Are you a small business owner and would like to improve your current marketing campaigns? If so, you might want to consider using some marketing management software for small business. In this article, I list out some of the best advertising software for small business as well as some other marketing tools which you might find helpful if you are into internet marketing.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to be a successful advertising manager in a small business? Or about the best marketing tools for small business? Turns out the answer is “it depends.” But don’t worry, I’ll help you narrow down your options with my handy guide to the world of small business and marketing management software and platforms.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a fantastic automation software vendor because it’s beginner-friendly but still has super powerful tools to automate your email marketing.
For example, you can send a single welcome email, targeted messages to specific people, or an automated email series that helps with lead nurturing.
And you’ll also get lots of support with this lead generation tool because it’s known for having incredible customer support, online training, and helpful webinars.
Cost: Starts at around $45 for the Email Plus plan (which includes automated marketing) and they offer a free 60-day trial.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
The job is tough for modern marketers. Either you’re juggling various point solutions, or you’re stuck with tools that are powerful yet impossible to use. This means scattered customer data, lackluster marketing, and too much time spent fussing with software. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With Marketing Hub, all your marketing tools and data are on one easy-to-use, powerful platform. You’ll save valuable time and get all the context you need to provide a personalized experience that attracts and converts the right customers at scale. Plus, marketers can keep data at the center of everything they do because Marketing Hub is built as part of the HubSpot CRM platform. When using the full CRM platform, marketers can achieve unparalleled alignment with sales to prove ROI and validate investments. Whether it’s strategies, services, or software — HubSpot allows you to scale your company, not complexity. HubSpot has everything you need to grow better.
KISSmetrics
The KISSmetrics platform is perfect for SaaS businesses, allowing you to find out where your prospects are coming from, and mapping their journey on your website from prospect to customer. KISSmetrics gives you the important data you need to optimize your marketing channels, attract more customers, and get them to convert once they reach your website.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is completely free software that provides valuable insights into who is visiting your website and how they engage with it.
It’s best paired with Google Search Console – another free digital marketing tool that helps you to identify any problems on your site and optimize it for traffic.
Some of the data points that Google Analytics makes available to you include:
- The number of visitors to your site by day, week, month, or any time period you choose
- Where these visitors are coming from – referrals from other website, organic search, ads, social, or direct
- The keywords people are using in Google to find your site
- The demographics and interests of your users
- How long each user spends on your site and which pages they visit
All this information is interesting, but it’s also vital knowledge that can help you to optimize your website and marketing campaigns (while keeping your SEO efforts low cost).
For example, you might notice through Search Console or Analytics that you’re getting a lot of traffic from a keyword that you lack content covering. Write a blog post optimized for that keyword and watch your traffic and engagement levels rocket.
Getting loads of visitors from Facebook but none from Twitter? Maybe this is a sign you should concentrate your marketing efforts on your main channel.
It’s all about the insights – not just the analytics.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a sales and marketing solution that helps you market to your customers through things like social media, live chat, email, and even text messages.
You can use Sendinblue to segment your email list and automatically send personalized emails to your customers.
In addition, they have an easy-to-use drag and drop builder so you can easily create completely automated email campaigns. Plus, you can set up Sendinblue with WP Mail SMTP for reliable transactional email deliverability.
Cost: Starts at around $55 per month for the Premium plan (which includes marketing automation for small business).
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign’s category-defining customer experience automation platform (CXA) helps over 130,000 businesses in 170 countries meaningfully engage with their customers. The platform gives businesses of all sizes access to 500+ pre-built automations that combine email marketing, marketing automation and CRM for powerful segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat and text. Over 75% of ActiveCampaign’s customers use its 850+ integrations including Microsoft, Shopify, Square, Facebook, and Salesforce. Pricing starts at just $9/month. ActiveCampaign was built on the idea that an excellent customer experience must go beyond the traditional marketing touchpoints, like email. Delivering a personalized, high-touch experience is easy in the very beginning, but as a business grows— adding channels, additional teams, locations, customer segments, etc.— the complexity of managing relationships is too much, and that personalized connection doesn’t scale (this is why we’ve all received sales emails for products we already own, been asked to review a product we returned, or had disjointed experiences across success reps while trying to resolve a support ticket, etc.) This is why email marketing, marketing automation, service and support tools, and CRMs end up wasting time for organizations instead of supporting their growth. With ActiveCampaign, and the customer experience automation (CXA) category, we are removing the silos between data sources, communication channels, and teams, and helping businesses scale their 1-1 personal customer relationships through connected experiences that span the customer lifecycle. This enables businesses to automate a truly personalized experience that feels authentic, so their customer relationships can scale, no matter how large that business grows. What are some of the things you can do with ActiveCampaign? -Automate personalized experiences across all your customer touchpoints -Track buyer preferences, behavior, and many custom attributes across the entire customer lifecycle for deeper segmentation and more effective outreach -Customize sends based on almost any parameter, so your messages are always targeted for the right audience -Use data from the entire customer lifecycle to choose the best content, send time, and delivery channel for each customer -Create entirely customized campaigns with minimal effort, then improve your send strategy in real time based on customer behaviors -Replicate the 1-1 personal experience for every customer, no matter how big your business gets
Intercom
Intercom is a customer messaging platform that allows you to see where your customers are getting tripped up and to send them targeted messages to solve their problems. The tool gives insight into areas of improvement on both your website and within your platform if you’re a Saas company. By automating customer service and triggering live chat, you can keep customers engaged and prevent costly churn.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp
No matter how large or small your business is, email marketing should definitely be a part of your overall strategy.
When a customer signs up to your mailing list, they’re inviting you straight into their inbox. That’s why email marketing on average offers a higher ROI than any other marketing activity.
To get started with email marketing, you need a service that will enable you to capture emails, manage your lists, send out emails automatically or on a schedule, and analyze engagement.
Mailchimp is an ideal choice if you’re just starting out or if you are running a small business. Mailchimp’s basic service is free until your list hits 2,000 subscribers. It offers the main functionality you need without making managing your email marketing too complex.
Plus, Mailchimp now offers a slew of features and digital marketing tools (some under paid plans):
- Segmentation and personalization
- Landing page builders
- Form builders
- Audience insights
- CRM tools
- Predictive insights
Conclusion
Using marketing software for small business can help save time and money. We all know that time is money, and it doesn’t get any simpler than that. So if you need to save both, then maybe it’s time to take a look at some of these marketing platforms.