Best Marketing Software for Small Businesses

Your company may have the best product in the world, but if no one hears about it, you won’t make any sales. Marketing is one of the most important elements of any business, right next to product development. If the latter is what your business is all about, it’s the former that brings interested customers to your checkout page.

A good marketing plan is more than just scheduling a few social media posts throughout the month. You need to design your brand’s tone of voice, work out your sales funnel, track your marketing campaigns, and switch between several platforms and marketing strategies. This can be quite a challenge to tackle alone, especially considering that each strategy has its own dos and don’ts. But as we all know, small businesses have tight budgets and can’t invest a lot of money on full marketing teams or agencies – that’s where marketing software comes in.

Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

Regardless of the marketing tools you use, consistency is key to increase brand awareness. But how can you run a non-stop marketing campaign over several platforms with a tight schedule and small budget? The answer is marketing automation.

Marketing automation software is any platform that helps you automize all your marketing efforts, cutting the time spent on managing them substantially. For instance, it’s unthinkable to manually tweet several times a day at the exact moment where your target audience is more active or to personally send an email to every newsletter subscriber. That’s why companies take advantage of marketing automation tools, such as social media schedulers and email marketing software.

But these are just two examples of a wide variety of marketing tools designed to help small businesses meet their objectives effortlessly. From image editors that come with built-in templates to hashtag generators and keyword planners, there’s a piece of software to help you with every marketing tactic.

Recommended Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Among the many marketing automation tools available, some are more essential than others. If you’re on a tight budget and need to narrow down which platforms to invest in, we recommend looking at the following:

SEO: Semrush

Google has become part of our lives – when we need something, the first thing we do is google it. However, most people don’t go past the first page of results, which is why it’s so important to optimize your website’s SEO. From online companies to local shops, all businesses need to include SEO strategies in their marketing plan. After all, appearing on the second page of Google may result in missing out on thousands of customers. Unfortunately, ranking at the top of Google isn’t easy – especially for keywords with a high number of volume searches. That’s where Semrush comes in. By offering an extensive set of tools, this SEO software allows you to easily understand which long-tail keywords to aim for, where to optimize your website, relevant blog topics to write about, and which backlinks improve your domain authority. You can also count on a social media scheduler, writing SEO assistant, local SEO optimizer, and much more. Read our Semrush review.

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Email Marketing: AWeber

Offering one of the highest conversion rates in online marketing, email marketing is still one of the best ways to reach your customers. Instead of publishing social media posts that may or may not appear on your target audience’s feed, email marketing puts you in touch directly via their inbox. That’s why it’s so important to have a newsletter for them to subscribe to. Of course, the only way to build an email list is by using an email marketing solution. By giving you the power to send emails to a massive subscriber list and segment your subscribers into different groups, email marketing platforms let you effortlessly send curated content that your audience will love. Additionally, advanced tools like AWeber even allow you to automate email sequences, which set off every time a subscriber meets a particular condition, and automatically compiles reports with clear insights. Read our AWeber review.

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Graphic Creator: Canva

No matter if it’s a social media post, a newsletter, or a blog article, images always go hand in hand with content. That’s because you need to stand out in a saturated online market. In other words, no one is going to stop to read what you have to say unless there’s an eye-catching graphic to grab their interest. However, not everyone is a born designer, and hiring one can be too expensive for a small business. That’s where graphic creators like Canva come in. Not only are they easy to work with, but they’re also available at affordable prices. Additionally, they come with a wide array of templates specifically designed for social media, newsletters, and other marketing images. You just need to change the text, add a photo, and you'll have a beautiful image to go along with your copy. Read our Canva review.

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Marketing Communication: RingCentral

When it comes to marketing a product, constant communication is key. The marketing team needs to be in touch with all other departments to make sure everything is being taken care of. More than that, it’s also critical to have a straightforward way for customers to contact you. As one of the best virtual phone systems on the market, RingCentral offers all of the features necessary for both situations. Plus, it supports countless third-party integrations, including CRM software, messaging apps, and contact center platforms – perfect for a smooth workflow. The best part is that RingCentral comes at an affordable price, and you can test everything out through the company’s 15-day free trial. Read our RingCentral review.

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CRM: EngageBay

A pleasant customer journey is key for a high retention rate and the simple fact of clients not having to repeat themselves every time they contact support shows that you care. The only way to offer a seamless customer experience is by having a reliable customer relationship management (CRM) platform – and EngageBay is just that, and much more. As an all-in-one platform, EngageBay allows you to keep track of customers’ interactions, manage your ticketing system, answer live chat questions, broadcast email newsletters, design landing pages, and the list continues. Instead of managing various product subscriptions, you can have everything in one place. But if this seems a bit of an overkill, we recommend saving some money by opting for the simpler versions of EngageBay. You can even use EngageBay’s CRM features for free. Read our EngageBay review.

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Stock Media: Shutterstock

In marketing, content is king. And even more essential for businesses than compelling copywriting and effective calls to action are strong visuals to catch people’s interest. That’s true for blog articles, social media posts, YouTube videos, flyers, and the list goes on. But hiring a designer, photographer, or filming crew is out of reach for most small businesses. This is where Shutterstock comes in. With one of the most extensive stock media libraries of pictures, vectors, video clips, and soundtracks, Shutterstock offers an easy way for you to find the best media to go with your content. The website is intuitive and helpfully lets you save the media files you love the most in collections. Additionally, Shutterstock offers several image tools for free – including a user-friendly drag-and-drop builder – and you can download ten images at zero cost by taking advantage of the 30-day free trial. Read our Shutterstock review.

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Qualitative Data Analysis: ATLAS.ti

Understanding your target audience is one of the most important steps in marketing your services correctly. Although quantitative data gives you a good overview of your soon-to-be customers, qualitative data analysis offers a more in-depth look at your prospects. Still, it’s hard work. Due to its open-ended nature, it takes longer to go over the information and get applicable conclusions. QDA software like ATLAS.ti helps you organize this type of data and find correlations across all your sources. More importantly, the app comes with various tools to make sense of your data. It’s possible to see quotations, codes, and memos in a tree view, automatically create code co-occurrence tables, and much more. The software is also available on mobile, letting you record and save interviews directly in your projects. ATLAS.ti provides a generous 90-day free trial, where it only limits the size of your projects after the first five days, while still allowing you to use all its features. Read our ATLAS.ti review.

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Video Editor: Filmora

While blogging is still popular and worthwhile, the newest phase of content marketing is video. From short social media clips to longer YouTube videos, it’s essential to include this kind of content in your marketing strategy. Due to its comprehensive set of features and user-friendliness, Filmora is perfect for any business needing to explore video editing. It caters to both beginners and advanced users by providing a wide range of premade templates and in-depth customization. In short, it’s the perfect software to create top-quality videos even if you’re just starting out. In addition to being affordable, Filmora offers volume discounts. So, businesses can save on their subscription by ordering licenses in bulk. Moreover, there’s a free version available. While Filmora adds a watermark to exported videos made in this version, it comes with all the features to let you try everything out for yourself. Read our Filmora review.

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SMS Marketing: TextMagic

The one item that everyone always has within reach is their cell phone, so what better way to stay in touch with clients than via SMS? With TextMagic, it takes just a few clicks for your customers to receive the latest deal, product update, newsletter, or even survey. Plus, the SMS marketing service is perfect for small businesses working on a tight budget, as it’s possible to buy credit instead of committing to a monthly subscription. TextMagic provides bulk SMS, SMS-to-email conversion, and contact subscription management. What’s more, its SMS automation means rules can be created for keywords, so an action is triggered when a client replies ‘subscribe,’ for example. For more advanced users, there’s the ability to integrate the service’s SMS API into their own system. TextMagic provides a money-back guarantee and a generous 30-day free trial, so whether you’re a fledgling or veteran small business, the commitment-free service will surely give your marketing campaign a boost. Read our TextMagic review.

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Marketing Automation: Freshmarketer

Trying to reach an extensive range of customers as a growing company is challenging, and it becomes even harder when a business depends on numerous apps. Fortunately, Freshmarketer can harvest the power of a hundred marketing tools. This affordable and cutting-edge CRM platform offers a variety of features to propel small businesses forward. Integrating through third-party services such as Zapier, Freshmarketer automatically syncs client data from numerous sources, letting users access everything from one location. With its marketing automation capabilities, which include multichannel journeys, Freshmarketer helps businesses re-engage their leads and improve customer relationships. Its AI-powered analytics learn clients’ behaviors and instruct marketing teams to act accordingly, from sending cart reminders to post-purchase messages over various communication channels. Plus, its comprehensive reporting dashboard presents all types of metrics in an accessible and user-friendly format. The cherry on top is that Freshmarketer even offers a free-forever plan. Read our Freshmarketer review.

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Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

A marketing strategy always needs to be backed up by a marketing plan. It’s essential that you know who your target audience is and the objectives you want to accomplish. Only then will you know what platforms to focus on and see your marketing efforts pay off. For instance, if you have a young target audience, you’ll probably want to focus on social media outlets like TikTok or YouTube. On the other hand, if you own a B2B business, email marketing and webinars might offer a better return.

There are several marketing strategies that will be present no matter your target audience. You should always have a website, focus on the right social media platforms, and run targeted ads. But it’s content marketing that has become key to any marketing strategy. People no longer enjoy in-your-face ads. Instead, there’s a higher probability of converting a lead into a sale by offering them free content that helps them with a particular problem. That’s why more companies are writing blog articles and guides that bring traffic to their website. If you have a physical business, like a coffee shop, then it’s essential to list your company on Google My Business so it shows up when people use the ‘near me’ feature.

Additional Marketing Resources for Small Businesses

There are more marketing tools that help small businesses to thrive. While the ones recommended are great to spend less time on executing marketing strategies, you should consider other software that improves your overall content marketing and make the content creation process smoother. Meanwhile, you should also look at getting tools designed to boost productivity across the board.