.ai is a great way to grow your contact list and generate leads. And one of its best features, Facebook post autoresponders, can turn your social posts into lead magnets.
#11. Marketing Automation Tools for Small Business: Autopilot
Autopilot is a visual marketing automation platform that helps companies create customer journey maps.
The self-service tool comes with a drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy for users to automate workflows and set up personalized messages based on user behavior.
Autopilot also includes features to measure campaign ROI and optimize revenue funnels based on real-time data.
#12. Marketing Automation Tools for Small Business: Automizy
Automizy is an intelligent email marketing platform that relies heavily on automation. It ultimately gives users more power over their email marketing, with less work.
Increasing email open rates is what Automizy does best. It does this with an AI-powered subject line tester, A/B testing, resends, and other email automation tools.
Additionally, with its drag-and-drop email editor, any marketer can create high-performing emails with no programming skills required.
Automizy’s AI is, however, is the platform’s differentiator. It predicts the performance of your subject lines with scores based on data from over one-million campaigns.
You can write up to 4 different subject lines for your automated emails. And its “multi-armed bandit algorithm” optimizes and sends different variations of the email that are predicted to receive the highest open rates. Once the software has identified a winner, it will only send out that variation of the email.
#13. Marketing Automation Tools for Small Business: Phantombuster
With all the growth hacking strategies that have become popular in recent years, one marketing automation tool emerged as one of my favorites. And that’s Phantombuster.
Phantombuster provides over 200 code-free automation and data extraction tools for LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Zapier, Medium, Quora, and others.
Each tool in Phantombuster can be used individually or combined with others to create full workflows.
For example, you can automate lead generation on LinkedIn, get noticed by Instagram users, hire developers from GitHub, get followed by your competitor’s Twitter followers, or get the Instagram accounts of all the restaurants in a neighborhood.
Use Phantombuster on your social media channels to automate the following:
- Lead generation
- Audience building
- Increasing social reach and engagement
Ecommerce Marketing Tools
#14. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Small Business: Spently
Spently is an ecommerce marketing tool that allows merchants to customize Shopify email notifications.
Additionally, using Spently you can:
- Automate post-purchase follow-ups
- Recover abandoned carts
- Embed remarketing tools such as product recommendations and discount codes to drive repeat purchases.
Once your follow-up automation emails are ready to go, you’ll begin saving your business a lot of time while also increasing revenue.
#15. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Small Business: Customers.ai
Customers.ai makes it easy to sell products online using chatbots.
Ecommerce marketing tools for web chat, SMS, and Facebook sponsored messages allow you to send mass messages across multiple marketing channels to all of your contacts.
The concept is similar to that of email blasts, but with chatbots. And the great thing is that with chatbots, you get higher engagement, conversion, and open rates.
You can use promo blasts to make announcements, share offers, and let shoppers know about new promotions and products. This makes for a much more interactive experience than any email blast.
Customers.ai uses OmniChatⓇ technology and chatbot marketing automation to instantly connect customers and prospects to brands through native web chat, SMS text messaging, Facebook Messenger, and other popular messaging apps, all from one platform.
Also great for ecommerce, you can use chatbots to get more reviews.
Here’s an example of how to get more product reviews that you can try for yourself.
You should be able to make your review generating chatbot in roughly 30min using Customers.ai’s easy to use chatbot builder.
#16. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Small Business: Tapcart
Building a mobile app for your ecommerce store is easier than you might think.
Tapcart simplifies the mobile app building process for you and enables non-tech savvy marketers to create their own branded iOS and Android apps for your online store.
No development is required with Tapcart’s easy to use drag-and-drop builder.
Building branded mobile apps are a proven ROI and CLTV driver that delivers the following:
- A more seamless user experience
- Faster loading times
- Optimized pages for conversions on mobile devices
Tapcart is great for small businesses with moderate or high mobile traffic, and brands focused on customer loyalty programs and retention.
#17. Ecommerce Marketing Tools for Small Business: Smile.io
Smile.io is an ecommerce marketing tool that helps to build a community around your brand. You can use Smile.io to encourage customers to join, engage, and share your brand messaging with rewards.
Smile.io’s VIP program allows you to strengthen connections with your top customers through increasing rewards, statuses, and perks.
Lastly, Smile.io also has referral tools you can use to mobilize your best customers to refer like-minded people to your brand, effectively growing your community without additional costs.
Online Advertising Tools
#18. Online Advertising Tools for Small Business Marketing: AdEspresso
AdEspresso is for performance markers that need to manage hundreds of ads and ad variations at a time.
The platform has a combination of marketing automation tools designed to save you time while increasing conversions.
Using AdEspresso, you can quickly create and analyze your ad campaigns for Facebook, Instagram, and Google, all from one platform.
Running lots of Facebook ads? Check out the top 7 Facebook ad hacks of all time to get some more ideas!
#19. Online Advertising Tools for Small Business Marketing: Customers.ai
One of the many marketing tools available on the Customers.ai chatbot platform is built specifically for Facebook Messenger ads.
Facebook Messenger ads are a huge opportunity that savvy digital marketers are taking advantage of.
And that’s because Facebook Messenger ads are different from regular Facebook ads. Even more important, Messenger ads perform better than normal Facebook ads because they initiate engaging conversations with chatbots.
- Messenger ads outperform other ads by 2X-10X
- Instant lead and data capture
- More features available for personalization
- Automated lead qualification and follow-ups with chatbots
There are a couple types of Facebook Messenger ads. There’s click-to-Messenger ads, and then there’s sponsored messages that are native to Messenger.
Another cool thing about Facebook Messenger ad experiences is that they can take place across the Facebook family of apps, including the Facebook newsfeed, Instagram newsfeed, Facebook and Instagram Stories, Marketplace, Messenger, and others.
Check out 19 different Facebook advertising tools you can use with Customers.ai
#20. Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Business: AgoraPulse
Agorapulse is a social media marketing tool to manage and measure your social media performance..
You can use AgoraPulse to better understand your audience at-a-glance and capitalize on otherwise missed opportunities with full monitoring and engagement capabilities.
Whether you want to schedule, reschedule, queue, or bulk upload your posts, AgoraPulse has plenty of options to fill your content calendar.
Additionally, AgoraPulse makes it easy to export reports with key metrics and analysis on engagement and growth.
#21. Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Business: AddThis
AddThis makes easy to use, drag-and-drop share buttons that you can place on any web page.
For example, in the image below you’ll see their share buttons on the left-hand side of the AddThis homepage.
AddThis also offers web tools for list building, link promotion, and recommended posts.
You can use AddThis to:
- Make content shareable with drag-and-drop share buttons.
- Build your audience with auto-follow buttons.
- Increase site traffic by promoting your links and creating enticing calls to action.
#22. Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Business: Customers.ai
More than 1.5 billion people actively use Facebook Messenger chat. But less than 1% of businesses are utilizing this lucrative marketing channel.
Therefore, Messenger presents an opportunity to engage with consumers on an untapped and highly engaging marketing channel.
Furthermore, Messenger is trending because it’s compatible with another high-performing marketing tool – chatbots.
Customers.ai Facebook Messenger chatbots allow you to engage with your audience with marketing automation tools such as:
- Chat blasting: Just like email blasts, but with chatbots
- One-time notifications: Invite users to get updates and promotional messages
- Drip campaigns: Sequenced messages across Facebook, SMS, and web chat
- Facebook post autoresponders: Capture leads and subscribers from organic Facebook posts
All the Messenger contacts captured by your Facebook Messenger bot can be added to other Customers.ai marketing channels. This includes SMS text messaging, native live chat for your website, and other web chat apps like Instagram and WhatsApp.
This way, you’ll be able to build user profiles, see their entire history across channels, trigger messages based on their behavior, and opt them into other campaigns.
Learn how to create a Facebook Messenger funnel that drives conversion.
#23. Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Business: MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a content recycler that can be used to automate the sharing of all your evergreen content across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
The time MeetEdgar will save you, along with the results it delivers, makes it one of my personal favorite social media marketing tools.
Unlike other content schedulers such as Hootsuite or Buffer, you can load MeetEdgar up with your most important content once, and then have that evergreen content shared as many times as you wish.
You can use MeetEdgar across your social media channels to do the following:
- Promote your best content, on repeat.
- Save time scheduling the same content over and over again.
- Auto-generate and test variations of posts linking to the same content.
- Schedule how many times per day you want your content posted to each channel.
#24. Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Business: RiteTag
RiteTag has been a favorite hashtag generator and tracker of mine. And that’s because it gives you instant hashtag suggestions for your social media posts based on real-time hashtag engagement data.
RightTag has lots of cool features, such as:
- Integrations with many social media scheduling tools like HootSuite or Buffer and allows you to add selected hashtags inside those platforms.
- Email alerts when new popular hashtags are receiving engagement in your niche.
- Measuring and comparing the metrics of different hashtag groups you’ve created.
- iPhone and Android apps for when you’re using Instagram on the go.
- Color-coded hashtag suggestions to make sure you choose the right hashtag according to your marketing goals.
One of RiteTag’s most useful Instagram marketing tools will generate hashtag suggestions for an image. All you need to do is right-click on your Instagram image, select Get Hashtag Suggestions, and RiteTag will provide multiple options based on image analysis.
Graphic Design Tools
#25. Graphic Design Marketing Tools for Small Business: Canva
Canva is one of the most used digital marketing tools to quickly create images, presentations, ads, and other visual content.
The visual content creator integrates millions of images, fonts, templates, and illustrations for marketers with little to no design skills to build professional-looking images.
Canva has pre-built templates for all of your favorite marketing channels, such as:
- YouTube
- Snapchat
#26. Graphic Design Marketing Tools for Small Business: Unfold
Instagram Stories provide marketers various ways to interact with consumers. And 500 million people view Instagram Stories every single day, according to Instagram.
The problem digital marketers run into today is that Instagram Stories doesn’t guarantee the level of engagement they once did.
Therefore, as a marketer, you need to create more compelling stories, with strong visuals. And this is where Unfold comes into play.
Unfold is great for creating the visual journey of your Instagram Story. It allows you to:
- Create engaging stories with user-friendly templates
- Edit photos and video with filters and effects
- Use advanced text tools with curated fonts and styles
- Export your stories and share them on Instagram
Unfold is one of the most popular Instagram marketing tools and is available for both iPhone and Android users.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Tools
#27. Account-Based Marketing Tools for Small Business: Datanyze
Datanyze by ZoomInfo uses technographics to profile prospective clients.
Technographics are just like demographics. However, technographics profiles companies based on the technology they use.
Datanyze has four main features:
- Technology tracking: Sell and market based on your prospects’ technology choices
- Predictive analytics: Score your existing pipeline and find net-new accounts
- Prospecting: Research accounts, search contacts, and find email addresses
- Data enrichment: Add technographics to your CRM
#28. Account-Based Marketing Tools for Small Business: InsideView
InsideView manages the quality of your data by cleaning accounts, contacts, and leads in real-time or on a schedule. This ensures your sales and marketing teams have the most up-to-date information.
The account-based marketing platform is made up of three core components:
- Discover new markets: Identify your total addressable market (TAM), expand your reach to new look-a-like businesses, and improve sales performance at each stage of the marketing funnel.
- Target the right prospects: Find more prospects that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP), and build a high quality, high-value pipeline that maximizes ROI for your ABM campaigns.
- Engage with buyers: Access the most accurate data, insights, and connections needed to identify and engage with buyers at your target accounts.
#29. Account-Based Marketing Tools for Small Business: Customers.ai
Studies have shown that live chat software tools increase conversions on websites by up to 45%. And in 2020, account-based marketing tools need to be able to track prospects across multiple channels.
Using Customers.ai OmniChatⓇ technology, your marketing, sales, and customer support teams can instantly communicate with customers and collaborate from one unified inbox.
Furthermore, the unified inbox keeps track across your website, Facebook Messenger, SMS text messages, and other web chat apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
This allows you to manage all customer communications from one place, as opposed to needing to manage different live chat tools across multiple platforms.
The benefits of omnichannel marketing technology are huge for account based marketers:
- Customer profiles rich with data and behavioral insights.
- Stronger customer support team collaboration and quicker response times.
- Time and money saved by using one, as opposed to many inboxes
- Audience segmentation and targeting for ABM teams.
#30. Viral Marketing Tools for Small Business: Quuu
I’ve used Quuu multiple times to curate and promote content for social media accounts.
Quuu’s promotion tool gets real profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to click and share your content.
Recently, Quuu introduced a new feature called Pods, which is really interesting.
It allows you to automate social media sharing of content between your accounts and your friends, colleagues, and business partners accounts.
Use Quuu to curate content that your social media audiences will find value in, and then promote your company’s best performing content to increase traffic to your blog.
#31. Viral Marketing Tools for Small Business: ReferralCandy
Of all the viral marketing tools your small business can have, word-of-mouth is the most powerful.
ReferralCandy is a referral generating platform that encourages customers to share your products and services with their connections via incentives.
When a customer buys a product from your ecommerce store, they automatically receive a referral code that they can share with their connections. Additionally, when a referral makes a purchase with that referral code, two things happen:
- Your friend gets a discount on their purchase.
- The referrer earns rewards from your online store.
#32. Viral Marketing Tools for Small Business: Customers.ai
Facebook autoresponders are a great tool to make all of your organic posts go viral. And marketers have had nothing but success with Customers.ai Facebook Comment Guards.
Autoresponders are easy to set up and will run fully automated on all of your Facebook posts.
Next time you create some content that you would love to see go viral, try the following:
- Ask a click-bait question on your post, such as, “Name your 10 favorite bands, go!” People love answering questions about themselves, it’s in our nature, and this always works.
- Have people guess the answer in the comments.
- Auto-send a private response with your Customers.ai chatbot via Messenger.
Then, when engagement one of your posts is well above average, boost your Facebook post to ensure that it goes viral.
The more people that respond, the more visibility the post will get in your news feed. The best part is that you automatically capture lead and user data every time someone replies to your private message. Additionally, those contacts have now opted-in to receive promotional messages from your Messenger chatbot.
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Marketing Tools for Small Business: Important Next Steps
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