We all know that we need to promote our business if we want new customers. But sometimes it’s difficult to keep up with everything. Most small business owners have limited hours to spend on their marketing so what little time they do have needs to be spent wisely. I’ve compiled my favorite marketing tools for small businesses to help you stay on track of your digital marketing. Oh, and I made sure to include only the free or low-cost tools.

Before we get into the list of marketing tools, I want you to know that being everywhere online is not necessary, especially when your business is starting out. Choose a couple channels that best meet your target audience’s demographics and/or interests and start there.

I see small business owners trying to be in so many places. However, when you are scrambling to be on all the channels you are not giving any specific platform time to gain momentum. Try testing new efforts one at a time to see if they are valuable to your brand.

Ok, on to the good stuff!

Managing multiple social media platforms can be very time consuming. Buffer allows you to manage them in one place and offers easy ways to share complimentary content, too.

The image below shows my news feed of marketing stories that I can browse through to share current marketing tips with my followers. All you do is search for feeds that fit your brand and they’ll continuously update.

You can schedule your posts one week or month at a time. Buffer also gives you a look at how your posts perform. Plus, you can add users to manage your account and posts will be held for your review to push them into the queue.

👉 https://buffer.com | Price: Free-$399/mo.

While I use Buffer for most of my social media, I love Tailwind for Pinterest. It makes posting the crazy amount of daily pins you need to generate traffic so much easier. They not only make it easy to search within the app for pins to share but also have a Chrome extension for when you’re just browsing.

I’ve seen traffic soar by increasing daily posts. During one of my experiments, I increased the number of daily pins that I was sharing from 10 to 30. The results were incredible. It took me less time to schedule the 30 pins in Tailwind than it did for me to manually schedule 10.

As you can see above, when I switched to 30 pins per day, the traffic to my boards increased drastically. Tailwind makes it so easy!

👉 https://www.tailwindapp.com | Price: $15/mo.

One marketing tool that keeps getting better and better is MailChimp. What once began as an easy way to manage your email subscribers has turned into a great platform to help you grow your business. Nowadays you can create automated systems that align with user’s actions on your online store. For example, if someone is shopping and leaves items in their cart before checking out, MailChimp can be set up to send an email to remind them of those items.

Another great feature is that users can segment themselves into different groups. Let’s say you’re offering parenting advice to moms. When a new mom joins your list, you can ask them to choose their kids’ age bracket(s) in order to send them relevant content. Once they make their choice, they are automatically segmented into a distinct group. So when you go to send an email, you can be sure you are sending the right information to the right group of moms.

Additionally, you can now create great landing pages, too. This is great for people who don’t have a website but maybe offer webinars or who just need a separate page made for an ad. There are so many options! And you can perform A/B tests to ensure you have the right message.

👉 https://mailchimp.com | Price: Free-$199/mo.

If you ever wished you could call up Google and tell them how you wanted your local business to appear in search results, this is the way! This listing is the one you see on the right side of search results with photos of the business, a map and links to the website.

The whole purpose of these listings is to give local businesses search presence when they’re up against big brands. But they are not automatic. You have to go in and set up your listing. It doesn’t take much time and you get to customize how your business is displayed.

👉 https://www.google.com/business | Price: Free

Last, but certainly not least, is my favorite contest app. King Sumo makes it so easy to create great, mutually beneficial giveaways.

You choose a gift to raffle off then allow your target audience to enter in. They have to use their email to enter, which grows your email list. They can then gain even more entries by liking your social media pages or watching one of your videos, visiting your site and more!

Plus, if you embed the giveaway onto one of your website pages, it will help you get traffic to your website, which you can then use the user data to re-market the contest audience. It’s awesome!

👉 https://kingsumo.com | Price: Free

There you have it, my top five marketing tools for small businesses! I hope you have fun trying them out. And I’d love to hear your feedback. Let me know which one(s) you tried and how you liked them!