12 Best Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

BuzzSumo helps you to identify the most popular trending topics online and influencers based on your marketplace. You’ll be able to identify the issues and people your target audience is most interested in and your competitors’ marketing strategies. Information like this is invaluable for creating content that can help you reach your audience and drive them to your business. 

BuzzSumo offers some of these features for free, but the most useful ones will require a subscription. There are three pricing plans available with BuzzSumo: 

• Pro ($99 a month when billed annually)
• Plus ($179 a month when billed annually)
• Large ($299 a month when billed annually)

Google Analytics provides a variety of information about your business’s website. You’ll be able to see how much traffic visits your site, whether or not it’s organic, how long it stays, where customers bounce, which backlinks gain the most clicks, and which pages are most popular. 

Naturally, Google Analytics integrates seamlessly with all Google products, so you’ll have access to the information you need to improve your website’s customer experience.

Perhaps the best part about Google Analytics is that it provides all these services for free. It might not provide the same features and information as other options, but it’s impossible to beat the price of Google Analytics.

Hotjar offers the tools you need to understand your customers’ behavior better. The overall goal of Hotjar is to help you find out what’s working with your target audience, what’s not, and how to increase the number of desired actions. The heatmaps feature will allow you to visually see the best and worst that your website has to offer and survey templates to help you get feedback directly from customers.

Hotjar offers a few features for free. However, the best ones will require one of the following pricing plans:

• Plus ($31 a month when billed annually)
• Business ($79 a month when billed annually)
• Scale (Custom pricing for custom features)

Unbounce is a software platform that helps you build and improve landing pages for your website. It offers predesigned templates that are easy to use and can help you create, upload, and manage landing pages. The software features artificial intelligence that will test various elements of your pages. You’ll be able to tell which aspects work and which ones need to be improved to increase your conversion rate.

There is no free option available for Unbounce, so you’ll need to select one of the four pricing plans:

• Launch ($90 a month when billed annually)
• Optimize ($135 a month when billed annually)
• Accelerate ($225 a month when billed annually)
• Concierge ($575 a month when billed annually)

HubSpot offers a cloud-based software platform that provides a little bit of everything. The programs can offer assistance with lead capturing, sales management, SEO optimization, social media marketing, email ad campaigns, and customer service. It’s a one-stop shop that can meet all of your marketing needs. 

Some of these features are free, but the best require a paid subscription. HubSpot offers three pricing plans: 

• Starter ($45 a month when billed annually)
• Professional ($800 a month when billed annually)
• Enterprise ($3,200 a month when billed annually)

Zoho CRM is another example of all-in-one marketing software. With functionality across your marketing channels—from social media management to email marketing tools and website marketing automation—it is a content marketing powerhouse. You’ll be able to create websites, easily manage your social media posts, establish automated email marketing campaigns, and use surveys for instant customer feedback. 

Zoho integrates seamlessly with other Zoho software and is worth considering if you’re already using Zoho Books, Zoho Inventory, Zoho Sites, or Zoho People. 

Zoho offers a few features for free. However, the most important ones are available by purchasing one of the following pricing plans:

• Basic ($49 a month when billed annually)
• Standard ($99 a month when billed annually)
• Professional ($249 a month when billed annually)

Mailchimp is one of the premier digital marketing tools and one of the most popular for email campaigns. The features provided by Mailchimp are easily integrated with more than 250 apps.

These features can help you with email lists and email templates, marketing CRM, behavioral targeting, predicted demographics, reports, surveys, and content optimization. 

It’s consistently voted the best software for email marketing teams and has been climbing the list for best marketing software overall in recent years.

Mailchimp does come with a free option that includes basic features. It also offers three pricing plans that include additional features to aid in your marketing efforts and project management:

• Essentials ($9.99 a month when billed annually)
• Standard ($14.99 a month when billed annually)
• Premium ($299 a month when billed annually)

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing platform that works with nearly 900 integrations. The best feature is the machine learning that can help you use various sales data to improve your email, phone call, and text-based customer interactions. You’ll have access to various templates to help you create automated marketing campaigns and manage them via a mobile app.

There are no free options for ActiveCampaign, so you’ll have to choose between one of four pricing plans:

• Lite ($29 a month when billed annually)
• Plus ($49 a month when billed annually)
• Professional ($149 when billed annually)
• Enterprise (Custom pricing for custom features)

MobileMonkey is a chatbot-based marketing platform that connects potential customers, prospects, and leads to a business. It’s like an email marketing campaign except it utilizes live chat, SMS text messaging, and social media-based messaging apps to reach customers. 

You’ll be able to create mass marketing content, spread it across a wide audience online, and establish autoresponders to handle the replies. 

There is a free option for MobileMonkey that includes limited and basic features. For the best features, you’ll need to choose between one of the two paid subscription plans:

• InstaChamp Platinum ($19 a month when billed annually)
• MobileMonkey Startup Edition ($119 a month when billed annually)

Leadpages can help you to create lead generation websites and soft landing pages for your site. You’ll be able to build your websites, pop-ups, and alert bars while receiving real-time analytics of website visitors, open rates, and conversion rate metrics. The unlimited traffic and lead feature are invaluable to a growing business, and free web hosting can save a lot of money in the long run. 

Leadpages doesn’t offer a free version of its software, so you’ll need to select one of the following two subscription plans:

• Standard ($37 a month when billed annually)
• Pro ($74 a month when billed annually)

Semrush is an SEO tool that offers highly detailed keyword research, including SEO audits for your content, backlinking opportunities, and a thorough analysis of your competition. 

Semrush aims to increase the amount of organic traffic that finds your website via search engines. The information made available by the Semrush research tool can help you create content that will rank higher on search engine results pages and reach a much larger audience. 

There are no free options for Semrush, so you’ll need to choose between one of three pricing plans:

• Pro ($99.95 a month when billed annually)
• Guru ($191.62 a month when billed annually)
• Business ($374.95 a month when billed annually)

Hootsuite allows you to operate all of your business’s social media on one central dashboard. You’ll be able to identify trending topics, monitor user experience, schedule posts, publish content across multiple platforms, engage directly with the public, track the performance of your posts, and receive analytics reports detailing the strength of your online presence. 

Hootsuite offers only two paid plans:

• Professional ($49 a month when billed annually)
• Team ($129 a month when billed annually)