⚒️20 Marketing Tools To Grow Your Business

Hey Business Owners,

The growing world of marketing tools can be a both a labyrinth and a treasure trove of potential. Every day, more features and new tools emerge making knowing if you’re using the best tool for your business more complicated.

Today, allow us to be your personalized beacon. We’ll share questions and marketing tools to help you boost efficiency, make confident informed choices, and stay ahead of the curve.

In 10 minutes or less, you’ll learn:

✅ a framework to navigate the current marketing tool landscape

✅ 20 different marketing tool options to help grow your business

✅ the latest trends and insights

⚒️ Marketing Tools To Grow Your Business

You’re not alone if you also get stuck analyzing and re-analyzing which marketing tools, services, and platforms are right for your specific situation. In fact, it’s easy to to get stuck in a choice paradox of options.

Even if you have concrete goals and know your budget, the landscape is simply overwhelming. There’s more than one solution to any marketing challenge and even more ways you could filter available tools.

Today, we’re sharing marketing tools we’ve come across and personally used over the years. Our main goal is to help you feel confident in taking one meaningful action today towards scaling your marketing efforts.

Here’s how the following tools were categorized:

• Social Media

• Content Marketing

• Email Marketing

• Additional Tools

Note: We shared tools that were either free or have a low cost monthly subscription option. Each of us are in different stages of owning a business and have different budgets available.

All that aside, here are a few questions to ask when considering which, if any, of the following tools could be right for you.

Disclaimer: These are tools, not rules. Only you know what works best for your situation.

1. What are your specific marketing goals and needs right now? (Examples: Grow social media, brand awareness with SEO)

2. What is your estimated budget for marketing software/tools?

3. Do the tools you’re considering have the exact features you need in a paid tier? If so, can you find a way to factor in the subscription cost to your budget?

4. How user-friendly is the tool? a.k.a. can you and/or your team easily learn how to use it?

5. What are the current tools you’re utilizing for marketing? Make a list and see if any of these could be integrated or replaced by another tool with the same function but also offers more features.

Social Media Marketing Tools to create, publish, and analyze social media content

Hootsuite - One of the ultimate social media management platforms that allows you to schedule, analyze, and manage social media content and interactions from several different platforms all in one single dashboard.

(Note: Hootsuite no longer has a free tier as of earlier this year. They do have several paid tier offerings)

Buffer - Free version allows you to connect up to three of your social media channels and gives you access to an AI assistant, a landing page builder, and multiple planning & publishing tools.

Adobe Express - free, no credit card required adobe app that allows you to design, and edit content on the fly. Offers text to image generative AI, converting designs to PDF’s, removing backgrounds, image resizing, you name it.

Canva - One of the best free image creation and editing tools out there hands down. Includes thousands of templates, images, graphics, and icon libraries to help you make compelling social media assets. (We love using this tool for designing banners, email headers, and collages)

Later - social media management tool with a free trial option. Best for scheduling and publishing, content creating, writing captions, and also has a link in bio tool that helps convert followers into paid customers by driving to your website through social media platforms.

Content Marketing Tools to write better, hear your audience, and manage marketing campaigns

CoSchedule - Project management platform to help teams plan, schedule, and execute marketing campaigns with a ton of great features like automation, analytics, etc. CoSchedule has a free basic plan available with limited features.

BuzzSumo - A content research + social listening tool that helps you find trending and engaging content/trends and analyze competitors strategies. Offers a 30 day free trial.

Hemingway Editor - Each of us has a writing style that comes with style preferences that are clear to us but may not be for readers. The free Hemingway Editor tool calls out complex sentences, passive voice, and adverbs to make your writing stronger. This tool has an open beta right now you can request to join where AI will also fix the issues it finds.

Grammarly - Grammarly’s basic plan is free to use and includes 100 free prompts/month with their new generative AI. If you’re not familiar, Grammarly is a writing tool that offering grammar, spelling, and punctuation fixes.

HeadlineAnalyzer (by CoSchedule) - Ever wish you could get a score on the effectiveness of your emails, website, articles, or ad copy? This tool is great at providing feedback and recommendations to craft compelling headlines. Free to use and has an easy to install plug-in.

Email Marketing Tools to build, manage, engage, and analyze your email list

Brevo (formerly known as SendinBlue)- versatile email marketing platform that gives you not only email campaigns you can build, manage, and track but also SMS marketing tools to keep in touch with your audience.

Mailchimp - one of the most known email marketing and automation platforms out there. Great free tier that makes it easy to build email funnels, craft audience segments, and get analytics on your email campaigns.

Beehiiv - A central hub for all things email. This email marketing platform is built to help creators grow and scale with a plethora of options. We’re currently using Beehiiv for this newsletter and loving the tools they offer at the free tier that other competitors don’t.

Constant Contact - digital and email marketing platform with tools and plans whether you’re just starting your business or are an advanced marketer. Offers free trials and various plans. Also offering generative AI for content crafting and other uses of AI for automation.

Hubspot - marketing and sales platform that helps you keep track of customers, sending emails, and sharing content on socials. Hubspot has free and paid features. It’s a strong solo platform where you can manage multiple parts of your business.

Additional Marketing Tools - Keyword Planning, Website Analytics, and Landing Page Builders; oh my!

Google Analytics - Analyze your and track your website traffic, see where your users are and what their behavior is, and see how you’re doing against key performance metrics. Gives you customer insights and ideas of how to better adjust google ads for free

Google Keyword Planner - one of the best free tools to research and discover relevant keywords for your business and provide valuable data you can use for ad campaigns and national + local SEO performance.

Unbounce - high performance landing page builder and conversion optimization tool. Allows you to test high converting landing pages and website pop ups without needing to have coding skills. Unbounce offers free trials and tiered subscription offerings.

Sumo - Known as the free #1 email capture tool. Easily connect the sumo plug in to your Wordpress or Shopify website. Customers will be prompted with email opt-in forms with a fully customizable design and added to your businesses email list. (*Does also offer paid options with additional features)

Segment - Customer Data Platform that helps you collect and utilize 1st party customer data from various sources to give you additional insights that you can use to personalize advertising and customer engagement for your business. Has a free tier that includes up to 1,000 visitors a month before you get into paid tiers.

Disclaimer: None of the marketing tools mentioned today are sponsors. They’re tools I’ve come across one way or another throughout my career.

Trends 📊, Insights 🧠, and News 📰 

🤖 AI-powered tools: Artificial intelligence and technology advances are giving business owners more options to automate tasks, generate content, and make edits. There’s a mad dash to have unique narrative angles and product features with AI. Reminder: These AI capabilities are also tools themselves, you have the choice of when and how to use them.

📈 Data-driven insights: More tools + tech = a boom in demand and availability of data. It’s important to define the meaning of data for your business and your strategy of how you plan to use various data points in your marketing campaigns to develop “data driven insights.”

💥 Integrations: As technology and AI capabilities are expanding, we’re starting to see more tools become integrated. For example on Slack you can now integrate over 2,600 different apps compared to the 150 apps they had at their launch.

LET’S CHAT! What are your favorite marketing tools? What emerging tools are you curious to learn more about?

Send me an email at [email protected]

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NEXT WEEK’S TOPIC: Think Big, Grow Bigger: 5 Big Business Marketing Takeaways You Can Use For Your Small Business 🚀 

ABOUT VERSA STRATEGY

Chandler Kirkman is the driving force behind Versa Strategy. She’s on a mission to elevate businesses’ marketing and empower Creative Strategists to think big picture about the business landscape.

In the past decade, Chandler has consulted with over a hundred businesses of various specialities from Fortune 100 companies to local small businesses. By infusing branding, advertising, and marketing efforts with her signature blend of creativity, strategic thinking, and enthusiasm, she cultivates a dynamic and empathetic approach that helps business owners better connect with their customers.