Today, small businesses all around the world take advantage of many different digital marketing tools to assist them in many different tasks.
While there are hundreds (or maybe even thousands) of options available out there, quite often businesses don’t know which ones are right for them.
In this article, we wanted to quickly go over the best online marketing tools for small businesses available today on the Internet and see what they can do for you.
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1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics stands out because it works well for businesses of any kind while offering itself as a free service. Being a Google product and 100% free Google Analytics is a household name when it comes to tracking data for your business website.
Once integrated into your site, Google Analytics offers data surrounding your site traffic, conversions, audience demographics, user behavior, and much more. Tracking how your site performs in search, and where your visitors come from is integral to building site traffic, and controlling the very top of your sales funnel.
While there’s a steep learning curve for this tool, it’s worth becoming proficient. However, there are plenty of tutorials, some even offered by Google themselves to help you set up and learn how to use the tool.
The best part that bears repeating: Google Analytics is completely free to use.
2. Google Keyword Planner
Figuring out search engine optimization (SEO) for your business can be a difficult task. SEO involves using the right keywords and phrases to move up the rankings in search engines. To help with SEO and search ads, yet another Google tool makes this list: Google Keyword Planner.
For small businesses that are just getting started, SEO may not have built up quite yet, and ads are necessary. Use Google Keyword Planner to decide on the best keywords to target and bid on for your business based on:
- Keyword research: you can look at different keywords and research them.
- Historical statistics: see how keywords performed in the past.
- Traffic forecast: view Google’s traffic predictions for keywords.
Google Keyword Planner has been integrated into Google AdWords, so you can use it directly in your ad account.
3. Facebook Ads
You may feel like Facebook ads aren’t worth your time or something that small businesses shouldn’t bother with. However, these statistics might take you by surprise.
Over 9-out-of-10 marketers pay to get their ads on Facebook, and there’s a good reason for it. With over a billion users, Facebook is the largest behemoth of social networking sites, and there’s a high probability that your target audience is present on it.
Facebook ads are also useful because they can run in concurrence with your organic social strategy, meaning you can “promote” successful posts to reach even more people. What’s more, Facebook ads allow for hyper-targeted advertising, allowing you to choose even the most minute details.
For any small business looking to get their name out there, Facebook ads is definitely worth trying out. However, you still need to be careful – with the wrong set up and targeting your budget can be wasted pretty fast.
4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs helps you to improve your SEO by showing you information about competitors. You can use it to perform keyword research against your competition, see your current rankings for particular keywords, and see which of your sites’ pages performs the best SEO wise.
Ahrefs will give you tons of information to help plan your content and keyword strategy:
- Shows you which keywords and links your competitors have
- Gives you automatic reports to show you how your website performs
- Points out flaws and mistakes in your own website’s SEO
By seeing exactly which of your pages need work, and how they stack up against your competitor, you’ll be able to develop a strategy to overtake them.
5. SEMrush
SEMrush is another insanely popular all-in-one digital marketing toolset. With a powerful SEO part, SEMrush is an alternative (and a competitor) to Ahrefs.
READ ALSO: Ahrefs vs SEMrush
However, SEO is not the only thing SEMrush offers, they have a wide range of different features that cover almost anything you might need to do as a small business or a new website.
Check SEMrush here or watch the video below to explore the platform:
6. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is another marketing tool for small businesses that allows you to collect important information about site performance. However, SimilarWeb recognizes the different types of businesses that exist and the people that need to use this software. They designed it in a way to benefit those involved in marketing, research, sales and investing.
You can sign up for free and begin viewing traffic history, SEO details, and other information to help you improve your performance and metrics. Since it gives you access to all of these statistics, you can make an informed decision about marketing, sales, and investments.
7. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo seeks to connect small businesses with influencers and others to help them build up their online presence. They provide a search engine where you can look up social accounts with the highest follower count, engagement, and so on, in any given domain.
This networking tool can help you find influencers, competitors, and potential partners. Use Buzzsumo to remain in contact with each other, meet others involved in your industry, and create projects that will allow you to build up your business.
8. Canva
Some small business owners may not know how to design or they don’t have time to do so. If you face these problems too, try Canva as a way to create designs based around templates.
Canva is an excellent tool for creating beautiful visuals literally in seconds. Using a ton of prebuilt templates, icons, graphics, and stock images, you can put together a well-designed visual for any occasion.
Canva covers a large range of designs to make the process easier for your business: posters, presentations, and logos, just to name a few. You can use this tool for free as a simple and straightforward way to create designs for your business. If Photoshop and Illustrator are out of your price range (or skill set), Canva is a great way to get the job done, and beautifully.
9. Jotform Sign
Businesses always need contracts when they need to onboard an employee or take on a third-party company for outsourcing work.
Jotform Sign is an all-in-one electronic signature tool that businesses can use to generate secure documents and share them with employees or customers.
Use their many templates to start creating documents that include signature fields that make them legally binding. Automate your processes by receiving a notification whenever someone signs your contracts.
It’s the easiest way to create proposals for your leads. Create documents and collect signatures that you can then turn into reports to find out more about your users and gain insight into them.
Digital Marketing Platforms for Small Businesses
Even though online marketing tools for small businesses matter, you also need to look at digital marketing platforms. They offer multiple small business tools in one that can help you to build up your business.
Spend some time looking through these four digital marketing toolsets to see which ones can assist your business.
HubSpot
Hubspot is a complete marketing hub that gives you access to different tools to help your small business at an accessible price.
On top of this, businesses can take advantage of their customer relationship management (CRM) software for free. HubSpot is an incredibly complete CRM tool.
HubSpot can help you in a wide range of areas including sales and marketing automation, lead nurturing, customer service and content management. It even can handle automatic appointment scheduling for you with its HubSpot Meeting Tools (not a standalone appointment scheduling app, but it does the work).
If there’s one all-in-one solution you need for contacting your customers no matter the capacity, HubSpot has you covered.
Omnisend
Omnisend focuses on omnichannel marketing automation, which makes it stand out from other platforms. While that might sound complex, Omnisend is infamous for making complicated automation workflows easy.
What sets Omnisend apart from other marketing automation tools is the ability to add several channels to the same automation workflow: email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more.
Omnisend offers multiple tools to make digital marketing easier for small businesses.
- Drag-and-drop builder for campaigns, automation workflows, email capture forms, landing pages, etc.
- Automated workflows powered by smart segmentation to send relevant messages to customers.
- Reports on your campaign and sales performance.
To add to this, they offer various prices, based on emails sent, so that you can pick the plan that works for your business.
Keap
Keap built its CRM features around online marketing for small businesses. They do this by putting emphasis on email marketing, organizing leads, getting jobs, and keeping clients connected.
Keap allows you to organize all of your contacts from the ground up, offer great customer support, and onboard new customers easily.
They also include a handy sales pipeline that helps you track exactly where each sale is, so you’ll never miss a follow-up. For many small and one-man businesses, a tool like Keap is a must-have for organization and CRM purposes.
Intercom
If you want your business to perform well, you’ll need to connect with your customers, communicate with them, and build up a relationship.
Intercom offers great live-chat and email communication features that help you do just that. Intercom stands apart by using automated bots for frequently asked questions that automatically connect with your Intercom-based knowledge base.
These show different ways that automated bots can communicate with your customers. Whether they immediately offer customers help, show them how to upgrade plans, or help them make purchases, these chatbots can help them through the process. This will help free up your customer service representatives to focus on the queries that truly need their attention.
Wrapping Up
Many may struggle with digital marketing at first, but using these online marketing tools for small businesses can make your life so much easier.
Not every tool will be right for every small business, so do your homework and make sure you invest your time in the right ones. Taking advantage of these tools can at least give you a great starting point for determining exactly what you need to make your company run smoothly.
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