When you are in a competitive business world, you know how important marketing is to you. It’s because marketing makes your potential customers aware of your products and services.
No matter what size your business is, as an entrepreneur you need to keep up with the newest trends, business development and customers expectations and hence you need to measure your resources, target your potential customers and market your products and services to the right people. It all seems difficult to do in one go.
So how do you keep up with all the requirements?
For you to do the things in the simplest, effective and efficient way there are various marketing tools available in the market. But with the number of choices available out there, it becomes quite overwhelming to choose the best one. Relax! We are here to help you out with the same.
First of all, what is a marketing tool?
As you already know that many aspects of marketing are slow, repetitive or inconvenient but these are necessary tasks that most of the times take several hours of your week. When your business relies heavily on active marketing, you may even need to hire multiple marketing experts for the same.
Hence Marketing Tools aim to make these time consuming and terrifying tasks easier and also reduce the amount of time needed to complete them.
We have detailed some of the marketing tools that have good features, are recommended and used by many marketing agencies and which streamlines your marketing functions to a greater extent. You just need to choose your right fit from the list.
List of Best Marketing Tools for Small Business
Hubspot
As you already must have heard that HubSpot is a leading growth platform which is an award-winning platform for providing software, services and support to transform the way to attract, engage and delight with your customers. It gives businesses a tool to grow better as it comprises of Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub and a free & powerful Customer Relationship Management i.e. CRM Technique.
It provides you with both marketing tools as well as CRM and hence if you are in a budget you should definitely go for HubSpot which would prove as a high performing business marketing tool for you.
Price –
- Free Plan which includes forms, contact activity, contact management, contact & company insights, ad management, conversations single inbox, team email, live chat, conversational bots, reporting dashboards, etc.
- Starter Plan which costs $ 50 per month and includes everything from Free Plan, plus HubSpot branding removed, email marketing, mobile optimization, etc.
- Professional Plan which costs $ 800 per month and includes everything from Starter Plan, plus SEO & content strategy, social media, calls-to-action, marketing automation, video hosting & management, goal-based nurturing, attribution reporting, A/B testing, etc.
- Enterprise Plan which costs $ 3,200 per month and includes everything from Professional Plan, plus custom reporting, custom event reporting, custom event triggers, predictive lead scoring, CMS membership, email send frequency cap, YouTube integration, etc.
ActiveCampaign
Second, in our list is ActiveCampaign which helps grow businesses meaningful connections and engage with their customers. Its SaaS platform allows businesses to create optimized customer experiences by automating many behind the scenes processes and communicating with their customers across channels with personalized, intelligence-driven messages.
ActiveCampaign marketing tool contains eight solutions into one platform like email automation, marketing automation, multichannel marketing, social analytics, lead behavioural tracking, email automation, messaging and sales plus CRM.
Price – For an ideal 1,000 contacts the prices are:
- Lite Plan which costs $ 29 per month and includes unlimited sending, email marketing, marketing automation, char & email support, up to 3 users, etc.
- Plus Plan which costs $ 70 per month and includes everything from Lite Plan, plus contact & lead scoring, deep data integrations, custom user permissions, custom domain, custom branding, one on one training, up to 25 users, etc.
- Professional Plan which costs $ 159 per month and includes everything from Plus Plan, plus site messaging, attribution, wins probability, up to 50 users, etc.
- Enterprise Plan which costs $ 279 per month and includes everything from Professional Plan, plus custom reporting (beta), custom mail-server domain, dedicated account rep, in-depth onboarding, free design services, free social data, phone support, unlimited users, etc.
SendinBlue
SendinBlue is another of the marketing tool that helps in easily managing your marketing campaigns, transactional emails and SMS messages all in one simple and powerful platform.
It features creating clean and professional newsletter as you just drag and drop the design blocks you want to build a sleek and a well-designed newsletter in just a few clicks; build and target your audience by allowing you to collect the email addresses and contact information from prospective customers and subscribers with ease; automate your marketing communications by optimizing your contact management with personalized workflows. It also offers amazing 8 automation workflow templates to improve your user experience.
Price –
- Free Plan which includes unlimited contact, 300 emails per day, mobile-friendly email designer, email template library, email & SMS personalization, A/B testing, etc.
- Lite Plan which costs $ 25 per month and includes everything in Free Plan, plus 40,000 emails per day, no daily sending limit, etc.
- Essential Plan which costs $ 39 per month and includes everything in Lite Plan, plus 60,000 emails per day, no SendinBlue logo, advanced statistics, etc.
- Premium Plan which costs $ 66 per month for Silver Plan and includes everything in Essential Plan, plus 120,000 emails per day, Facebook ads, send-time optimization, landing page builder, unlimited automation workflows, multi-user access, etc.
- Premium Plan which costs $ 173 per month for Gold Plan and includes everything in Essential Plan, plus 350,000 emails per day, Facebook ads, send-time optimization, landing page builder, unlimited automation workflows, multi-user access, free dedicated IP, etc.
- Enterprise Plan which can be Custom made plan and hence rates may differ but include everything in Premium Plan, plus dedicated account manager, services packs, unlimited users, etc.
Marketo
Ask anyone about the leading Engagement Platform that empowers marketers to build brand value, grow revenue and prove impact; only one name would be heard and that’s Marketo.
Marketo software tool is perfect for businesses who want one-stop shopping to cover all of their business marketing and automation needs. The unique feature is that it allows you to pick and choose among categories and buy specified bundles such as mobile marketing, email marketing, lead management, customer base marketing, consumer marketing and email marketing.
This marketing also beats competitors in its streamlining of A/B testing of landing pages which is an essential feature for maximising site performance.
Price – It depends on the plan you choose as it provides various plans for each type of solution category.
Ontraport
When researched intensely you’ll know that the Ontraport is an all-in-one integrated platform that delivers essential business features including a powerful CRM system, membership sites, one-click WordPress hosting, outstanding email delivery, payment processing, direct-mail printing, affiliate management and our innovative business automation suite.
It specifically helps you to create a complete marketing and sales campaigns by automating your marketing with coordinated campaigns that bring results at each stage of the customer lifecycle;
Price –
- Basic Plan which costs $ 79 per month and includes managing 1,000 contacts, unlimited emails, single user (additional user $ 47 per month), etc.
- Plus Plan which costs $ 147 per month and includes managing 2,500 contacts, unlimited emails, up to 2 users (additional user $ 47 per month), account setup available, etc.
- Pro Plan which costs $ 297 per month and includes managing 10,000 contacts, unlimited emails, up to 3 users (additional user $ 47 per month), account setup available, email consultation, etc.
- Enterprise Plan which costs $ 497 per month and includes managing 20000+ contacts, 200,000 per month emails, up to 5 users (additional user $ 47 per month), account setup available, personal account rep available, etc.
MailChimp
You should know that MailChimp helps you design and share campaigns across multiple emails and advertising channels, integrate with services you already use and track your results. It’s similar to your own personal publishing platform.
The overall MailChimp solution may not offer as much as others in the market, but it works ideally for smaller businesses in B2C space. Further, MailChimp is one of the most easily integrated programs available as almost every CRM solution offers some sort of MailChimp integration, which on its own increases it’s value.
Price – Starting free with limited features but can be upgraded with the Grow Plan of $ 10 or more per month or Pro Plan of $ 199 or more per month.
Prospect.io
Prospect.io is a different kind of automation tool, primarily aimed at companies looking to automate lead generation and sales activity. If you’re doing any kind of marketing outreach, this tool is impressive and ideal for you.
Propsect.io does one very specific part of marketing automation that is of finding cold leads and engaging them to become warm, but it does it very well like a pro. Additionally, the best feature about Prospect.io is that it is not easy to find elsewhere as the automation emails can be triggered directly from your mail servers like G Suite or Microsoft Exchange.
Price – starting with $ 129 per month to use 2,000 credits earned by using more of Prospect.io each month.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite helps you to monitor keywords; manage multiple Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping.fm and WordPress profiles; schedule messages and also measure your success. So you know that Hootsuite is a premium social network integration software that features automated publishing, analytics, content management, customer targeting and post scheduling.
Price – Starting with $ 99 per month depending on your choice and specifications.
OutboundEngine
OutboundEngine is a marketing tool that helps businesses grow by making online marketing simple and easy for everyone including a layman. It creates a beautiful, high-impact marketing campaign then delivers them automatically and additionally track engagement to show who is ready to have a conversation.
This marketing tool is known for strengthening relationships with customers, partners and prospects to uncover more opportunities with less work. OutboundEngine is a very popular marketing tool for small-medium businesses that are looking to uncover more quality leads at a faster pace.
Price – Starting with $ 199 per month plan with the limited feature but can be upgraded as per your requirement.
Act-On
The Act-On Integrated Marketing Platform is the foundation for successful marketing departments in organizations of all sizes. Act-On reviewers give it top ratings for user interface and user experience. Its unique features include solid data and tools, easy-to-understand analytics and reliably streamlined.
Price – starting with $ 900 per month to use advanced features for marketing automation.
TextMagic
Last but not the list we recommend TextMagic as it is a business text-messaging service for sending notifications, alerts, reminders, confirmations and SMS marketing campaigns to your customers, staff and suppliers.
Further, TextMagic provides businesses with bulk text messaging service, including automated messages. The marketing tool has a lot of convenient features like email conversion into SMS, two-way SMS chat online and texting directly from your businesses app.
Price – Starting with $ 0.03 per text.
Conclusion:
Remember that marketing is not only for the bug and famous companies, but it’s also for all the sizes of business who wants to survive in the competitive business world and showcase their products and services. Ultimately, these are our recommendations on online marketing tools which seems to be essential for small businesses.
When it comes from lead capture to SEO research to analytics these marketing tools are capable of helping you create a fully integrated and successful long-term marketing strategy for your business.