10 Powerful Must Have Marketing Tools for Small Businesses in 2021

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Small businesses don’t have the same resources or finance that can help make various work processes easier. However, that shouldn’t stop you as a business from progressing forwards. There are many marketing tools that you can take advantage of today that will certainly help fulfill the needs of your marketing team or those individuals responsible for the role.

In this article, we’ll be sharing some of the most powerful, must-have marketing tools for small businesses in 2021. These tools will help provide you with the assistance you need to get your business seen by the masses and hopefully, help improve sales.

Flodesk for email lists

There can be a lot of benefit from having access to an email list of subscribers. Whether they’re current customers or potential ones, an email list can be great for marketing. 72% of customers actually prefer email as their main channel for business communications, so why not appeal to the masses?

You can still build an email list without a website and Flodesk can be a helpful tool for you to do so. Flodesk allows you to build a form in which potential subscribers can fill in to sign themselves up to the list.

It’s a great tool to utilize and try for free before committing to it financially. The form you create can be put onto a landing page or a guest blog post for example. There are many ways to create an email list whether you have a website or not. 

Inbound marketing with Hubspot

Hubspot is a well-regarded platform for all things inbound marketing. It’s a CRM platform that’s split into various hubs, including one for marketing. It’s here that you can manage all your marketing needs from publishing blog content to managing your social media needs. 

What makes Hubspot one of the best is that you can integrate other tools into the platform. This allows you to streamline your marketing team’s work processes and that can be important for a small business. Where time and resources may be limited, Hubspot can cater to this.

Some of the other features included in this marketing hub are:

  • Ad tracking and management
  • Live chat features
  • Video content

It’s a great all-rounder for inbound marketing and is affordable for both small and big businesses, even start-ups. 

Asana for project management

For any department in a business, management is necessary. For marketing, you may have several projects running at once and that can quickly become challenging with limited members of staff working on each one. Without proper management of the projects in place, you may see more mistakes occurring and certain projects getting more attention than others.

Asana is one of the many platforms that can be fantastic for project management but also to help with communication amongst staff members and any external help you acquire.

With this platform, you can have multiple staff all accessing the same calendars, task boards, etc. to ensure that everyone knows what they’re doing and that everything gets done. Set deadlines, assign tasks to specific employees and oversee multiple projects all at once under one, streamlined platform.

Hootsuite for social media scheduling

Over 53% of the world’s population is on social media and that’s a lot of people that you could be reaching out to, as a small business. Creating the content for social media is one thing but actually getting out consistently and in a timely manner is difficult. 

Again, resources may be limited and so having someone available to manually press the publish button may not always be available.

Hootsuite is a great platform to utilize when it comes to social media scheduling. It can allow you to put all your social media platforms in one place to manage the creation and publishing of your content. There’s also the opportunity to analyze how the posts perform as well as providing opportunities for engagement with those who interact with the posts.

Data analysis using Google Analytics

Marketers can benefit from gathering data whether that’s through the social media platforms they use to the company website. Data is digital gold and can provide an insight into your target audience, as well as any demographics that you might be missing.

It’s also helpful in showing you what content is doing better than others and how much engagement you’re getting on one post or page to another.

Google Analytics works by implementing the code into the HTML of your site. From this, you can start to collect data as visitors hop on and off your site. Over the years, it can prove as useful information that can help tailor your marketing towards your site’s visitors. 

There are many platforms that can offer this type of data as well as the social media platforms themselves. The more data you have, the better informed you’ll be for your marketing efforts.

SemRush for SEO

Search engine optimization is important to marketing because it’s no good trying to assume who your audience are and what they want. Research is important to do and as mentioned above, data is useful to understand your audience’s wants and needs.

SemRush has existed for a while now, providing a service to businesses and individuals who are looking to improve the SEO of their content. From optimizing your site for local SEO to link building and competitor analysis. 

With 70% of marketers valuing SEO as more effective than PPC, it makes sense to spend some of your marketing budget and efforts into improving it.

Lead capturing with Elementor

There’s a reason marketers place such a heavy premium on getting prospects to land on their website. Once there, visitors can be met with a variety of powerful tools and features designed for one ultimate objective:

Facilitate visitor conversion.

Elementor is a code-free WordPress website builder used by almost 6% of all the world’s websites. A one-stop-shop for website creation, Elementor also offers powerful features geared towards lead capturing and other marketing objectives: 

  • Elementor’s no-code page builder is a perfect way to create must-click landing pages. 
  • Features such as fully customizable forms and smart popups enable site owners to considerably grow their audience. 
  • Elementor users can leverage customizable templates and set triggers to target their visitors at the right moment. 

Just as importantly, Elementor integrates with all your other powerful marketing tools, so you can engage with your customers on all fronts.

Content creation with Google Docs

Content creation is definitely an essential part of marketing. In the digital world, we digest so much information online on a daily basis. Millennials spend an average of 11 hours per day engaging with digital content.

Even though so much content is put online every single second of the day, your business still has an opportunity to be seen through it’s content. Google Docs is a great platform to create content whether that’s for a blog on your own site or for creating content for other sites. 

Google Docs works well for small businesses because it’s free to use and you can use it collaboratively by sharing it with others via email or through a shared link. With many businesses working remotely nowadays, it’s certainly a useful tool for marketers in content creation.

Social media platforms 

The beauty of social media is that it’s completely free to use and that means free advertising. Whilst there are options like paid advertising available, it’s also important to have organic content in your feeds too.

Each social media platform whether it’s Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram or more recently TikTok, presents an opportunity to reach your audience. It is certainly worth making use of these platforms in order to boost your following and to increase awareness of your small business. 

Regardless of whether or not you’re looking for a global audience, there’s always potential for more when it comes to marketing. If you’re not familiar with social media apps, then it’s always worth outsourcing this to an agency if you don’t have the resources in-house. 

Canva for editing anywhere, anytime

Before so many online tools like Canva existed, editing visual content would be done via programs like Photoshop. Often this needs a lot of training and experience to use it properly and that may have limited many businesses who didn’t have professional designers in house.

However, that all changed when online tools like Canva came about. It allows both designers and non-designers to create and edit visual content anywhere and at any time.

Canva has many features that are mostly free but certain elements of the platform require a premium membership. Here are some of the features that users can benefit from.

Posters/Flyers

Create stunning visuals in the form of posters and flyers in order to promote a campaign or a product launch/event.

Social Media Content

Design and edit social media content whether that be through Instagram Stories to video content.

Infographics/Presentations

Infographics and presentations are often required for marketers when pitching new ideas or outreaching to clients. Canva provides the templates to make it an easier and more creative process.

The options are endless and for a tool that’s predominantly free to use, it caters well for small businesses with limited funds.

Keywords with Keyword Finder

Keywords can help put your content in front of your target audience. Keyword research is something that small businesses may have lack of knowledge in if they don’t have SEO professionals to help out. However, that doesn’t mean there’s plenty of companies out there that can help with this.

There are also plenty of tools to assist with keywords, such as the keyword finder. Described as the only keyword tool you’ll ever need, this platform helps find the best keywords for your business but also for that of your competitors too.

There are many marketing tools to take advantage of in 2021 as a small business. It’s worth implementing all of the tools above to help grow your business and provide it with all the ingredients it needs for further success.

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