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There’s no one size fits all digital marketing tool. They all focus on making marketing easier for your business, but in many different ways. It’s important that you find a tool that is designed for the specific marketing channels and tactics that you use.
The summaries below will help you quickly identify tools that have the features that will benefit your small business, startup, or nonprofit.
The Best Small Business Marketing Tools: Shortlist
Our Top Picks
Best Landing Page Builder
Best for Inbound Marketing
Best for Social Media Management
Great for Social Media Agencies
Simple Social Scheduling
Social Media Management on a Budget
Best Social Media Analytics
Best for Hiring Freelancers
Digital.com dives deep into every topic it covers to offer trusted and reliable recommendations for the best business tools. Learn more about our review methodology.
Tips From an Expert
You may need multiple small business marketing tools.
Marketing tools can be divided into three main categories: social media, email marketing, and content marketing. Marketing tools aim to make marketing tasks easier and more automated, social media tools make scheduling and planning social media campaigns a breeze, and content marketing tools cover a lot of different activities from email and social to analyzing traffic and behavior across your website.
The Top Marketing Tools for Small Businesses in 2023
Best Landing Page Builder
Features
- Drag-and-drop landing page builder
- AI writing and optimization features
- Popups + announcement bars
#1 Top Pick for 2023
Landing pages are the ultimate tool for marketing, whether you’re doing it via email, social, search, or content. Strong landing pages lead to more conversions and higher ROI on marketing spend.
Starting Price
$74 per month
Free Trial
14 day trial
Value Add
AI writing tools, unlimited landing pages and popups, the same features on every plan
Read More
Unbounce is a user-friendly landing page builder, allowing you to create high-conversion landing pages without a single line of code. The platform offers a drag-and-drop builder with ready-to-go templates. It recently launched the conversion intelligent platform, an AI-powered solution for effortlessly creating your highest-converting marketing campaigns.
The Unbounce Conversion Intelligence™ Platform lets you quickly optimize campaigns that get more of your visitors to take action.
Features
- Comprehensive free plan
- Includes email, social, CRM, and more
- Excellent scalability as you grow
Starting Price
Free
Free Trial
14 day trial
Value Add
Email marketing, social media tools, lead management, and automations in one
Read More
HubSpot is a set of essential software tools that help businesses grow through inbound marketing. It can help your small business get organized, capture qualified leads, identify which prospects are likely to buy, and increase sales.
Best for Social Media Management
Features
- Unlimited posts on all plans
- Unified inbox for managing messages
- Easy post scheduling
Starting Price
$99 per month
Free Trial
30 day trial
Value Add
Up to 10 social accounts on cheapest plan, recommended publish times, bulk scheduling
Read More
Hootsuite is a complete social media management tools. You can connect accounts from all the major social media platforms. Features include scheduling posts, content curation, analytics, and team management.
Great for Social Media Agencies
Features
- Agency-ready plan for up to 300 profiles
- Dedicated customer success team
- Affordable plans for smaller teams, too
Starting Price
$25 per month
Free Trial
14 day trial
Value Add
Unique plan specifically for agencies, support for nearly all social networks, reports
Read More
Sendible was designed for agencies needing to manage multiple clients as a team from one dashboard. It lets you schedule posts, monitor results, and generate professional looking reports.
Simple Social Scheduling
Features
- Straightforward free plan
- Connect to social profiles and blogs
- Full review & approvals system
Starting Price
Free
Free Trial
30 day trial
Value Add
Unlimited posts on the free plan, AI social generation tools, affordable pricing
Read More
Social Oomph is primarily designed to schedule posts on Twitter. However, it can also be used to schedule posts on other networks like Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Social Media Management on a Budget
Features
- Affordable plans for everyone
- At least 10 social accounts on every plan
- More functionality as you scale
Starting Price
$25 per month
Free Trial
14 day trial
Value Add
Plenty of social profiles on the cheapest plan, easy to use, lots of room to grow
Read More
SocialPilot is an all-in-one social media management tool on a budget. It’s built for social media marketers and agencies to manage their accounts. You can work as a team to schedule posts in bulk, curate content, and analyze the results.
Best Social Media Analytics
Features
- Powerful social media tools
- Review management + team inbox
- Keyword & location monitoring
Starting Price
$249 per month
Free Trial
30 day trial
Value Add
More advanced features than other tools, granular analytics, robust reporting
Read More
Sprout Social is best known for its visual user interface. It’s easy to see engagement or tracking results at a glance through charts and tables. You can schedule posts and reply to them from within the tool.
Best for Hiring Freelancers
Features
- Used by Netflix, Twilio, Dollar Shave Club
- Pre-vetted pool of professional marketers
- Hire freelancers in less than a week
Starting Price
Varies
Free Trial
No
Value Add
All freelancers are prequalified, takes less than 48 hours to get matches
Read More
MarketerHire bridges the gap between qualified freelancers offering digital services and the marketing needs of their clients. They use a rigorous freelancer screening process ensures to look for proven experts with passion and drive. Accordingly, hundreds of marketers apply to MarketerHire each month and only 5% is accepted.
What Do Marketing Tools Do for Small Businesses?
Many aspects of marketing are slow, repetitive, or inconvenient. These are necessary tasks that take several hours a week. If your business relies heavily on active marketing, you may even need to hire multiple employees or freelancers to help.
Marketing tools aim to make those annoying tasks easier, and almost always significantly reduce the amount of time needed to complete them.
Some do this through automation, while others let you do tasks manually but in bulk.
The Main Benefits of Marketing Tools
The benefit of a marketing tool will depend on its purpose. In general, however, expect to get most of the following benefits if using tools effectively:
- Saving time through automation.
- Less time spent on the boring parts of marketing, freeing up your time for the enjoyable parts.
- More convenient. For example, no more having to log in at a specific time just to post something.
- Better results through advanced analytics and optimization.
- More reliable, as it’s less likely that you forget to do a task when it’s planned and tracked in a tool.
The more time you currently spend on marketing, the more of a benefit you will get from using tools.
Compare Marketing Tools for Small Business
Marketing Software
Best Features
Starting Price
Best Landing Page Builder
- Drag-and-drop landing page builder
- AI writing and optimization features
- Popups + announcement bars
$74 per month
Best for Inbound Marketing
- Comprehensive free plan
- Includes email, social, CRM, and more
- Excellent scalability as you grow
Free
Best for Social Media Management
- Unlimited posts on all plans
- Unified inbox for managing messages
- Easy post scheduling
$99 per month
Best for Social Media Agencies
- Agency-ready plan for up to 300 profiles
- Dedicated customer success team
- Affordable plans for smaller teams, too
$25 per month
Simple Social Scheduling
- Straightforward free plan
- Connect to social profiles and blogs
- Full review & approvals system
Free
Social Media on a Budget
- Affordable plans for everyone
- At least 10 social accounts on every plan
- More functionality as you scale
$25 per month
Best Social Media Analytics
- Powerful social media tools
- Review management + team inbox
- Keyword & location monitoring
$249 per month
Best for Hiring Freelancers
- Used by Netflix, Twilio, Dollar Shave Club
- Pre-vetted pool of professional marketers
- Hire freelancers in less than a week
Varies
What You Need to Know
What are the different types of marketing tools?
While there’s often some overlap, marketing tools can be divided into 3 main categories:
- Social media marketing tools
- Email marketing tools
- Content marketing tools
Some tools cover marketing in one or more areas. Tools from one category can also be used together with tools from another.
What are email marketing tools?
Many tools are created with the purpose of making email marketing simpler or more effective.
Some are basic, letting you add users to an email list and send out basic emails to them.
Others are more advanced (and more expensive). They let you create highly targeted segments based on behavior, which can be used to improve conversion rates. They often have advanced features like split testing available.
What are content marketing tools?
Content marketing covers a lot of different marketing activities. There’s a lot of overlap with email and social media marketing.
These include tools that help you analyze traffic and behavior on your website. Other tools focus on helping you distribute your content more effectively, usually at scale. SEO tools are also often included in the umbrella of content marketing tools.
If you find that you’re spending too much time on the same marketing tasks every week, there’s likely a tool or two that can save you time and effort. The tools mentioned on this page are some of the best that exist, if any of them are relevant to your marketing efforts, give them a try. Stick with them past the initial learning curve and you’ll typically get great results.
What are social media marketing tools?
Social media tools help users build editorial calendars, schedule social media posts, and automate the publishing process. Some also provide detailed analytics so you know what types of posts get the most engagement, who’s engaging with your posts, when they’re engaging, and more.