Marketing Tool Stack Used by Smart Small Businesses
Taking the first few steps to start a small online business is surprisingly simple.
You need about an hour to get your website up and running, showing your products and services to the entire world.
At that point, you feel empowered and ready for some serious growth, and it seems like success is just around the corner.
There’s one problem, though: there are thousands of thousands of others doing the same thing with marketing tools. That’s why bringing business into existence might be simple, but it’s a whole new world to break through the noise made by the competition.
The sad fact remains that small businesses have either non-existent or small budgets to market their products; there are estimates that 47 percent of SMBs spend less than $10,000 on digital marketing.
Fortunately, a limited budget doesn’t mean that your marketing won’t be successful. There are many low-cost tools designed to help small businesses with reaching their target audiences.
I handpicked an impressive arsenal for you – twenty seven tools for graphic design, social media management, customer support, and marketing.
Need some advice with choosing the ones for absolute beginners? No problem, here’s my list with nine low-cost marketing tools that you need.
- Graphic Design: Crello
- Customer Support: Tidio
- Social Media Management: DrumUp
- Digital File Management: FileCamp
- Paid Advertising: Adzooma
- Lead Generation: Albacross
- SEO: SERanking
- Video Marketing: Breadnbeyond
- Project Management: Monday.
Okay, now we can just dive into the full list. Let’s start with the tools for absolute beginners and make our ways to the best alternatives.
Part I: Must-Have Marketing Tools for Small Businesses
1. Crello: Graphic Design
If you don’t have a graphic designer in your team, you should definitely take a look at Crello. It’s an easy-to-use graphic design tool that helps non-designers create stunning visuals for various marketing purposes (social media graphics and ads, email headers, business cards, blog post headers, etc.).
Crello has a collection of over 20,000 ready-made templates with access to 8,000 premium vector graphics & illustrations that help to create marketing visuals with ease. You can also upload up to 1,000 of personal images and customize your visuals with logos and fonts.
You can either choose a free account or sign up for a pro plan to get access to premium images, make animated content, and work with your team together (start at $7.99/month, billed yearly).
2. Tidio : Customer Support
Tidio is a live chat solution that helps small businesses by automating customer support. It combines email, live chat, messenger, and chatbots to help with minimizing response time and generating more leads.
By using Tidio, you can interact with every visitor on your website in real time with chabots and human operators. The customers, on the other hand, can use a customized widget to contact your support team at any time.
As a result, you’ll be able to increase visitor engagement, resolve more support requests, and improve the overall customer experience with your business.
Another thing that makes Tidio good is the integration with many other popular marketing tools, including MailChimp, Shopify, Zendesk, and Zapier.
3. DrumUp: Social Media Management
Content marketing is a must for small businesses, so you definitely need a good tool to manage it. DrumUp is worth a look because it automates many content marketing tasks, including social media posting, content discovery, influencer discovery, and content curation.
For example, if you’re struggling with coming up with fresh and popular ideas for your blog, you can use DrumUp to recommend some. The tool employs advanced algorithms to search content on the web and identifies the most popular pieces based on your keywords.
Another great thing that DrumUp can do for you is allowing to link your social media accounts into one place. This makes managing your social media presence much easier.
4. FileCamp: Digital File Management
Do you sometimes have trouble with finding files such as presentations or reports? This is something that many of us struggle with during the workday, and this tool can help to solve this problem.
The promise of FileCamp is simple but useful for small businesses: effective and efficient file management.
The tool is designed to be a go-to source for all types of files that businesses use in their work, including PDFs, textual documents, presentations, videos, spreadsheets, images, and more.
Managing, uploading, and accessing files is easy – in fact, many users reported having started using the tool with no training – so you can quickly make a difference in your everyday business activities.
In addition to storing and viewing files, Filecamp also offers sharing options enabling your team to collaborate on projects easily. The pricing starts from $15, so for this small cost, you can make your file management and collaboration much more efficient.
5. Adzooma: Paid Advertising
Speaking of social media, you might also want to optimize your Facebook Ads. This tool uses a database of best practices from your niche and evaluates the data from your social media campaigns. The process runs 24/7 and uses machine learning to improve the performance of your ads at all times.
As a result, you’ll be able to see where your campaigns might be underperforming and what needs to be done to increase the overall ROI.
Thanks to machine learning, Adzooma can detect a wide range of mistakes or inefficiencies, from simple grammar mistakes in post copy to more complex ones like adjusting bidding strategies.
And the best part? It can be used to manage Google and Microsoft ads campaigns as well. So, you can make Adzooma a one-stop solution for monitoring paid advertising.
6. Albacross: Lead Generation
Lead generation is often hard for small businesses, especially for B2B. Albacross can help with that by adding a major source of leads to your effort: website visitors. Now, the vast majority of people visiting your website don’t leave any contact details, which is something you can address with Albacross.
The tool captures the visitors, tracks their activity, and lets you identify them. By discovering who is actually browsing your website, you can create custom lead generation messages and contact them directly.
By using Albacross, you’ll keep your sales team busy by supplying them with visitor information. Integration with popular CRM, communication and collaboration tools such as Slack and Zapier makes it possible to get notified about new visits, too.
7. SERanking: SEO
This tool is a beautiful collection of digital marketing features that your marketing team. The suite provided by SERanking was created to help businesses to track their ranking in specific countries and keywords, do keyword research for content, make SEO checklist, and manage social media.
By using SERanking, you can conduct a comprehensive competitor and keyword analysis, website audit, backlink monitoring, and ranking analysis – everything you need to ensure that your website’s SEO is superb.
A great thing about SERanking is that all of the tools are really easy to use, so a small business owner without a lot of experience would not need to go through training.
8. Breadnbeyond: Video Marketing
Video explainer videos are the most popular way for online shoppers to learn about products and services. That’s why businesses are investing in the creation of animated product guides, explainers, how-tos, reviews, and other videos to attract more leads.
Breadnbeyond is a tool for creating animated explainer videos that won’t burn a hole in your marketing budget. They create custom on-demand videos for businesses from a wide range of industries which can be used for websites, social media, and other marketing materials.
One interesting thing about BreadnBeyond is that they guarantee delivering a custom video according to client requirements in 25 days or less (this includes a complete video consisting of the animation and script). This could be useful for small businesses looking to get quick exposure with a website launch, etc.
BreadnBeyond provides free consultations for every package they have, so you can check out what they can do for you at no cost.
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9. Monday
An online project management tool, Monday helps small businesses to complete projects more effectively and efficiently through a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
In the dashboard, one can see each team member’s tasks, projects, and to-dos, as well as communicate with everyone in one place. A manager, for example, can keep track of a project, share ideas and files, and coordinate the work to ensure a positive outcome.
In addition to project management, Monday is also great for product and client management, agile development, and order tracking. For example, a small business can manage orders from the dashboard, set deadlines for manufacturing and delivery, assign team members to work on tasks, and get notified if a project is delayed.
No training is needed to use Monday as a marketing tool, so you can just sign up for a free company account and see what this team management software can do for your business.
Part II: The Alternatives
Now we’re finished with the must-haves, let’s take a quick look at some alternative marketing tools for small businesses.
10. Moosend
Small businesses can use Moosend to begin automating their email marketing. A set of pre-flows is available to create triggered campaigns and target specific customers.
For example, a small eCommerce business can send welcome emails to new customers, share personalized product recommendations, and send cart abandonment emails.
One of the best things about Moosend is that it comes from a large library of pre-developed email templates you can use in your campaigns. Also, there’s an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor to help businesses with the creation of custom templates.
Additionally, a landing page builder and a subscription forms editor have been added recently that enrich an already wide selection of features.
The ability to create custom emails and automate email marketing are the main reasons why small businesses should take a look at this tool.
Moosend pricing is structured around list size which makes it a great option for SMEs. Additionally, the free plan allows you to fully test the platform up to 1,000 subscribers.
11. Kontentino
Does your small business do social media marketing? If yes, then chances are you’re dealing with a lot of presentations, spreadsheets, and files while planning your content.
Kontentino can help to minimize the time you need in the following areas:
- Content planning and collaboration. With tools like topic labels, drag & drop calendars, post checklists, tags, and bulk actions functionality, planning becomes much easier for marketing teams
- Content performance analysis. Kontento offers tracking custom social media metrics, marketing budget watch, and performance indicator monitoring.
Kontentino pricing is small business-friendly: you can sign up for a plan for only $49 in monthly costs.
12. JookSMS
SMS marketing is often overlooked by small businesses even though this channel can actually be very powerful. SMS messages have the highest reading rate of more than 98 percent, which makes them an effective tool to reach and engage customers.
This is exactly what JookSMS is here for.
It’s a bulk messaging service that businesses use to share their marketing messages with customers. If you need to let your customers know about an upcoming sale or send coupons to encourage them to visit your website or location, JookSMS is perfect for that.
With JookSMS, you just need to upload your list of contacts in a CSV format to the platform, create your message and click send. You can schedule messages to go out at a later time, automatically have clients opt out of future messages from you, send and reply to messages in our JookSMS account, and much more.
With cheap service packages starting from $25 and free customer support, you can easily start letting your subscribers know about offers. Plus, all new clients get $2.50 in credits to try the system for free.
13. ReportR
Collecting feedback from customers is a must for small businesses. Product feedback and ideas, customer service satisfaction – these are just a fraction of the ways in which online businesses use customer input to their advantage.
With ReportR, you can create unique surveys, quizzes, and assessments, as well as instantly downloadable PDF reports with personalized content.
This makes it a great tool for lead generation in SME’s as it gives you the ability to build an online questionnaire with scoring capabilities and logic, so you can show various outcomes depending on the score.
What’s so special about these reports?
- The content of the PDF is personalized based on answers and scores
- The PDF report can be fully branded with your company’s branding items like logo and colors
- Content of the PDF can be fixed texts, scores, results of formulas, graphs (spider-, pie- column charts), tables and images. Every item will be presented in the PDF, based on certain conditions. This way, every report becomes a personalized document for each respondent.
14. Lemlist
Lemlist, is the cold email outreach tool built for SMBs with advanced personalization options. With it, you can create different cold outreach campaigns with this marketing tool.
Whether you want to send cold sales emails, to market some event or to build backlinks, Lemlist’s advanced personalization features will help you to have the best open and reply rates.
With Lemlist, you can easily create personalized images with prospect’s logos, names, and other data, as well as the personalized videos and landing pages.
Another great thing about lemlist is the Lemwarm feature – that essentially improves your email deliverability. It’s one of the best Mailshake alternatives on the market.
It’s intuitive, eye-catching and easy-to-use.
Lemlist starts at $29/mo.
15. TeamBuzz
Keeping your small team engaged and motivated is crucial in ensuring the success of your small business. It’s no secret that a motivated team is a productive team.
TeamBuzz is a real-time employee feedback tool that helps companies to create a positive work culture and boost teams’ performance. The tool makes it easy to provide peer-to-peer feedback in real-time and allows employees to freely share their workplace improvement ideas.
With an extended free trial of 30 days and affordable pricing starting at $3 per employee/month, TeamBuzz is a great solution for any small business wishing to create an employee-centric workplace.
16. CanIRank
Getting higher in search engine results is one of the biggest obstacles that small businesses face today. Since hiring a dedicated content production and SEO team is often a problem, improving Google ranking remains a long-time struggle.
CanIRank is a tool designed to help small businesses with getting higher in Google results by supplying them with custom tips and recommendations:
- Keyword research for a specific website so you can create optimized content and website copy
- Rank tracking to notify the user about changes and competitors on the move
- Avoiding Google penalties by following the SEO tips given by the tool
- Providing SEO progress reports with notifications in ranking factor score changes, ranking changes, and explanations of SEO tasks and actions that were effective.
Using CanIRank would be like having an SEO expert on the team, so small businesses with the need to increase ranking should definitely give this marketing tool a try.
17. Visme -visual marketing tool
Web content with visuals performs better and gives a better chance for lead generation and customer engagement. If you’re looking for a tool to create visuals for non-graphic designers, Visme could be a great option.
It’s an all-in-one content creation tool that allows small businesses to create sales and marketing materials such as social media and blog visuals, design digital ad assets, edit photos, and maintain their brand style with a single platform.
The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy for anyone with any level of design skill to jump right in and start creating beautiful and engaging visuals for their audience. Save your favorite templates for later, change color themes with the click of a button, upload your brand fonts, and get designing.
18. ReferralCandy
Referral marketing can help small businesses to spread the word about themselves by running campaigns through partners and brand ambassadors. If there’s a bunch of campaigns you need to track, though, then having a tool for monitoring would be a great idea.
ReferralCandy is one of these marketing tools. It’s a referral program tracking and management software where you can monitor the performance of campaigns, track partners and affiliates, and reward them for their recommendations.
By using this tool, you can get an overview of your current and past campaigns, identify the best-performing ones, and end those not meeting your expectations.
With features like automatic reward distribution, detailed revenue reports, email support, ROI indicator monitoring and partner engagement tracking, ReferralCandy makes referral marketing much easier for small businesses.
19. SendinBlue
Email marketing has the highest ROI, so presents an amazing opportunity for small businesses to engage customers.
SendinBlue is a good option to start with email marketing. It’s an all-in-one sales & marketing toolbox that can help small businesses take care of all the email needs.
SendinBlue is a very affordable Mailchimp alternative with a wide range of features. Among them:
- Marketing Automation workflows
- Send Time Optimization
- Dynamic lists
- Chat
- SMS Campaigns
- Google Analytics Integration
- Spam check
- Flexible, Customizable Layouts
SendinBlue is one of the most popular new email marketing tools to send your newsletters with. Small businesses can use it to stay in touch with their subscribers, create marketing funnels to sell more and follow up sequences.
Pricing starts at €19 for 40,000 emails, but it also has a forever free version for smaller senders.
20. Landingi
A landing page is the heart of your marketing that you absolutely cannot afford to mess up. If you have a problem with pre-made or template landing pages, then creating your own, custom one is the best way to go.
That’s where Landingi comes in. It’s a landing page creator for businesses that allows to build custom landing pages without any programming skills.
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The reason why you don’t need any coding skills is that Landingi is basically a drag-and-drop page creator. It’s very easy to learn and use, and it comes highly recommended by some of the best marketers, including Neil Patel.
Landing also comes with 200+ completely customizable landing page templates that you can make your own. You can sort them by industry and goal, so the selection process is not complicated at all.
21. Planable
Most small businesses do social media marketing, but many of them aren’t strategic about their effort. This means they publish content just for the sake of it, so they miss opportunities to promote their employer brand, create a community around the brand, and collect customer feedback.
Planable is here to change that. It’s a social media management and marketing tool that helps businesses to make their content publishing more consistent, engaging, and strategic. For example, in terms of engagement, you can use the tool to publish posts at peak times to achieve maximum exposure.
Other important things that Planable is known for content planning and social media collaboration. For example, it’s easy to create, save, and schedule posts as well as collaborate on them with your social media marketing team.
There’s a 14-day free trial plan for new users, and Planable pricing starts at $32.5.
22. Nextiva
Nextiva is commonly considered one of the best providers for when it comes to business VoIP. It’s a communication suite created specifically for small businesses to help with building customer relationships. For example, Nextiva combines voice communication with CRM, which allows to manage all customer interactions regardless of the channel.
One way in which Nextiva can improve your communication with customers is by data collection. Let’s say that a customer calls you for a question. With Nextiva, you can get additional information about that customer and send them personalized messages through a channel they prefer, including email and phone.
On the other hand, your marketing team will get a dashboard to manage all customer conversations in one place. Not only they can use it to track the entire customer journey, but also communicate, secure customers, manage deals, renew subscriptions, and share customer-related information between departments.
23. KyLeads
The next tool on our list is a lead management and sales platform.
If you’re a small business looking to increase the conversion rate on your website, you can create quizzes, pop-up windows, surveys, and other interactive tools to get feedback and engage and convert visitors into leads. Creating these tools is pretty easy with the Intuitive Builder with lots of templates for inspiration.
Your sales team will be happy to get customer data and feedback provided by the tools, as they can develop more personalized and targeted marketing communication. Thanks to integration with GetResponse, MailChimp, Active Campaign, and Constant Contact, you can put the insights to good use with email marketing.
KyLeads pricing starts from $50 per month but there’s a free trial available (you can also get two months free when you pay yearly).
24. Qwirl
If you think it’s time for your small business to ditch traditional documents business proposals, PDFs, and Word documents, then check out Qwirl.
It’s a tool used by thousands of small businesses to create slick, professional-looking business documents. Business proposals, branding strategies, consulting agreements, sales proposals, marketing research reports, and many more – Qwirl has lots of good-looking templates to impress your clients and colleagues.
Also, you can incorporate advanced features, like embedding videos, having interactive price quotes, digital signature capability, and even the ability to track when the proposal is viewed.
A great thing about Qwilr is that it comes with many templates for documents, so your team doesn’t have to create their own (unless they want to).
Qwilr costs as little as $12 per month, and you can try it for free.
25. Respona
Does your small business need to expand its online reach? Respona can help with link building, sending pitches to journalists, and promotion of content with influencers and bloggers.
It’s an outreach tool for businesses to scale their outreach efforts, get in touch with similar businesses and establish relationships with influencers in their niche.
For example, a small business can search for the most popular content with the built-in live search engine and make adjustments to a digital campaign.
Respona’s AI-based algorithm studies the content created by popular influencers and helps to write personalized pitches to get a response from them (there’s an email pitch quality analyzer to help with this).
As a result, small businesses can get more opportunities to get covered and seen by more potential customers.
You’ll also find tools like brand mention monitoring and backlink checker useful for up your SEO game.
26. Biteable
With video marketing being extremely effective for engaging customers, small businesses definitely need a great tool to create videos for promotions.
Biteable is one of the best for this. It allows small businesses to easily create epic DIY videos using ready-made and customizable templates for use in content marketing campaigns e.g. slideshows, ads, explainers, social media, and even video resumes.
The tool comes with an impressive library of templates, animations, and clips, so you can create stunning videos quickly and share them with colleagues and clients. Uploading of new images and clips is also available so you can mix the template with visuals featuring your products and services.
Biteable offers very affordable plans for small businesses; for example, you can use the full version and get access to all templates and functions for only $9.50 per month.
27. Uplead
Uplead is a great lead generation tool for small businesses as a marketing tool. It generates information-rich profiles for each lead so you know better how to adjust your messages to get a response from them. You can also use it to build lists of targeted leads based on their characteristics to personalize your marketing communication and improve conversions.
Uplead was created specifically for sales and marketing teams to help businesses achieve growth quickly. Its users say that it really helped their lead generation effort because it generates not only the general information like email but also really useful, verified data like phone numbers and companies.
Working with UpLead is also easy, as you can save your lead searches, build lead bases, and import your own information. The pricing starts at $79 per month and there’s a free trial available.
Wrap Up
Having a business website without marketing is simply pointless. With the competition increasing every day, you need to have an arsenal of marketing tools for the channels you use to communicate with your customers.
Hopefully, you found these tools interesting and worth a look. All of them come with a free trial so don’t hesitate to give a try to a few of them to see how your business can benefit.
