Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Choosing the right marketing tools to help you grow your business can mean less stress, more time, and better ROI.

Whether you are a small-but-mighty team, a small business owner wearing multiple hats, or a solopreneur wearing all the hats, choosing the right tools can be like selecting the right person to join your team.

Yes, it’s that big of a deal.

Below, we’ve broken down key areas where it might be time to look at investing in a resource to help you streamline your content. We’ve also shared our favorite tools that support each.

After reading this article, you will gain a better understanding of what you need to help automate your processes and maximize your efforts. So you can spend less time worrying about your marketing and more time handling your other 962 responsibilities.

Marketing Tool: Email Marketing

Call us crazy for listing email marketing first, but hear us out. (And no, email is not dead). Did you know email converts at higher rates than social media and ads? It’s true!

We won’t bore you with statistics unless that is your kind of thing. If so, send us an email and we will dish them out. Instead, we’ll share why you should start building your email list with one simple question:

What does your typical morning look like? You know, after you turned off the alarm and refused to get up. You grab your phone and open your email.

According to the stats (see comment above), so does 58% of the world. That’s 58% of your potential customers opening their email before they brush their teeth! The rest of the dragon-breath folks will check the news, fire up the trusty old search engine, and check social media.

Email is the first check of the day! So, when you look at the effectiveness of email compared to social media and take a peek at the ROI of each (the stats again), it’s pretty clear that email is the winner. By a lot.

Another reason to love email marketing: it’s called first-party data. Meaning you have direct access to their data that you collected directly from your audience to market to them.

What platforms do we like the best for email (with a good price tag)?

Flodesk (we love them!) – This platform is great for e-commerce, consultants, creative companies, arts & education, and more. You can try it free for 30 days by CLICKING HERE. Why we love this platform: Hands-down it might be the most intuitive, easiest platform to use. And their BEAUTIFUL pre-built templates you can customize to mirror your brand, paired with their functionality, make this platform one of the next greats you’ll see everyone talking about!

ConvertKit – For price and functionality, this platform is great to help you manage your online forms, segments, automation, and even create landing pages. So, if you aren’t great at managing your website, this is a plus. We recommend this platform for businesses that are in service-based industries who want something clean and simple to send out emails.

Hubspot – We will talk more on this one later.

Marketing Tool: Social Media Scheduling

If knowing what to post and when to post is the bane of your existence, you’re in good company. For most people, this is a HUGE pain point. But before you start worrying about what to post, make sure you take time to dive into the foundations of marketing that will help make it a lot easier.

Knowing what to post and when to post is a HUGE pain point for most people. So don’t worry, you’re not alone. WHAT to post is much easier to determine once you’ve taken the time to dive into the Foundations of Marketing. WHEN to post … well, these platforms make building out your content plan easy!

CoSchedule (Our personal favorite) – We love CoSchedule so much we actually use it ourselves. If you are a visual kind of person like us, this platform allows you to schedule your content, from social, email, to blog articles (and more).

You know how Relly makes marketing easy? Well, CoSchedule makes planning and executing that plan easy too!

Plann – We love Plann for many reasons. It’s also a visual platform for easy planning and scheduling. It connects directly to Canva to edit your designs (WHAT?!!). Lastly, within the platform you can select hashtags to use, royalty-free images, and pre-written content themes designed to help you know what to post (based on your industry type). The only thing missing is the ability to schedule emails and blogs on your calendar (which is why we chose CoSchedule).

Canva – Let’s talk about that next.

Marketing Tool: Design

Let’s face it, you need good design when it comes to marketing. Whether photos, video, or graphics, it would be near impossible to market your business without visual elements.

That is why there are a lot of platforms out there to choose from. But when it comes to price (starting at FREE), features and benefits, and ease-of-use you should run—not walk—to get Canva! We thought our designers would cringe when we first brought up this platform to them. BUT THEY LOVED IT!

Did we mention our designers build templates in Canva that you can use? Well, that is if you sign-up for Relly. 🙂

Marketing Tool: CRM

Remember when we said we would talk about Hubspot? Well, here it is.

Anyone who is in sales needs a CRM tool (Client Relationship Management). CRM platforms help you manage your contacts, your interactions with them, and capture data that can help you serve them on a deeper level. For certain industries, the need is so niche there are entire companies dedicated to building CRM platforms specific to that industry.

Our overall favorite that any industry can use is HubSpot. The CRM feature is free (FREE!), and you can tack on additional features for a monthly charge like email marketing, analytics, online forms, and more!

We use this tool a lot when working with brands that have media spends on platforms like LinkedIn, Google, and Facebook. The native integrations HubSpot provides give you the opportunity to capture rich data on your leads and current customers.

This leads us to our last topic.

Marketing Tool: Analytics

Last, but certainly not least, let’s chat about the best tools you can use to dive into your analytics with platforms you already have.

Google Analytics: If you have not set-up GA on your website yet, do it right after you finish this article. Google Analytics is a great tool to help you understand the traffic on your website and the audience who is viewing it. If you hate rummaging through each of the reports, you can use Google’s Data Studio platform to connect your account directly to a beautiful presentation with visuals, percentages, and pie charts.

Facebook: Your business page (if you have one) has a variety of insights that can help you tailor your messaging and schedule to mirror what your audience engages with and what time they are online.

Instagram: Just like Facebook, your business Instagram account has great data that can help you deliver better quality content to users.

Scheduling Software: Remember the scheduling tools we mentioned above? Like CoSchedule and Plann? Their platforms have robust analytic tools that can help you analyze your data in one convenient place, too.

Want more advice and help with the marketing tools we mention above? Join Relly for as little as $14.99/mo. Get access to on-demand toolkits, video tutorials, expert advice, and DIY templates.