Top 20 Digital Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

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Small businesses need all the help that they can get. It’s no mean feat to break into any market and establish a reputable, well-known brand name for yourself. Sure, word-of-mouth advertising is powerful and remains one of the best forms of marketing that any brand can wish for, but brands can’t afford to wait for happy customers to start mentioning and recommending their products or services to others. 

From day one, they need to market their offering actively on a range of channels. To create a lasting digital footprint, they need a website and social media profiles, at the very least. Then, to ensure that these digital assets perform as they should, they need to pay attention to search engine optimization (SEO) and create and post high-quality content regularly. 

We’ll be honest – it’s a lot of work. Digital marketing isn’t something that any business can tackle without a decent selection of digital marketing tools. From website builders to email tools to marketing automation tools, here are 20 of the top online tools that small businesses can use to streamline their marketing efforts. As small businesses often have a tight budget, most of these business tools offer a type of free plan or free trial. If not, their pricing is reasonable, especially compared to some of the other tools available on the market.


Top 20 Digital Marketing Tools for Small Businesses:


Top
digital marketing tools small business
2024

1. Squarespace

Squarespace

Squarespace is another website builder that you can check out. It’s ideal for startups, but is powerful enough for established brands too, making it a great tool if you’re planning to scale significantly soon. You can choose one of its award-winning, easy-to-customize templates that are sorted by industry and use it to display your work or products. If you’re planning on starting a blog (which we recommend you include in your digital marketing strategy), it also offers powerful blogging tools to help you get started.

Key features:

  • Templates
  • 100s of layouts, fonts, stock photos, and colors
  • Built-in SEO tools
  • Analytics

Pricing: 

For a personal website, pricing is $19 per month. Though, for eCommerce capabilities, you’ll need to sign up for a Business, Basic Commerce, or Advanced Commerce plan with pricing starting at $33 per month. 


2. Buffer

Buffer

Buffer is another social media marketing tool that you can check out. If you use our new Software Comparison Tool and compare Buffer vs Hootsuite, you’ll see that we’ve given Hootsuite a better overall score, but only marginally.

Just like Hootsuite, it also offers a free plan, making it a good starting point for smaller brands. It offers a wide range of tools to help with scheduling, engagement, and analytics. Though, its analytics might be a bit too basic for your needs. Nevertheless, it’s a great tool overall and even includes a landing page builder and an image editor. 

Key features:

  • Twitter hashtag suggestions
  • An image editor
  • A landing page builder
  • Post scheduling

Pricing: 

It offers a Free plan and two paid plans. Pricing starts at only $6 per month per social channel. 

Buffer
4.4 out of 5 stars
Buffer is one of the most popular social media scheduling platforms. This software helps drive engagement and traffic on social media with the help of their scheduling, engagement, and analytics tools.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
4.0
Ease of Use
4.6
Support
4.5
Overall Score
4.4
Features & Pricing
Automated Publishing
Content Management
Multi-Account Management
Post Scheduling
Reporting/Analytics
Price starting at:$5
Pros and Cons
Simple cross-posting
Straightforward calendar view
Integrates with almost every social platform
Buffer Analyze may be too basic for some
Buffer may glitch with Instagram
Arbitrary character limits for Facebook, Twitter
Pay-as-you-go packaging
Best for: Publishers, mid-stage startup teams, non-profits, higher education, sports teams, e-commerce, solopreneurs, businesses
Buffer
4.4 out of 5 stars
Buffer is one of the most popular social media scheduling platforms. This software helps drive engagement and traffic on social media with the help of their scheduling, engagement, and analytics tools.

3. Wix.com

Wix.com

Every small business needs a website. Wix is probably one of the most intuitive website builders that you can use and you can create a beautiful website without knowing any coding. It offers hundreds of customizable templates and with the help of its easy-to-use, drag-and-drop editor you can add several design elements like text, photo galleries, and videos. 

Depending on the type of business that you’re running, you can also add a members’ area, booking system, or an online store. Also, your website automatically comes with a version that’s been optimized for mobile and if you need to customize it further for smaller screens, you can use its mobile editor that’s just as easy to use as all of its other features. 

Key features:

  • 500+ website templates
  • Powerful SEO tools
  • Built-in eCommerce features
  • Mobile editor

Pricing:

Website plans start at only $4.50 per month.

Wix.com
4.3 out of 5 stars
Wix is an online website building platform that helps anyone build their own website. Wix has more than 500 customizable, easy-to-use website templates with both free and paid options. The platform also offers web hosting, SEO optimization, and more.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
4.4
Ease of Use
4.4
Support
4.2
Overall Score
4.3
Features & Pricing
Email Marketing
Kitting
Promotions Management
Templates
Data Security
Inventory Management
Multi-Store Management
SEO Management
Price starting at:$23
Pros and Cons
Great value, competitive price points
Easy store setup
Sell both physical and digital products
No sales fees or commission
Wix websites may load slower
Some elements cannot be customized
May need other platforms to avoid transaction fees
You'll have to use the Square payment gateway to avoid larger transaction fees
Best for: Good for small businesses
Wix.com
4.3 out of 5 stars
Wix is an online website building platform that helps anyone build their own website. Wix has more than 500 customizable, easy-to-use website templates with both free and paid options. The platform also offers web hosting, SEO optimization, and more.

4. Canva

Canva

Every business also needs a good design tool. Canva ticks many boxes and even its free plan offers loads of features that include templates, stock photography, fonts, and illustrations. While its free plan has more than enough to get you started, if you sign up for a paid subscription, you’ll also be able to create a brand kit which is very useful for making sure all your digital assets are consistent.

Another tool that small businesses might be interested in is its logo maker. While basic, it’s free and easy to use. So, if you don’t have a logo yet, Canva can solve many of your worries. 

Key features:

  • Thousands of social media templates
  • Text animations
  • Audio clips
  • A video-to-mp4 converter tool
  • Photo borders

Pricing:

It has a Free plan and two paid subscriptions. Pricing starts at about $7 per month for up to five people.


5. Calendly

Calendly

Calendly is a free online appointment scheduling software solution. Trusted by millions of users, it can act as a great online marketing tool if you want to schedule, for example, demo sessions with prospects or meetings with team members. For example, if you’ll be using it to schedule appointments with prospects or customers, you can embed it on your business website, an effective way to improve the overall customer experience.

All in all, it can be very useful for small businesses that are looking to save costs. As it can automate admin tasks such as follow-up emails, it can basically act like a virtual assistant. 

Key features:

  • Automatic reminders
  • Pre-call email questionnaires
  • Confirmation texts
  • Post-call, follow-up links
  • Meeting polls

Pricing: It has a Free plan and four paid subscription plans. Pricing starts at $8 per seat per month when billed annually. 


6. Grammarly

Grammarly

Whether it’s transactional texts, like emails, or something that calls for more creativity like ad copy, small businesses need to create written content every single day. Even if you’re comfortable with the pen or blessed to have a dedicated content writer, investing in an online grammar checker is recommended. And, no, your word processor’s autosuggest won’t cut it.

If you opt for one of its paid plans, you’ll also get access to a plagiarism detector. This is especially useful if you’ll be focusing on blogging. 

Key features:

  • Grammar, spelling, and punctuation checking
  • Writing suggestions
  • Tone detection
  • Plagiarism detection

Pricing: It has a Free plan and two paid plans: a Premium plan for individuals and a Business plan for teams. Pricing starts at $12 per month for the Premium plan.


7. Hemingway App

Hemingway App

Hemingway App is another free writing tool that can help small businesses to elevate their written content. Not only is it free, but it’s also very easy to use. All you need to do is copy and paste your text into its interface and it will check your text for readability. It will highlight “errors” like complex phrases that can be simplified and areas where you’ve overused passive voice. This doesn’t replace a grammar checker like Grammarly, but can help you to make your texts, like website copy, marketing emails, and blog posts, more reader-friendly. To use the app’s own words, it’s like a spellchecker but for style instead.

Key features:

  • Suggestions for words, phrases, and sentences that can be simpler

Pricing: It’s free via the web. 


8. Smarter Contact

Smarter Contact

While social media marketing is all the rage nowadays, there’s still a use for text marketing. In fact, text messages have a much better open rate than email and many consumers are now comfortable with the idea of using text messages to engage with local small businesses.

One such tool that can help you to leverage the power of SMS marketing is Smarter Contact. It’s an SMS marketing platform that you can use to create customized marketing campaigns. Using their pre-built message campaigns, you can automatically follow up with leads which will help your marketing team to save loads of time. 

Key features:

  • Built-in CRM
  • Scheduled texts
  • Two-way messaging
  • Templates and duplicates
  • Skiptracing (number lookup)
  • Reporting

Pricing: After a free seven-day trial, pricing starts at $99 per month. 


9. Mailchimp

Mailchimp

While SMS marketing campaigns have a higher open rate than email marketing campaigns, it doesn’t mean that you should abandon email for text messages altogether. From weekly email letters to the occasional cart abandonment email, there are various types of email that you can send to ensure your brand stays on top of mind. 

To help you with this, an email marketing platform is a must-have tool. Mailchimp is one of the most popular marketing platforms for small businesses. Not only can you use it to build beautiful email templates and send your messages based on your subscribers’ behavior, but you can also use it to create a free website. 

Key features:

  • Website builder
  • Email templates
  • Reports and analytics

Pricing: It offers a Free plan and three paid plans. Pricing starts at about $12 per month. 

Mailchimp
4.8 out of 5 stars
Mailchimp has been doing email marketing since the beginning of email marketing, and you’d better believe they know a thing or two about how to do it right.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
5.0
Ease of Use
4.5
Reporting
5.0
Overall Score
4.8
Features & Pricing
CRM
Email Marketing
Price starting at:$13
Pros and Cons
Free plan that’s actually useful
Tons of automations; you can even automate some of the automations
Creative Assistant enables even the most artless users to send good-looking emails
Several ways to target mailings to the right people
No onboarding or configuration services available
Limited support at the lower end of the subscriptions
Workflow is unclear
Best for: Small, Medium, and Large Businesses
Mailchimp
4.8 out of 5 stars
Mailchimp has been doing email marketing since the beginning of email marketing, and you’d better believe they know a thing or two about how to do it right.

10. Drip

Drip

Drip is another email marketing tool that small eCommerce businesses can check out. It can help you to increase revenue by creating personalized email marketing campaigns and with the help of their pre-built email templates and point-and-click visual editor there’s no need to start from scratch.

Another useful feature included is forms and pop-ups to help you grow your contact list. Without any coding skills, you can use it to customize all the form elements to create on-brand, dynamic forms. 

Key features:

  • Pre-built email templates
  • Email segmentation and personalization
  • Pre-built email workflows

Pricing:

After a free 14-day trial, pricing starts at $39 per month.


11. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo

If you’re a regular reader of yours truly, you’re probably already familiar with BuzzSumo and its great functionality. It’s one of the most popular content marketing software solutions and can help you with content discovery, content research, and monitoring. You can use it to browse topics and trends to help you identify evergreen blog post ideas and viral posts. Once you’ve found relevant topics to write about, it will also share distribution tips to help you make the most of your newly created assets. 

Key features:

  • Keyword generation
  • Forum and Reddit search to find the most popular questions for a keyword
  • Influencer discovery
  • Brand mention monitoring
  • Backlink tracking

Pricing: 

It has a Free plan and three paid plans. Pricing starts at $99 per month when billed monthly.

BuzzSumo
4.5 out of 5 stars
BuzzSumo is a leading content marketing tool. This platform helps provide content research and performance insights worldwide. BuzzSumo partners with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit and also scans content, incluenders, trending news stories, and more.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
4.6
Ease of Use
4.4
Support
4.4
Overall Score
4.5
Features & Pricing
Audience Segmentation
Competitive Analysis
Configurable Alerts
Customer Engagement
Dashboard
Impact Scoring
Influencer Tracking
Reputation Management
Trend Tracking
Price starting at:$159
Pros and Cons
Excellent tools to build high-performing content
Powerful content suggestion tool
Easy-to-navigate interface
Expensive price points
Interface can be confusing when more features are added in
Best for: Publishers, brands, and agencies
BuzzSumo
4.5 out of 5 stars
BuzzSumo is a leading content marketing tool. This platform helps provide content research and performance insights worldwide. BuzzSumo partners with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Reddit and also scans content, incluenders, trending news stories, and more.

12. Powtoon

Powtoon

Powtoon is a video and visual communication platform that helps brands to transform their communication into visual experiences. You can use it to create your very own animated videos that you can use to explain how your products use, for example. Other types of videos that Powtoon can help small businesses to create include webinars, social media videos, and announcement videos.

Key features:

  • Hundreds of professionally designed animated video templates
  • An animated video maker

Pricing:

Pricing starts at $89 per month when billed monthly. However, if you opt to be billed annually, you can save as much as 79% with pricing reduced to only $240 for the whole year. 

4.3 out of 5 stars
Powtoon helps empower people with no video skills to turn everyday communication into visual pieces. Their tools help beginners edit video that achieve measurable results.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
4.2
Ease of Use
4.3
Support
4.4
Overall Score
4.3
Features & Pricing
3D Video Editing
Media Library
Video Capture
Price on request
Pros and Cons
Highly customizable and flexible
Professional and dynamic template options
Powerful content design platform
Limited free options
No mobile editing
Lack of sufficient layers in the timeline
Best for: HR, internal comms, marketing, sales
4.3 out of 5 stars
Powtoon helps empower people with no video skills to turn everyday communication into visual pieces. Their tools help beginners edit video that achieve measurable results.

13. Yoast

Yoast

If you need help specifically with SEO (which is pretty much all small businesses), you can check out Yoast. It’s one of the top content marketing tools and helps website owners to generate more traffic from search engines. While it offers a product for Shopify that can help you to make technical SEO improvements and optimize product pages, it’s mostly geared towards WordPress websites. Not only can it help you with local SEO, but it also has a video SEO plugin that will help you to drive more search traffic to video content on your website and ensure that your videos are responsive for all displays. 

Key features:

  • Page speed optimization
  • Identification of key phrases and optimization opportunities
  • Internal linking tools

Pricing:

It has a free SEO plugin, a Premium SEO plugin at $99 per year, and a plugin subscription that includes five powerful Yoast plugins for $229 per year. 


14. Moz Pro

Moz Pro

MOZ is another leading SEO tool that you can check out. While you can sign up for its all-in-one suite of SEO tools (Moz Pro), it also offers a number of free SEO tools that include a link explorer, keyword explorer, and domain analysis. It also offers a useful, free competitive research tool. All you need to do is enter your website and it will display a list of the top search engine ranking page competitors and identify any keyword or content opportunities.

Key features:

  • Search, social and page metrics
  • Competitive analysis
  • A keyword explorer
  • Prioritized recommendations to improve page optimization

Pricing: Pricing starts at $99 per month, but you can save 20% if you opt to be billed annually.

Moz Pro
4.6 out of 5 stars
Built by the earliest SEO experts in the industry 15 years ago, Moz Pro is at this point synonymous with search engine optimization.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
5.0
Ease of Use
4.5
Reporting
5.0
Integration
4.0
Overall Score
4.6
Features & Pricing
SEO Management
SEO Auditing & Monitoring
SEO Content & Rankings
Keyword Research
SEO Reporting
Competitor Analysis
Data Visualization
White Label
Price starting at:$99
Pros and Cons
Doesn’t just give data, but teaches you the importance of each metric and how to improve
Site crawling performs an exhaustive health check of your website
List feature aggregates data for the keywords and links that are most important for you to monitor
Some of the tools could be overwhelming for SEO newbies, even with an explanation
Customers complain about long waits for onboarding session means, say the first month is essentially a wash
Best for: Small, Medium, and Large Businesses
Moz Pro
4.6 out of 5 stars
Built by the earliest SEO experts in the industry 15 years ago, Moz Pro is at this point synonymous with search engine optimization.

15. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a tool that’s designed by Neil Patel, one of the leading names in digital marketing. It’s another great tool that can help you with SEO and will analyze your website for SEO errors and keyword opportunities.

Want to know what your competition is doing right? It can help you with that too. Its SEO pages report helps you to identify which pages of your competitors are ranking for top organic keyword phrases and will create a list of the keywords that are delivering results for them. 

Key features:

  • Content ideas
  • Backlink data
  • Keyword suggestions

Pricing: Pricing starts at about $30 per month, but it also offers a lifetime offer for only $300.


16. Optimizely 

Optimizely 

For help with website personalization, you can check out a tool like Optimizely, a digital experience platform. Trusted by brands like Dolby, eBay, and Pizza Hut, it can help you to create hyper-personalized experiences. For example, with its web A/B testing tools, you can create targeted messaging and suggest the most relevant content to your users. It also offers features like an integrated marketing calendar, a digital asset management tool, and approval workflows, helping you to streamline the content creation process.

Key features:

  • Approval workflows
  • Digital asset management
  • Performance analysis
  • Web A/B testing
  • An intuitive visual editor

Pricing: 

It offers a project management tool aimed at small marketing teams for free. Pricing for their other plans is available upon request.


17. Hotjar

Hotjar

Hotjar is another tool that you can check out if you want to find out more about how website visitors behave on your business website. It offers heatmaps that you can use to visualize where users click, which elements capture their attention, and where they simply scroll past. In addition to heatmaps, it also offers useful tools like recordings, feedback, and on-site surveys.

Key features:

  • Session recordings
  • Feedback widgets
  • Survey templates

Pricing:

It has a basic Free plan and three paid subscription plans. Pricing starts at $39 per month.


18. Google Ads

Google Ads

While the social media scene has exploded over the last couple of years, Google remains a powerful tool. In short, you can use Google Ads to create three short sentences highlighting the unique selling propositions of your business. Then, when users search for similar services or products, your custom ad will display via Google Search or Google Maps. For example, if you have a brick-and-mortar location, Google Ads can help locals to find your business on the map and if your customers can reach you telephonically, you can make it easier for them to call you by featuring a click-to-call button right in your ad.

Key features:

  • The ability to target a local or global audience
  • Banner ads
  • Reporting and insights

Pricing: You can create a monthly budget cap that you can adjust anytime. Plus, you’ll only pay when users click on your ad to call your business or visit your website. 


19. Top 20 Digital Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

If you’re in search of a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, you can check out HubSpot. Via its visual dashboard, you can track sales activity in real time helping you to stay informed about how your sales team is performing. Then, to help your team meet their targets, it offers a number of free advanced features like email tracking, prospect tracking, live chat, and a meeting scheduler.

Key features:

  • Email templates and scheduling
  • Meeting scheduling
  • Live chat
  • Task management
  • Sales quotes

Pricing: 

It’s completely free, but for more advanced CRM functionality you can check out its premium Sales Hub products that start at $45 per month. 


20. Hootsuite

Just like every small business needs a well-designed, mobile-responsive website, a solid social media management tool is also a must. There’s a long list of great social media management tools that will help you to manage all your social accounts and grow your online presence on social media too and Hootsuite is one of the tools that are better suited for smaller businesses. Though, make no mistake, it’s a great choice for larger brands too. Included in its impressive set of features are content curation, post scheduling (including bulk scheduling), a unified inbox, analytics, and reporting.  

Key features:

  • A publishing calendar
  • Recommendations for the best time to post
  • A content library
  • Social listening

Pricing:

Pricing starts at $49 per month, but it also offers a basic Free plan. 

Hootsuite
4.6 out of 5 stars
One of the first platforms designed to streamline social media management, Hootsuite continues to be one of the market leaders.
Ratings
Features & Pricing
Pros and Cons
Ratings
Features
4.8
Ease of Use
4.8
Reporting
4.3
Overall Score
4.6
Features & Pricing
Analytics
Automated Publishing
Contact Management
Content Management
Conversion Tracking
Customer Targeting
Keyword Filtering
Multi-Account Management
Post Scheduling
Brand Tracking
Customer Engagement
Multi-User Collaboration
Reporting/Analytics
Social Media Monitoring
Price starting at:$99
Pros and Cons
Customizable feeds show you all the social posts you need to see—no filler
Highly flexible post composer and scheduler, with a bulk option, drastically simplifies the most challenging part of the job
Inbox consolidated every message, comment, and mention—you’ll never miss a conversation
No demo- or psychographic data for the audience
Best for: Small, Medium, and Large Businesses
Hootsuite
4.6 out of 5 stars
One of the first platforms designed to streamline social media management, Hootsuite continues to be one of the market leaders.

Wrapping Things Up

There are a number of marketing channels that small businesses can explore. So, the issue doesn’t necessarily come in with opportunity, but rather with finding time to leverage all of these platforms. Sure, you don’t have to be active on all 100+ social media sites available, but you’ll need to have a website, an email marketing strategy, and social media accounts on the main platforms at least. 

Managing all of this alone is already a full-time job, though. Not only will these tools help you to streamline your digital marketing activities, but it will also help you to improve the level of customer service. Other than money (perhaps), there’s no reason why you can’t invest in a number of these tools. 

About the Author
Koba Molenaar brings nearly a decade of rich experience in content writing, specializing in digital marketing, branding, SaaS, and eCommerce. Her passion for helping brands, from solopreneurs to established companies, connect with their audiences shines through her work. As a member of the Golden Key International Honor Society, Koba’s commitment to excellence is evident in her work, showcasing her as a relatable and knowledgeable voice in the industry.