For small businesses, putting together the right team and the right tools is critical. In trying to cut down marketing expenses, technology tools often take the back seat in small enterprises. It might seem like you can pull off most tasks manually. But you are probably compromising on productivity, quality, and, most importantly, time. With a small team and a limited budget, the more you can achieve in lesser time, the greater are your chances of growing as a business. And, this is exactly what small business marketing tools are for.
Tools for managing your everyday business activities can boost productivity by automating repetitive, mundane tasks. They leave your team with more time to focus on the strategic, outcome-oriented work. Here are some must-have small business marketing tools that you should know about.
11 Must-Have Tools for Small Businesses and Their Uses
Social Champ – Social Media Management Tool
Social Champ is a social media management tool that lets you manage multiple social accounts in one place. From creating your social posts with engaging images and videos to tracking analytics and generating reports, Social Champ helps with social media management end-to-end.
The platform allows you to –
- Create, schedule, and publish content for multiple social platforms
- Reply to comments, direct messages, reviews, and mentions from unified inbox
- Manage your social posts using a powerful, all-in-one calendar
- Track performance with custom metrics for each platform and generate easy to read reports
- Add team members and assign different roles for better collaboration
There are a host of other features too, like bulk upload, sentiment analysis, auto-posting of RSS feeds, and more that make social media management a lot more convenient. Social Champ has a Chrome extension and mobile app too. It supports almost all the major social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and more.
It supports LinkedIn marketing too because there is a lot you can do on LinkedIn today. A good bio or a catchy LinkedIn headline is not enough anymore. Regularly posting content is the key to LinkedIn marketing success for small businesses, especially in the B2B sector, and Social Champ is the perfect tool for it.
Use Social Champ for Quick Scheduling
Create, edit, design, and schedule social media posts using the all-in-one social media management tool for free. Sign up now!
Narrato – Content Creation and Collaboration Platform
Content is a crucial component of any business’ marketing campaigns and creating quality content takes good organization and structured effort. Narrato is a content creation, collaboration, and workflow management platform that brings all your content processes to one place. From content ideas generation to creation, assigning tasks, editing, sharing, publishing, and maintaining a repository, Narrato helps you streamline your entire content workflow.
For marketing and content agencies that create content for clients, Narrato makes client work delivery and collaboration convenient as well.
With Narrato Workspace, you can –
- Create quality content with the powerful content editor on the platform. The content editor on Narrato offers an AI writing assistant, grammar and readability checks, and suggestions. You can also run a plagiarism check on the content to ensure it is unique and original.
- Collaborate with the content team, bringing all writers, editors, project managers, clients, partners, and other stakeholders together on your workspace. Content tasks can be easily assigned to writers and editors. The in-line commenting and messaging features allow team members to share their inputs and feedback on a content piece. Narrato allows you to share completed content pieces easily with a publicly shareable link or publish directly to your blog/ website through the WordPress integration.
- Organize your content under projects and folders, and work with the content tasks using a calendar or board views. Track the progress of your content projects and tasks using content workflow statuses.
- Create guidelines and templates to help your content team adhere to requirements. You can add project guidelines that are common to all content tasks under a project, topic-specific guidelines for individual content tasks, and content templates to give your writers a structure to follow.
- Manage freelance content creators and their payments.
While Narrato will take care of most of your content collaboration requirements, we also recommend having a visual content collaboration tool like Canva or some Canva alternatives in your tool stack. This is essential for all the graphics, images, and videos that go with your content.
Mageplaza Reward Points Extension
In today’s e-commerce era, an online store has to compete with others to win customers and even make an effort to get a buyer to repeat purchasing. Understanding that customer loyalty means a lot to a business in terms of long-term sustainability, brands are looking for ways to improve customer retention while catching the attention of new customers. To do this, an attractive rewards program appears on the must-have list.
Mageplaza Reward Points for Magento 2 is the most powerful Loyalty program, in which the Rewards System makes it easy to convert your buyers into loyal customers by building an automatic point and spending system through customer actions such as purchasing products, sharing products via social networks, etc. This not only helps to attract new customers but also retain loyal customers for your online store. Besides, customers can also use bonus points as a payment method. As a result, your stores can drive sales, conversion rates, as well as have customers around them now and again.
Below are some key features that Magento 2 Reward Points offers:
- Optimize mobile shopping experience of the reward points features with the ready solution of PWA compatibility
- Easily customize Reward point labels
- Use points spending slider to increase customer’s shopping experience
- Reward points by Earning & Spending rules
- Allow buyers to be rewarded points by sharing products on social channels
- In addition to rewards for purchasing, other customers’ behaviors can also be tracked and rewarded.
- Allow customers to purchase products by using their reward points
- Reward for referring friends
- Track Reward program via an advanced report
- Import & Export reward points
In short, this is a must-have module for online merchants, especially those who want to build an effective loyalty program. Why don’t you experience it right now and share your surprising results with us?
Less Annoying CRM – CRM Tool
It is usually hard to find a CRM tool that is made keeping the needs of small businesses in mind. Most CRMs are made for big enterprises with a large number of users. Small businesses need something simpler and more affordable. That is where Less Annoying CRM can help. From the name itself, it should be evident that this CRM tool cuts out all the complexities. It is easy to set up so your team can get on board easily without much fanfare.
Less Annoying CRM offers all the basic features you would expect from a good CRM tool, including –
- Contact management
- Calendar and task management
- Leads and pipelines management
- Customization options
The platform is optimized for computers, tablets, and smartphones so you can access it from anywhere and at any time. You can easily import your existing contacts and customer data to the CRM tool from spreadsheets. All your data is backed up on secured servers, so you don’t have to worry about data security. Exporting the data is equally convenient. The platform also sends you an email every morning with your daily agenda of tasks and events, so you can start planning your day without even logging in.
The biggest advantage with Less Annoying CRM is that, despite being a small business CRM tool, you get frequent and free updates and excellent customer support.
Flodesk – Email Marketing Tool
Flodesk is an intuitive email design tool that can spruce up your email marketing campaigns. It makes creating attention-grabbing emails extremely quick and easy with its user-friendly editor. You can choose from one of their tried-and-tested templates or create a design of your own from scratch. There are hundreds of options in fonts, layouts, and colors to help your emails stay aligned with your brand identity, be it for your weekly newsletters or an important event like a product launch.
Flodesk integrates with all your other apps like Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Google Sheets, WordPress, etc. through Zapier. You can also directly link it with Shopify. The platform also helps you create attractive opt-in forms to grow your subscribers’ list and build powerful email automation workflows as well.
Sitechecker – Website SEO Checker and Audit Tool
Your small business marketing efforts are incomplete without SEO. Making sure that your website SEO is on point requires an efficient SEO audit tool. With a tool like Sitechecker, you don’t have to be an SEO expert yourself, nor do you have to hire one. This website SEO checker generates comprehensive SEO reports along with a personalized checklist on how you can improve your search rankings on Google.
The tool runs on-page and technical SEO audits. The Sitechecker crawler helps you –
- Detect broken links
- Check important meta tags on every page
- Identify issues slowing down the page loading speeds
- Visualize the internal linking structure of your site
- Check all internal links, external links, anchors, and more
Sitechecker can also help you generate actionable insights from your Google Analytics and Search Console data. You can also generate keywords reports, keep track of all the backlinks you have created to your site. This all-in-one SEO audit platform is very easy to use and perfect for small businesses that are just starting out with digital marketing.
Cyfe – Business Analytics Dashboard
Having a dashboard to visualize all your business data across marketing, sales, support, and more is imperative for gaining more clarity and visibility into your processes. Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard that brings all your critical data together. You can choose from pre-built dashboard templates and customize them with important widgets that you need. To get started faster, you can also configure pre-populated widgets like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Moz, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
Cyfe lets you monitor everything starting from analytics, to sales to online reviews of your business. You can create dashboards for individual departments within your company, for your clients, or exclusively for the C-suite. The platform can pull data from sources like Google and Salesforce to populate your widgets.
Automated email reports of your data can be downloaded or scheduled for constant activity monitoring. Benchmarking metrics against your business objectives on the different widgets helps you track your performance and identify areas of improvement. Cyfe offers different white-label options and customizations, so you have control over who you share your data with.
Clipchamp – Free Video Editor
Struggling with marketing ideas for your business? Whether you want to promote a new product, your brand story, your customer testimonials, or even a sale—use video to catch your followers’ attention. With an online video editor like Clipchamp, you can make these promo videos fast and free.
Clipchamp is a free video maker that works in your web browser so there’s nothing to download. The editing is beginner friendly as it uses a drag and drop style. You can save your videos in 1080p HD quality for free.
If you’re really busy or not feeling creative, you can select one of the pre-designed video templates and adapt it to your business and publish it in 5 minutes! Their stock library has more than a million options of stock video, audio, and stickers. Some media is free while some can be accessed under a premium plan that starts at $9/month.
Key features:
- Drag and drop video maker
- Trim video, crop video, resize the video to suit any social media
- Add your brand logo and choice of fonts
- Free and paid 1 million+ stock footage, music, and stickers from GIPHY
- Compatibility: Google Chrome or Edge browser, iOS app
- Save videos in 1080p HD for free
- Premium account allows you to cloud sync your projects
You can also generate a professional voiceover using their natural AI voices to make your video ad more engaging.
Cognism
Cognism is a sales intelligence solution that helps marketing, sales, RevOps and GTM leaders connect with the people they want to do business with. Unlike other data providers, its B2B data is unrestricted*, limiting the need to buy credits.
If you’re looking to market globally, it boasts an extensive quality-driven and verified database of mobile numbers in the US and the most complete data in EMEA.
CIENCE GO Data
CIENCE GO Data is a sales intelligence platform that offers over 300 million records of leads from all industries, validated by CIENCE professionals to help you find smart business contacts that match your ideal customer profile (ICP) criteria.
GO Data validates millions of records through regular outbound outreach with up-to-date demographic and technographic records, company information, accurate email addresses, phone numbers, trigger events, specialized data points, and many others.
With access to highly accurate data, you can build a more effective sales and marketing strategy that can be customized according to the needs of your audience. Get GO Data and grow sales faster.
DataFeedWatch
DataFeedWatch by Cart.com is a feed marketing solution for managing and optimizing product data feeds for e-commerce retailers, brands, and PPC agencies. If you advertise your products on multiple marketing channels and comparison shopping engines, such as Google Shopping, Facebook & Criteo, or would like to start doing it, that’s the right tool for you.It will help you streamline the process of creating and maintaining product listings across all advertising channels. It also helps you achieve better performance with PPC campaigns by automating the bulk of your data feed work and providing lots of optimization functionalities. The tool can be used by novice marketers as well as highly specialized experts – whoever you are – you will save a lot of time, increase the visibility of your products and improve your advertising performance.
The shop plan begins at $49 per month and you get a 15-day free trial.
Summing Up
Having the right technology tools at your disposal is just as important as hiring the right people for your company. A capable team with the right tools to assist them can work wonders for your business. Not only will you see better outcomes, but you will also achieve them faster.
And acquiring the right tools does not always mean overshooting your budget and investing a fortune for a host of features you don’t even need. Tools that are designed for small businesses understand what you can afford and what your requirements could be. You only need to know which ones to pick.
Author Bio:
Neelam Goswami is a Content Writer at Godot Media, a leading content writing agency. Her areas of interest include digital and content marketing. She is also an amateur artist and loves to spend time on creative work.