Have you been struggling to get your small business off the ground? As an entrepreneur, marketing your new company can seem overwhelming.
With so many options out there, how do you know where to start or what tools are really worth your time and money?
Well, you’ve come to the right place.
We’ve rounded up 15 of the best marketing tools for small businesses that can help take your marketing to the next level in 2023 without breaking the bank.
Whether you need help creating eye-catching content, building your email list, optimizing your social media, or analyzing your results, these tools have got you covered.
Ready to take your marketing to the next level and start attracting more customers?
Keep reading to discover the essential tools that should be part of your small business marketing stack this year.
WP Rocket
To speed up your WordPress site, you need WP Rocket. This popular caching plugin does wonders for performance.
WP Rocket stores your site data, images, and other media on your server and reuses them so your site loads faster. Caching also reduces strain on your server since it’s not regenerating pages each time.
With WP Rocket, you can:
- Choose which pages or posts to cache
- Set cache expiration
- Enable minification to compress CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Lazy load images and videos so they only load as visitors scroll down the page
- Cache login page, comments and more.
For under $50 a year, WP Rocket provides an easy way to seriously improve your site’s speed and user experience. Your visitors will appreciate how fast your site loads, and search engines will reward you by ranking faster sites higher in results.
It’s a win-win for small business websites. Why wait? Give your site a boost with WP Rocket today.
Optinmonster
OptinMonster is a must for generating more email subscribers.
This popular lead generation tool lets you create attention-grabbing popups, slide-ins, and email opt-in forms to convert more website visitors into email subscribers.
With OptinMonster, you can:
- Design mobile-friendly popups and slide-ins to match your site’s look and feel.
- Offer an incentive like a coupon or freebie to encourage people to subscribe.
- Target popups to only show to visitors who meet certain criteria, like visiting a specific page or spending a certain amount of time on your site.
- Split test different opt-in forms to see which one gets the most signups. Then sit back while OptinMonster automatically shows the winning variation to get you the most subscribers.
For a small business, every new email signup matters. An tool like OptinMonster makes it simple to start building your mailing list and staying in touch with more potential customers.
At under $100 a year, this is an investment that will pay off big time.
Jasper AI
Jasper AI is an artificial intelligence tool built for small businesses to help with various marketing tasks. It can write blog posts, social media posts, email newsletters, website content and more.
With Jasper AI, you describe what type of content you need and the tool will generate an initial draft for you. You can then easily edit it to your liking.
This saves you time while still allowing you to control the message and voice. The tool uses machine learning to improve over time based on your edits and preferences.
For small businesses without a dedicated marketing team, Jasper AI is a helpful way to keep your content marketing engine running.
It eliminates the excuse of not having enough time or resources to maintain an active blog, social media profiles or email newsletter. The AI does the heavy lifting, you provide the final polish.
Shopify
Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows small businesses to set up their own online store. Over 600,000 businesses in 175 countries use Shopify. With Shopify, you can sell products, accept payments, track inventory, and much more.
Fiverr
Fiverr is an online marketplace for freelance services. As a small business owner, you can find affordable help for many of your marketing needs on Fiverr. For just $5, you can get:
- Logo or business card designs
- Voiceover work for explainer videos
- Blog post writing
- Simple animations or video editing
- Social media posts scheduling
The options are endless. While gig prices start at $5, many sellers offer upgraded packages with more features for $10-$50.
Fiverr Pro also has high-quality services starting around $100. Whatever your budget, you can find skilled freelancers on Fiverr to help promote your business.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing service that makes it easy to create, send, and track email campaigns. With over 15 million customers, Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools for small businesses.
Some of the key features that make Mailchimp great for small businesses include:
- Easy to use drag and drop email designer to create professional looking emails
- Automated welcome email series for new subscribers
- A/B testing to optimize your email performance
- Detailed reports to see open rates, click rates and more
- Integrations with many popular small business tools like WordPress, Shopify, and Squarespace
- Affordable plans starting at free for up to 2,000 subscribers
For a small monthly fee, Mailchimp provides an easy to use solution to help you strengthen your connection with your customers through regular email communication.
With beautiful templates, automation, and detailed analytics, Mailchimp is a must-have tool for any small business.
Monday.com
Monday.com is an intuitive project management platform that helps organize your team’s work. With a simple drag-and-drop interface, you can:
-Create tasks, milestones, and entire project timelines. Connect related items to keep everyone on the same page.
-Assign owners, deadlines, and priorities to tasks. Get notifications when items are behind schedule.
-Share files, comments, and updates within each project. No more searching through endless email threads to find important details.
-Choose from dozens of useful templates to get started or build your own workflow from scratch. Whether you need to organize marketing campaigns, product roadmaps, or client work, Monday.com has a solution.
-Integrate with your favorite tools like Gmail, Slack, and Google Drive for maximum efficiency.
For small businesses wanting an easy way to coordinate projects across teams, Monday.com is an essential tool that simplifies work management so you can focus on growing your company.
With plans starting at $8/month, this is one investment that will pay for itself.
Canva
Canva is a free graphic design tool website and app that lets you create social media graphics, presentations, posters, and more.
With an easy drag-and-drop interface and access to over a million photographs, fonts, and design elements, you can make promotional images for your business quickly and without needing advanced design skills.
Some of the visuals you can create include:
- Social media posts for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
- Marketing flyers, brochures, and postcards
- Presentations and infographics
- Business cards, letterheads, and logos
- Blog post images, eBooks, and whitepapers
Semrush
Semrush is an all-in-one marketing toolkit for digital marketing professionals. It offers a wide range of useful tools for SEO, content marketing, competitive research, and more.
For small businesses, it’s an easy way to improve your online visibility and connect with your target audience.
With Semrush, you can analyze how your website ranks for different keywords, see what content is driving the most traffic, learn what keywords your competitors are ranking for, and uncover new opportunities to improve your search engine optimization (SEO).
You can also use it to research trending topics in your industry to create timely and relevant content, analyze how that content is performing, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your content marketing strategy.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a powerful tool for researching the content that resonates most with your target audience. It allows you to enter any topic or keyword and see the most shared content on social media.
You can see:
- The headline and content of popular articles
- Who published it
- How many shares and links it received
- The social network it was most shared on
This data helps you understand what types of content and messaging your audience finds most engaging.
You can then model your own content after these winning examples to increase shares and links to your own site.
At around $99/month, Buzzsumo is an affordable tool for maximizing the impact of your content marketing.
Rankmath
RankMath is an SEO optimization plugin that helps you rank higher in search engines like Google. It offers on-page SEO analysis and helpful suggestions to improve your content.
RankMath lets you:
- Set up smart redirects and canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content
- Create XML sitemaps to help search engines index your site
- Generate SEO-friendly metadata like page titles, meta descriptions and open graph information
- Do keyword research and check keyword density
- Get insights into your site’s SEO health with their optimization checklist
For any small business looking to improve their search ranking, RankMath is an invaluable tool to have in your marketing toolkit.
Its user-friendly interface makes SEO easy for non-technical users but still robust enough for SEO professionals.
Astra theme
Astra is a popular, lightweight WordPress theme perfect for small businesses. It’s highly customizable without requiring code, so you can quickly create an attractive website.
Astra offers dozens of starter sites to choose from, each optimized for different types of companies like restaurants, travel agencies, freelancers, and more.
Simply install the theme, select a starter site in the demo importer, and your site will be set up in minutes with content and images in place. You can then easily modify anything to match your brand.
Astra’s page builder gives you drag and drop control over your content.
Add text, images, buttons, spacing, and more by clicking and dragging the elements into place. Change fonts, colors, and layouts with the click of a button.
For small businesses on a budget, Astra’s affordability and simplicity can’t be beat.
Active campaign
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and sales platform that helps small businesses streamline marketing automation.
With ActiveCampaign, you can:
- Easily build email lists,
- Create drip campaigns to nurture leads,
- Send newsletters to engage your subscribers,
- Track email stats to see open and click rates.
ActiveCampaign also has a full CRM to manage your contacts, plus landing page and form builders to capture more leads.
For small businesses, their “Lite” plan starts at just $9/month and includes many of these key features to get your marketing going.
If you’re looking for an affordable, user-friendly system to automate your marketing and sales follow-up, ActiveCampaign is a great place to start.
Chatgpt
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot created by OpenAI to have natural conversations. It can answer questions, explain concepts, and provide helpful information to users on various topics.
While still limited, ChatGPT shows the potential for AI to meaningfully interact with and assist people in their daily lives.
For small businesses, ChatGPT could be useful as an automated customer service agent or to provide quick answers to frequently asked questions on your website.
However, its abilities are currently narrow, and it may give incorrect information or have issues handling complex questions. ChatGPT requires close monitoring and may not fully replace human agents.
But as natural language processing continues to advance, chatbots like ChatGPT will become more capable and trustworthy, potentially revolutionizing how we get information and complete tasks.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a must-have tool for any small business. This AI-powered writing assistant checks for proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in real time.
It’s available as a web app, mobile app, and browser extension so you can use it wherever you’re writing – email, social media, blog posts, and more.
Grammarly explains each correction and provides examples so you can improve your writing skills over time.
For small businesses, clear communication is key. Using Grammarly helps ensure your messages are polished, professional, and impactful.
The free version catches most common mistakes, while paid plans offer advanced suggestions for word choice, tone, formality, and plagiarism detection.
At under $30/month, Grammarly Business is an investment that will pay off through improved customer experiences and brand consistency.
Conclusion
And there you have it, 15 tools that can help take your small business marketing to the next level in 2023. With so many affordable and intuitive options out there, you have no excuse not to start leveraging technology to spread the word about your company and connect with new customers.
Don’t feel overwhelmed by all the choices – pick 2 or 3 to focus on, learn the ropes, see what works for your business and your audience, then build from there.
The key is just to start – because while the marketing landscape continues to change rapidly, one thing remains the same: for a small business to succeed, people need to know you exist.
Now get out there and make some digital marketing magic!