11 Must-Have Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Marketing your business is essential for building a brand identity, maintaining a steady flow of projects, and spreading the word about your services. As an independent professional, doing great work is only part of the equation—you also have to actively seek it out. Keeping your brand visible and relevant in the marketplace can sometimes feel like a full-time job on its own.

With remote work more popular than ever, a wide variety of tools are now available to help you achieve your marketing goals. Here are 11 marketing tools to effectively drive visibility for your business.

1. Professional Website: Squarespace

A professional website identifies your business and service offerings to potential clients. A website is an important first step in developing a robust marketing strategy. It can help you stand out from your competitors, establish a strong online presence, and showcase creative work or past projects.

Best of all, you don’t need a technical background or coding skills to build a great website. Today, there are many tools that help walk you through the process with pre-made, customizable templates. Squarespace is a popular option that provides fully-managed website hosting, drag-and-drop interfaces, and a variety of pricing plans.

Check out: How to Set Up a Small Business Website: 5 Simple Steps

2. Keyword Optimization: Answer the Public

Once you know the topics your audience is interested in, use this insight to inform the content you create. Whether your content is a blog, social media post, or eBook, generating information about the topics your audience cares about will help drive them to your business.

Answer the Public is a tool that generates questions and topics people search for in Google based on a keyword you enter. This can be a useful way to find relevant topics for your content.

Check out: 4 Ways a Consultant Can Become an Industry Thought Leader

3. Brand Recognition: Tailor Brands

A logo creates brand recognition and makes your business more memorable. It can also help with brand consistency when used across your personal website, social media platforms, and business cards.

Tailor Brands is an online tool that walks you through creating a logo, stores the files you create, and ensures you maintain the rights to your design.

4. Graphic Design: Canva

Including a visual component in your content is a great way to pull readers in and keep them engaged. Fortunately, you don’t have to be a design whiz or invest in expensive software to create eye-catching graphics.

Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design tool that provides images, photo filters, icons, shapes, fonts, and useful templates—such as infographic templates—that you can customize.

5. Social Media Assistant: Buffer

You probably already know that social media is a great way to promote your business, but managing it can quickly consume a lot of your time. Use a scheduling platform such as Buffer to curate, schedule, and send social posts from one dashboard.

With an upgraded version, you can even create marketing campaigns, and use analytics and reports to see how your posts are performing.

Check out: 5 Ways to Promote Your Consulting Business on Social Media

6. Email Marketing: MailChimp

Email can be a great way to stay connected to your network—whether you use it to drive specific marketing campaigns, or to send out a weekly newsletter.

MailChimp is a popular email-marketing platform that helps you send marketing emails, automated messages, and targeted campaigns. Target emails based on customer behavior or preferences, and use analytics reporting to monitor how your campaigns are doing.

Check out: 8 Effective Marketing Strategies for Consultants

7. Spell Check: Grammarly

A good first impression is key, so don’t let an obvious spelling mistake distract potential clients. Grammarly is a Google Chrome add-on that will check over your content for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors. It’s a quick way to ensure your writing is polished and professional before hitting send.

8. Website Monitoring: Google Analytics

After investing time and effort into building a website, creating content, and maintaining a social presence, it’s essential to monitor your brand and keep an eye on competitors.

By connecting your website to Google Analytics, you can track and report on website traffic. This free Google service offers a range of features, including insights into individual page performance, visitor clicks on specific pages and links, and social analytics like visitors’ geographic locations and the types of devices they use to access your site.

If you’re not sure how to get started, check out the Analytics Academy for free courses on how to set up and use Google Analytics.

9. Customer Feedback: SurveyMonkey

Customer feedback is a valuable way to gather trends and insight to improve your services. Use SurveyMonkey to quickly and easily design and send out surveys. Once you receive feedback, use analytics to evaluate your results.

10. Networking: LinkedIn

Networking is an essential part of building a brand and boosting business prospects. Even if your business isn’t big on social media, one important place to maintain a social presence is LinkedIn. LinkedIn allows you to showcase your services, connect with clients, and display your skills and successful projects.

11. Automation: Chat GPT

ChatGPT is an AI Chatbot developed by Open AI. The chatbot has a language-based model that the developer fine-tunes for human interaction in a conversational manner.

Check out: How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile if You’re Self-Employed