If you’re marketing a small business or a growing brand (like myself), you’re in for a challenge. How do you cut through the noise? How do you compete against competitors with deeper pockets than you?
The good news, there's plenty of useful tools to help with your small business marketing plan. These can support all aspects of your strategy, from apps for advertising your business, to acing your social media and unearthing insight into potential customers. Picking the right ones will set your marketing strategy up for success.
We’ll cover how to build your martech stack first - but for those who can’t wait, here's my list of essential, affordable marketing tools for small businesses in 2024:
How to build a martech stack for your small business
Before you jump into buying loads of digital marketing apps, consider your channels first. Pick apps which best match your overall strategy.
These are the four broad categories of business marketing apps:
- Running your website: Almost everything you do in online marketing points visitors back to your website. There’s a whole suite of tools you can pick which can help you build landing pages quickly and boost conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
- Content creation and organisation: Every online marketing channel needs visuals. Picking tools which help you create, organise and share your marketing assets will be essential.
- Deployment and acquisition: Whether you want to focus on SEO, or invest more in paid advertising, there are tools out there to support your acquisition strategy.
- Analysis: Getting clear performance data on your marketing is key. You can use the insights you glean to better optimise your future campaigns.
Digital Marketing apps for Small Business
Canva
There’s times you’ll definitely want to use a talented graphic designer, like if you’re considering a rebrand or you’re working on a bigger project (such as a catalogue launch).
But for standard social media graphics and website banners, it’s not the best use of your graphic designer’s time. As marketers, being able to create these ourselves saves time so we can launch campaigns quicker.
Canva is great for that. With an extensive library of stock elements and templates, it lets you easily create and collaborate on graphics. If you're not a designer, and struggle finding your way around Photoshop layers (just me?), this is the tool for you. And now that Dash integrates with Canva, you can drop assets from Dash straight into your designs.
We use Canva a lot in the Dash marketing team when creating content. In fact, the header for this very blog post was created in Canva! If you’re feeling inspired, here’s tips on how to improve your Canva design skills.
Pricing: Canva offers a pretty good free version to get up and going with, although you'll find most design elements locked away. The paid version we have in the team is £89.90 / $114 a year for 3 user seats.
Webflow
A content management system (CMS) is an essential digital marketing tool. It's a way for you to build a website, edit pages, and run your blog through a single platform.
We were using HubSpot’s CMS for the Dash marketing website. But the more the site grew, the harder it became to update quickly and the more we felt we were compromising on the quality of our brand identity. So last year we moved to a new CMS provider - Webflow.
Webflow lets us reflect the Dash brand properly on the website. It works out as more affordable for small businesses too (although I’d suggest using a Webflow agency or freelancer for your initial build). Like HubSpot, Webflow also has its own form builders for capturing those valuable leads.
Pricing: Webflow lets you get started for free, but you'll most likely want their CMS plan starting at £18 / $23 a month.
Google Analytics
This will come as no surprise - but Google Analytics is an essential tool for any digital marketer. It should be one of the first places you go to when your boss messages you with the dreaded “what did that campaign actually result in?” question.
But it’s a double-edged sword. The amount of information it contains can be overwhelming. It's got data on website sessions, audience demographics, content performance and page load times. And that's just scratching the surface. It's easy to fall down the data rabbit hole, and I've done just that in the past. But you can't report on everything - and not everything will be useful. Here's a tip if you're finding yourself overwhelmed. Take a step back and plan what would be the most useful to find out.
Tackling Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a top priority for our own marketing team this year. Whilst it’s proving a stepper learning curve than the older Universal Analytics, once fully implemented we should be able to have proper attribution and revenue reporting by channel.
Pricing: The standard version that most growing brands use (including ourselves) is free. They offer a more advanced version, called Google Analytics 360, but it's decidedly not free - it'll set you back about £110k/$150k a year!
Zoho Invoice
Zoho Invoice is one of the best Online Invoicing software for small businesses because it is easy to create invoices and manage customers, assignments, and financial statements.
With Zoho Invoice, you can create different hourly rates for various organisational tasks or individuals.
However, the software can be complicated if you want to create recurring invoices a more advanced custom or recurring invoice.
Moreover, automatically generated invoices lack the ability to be edited and miss some elements.
The software offers a free plan with restricted functionality and four premium plans that may be costly for small business owners, especially if they do not anticipate frequent usage.
Generally, Zoho Invoice is a suitable choice for small businesses needing essential invoicing tools. Still, it may not be the most suitable option for those requiring more advanced features or for those looking for a more budget-friendly option.
VWO
Nothing stays the same. And that certainly should be the case for your marketing site: there’s always improvements you can make when driving conversions on your site.
Hotjar is great for first giving you a picture of what parts of your site might be blocking conversions. Then you can put your hypothesis into action with a tool like VWO. Whether you’re going for the traditional A/B testing model, or want to try multivariate testing, this app lets you create website experiments so you can see what performs the best.
Pricing: They have a free plan, but their best features start at £340 / $430 a month.
Buffer
If you want to sell your products and build your brand, social media is essential. But managing your brand's social profiles takes time, effort and creativity. That's why many marketers use social network management tools, like Buffer.
Using Buffer, you can run all your social media platforms through a single application. You're able to collaborate on social media posts with your team and then analyse their effectiveness once they've been sent. One of their most useful features helps you schedule posts for your social platforms ahead of time. This means you can set up months of content ready to go out on your brand's channels - rather than realising you haven't tweeted in a while and doing a mad scramble for content (trust, I've been there).
Pricing: They've got a free version, but the functionality is a bit more limited. Paid plans start at £5/$6 a month for each social network you sync up.
Ahrefs
Content is king but SEO is… important? I tried.
SEO (or rather ‘search engine optimisation') can be a bit of a dark art, but it's basically to do with how far up your web pages rank in search engine results. Using a variety of different factors, search engines try to match content they think best serves a user's search. On average the first result in a search hoovers up about a third of all clicks for that search phrase. So the further you are up the rankings, the better you'll perform. Creating an SEO content strategy can help boost you up the search results for terms relevant to your brand.
We've been drafting one ourkeyto start. To help us out, we've been using Ahrefs. It's super useful for unearthing opportunities to rank for relevant search terms which are less competitive and easier to appear for.
How does it work? Let’s use the same houseplant brand example. Ranking for obviously relevant keywords like ‘houseplants' will be difficult right out of the gate as you'll be facing stiff competition from established brands. According to Ahrefs' keywords explorer, the term has a keyword difficulty of 62 (1 being the easiest, 100 being the most difficult). It estimates you'll need backlinks from 141 referring other sites to stand a chance of ranking in the top 10 results.
To review keyword density, you can manually go through your text to calculate it, or, to save time, use a readability checker with a keyword density feature.
Don’t despair. Delving further into Keywords Explorer can unearth less-competitive terms to target your content to instead - like ‘houseplants for beginners', which has an average monthly search volume of 350 and a keyword difficulty of 22! Score.
Mailchimp
Email marketing is one of the older and more established forms of digital marketing, and it's not going away any time soon. Email campaigns are still one of the most effective ways of interacting with your customers. 72% of people say email is their preferred way of brands communicating with them!
If you want to level-up your email marketing campaigns, take a look at Mailchimp by Intuit. Not only does it have the cutest logo in this list (sorry but a monkey in a hat? I'm sold), it also makes it easy to send stylish and effective email campaigns.
Got your email content ready to go? Use Mailchimp's Content Optimizer to whip it into shape. It'll suggest improvements to your copy and imagery based on what it knows about email best practices.
Email automations are another way to improve your email game and you can do those through Mailchimp. Rather than email campaigns, which usually go out to everyone in a defined audience in one go, automations are ‘always-on' emails which send based on individual behaviour. There's a tonne of clever ways to set these up, but ‘abandoned shopping cart' emails are a pretty common and effective one.
P.S. While we're talking about emails - as an extra bonus (you're welcome), I'd recommend Really Good Emails. It's a free library of cool email examples you can take inspiration from.
Pricing: Mailchimp has a free tier to get you started. Its paid plans with more advanced features start at £10 / $13 a month.
How much will all these marketing tools cost in total?
Budgets are tight for small businesses and every penny spent should count. But by picking tools specifically priced for growing brands, you’re not going to spend a fortune. If you decide to go with the tools I’ve recommended above, and opt for free versions where they’re offered, you can bag them all for around £400 or $500.
If you’re particularly interested in Dash but want to get it past your manager, check out our article on justifying the return on investment (ROI) of your DAM.