A Compilation of the Best Digital Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Digital marketing is essential when aiming to expand your business. When you’re just starting out or looking to gain a loyal following, your digital marketing efforts should...

Jamie Gonzales
Jamie Gonzales September 6, 2019

Digital marketing is essential when aiming to expand your business. When you’re just starting out or looking to gain a loyal following, your digital marketing efforts should generally be focused on these areas:

If you’re a small business owner with limited know-how and funds, it’s easy to get intimidated by digital marketing. Fortunately, there are a number of digital marketing tools that can help you get started and learn the process as you go. Here’s our rundown of the most useful and effective tools to date:

1. Google Analytics

To know if your online efforts, like SEO, social media, Google Ads, and content marketing, are paying, you need Google Analytics. It lets you collect, manage, and analyze data. Using its reporting tools, you gain access to valuable insights into your performance online. Powerful and highly customizable, Google Analytics can help you identify which elements in your website or app consumers are responding well to, and which areas you need to improve. 

2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

A well-optimized website is one of the keys to making it big online, no matter how small your business is. Screaming Frog SEO Spider gives you the information you need to analyze technical and on-page SEO without having to manually audit every single webpage. It crawls your site to alert you of any broken links (404s), duplicate content, weak metadata, and faulty redirects. 

The free version of this tool is a good start with a crawl limit of 500 URLs per year. With its paid version, you get an unlimited number of crawls plus bonus functions like Google Analytics integration, custom source code search, JavaScript rendering, and more. 

3. SEMRush

SEMRush is an all-in-one SEO workflow tool fit for growing businesses. It has a multitude of features that are meant to guide you through gathering and organizing analytics reports, discovering keywords, and tracking marketing campaigns.

With SEMRush, you can learn about your competitors’ strategies in organic search, link building, and display advertising. It also provides a clear visualization of data so you can draw out necessary conclusions from raw statistical results at a glance. 

4. Moz

Moz offers two SEO software: Moz Pro and Moz Local. Moz Pro specializes in eliminating SEO complexity from rounding up target keywords to creating custom reports. It also has features that track website rankings and compare search behaviors between desktops and mobile devices. On the other hand, Moz Local is all about refining your local SEO listings. 

Inaccurate information discourages 73% of consumers from availing of products or services. With Moz Local, you’ll only need to provide data once for every business location as the tool automates the rest of the standardization process.

5. SendinBlue

Crafting professional emails becomes a walk in the park with SendinBlue. It has a number of beautiful templates you can work with, plus an intuitive drag and drop builder for when you feel like making everything from scratch. 

SendinBlue understands the power of personalized emails—a tactic that increases open rates by 26%—and offers a handful of advanced email personalization options you can explore. It also helps you organize your contact list based on specific criteria, as well as send emails during the best times to engage with your audience. 

6. MailChimp

A lot of marketers swear by MailChimp to produce emails that look good across all devices. The process is made simple with its user-friendly email designer that provides an array of templates, stores files, and comes with collaborative features.

When you connect the software to your ecommerce site, it sets up an automated campaign that sends recommendations to your contacts based on previously viewed and purchased items. With MailChimp, you’re getting an advanced delivery infrastructure complete with built-in email and domain authentication.  

7. GetResponse

While you’re nailing the content that goes into your messages, GetResponse makes sure it doesn’t end up in the spam folder. The tool boasts 99% deliverability, so you can be confident your emails actually reach your leads. It’s made more powerful with Perfect Timing and Time Travel delivery tools that trigger email blasts right when your contacts are most active.

GetResponse is equipped with its own analytics tools to keep track of opens, clicks, bounces, and more. After reviewing stats, you can implement split tests on subject lines, content, and sending times to optimize results further.  

8. Buffer

Buffer makes sharing your story on social media a lot easier by promoting smooth, collaborative work within your team. The interface gives everyone access to your drafts so they can share their ideas and insights before publishing. Once they’re approved, you can queue them in for posting on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and others.

Buffer has many options to tweak your content in order to custom-tailor them to a specific social network. It also has a centralized inbox where you can view and reply to customer inquiries regardless of which platform they’re coming from.

9. Agorapulse

Agorapulse prides itself as the social media marketing tool with the most flexible calendaring features. There’s a ton you can do all in one place. Whether it’s scheduling posts, queueing content, categorizing, delegating, or bulk uploading, Agorapulse provides great options for all your publishing needs.

Its automated inbox assistant frees you from having to manually sort through your messages. Simply indicate your moderation rules and sit back as the software automatically reviews, tags, hides, or assigns your mail. It also directs 100% of ad comments in your inbox to boost ROI.

10. Raven

Raven gives social media marketers the recognition they deserve. It’s focused mainly on communicating the results of social media marketing campaigns, thus armed with a user-friendly report builder. Because it connects directly to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Analytics, accurate and up-to-date social media metrics are always within arms’ reach.  

Raven’s sophisticated reporting engine generates reports as an interactive page that clients can access on their phone or download as a PDF. You can also schedule exactly when the tool is meant to create reports and have it automatically send them out to stakeholders.

11. Woobox

Social media engagement shouldn’t stop at the size of your following. With Woobox, you get to create and manage exciting contests, giveaways, quizzes, and polls that make nearly 85% of users share branded content. This social media marketing tool provides everything you’ll need to collect and moderate submissions, display entries, and pick winners easily.

Campaigns created with the software engage leads wherever they are. You can enable popups and embeds on your ecommerce site or any other website using templates that scale appropriately to any layout or device. 

12. Adwords Editor

Also called Google Ads Editor, this app streamlines managing your advertising campaigns with bulk editing tools. On a single dashboard, you can search and replace text, move items, and undo past changes across multiple campaigns. Before your edits go live, Adwords Editor lets you see them as a draft to make sure everything is up to par.

You can even work offline by downloading your campaigns for multiple accounts. When you view them from the software’s account manager, you also get to review changes, errors, and warnings at a glance.

13. WordStream Advisor

WordStream Advisor is made specifically with small- to medium-sized businesses in mind. Its goal is to simplify online advertising from creating advertisements to monitoring campaigns. Featuring 20-Minute Work Week, WordStream Advisor helps you execute optimizations at a click of a button.

This innovative technology calls your attention in case of business growth opportunities and account structure suggestions which are grounded on users’ individual data. What’s more, since you don’t have to open multiple tabs, you can replicate success across different platforms in an instant.

14. Grammarly

Grammarly is a handy AI-powered writing assistant that checks for grammatical errors, clarity issues, and readability. Its advanced algorithms detect problems with punctuation, wordiness, and style, and align its suggestions with the context of your sentences. Grammarly is also capable of detecting plagiarism in copies.

You can enable the tool on almost any site or software by embedding it onto your browser and downloading its free app. This way, your written content will come out more polished, engaging, and effective.

15. Vidyard

The future of content marketing is in videos, with 45% of netizens tuned in to Youtube and Facebook videos for more than an hour a week. Vidyard lets you leverage this trend by offering an efficient platform to host, share, and promote video content on your website. It features a powerful and highly-customizable video player to ensure that the uploaded media is responsive no matter where it’s being viewed.

Vidyard plays right into the needs of marketers by providing analytics and A/B testing. With this tool, you’re given the information you need to understand how your videos are performing, who your audience is, and what device they are typically streamed on. 

Maximize the Results of Your Digital Marketing Strategies 

Having the right tools in your arsenal is an important step in ensuring the success of your digital marketing strategies. But after you’ve secured these tools, you still need to jump through hoops to deliver the best service to your customers. 

Speak with a chief marketing officer from Growth Rocket to couple these digital marketing tools with the proper know-how needed to grow your business. 

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