As a small business owner, your focus should be entirely on raising brand awareness, finding leads, converting leads into customers and getting more visitors to your website.
This is where marketing tools become crucial.
Marketing tools can help you reach all your small business goals on a budget. However, choosing the best tool for your exact business needs can be a challenge.
There are so many tools on the market, and they all claim to be the best. That’s why this list brings together nine tools for a small business’s key online tasks: building your website, doing email marketing, researching content, improving your SEO, protecting your connection and managing projects and teams. Most of them have a free plan or a free trial, so you can try them before you pay.
Let’s get started!
1 – WordPress (Website Management)
WordPress is an amazing page builder that will help you create a website without any code or manual. You can let your creativity run free without having to hire a developer.
WordPress is perfect for any small business, as it offers a free plan with impressive features. You can also sign up for paid plans with more powerful features.
WordPress features
- WordPress lets you create a blog, a full website or both. It has thousands of themes and plugins that are easy to install.
- You can get creative with drag & drop features designed for adding audio, video, documents and more.
- It comes with built-in Jetpack, which offers essential features such as website stats, basic SEO and social sharing options.
- You can update your website from desktop and mobile apps for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows and Linux.
Pricing: WordPress.com has a free plan, and its paid plans add a custom domain, more storage, premium themes and plugins. Check the current prices on their website, as they change often.
2 – Mailrelay (Email Marketing)
Mailrelay is a sophisticated email marketing platform with powerful features. It lets you create, send and manage your campaigns, and gives you advanced statistics on subscriber behavior. It’s a perfect option for small businesses, as it offers the largest free account on the market and includes personalized support.
Mailrelay features
- Mailrelay has its own technology to track subscribers’ opens and clicks on your newsletters.
- It has its own IP ranges and expert email marketing consultants who can help improve your deliverability.
- It offers an automatic tool to block suspicious emails and has an automated system to detect spammers.
- It includes professional HTML newsletter templates so you can prepare your emails without writing code.
- It offers a dedicated SMTP server to send directly from your email client or your application, included in paid plans (on the free account, a 30-day trial and then €14.95/month).
- Mailrelay offers the largest free account on the market: you can send up to 80,000 emails a month to a maximum of 20,000 contacts.
- For users who want to work with paid plans, the email marketing software offers monthly and prepaid plans, as well as different versions for different needs.
3 – BuzzSumo (Research and Monitoring)
BuzzSumo is a research and monitoring platform that works as a content trend analyzer and a tool for finding key influencers. It can be a magic tool for small businesses to find leads. It doesn’t offer a free plan, but it does offer a free trial, and its paid plans have a lot to offer.
It also has a range of plans designed for every business. You can pay for them monthly or annually.
BuzzSumo features
- BuzzSumo lets you discover content by generating thousands of relevant keywords, learning the trends for any topic, domain or location and searching millions of forum posts.
- It lets you find popular content in any niche, as well as websites linking to major domains and competitor websites.
- It helps you find influencers on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter) and the web.
- You can monitor your competitors, brand mentions and industry updates.
- You can integrate, automate, create and develop analytics tools, dashboards and reports through an API.
Pricing: BuzzSumo has no permanent free plan, but you can try it for free. Paid plans start at around $199 a month.
4 – Ubersuggest (SEO)
Ubersuggest is a complete tool for your SEO needs. The platform offers training and support, rank tracking, website audits, keyword research, competitor analysis and backlinking.
Its price is far lower than that of any professional SEO platform. They claim to have a cheaper lifetime plan and a more affordable monthly plan than their competitors.
Ubersuggest features
- Ubersuggest gives you full details on any URL, including organic keywords, monthly traffic, domain score and backlinks.
- It lets you see the top-ranking pages on any website.
- With Ubersuggest, you can see backlinks and referring domains to plan your strategy.
- With the keywords feature, you can find the most relevant keywords for a specific domain. The results include volume, ranking position, estimated visits and search difficulty.
Pricing: Ubersuggest has a free version with a limited number of searches per day. Its paid plans can be paid monthly or with a one-time lifetime payment.
5 – NordVPN and VeePN (Security)
NordVPN is a virtual private network service provider. You can use it to keep your network secure, whether you’re working in the office or remotely. Many customers use it because it doesn’t log user data and it protects the connection with AES-256 encryption.
By creating an encrypted tunnel, it blocks any unauthorized access to your internet data. NordVPN works well even on public Wi-Fi networks, or when you want to keep access to your personal and work accounts secure while traveling. With NordVPN, your data will always be protected. You don’t have to worry, as they don’t log your online activity.
NordVPN can be the best option for your small business, as you can protect up to 6 devices at the same time without buying a separate VPN connection for each one.
NordVPN features
- NordVPN offers more than 8,000 servers in over 170 countries to choose from, for a faster VPN experience.
- It’s compatible with Windows, macOS and Linux, with mobile apps for Android and iOS, and with Android TV.
- It offers manual setup for wireless routers, NAS devices and other platforms.
- Encrypted proxy extensions are available for Chrome and Firefox.
- It lets you protect up to 6 devices at the same time.
- It has a strict data protection policy: the system never keeps user logs.
As an alternative, VeePN is worth it if you need to protect more devices: a single subscription covers up to 10, with servers in more than 42 countries. It includes AES-256 encryption, a kill switch, split tunneling and a no-logs policy.
Pricing: Neither NordVPN nor VeePN has a free plan, but both offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. In both cases, the longer the subscription, the lower the monthly price.
6 – Trello (Content Management)
Trello is an intuitive tool for planning content calendars, managing teams and monitoring the progress of content promotion.
You can keep all your information on a single platform and easily contact your staff members.
Trello is a fantastic option for small businesses or startups because it offers a free plan with lots of features you can’t ignore.
Trello features
- Trello helps you collaborate with your team and share files.
- The drag & drop option helps you manage several projects at the same time.
- All team members will receive your messages in real time, as all actions and messages are synced automatically.
- It lets you monitor your team, assign tasks and review the progress of each action on a single board.
- The system sends notifications and updates instantly across devices, browsers and email.
- It lets you invite as many members as you want.
- It has features to help you add labels, set due dates, post comments, create checklists and more.
- It also lets you integrate other productivity apps.
Pricing: Trello’s free plan supports up to 10 collaborators per workspace. Paid plans start at $6 per user per month.
7 – Flock (Team Management)
Flock is an effective communication and collaboration tool for any business. It was designed to streamline internal team communication. This software is very useful, as it will help you save time by removing the need to work with multiple apps to manage your projects.
Flock is a fabulous tool for small businesses or startups because, on top of its great features, it has a free plan with useful features. It offers a 30-day trial, and its paid plans are also incredibly low-priced.
Flock features
- Flock lets you manage projects in real time so everyone can work at the same time.
- It lets you start a chat with anyone or create a channel and start a group chat.
- It lets you share files instantly.
- It can be integrated with popular third-party apps such as Google, Dropbox, Jira, Trello and more.
- You can use several built-in features, such as shared to-dos, reminders, notes, polls and more. Its video calling features let you call other users and share your screen for better interaction.
- With automatically generated distribution lists, you can easily send emails to several users.
Pricing: Flock’s Starter plan is free for teams of up to 20 people. The Pro plan adds more features and has a 30-day free trial.
8 – Crazy Egg (Data Collection)
Crazy Egg is a website optimization tool packed with features to increase your sales and sign-ups or get more page views. This tool optimizes your website with heatmaps, scroll maps and other visual reports.
You can use it to see how your customers respond to specific elements of your website.
Crazy Egg is an excellent option for small business owners to track their performance and increase traffic to their website.
Crazy Egg features
- Crazy Egg lets you add an extra layer of information to your Google Analytics data.
- You can see the behavior of subscribers who visited your website from newsletters and ad campaigns.
- You can add relevant CTAs and content in the best positions on the page to maximize conversions.
- You can track actions inside popups or login screens.
- You can spot areas of customer dissatisfaction, such as form failures or places visitors aren’t looking at.
- You can see how consumers interact with your product pages or checkout pages in real time.
- With the A/B testing interface, you can get as many conversions as possible without losing traffic.
Pricing: Crazy Egg has no permanent free plan, but it offers a free trial. Paid plans start at around $29 a month.
9 – Monday (Project Management)
Monday is a useful tool that can help you better manage teamwork. This highly efficient cloud-based project management software is ideal for communication, as well as for managing tasks, projects and collaboration.
Because it’s affordable, effective and easy to use, it’s the perfect choice for small businesses and startups.
Monday.com features
- Monday.com lets you plan, track and deliver your team’s work, automating every action.
- It lets you see how well your team adapts to deadlines and how it performs.
- It lets you add more than 50 integrations to optimize workflows.
- It lets you build custom apps and integrations.
- It lets you switch between mobile and desktop apps.
Pricing: Monday.com has a free plan for up to 2 users. Paid plans are charged per user and are cheaper with annual billing.
Final thoughts
Marketing tools can help you manage your tasks easily and efficiently. As a small business owner, you need access to affordable tools that help your team be more productive.
You can use the marketing tools for small businesses suggested in this article to take your business to the next level.
About the Author
All of these fit into a broader digital marketing strategy, and it’s worth carefully comparing email marketing tools before choosing one.