10 Must Have Marketing Tools To Add In Small Business Growth Strategies!

Published on: 12 May 2022 Last Updated on: 18 February 2025

Marketing is an essential part of business growth because people will buy your service only when they know about your existence. And people will know about you only when you promote your business on various platforms where they are looking for your product or services. Therefore, marketing tools play an essential role in spreading brand awareness.

Digitization has provided an equal platform for every large and small business; all you need is the right knowledge and skills to use marketing tools to grow your business.

What are Marketing Tools?

Marketing tools are techniques, strategies, and materials used by marketing specialists of brands to create, enhance, and promote their products and services in order to expand their visibility. They are used for market research, generating leads, data analysis, content creation, SEO, and other categories of marketing.

To increase productivity and make marketing time cost-efficient, there are various marketing tools in the form of software that helps you with various activities related to marketing.

Here We Have Listed Ten Must-Have Marketing Tools:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

HubSpot CRM
Zendesk

Social Media Tools

Buzzsumo
Buffer

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools

SEMrush
Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension

Content Creation and Design Tools

Canva
Adobe Spark

Lead Generation Tools

Unbounce
Instapage

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

These tools let you interact with your customers through data analysis of gathered information. They compile data from various communication channels such as the company’s websites, calls, emails, live chats, and other marketing materials posted on social media platforms. The data analysis helps a business know about customer behavior, their needs, and demands to provide them better services, which is an integral part of growing a business as they help to form business growth strategies to retain customers and drive sales.

1. HubSpot CRM: being free, every small business can have access to this incredible free tool. The tool saves a lot of time for the sales team as it gives you complete visibility of your entire sales pipeline on a clean and visual dashboard. It lets you connect to the prospects through free meeting scheduling, live chat, email templates, click-to-call functionality, and more.

2. Zendesk: it is an easy-to-love sales tool that will boost the productivity of your sales team, make data-driven decisions, and deliver enhanced customer experiences. Additionally, you can build and manage a pipeline that aligns with your business.

Social Media Tools:

social media helps to expand enormously, as most of the world’s population is an active member of at least one social media platform where you can connect to them on a personal level. Therefore, it is highly important to manage what you post and how your followers respond to your content. Social media tools help you schedule your posts and get the right analytics from the posts, even from the channels where it can be hard to get the information.

3. Buzzsumo: The tool explores premium content that can help you get more likes, links, and shares. It analyses a vast amount of data to enhance your social media marketing strategies. Moreover, it helps you find influencers who can be an asset to your campaign. Another most important feature of the tool is that it tracks comments and trends to make a real-time connection with your audience.

4. Buffer: it is one of the most affordable and intuitive tools to manage your social media activity. It analyzes the data, helps your plan and schedule your posts, filters out important comments, and responds quickly to them. Additionally, it lets you track down your activity and analyze your progress to make better strategies.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

SEO is an integral part of digital marketing, as only an optimized website of content is visible on the search engines such as Google, which are the primary gateways for customers to enter a conversation with your brand. Therefore, you need SEO tools to manage and plan various SEO-related tasks such as keyword research, content optimization, or checking your current page ranking.

5. SEMrush: It is an award-winning tool used worldwide as a single platform to do SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing. Specifically for SEO, it uncovers millions of local, and national keywords, analyzes any domain’s backlinking profile, tracks your SERP position on a daily basis, and runs technical SEO audits.

6. Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension: this add-on browser is easy to install and is compatible with both Chrome and Firefox. The extension shows monthly search volume, CPC, and competition data of keywords on multiple websites. Therefore, it will save you time that you can utilize to strengthen your business growth strategies.

Content Creation and Design Tools:

Content such as social images, logos, blog posts, or eBooks is the most influential way to attract people’s attention to your brand. And there are many tools to create them.

7. Canva: the tool lets you create professional designs with premium features such as brand kit and background remover. It lets you can plan, create, and edit the content on your own or with your team. Additionally, the Built-in comments feature helps you communicate, work, and resolve suggestions in real-time. Therefore, with Canva, you can create world-class designs and share them with the world in just a few clicks.

8. Adobe Spark: it is a collection of three web/mobile apps, namely Spark Page, Spark Post, and Spark Video, to allow the creation of social graphics, flyers, logos webpages, videos in various themes, and other types of content in no time. It has thousands of templates that any beginner can use to create effective content.

Lead Generation Tools:

To expand your business, you need to generate leads, and it is the most challenging part of marketing. Lead generation tools will help you make the lead generation process easy and simple as their automated features increase the process of conversion.

9. Unbounce: with this tool, you can launch overlays on top of any web page that has a call-to-action feature. You can customize the triggers and targeting rules to choose who sees the offers and when. This feature helps to make your brand reach the relevant audience whose chances of conversion are maximum. Additionally, you can personalize your overlays by making your copy adaptable to what your audience searches for.

10. Instapage: the tool lets you create and optimize relevantly, on-brand, mobile-responsive post-click landing pages and experiences without the help of a developer. It helps to increase visitor engagement and conversion with unique landing page experiences for every ad and targeted audience.

The main motive behind using these tools is to enhance the productivity of your sales department. You can make the best use of these marketing tools by hiring an expert who knows them in and out to save your time by focusing on your product and services and letting them do the rest of the job.

The best part about these marketing tools is that they are affordable, and some of them even offer free trials and templates. So, even if you are short on funds, you can still make use of these marketing tools to grow your small business.

Author Bio:

Joe Martin is a long-time contributor in the tech industry as a leader at Adobe, CMO of CloudApp, and SVP at Scorpion. With his business and marketing degress from Utah and Stanford and his work in tsech he brings a unique balance of strategy and execution to help businesses large and small grow.

Arnab

Arnab is a professional blogger, having an enormous interest in writing blogs and other jones of calligraphies. In terms of his professional commitments, He carries out sharing sentient blogs.

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Key Components for Your Marketing Stack

It's clear to see that marketing is one of the most important aspects of any business. You can have the best products and services on the planet, but if you don't market them effectively and get people interested and aware of what you have to offer, your business won't be able to grow, develop, and fulfill its true potential. This is where marketing comes in, and in today's technological world, marketing is more evolved and in-depth than ever before. The average company has many components making up its 'marketing stack' - a term used to refer to the group of technological tools and innovations used by companies in their marketing campaigns and activities. Stacks can vary from one business to the next, and the exact tools you use will depend on your company's own needs and aims, but, in general, there are certain components that are absolutely key in order to create, distribute, and evaluate your marketing strategies. This guide will look at some of those essential items. Email Marketing: In the past, marketing efforts were mostly conducted via print ads or on TV for the bigger brands, but in today's world, the digital space is where you'll bring in a lot of your leads and customers, with email marketing being one of the most effective forms of them all. They're affordable, accessible, and highly effective for boosting sales and building brand awareness, and there are various email marketing tools you can choose to strengthen this aspect of your stack. Many email marketing tools are focused on automation and integration. They're able to automatically send out personal, timely messages to your customers and potential leads, saving you a lot of time in the process, as well as integrating with other leading apps and services, allowing you to sync data seamlessly across platforms and track the effectiveness of your campaigns. In short, they can help you build, send, and monitor your email marketing efforts much more easily. Social Media Marketing: Along with email marketing, social media marketing is one of the most effective and efficient methods available to modern-day brands. There are countless users on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and you can grow your brand on a global scale by conducting the very best social media marketing campaigns. Again, various tools can assist with this, designed to save you time and make your campaigns stronger. There are certain tools that can help you distribute marketing content easily across social media platforms, for example, as well as other services that can assist you with managing and launching campaigns in the first place. Some platforms offer seamless integration with the major platforms like Twitter and Facebook, letting you create and manage content and then track how well your posts and pages perform. Customer Relationship Management: Customer relationship management, often shortened to CRM, is another major aspect of marketing in today's world. It's all about controlling and managing the way you interact with customers throughout their journey, and CRM software is able to handle most of this management behind the scenes, reducing the risks of human error or bias and giving you the information and tools you need to engage with customers in the most efficient ways. CRM tools for marketing can help with everything from lead generation and management to marketing automation, analysis of sales data, keeping track of contact and company profiles, email tracking, event tracking, sales management, and so much more. This kind of software can seem a little complex at first, but once you get to grips with it, the advantages are almost limitless. Analytics and Evaluation: A big part of marketing that can sometimes be overlooked is the process of analyzing and evaluating the success, or lack thereof, of your campaigns and looking for ways to make improvements. Businesses that want to grow and evolve should never simply settle with the status quo; you always need to be looking for ways to take your marketing game further, and analytics tools can help with this. Analytics tools often appear as features of some of the other tools mentioned above on the list; for example, an email marketing platform might come with an analytics section to show you the engagement levels of your campaigns. However, dedicated analytics tools go a lot further than this and offer much more widespread application, letting you track conversions, leads, customer experiences, and more across your site, social media accounts, and other campaigns. Are We Forgetting Something? While this article covers some essential tools for a marketing stack—email, social media, CRM, and analytics—there is one crucial area that we of often overlook - Personalization! As more consumers are craving a tailored experience, businesses that fail to integrate personalized marketing into their strategy are risking a failure to launch. Why Personalization Matters Customers today expect brands to speak directly to them. Gone are the days of blanket emails and generic social media posts. Personalized marketing allows you to target individual customer preferences, making your campaigns more impactful and driving higher engagement rates. But here's the catch! Not many businesses have mastered this yet. They often focus on the tools themselves but fail to fully leverage the data these tools provide for creating personalized experiences. How to Implement Personalization Start small by segmenting your audience in your email marketing tools, then create content that resonates with their specific needs. This is an attempt to make your audience feel special upon choosing your brand! You can also use CRM to track customer behaviors and personalize touchpoints at various stages of their journey. Add personalization to your social media efforts by customizing ads based on user preferences and past interactions. Lastly, analytics tools can give you the data needed to tweak your personalized marketing efforts further. These are just some of the major components that should be included in your marketing stack to improve the effectiveness and potential of your campaigns. Explore your options today and build a stack you can rely on. Read Also: How to Integrate Email Marketing With SEO Best 5 Instagram Marketing Tools You Should Be Using Exploring The Different Types Of Digital Marketing Strategies Crucial Role of Content Marketing in Local Business Online Marketing : Selling Your Product And Services

The Importance of Packaging Design in Small Business Success

As you strive to take your small business idea and make it into a reality, there will be various ways to set yourself up for success. From the creation of your product to the building of your team, there are different parts to a brand, making it for the long haul. Something to pay attention to when striving for success is the importance of packaging design. Here are a few reasons why: 1. To Make It Through Shipping When you have products that need to be shipped, packaging is really important, as you have to think about how it will arrive to the consumer. From testing ASTM F1980 to making sure it can stand the environment in shipping to materials that keep the product safe during handling, there are various components of safe shipping to pay attention to. Firstly, you’ll want to find appropriate shipping and packaging practices for the kind of products that you’ll be selling so that you can always be sure that they’ll arrive intact. 2. Aesthetics, of Course Another way that packaging design is key to your brand’s success is how it can be the perfect first impression of your business. When a product arrives at the consumer’s home or office, the first thing they’ll see is the packaging itself. This is why careful planning and even brand strategizing should go into your packaging design. The aesthetics matter more than you’d realize when it comes to putting your best foot forward in your packaging, so hire a professional to help you design the perfect product protection. 3. Sustainable Materials Something else to consider when designing your product’s packaging is that customers are looking for sustainable brands to do business with. So, as you get going with your product’s packaging design, think about what materials can work both for your product’s protection but also for the environment. The good news is that there are a lot of great sustainable packaging brands to choose from in today’s eco-conscious world, so keep this in mind as you seek the best practices for your product’s packaging 4. A Unique Way to Advertise Something else to consider as you come up with the best packaging options for your product is that your packaging can be the perfect way to advertise. Have you ever thought about how many people may see your product in one day? From the people who are delivering your product to the individuals who pass by it as it sits at a neighbour’s door, there are numerous eyes on a package, making it the perfect “billboard” space for your advertising. Why stress about getting a billboard when a package can help get your product sold just as well? From a funny quip to clear brand messaging, there are several ways to use the canvas space on a package for better marketing practices. 5. To Set Your Brand Apart As you strive to stand out from competitors, know that sustainable practices and smart messaging can help your brand stand out from the rest. It may take more planning than simply picking out products from a packaging supplier, but you can trust that consumers do sit up and take notice of the packaging. What that means is that if you want your brand to stand out as you build up your small business, don’t ignore the importance of your packaging when looking for ways to stand out from your competition. It can make a bigger impact on your target demographic than you’d imagine. 6. Good Packing Design Builds Brand Awareness It is very important to have original and recognizable packaging that will only enhance brand recognition and awareness and generate more revenue for the brand. Unique packaging creates an identity for the brand that goes a long way, like the powder blue box of Tiffany & Co. They make a lasting impact on the minds of the consumers, creating a strong recall factor. The main goal of good packing is to make the consumers think of your brand and product only by looking at the packing. And if the packaging is attractive and good, then sharing it along with the product on social media increases. This increases the brand value all over social media as well. 7. A Good Packing Design Differentiates You From the Competition Packaging is the first thing that consumers remember when they think about a brand. Such as, when you think of Victoria’s Secret, the pink bags come to mind same goes for Tiffany & Co.; the light blue box is the first thing that comes to mind. So it is important that when you are designing, the packages should be done keeping in mind the target audience of the brand. Whether they can relate to the packaging and find it good and relatable to their aesthetic or not. Guidelines to Keep in Mind Before Designing a Product Packaging There are certain things that you need to keep in mind before you start designing the packages for your brand. So follow these guidelines to know all about them. Your Audience: You need to understand the preferences, interests, and expectations of your target audience that way, your brand's brand loyalty and awareness increase by a lot. Your Brand: Your packaging must display your brand's style and personality so that your customers can identify and recall your products at first glance. If your brand is modern and sleek, a lot of people will notice it and remember it. How to protect your product: You should also think about how and from what you need to protect your product so your customers will receive it in its best condition. Some products require a material that keeps moisture and oxygen out, so using a metalized, foil or transparent barrier is necessary. Wrapping Up! Are you striving to set your brand apart from the rest or to make an impact with advertising? Turn to your packaging to achieve the goals that you have in mind. It’s more important than many businesses realize. Read More: Streamlining Your Operations: The Benefits Of Partnering With Fulfilment Companies Unpacking The Importance Of Quality Assurance In Customer Satisfaction Motivational Tips to Kick-Start Your Packing Process for the House Move

What Is Integrated Marketing Communication in 2020 [Full Guide]

It is just a simple concept of making all kinds of communication and messages linked together. This is just to ensure that there is no lack of information. This lack of information can have a negative result on the work. Do you know what is integrated marketing communication? At the basic level of IMC i.e., Integrated Marketing Communication, all the promoting tools are linked together for smooth communication. You surely must have heard of the marketing mix. Yes, that 4Ps of the marketing mix. This promotion is one of that marketing mixes To make all the tools work smoothly, all the tools must work together in harmony. This can be advanced when regular communication is integrated into several levels, such as Horizontal, Vertical, Internal, External, and Data integration. Let’s go through various components of IMC: 1. The Foundation: In this, a detailed analysis of the product and the target market is required. For the marketers it is essential to understand the nature of the brand, what are its USP (unique selling proposition) and the requirements of the end-user. It is important to have a close eye on your competitor’s behaviors. Every need of the customers is of the utmost importance. 2. The corporate culture: There must need to be relevant in the product and the producing company. Every organization has its own vision, so while planning marketers need that to keep in mind. For example, there is an organization whose vision is to train teenagers in the field of their interest. If they start training the middle-aged man they are deviating from the vision. 3. Brand focus: Every organization is known by the brand they are producing or facilitating. So, it’s important to have plans which are always focused on the brand. Making their brand the center of attention. 4. Consumer experiences: You must not forget about the consumer and how they feel about the product. Nowadays customers are more attracted to the product which looks good, has good packing, and of course, the product itself needs to be one of the best. 5. Communication tools: It is a way via which the brand communicates with the customers. The ways can be direct selling, advertising, social media, advertisements, etc. 6. Integration tools: Selling the product is one part of communication but also getting feedback from the customer is also part communication. Plans for Integrated marketing communication It integrates all aspects of the marketing mix to promote the products and services to the customers at the right place and at the right time. It is a proven fact that if you use different IMC tools at the same time it can improve the customer experience of the product. If done correctly. IMC can improve the visibility of the brand. Whenever a customer goes to the market for shopping, they will be reminded of your brand. The impact of integrated marketing communication increases if the end-user sees the brand simultaneously multiple numbers of times. A marketer should be well versed in time management. Because doing many things like budgeting, allocating the right resources at the right for the promotion of the product is of utmost importance. Gathering information about your company and its product and the audience who buy this product is very important for planning. While planning some points are needed to keep in mind: A detailed summary needs to be made on the brand is going to reach its targeted audience. Everything about the organization needs to be crystal clear. Good knowledge of the product is required. Choosing the right market is very important, and hoe you are going to promote it into the market needs to be mentioned clearly. Competitors’ analysis is very important. And how the competitors are active in the target market. Knowing your brand weakness as well as your strong points can be a good start to promote your brands. Implementing integrated marketing communication Integrated marketing communication is a way of promoting the brand through various methods like advertising, social media awareness, direct selling, public relation, etc. It focuses on using all the available ideas together to get the most desired result. Instead of using one integrated tool at a time, it brings all the possible tool under one umbrella and uses any viable option which is used in an effective way. The success of integrating marketing communication relies totally on understanding the customers, their needs and expectations. Just remember one thing the customer will be loyal towards you only when you outperform their expectations. And to do so you need to be well versed in the marketing mix and need to apply that knowledge in the fields. Just promoting your product once or twice does not make you gainer. You need to keep doing that. So that whenever they think of buying a product, your brand needs to be the first to come in their mind. This can be done only after promoting the same product several times a day to the same audience. This makes their subconscious mind active and your product makes space in their second mind. Let’s take Colgate for example, no matter where you are, whenever you think about a toothpaste product the first name that comes into mind is “Colgate”. Why? Because it was their integrated marketing communication skills that have made you think this way. This what an integrated marketing communication does if done correctly. What are the components of successful integrated marketing communication? It is essential for organizations to have a well-integrated marketing communication team, who can work hard for the organization. And make the customer satisfied so that the customer can invest in the product. This can only happen if the brand can provide services that can make the customer loyal to the brand. This can be done only by using the components effectively: Customer focus No matter how good your product is, no matter how good is your service is, until and unless you make a customer happy all is worthless. Do you believe in God? No, then start believing in the god named “Customers”. If you are a marketer then you need to have faith in this god. Only this god has the power to make your brand, organization what you hope for. So, if you think ignoring their needs and doing and coming up with the best plan will work for you then you need to go back a little bit and have a fresh start. Everything about the customer is very important. Their appraisal, as well as their, complains both hold the same value. But for me complain matters the most. That shows where we are lacking and where we need to improve ourselves. Make sure whatever you are planning customer needs to be at the center of that. Co operation Cooperation among the marketing team is important, but it is essential that every member of the organization work as a whole, to promote the product. Other members who are outside of the department are needed to be allowed to give their thoughts on the matter. This can help in unboxing new ideas, which can really accelerate the promotion. Database communication The sharing of information is one of the important aspects of good planning. This helps in formulating the best course of action. Every employee needed to be filled in on every relevant detail that they need to do their job. Leverage Analyze every channel on which the promotion is done. Calculate their cost estimation. See that if the ROI on that cost is relevant or not. This helps your brand’s promoting efficiency. Profitability At the end of the day, we have to gain revenue. So, making a plan, formulating the strategies are only helpful when they can bring in profits. So, we have to market in such a way that it really brings in the audience to invest in our brand and stay loyal to the brand. This will help to bring in higher revenue. Importance of integrated marketing communication Nobody can deny the fact that integrated marketing communication is an important aspect of the promotion of the brand. Let’s go much deeper: It acts as a messenger between the brand and the audience It recognizes the need of the customers, it gets the data of the competitors, locate an important place for marketing the brand and send this back to the organization for the analysis. Brand awareness at a low cost It is a long-term process where you gain audience trust, and convince them to invest in your brand. Integrated marketing communication is the best way to promote your values. Think like this, if brand A is already communicating with you properly, and delivering its USP on a regular basis. Why would you go for the brand B. you will subconsciously choose brand A Integrating marketing communication over traditional ways IMC is taking over traditional ways because it not only focuses on getting new customers but also tries to retain the older on as well. Gaining a new customer does not mean that you forget about the older customer who has already avail of your services. Gaining new customers is very good but losing the older one is not accepted. Because once the trust is broken, it cannot be restored. The customer will never trust you again. So, doing both is of utmost importance. It reduces the time required for the planning If not for this IMC, strategizing the plan would take lots of time. It is due to the IMC that the time is reduced to none. IMC tools It is essential for organizations to have a well-integrated marketing communication team, who can work hard for the organization. And make the customer satisfied so that the customer can invest in the product. This can only happen if the brand can provide services that can make the customer loyal to the brand. Let us go through the tools which are used in IMC: Advertising It is the best way of promoting the brand. It can reach a huge amount of audience in the shortest time frame. Advertisements on the television, newspaper, radio can reach many audiences in a small frame of time. This also increases the authenticity of the brand. Now it is the marketer’s job to make sure that the right messages are sent to the audience. Self-promotion The promotion which the brands do with the promotional code, discounts, attractive offers, etc. brands itself can pay for advertisements to the newspaper, distribute leaflets for the promotions. Direct selling There are various tools like mailing, text messages, brochures, which the brands use to promote themselves. Personal selling Personal selling here is referred to the selling of the products from their showrooms, via their agents and making sales call. Public relation activities Well, have you seen brands presenting themselves in the community meetup, in fairs, in public events? If yes, then you can understand what public relations mean. It’s all about communication with the public by going in between them. This makes them feel closure to you. This creates a friendship bond with potential customers. Even if they had never thought of investing in your brand, but due to your public appearance. They may think at least once of buying your services. Managing IMC It is essential for organizations to have a well-integrated marketing communication team, who can work hard for the organization. And make the customer satisfied so that the customer can invest in the product. This can only happen if the brand can provide services that can make the customer loyal to the brand. Just making the strategies and implementing those can be said that only half work is done. The rest half is managing and maintain those plans. There are different modes of communication, so it needs to be managed effectively so that all work in the same synchronization to deliver the same message to all the audience. This can be done with the help of proper managing plans. The first step is to identify the right audience Finding the right audience is the best way to make your promotion fruitful. You need to understand who is your audience. what can be done to find the relevant audience for providing services, and who are willing to invest in you. After you find out the answer to these questions, only then you can move on with the second phase of the IMC. The second step is to think of what to communicate The kind of message you send to the customer is very crucial for gaining their trust. You need to have a proper crystal-clear message for audiences. This makes your brand much more authentic. The third step is to plan your message in a way that convinces them Having clear messages will not do, you need to present them in such a way that the audience likes it and get the meaning of it. Make sure that your messages are all properly formatted. The fourth step is to identify the various channel via which you can communicate with them Choosing the best course of action is very helpful in making a promotional platform. It needs to be efficient that it reaches the right person at the right time. The fifth step is to allocate the right source at the right time Investment is needed to be done properly so that ROI gains a profit rather than a loss. So investment needs to be done after analyzing ever aspects of the promotional platforms. Lastly, it’s important to measure the reach of Integrated marketing communication You need to monitor constantly that the promotion is reaching the people or not, doing a blind job is just like walking on the edge of the mountain blindfolded. Conclusion As a whole, integrated marketing communication lays down a bridge between the organization and the audience. Without the IMC informational gap is created which can lead to malfunctioning of the whole organization. There are many strategies that can be implemented to overcome any possible crisis faced by the organization. Each and every detail on integrated marketing communication is given in this article. Image source Read Also: 6 Ways To Increase Real Instagram Followers Without Spending Money! Organic Traffic vs. Paid: Where Should You Focus Your Budget?

10 Must Have Marketing Tools To Add In Small Business Growth Strategies!

What are Marketing Tools?

Here We Have Listed Ten Must-Have Marketing Tools: