An Ultimate List of the Best Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

My thoughts on WordPress

WordPress has always been my top platform for any kind of content-focused website, like blogs or publisher websites (including this very website!). It’s the industry leader for content management systems, making it my easy top choice for building brand presence through content marketing and blogging. It’s also easy to build professional-quality websites using its templates (or the AI website generator).

There’s even a free plan that lets you publish unlimited blogs, although your site will be on a “.wordpress.com” subdomain, so I recommend upgrading to the paid plan starting at $4 per month to get a fully custom domain if you’ll be publishing blogs regularly, i.e. you’re serious about having a content hub. It makes your blogs look more professional and credible.

But overall, WordPress has yet to let me down. It’s one of those “legacy” marketing tools for businesses that I’m very fond of and always recommend to small brands or independent bloggers who want a reliable platform on which to establish a reputation.

WordPress’s tool for publishing blogs is the industry leader and is helpful for growing your brand. (Source: WordPress)

My thoughts on Squarespace

Nowhere else are there website templates as sleek and modern as Squarespace’s, which is why it’s often a top pick for many an artist or creative entrepreneur. It’s got the tools to make your brand stand out, including an AI “Design Intelligence” tool that incorporates your brand identity into the website it generates — something unique to the platform.

I also like that Squarespace has a built-in marketing suite for growing your brand through email marketing, social media, and SEO — no plugins necessary, unlike WordPress. It’s these tools that make it ideal if you’re a beginner or a one-person marketing team.

There is no free plan, and plans start at $16 a month, so it’s more of an investment into an all-in-one marketing platform than just a website builder, especially if you’re more into social and email marketing than publishing blogs to grow your business.

Squarespace is the website builder for the modern creative. Navigation is also great — I was able to build a website using both a template and the AI generator without a hitch, with results looking good and ready to go live.

Squarespace’s websites are great for visual branding. (Source: Squarespace)

My thoughts on BrightLocal

BrightLocal is an industry leader in local SEO, and its tools reflect that. This is the most helpful local SEO tool I’ve had so far — it lets you track local citations like your Google Business Profile, Yelp, etc., and recommends ways to improve them, such as fixing your address or a broken link.

If you have a physical location and want to establish a local presence, this tool will help people in your area easily find and reach your business.

My main criticism of BrightLocal is that it’s not the most user-friendly platform. There are so many tools to navigate, and the summarized reports tend to present lots of data without context, requiring deeper analysis — not ideal for a busy business owner.

It takes a while to familiarize yourself with the platform, but once you do, it has everything you need to track and manage your local online presence and reach local audiences.

BrightLocal shows all your online listings at a glance. (Source: BrightLocal)

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It also monitors your general local online presence. (Source: BrightLocal)

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My thoughts on NiceJob

Reviews can make or break a business, which is why NiceJob, a platform that helps you manage them, is one of my best marketing software for small businesses. What I particularly find helpful is that it automatically requests reviews via email and text after customers purchase from your store. If you have an online business, it’ll be helpful for building your credibility.

There’s also the Social Proof software that imports reviews from your store onto your website, and everything is accessible in your dashboard once you connect to your review platforms. I’m also giving it extra points for its Get Repeats tool, which sends texts or emails to previous customers to win them back — a feature I don’t often see on other platforms. However, I’m a little disappointed that it only connects to a handful of review sites — for instance, it doesn’t include Yelp or Trustpilot.

Its benefits still outweigh its shortcomings, though. It’s still one of the most useful reputation-building tools for small businesses.

NiceJob lets you collect, track, and manage reviews to build your brand reputation. (Source: NiceJob)

My thoughts on Mailchimp

I’m a big fan of Mailchimp — especially its very generous free plan that’s been my ride-or-die for many an email campaign. Mailchimp was the first platform I used when I started email marketing, and it’s still the first one I’d choose now for clients who don’t have an email platform yet.

Reason one: It’s easy to set up, meaning clients can easily take over. The second reason is that it has everything you need to make email marketing campaigns, from sign-up forms to landing pages.

Mailchimp even has social media tools and a mini website builder as extras, and I love that it makes everything accessible on the free plan. You’ll only need to upgrade when your contact list grows or when you need to start sending more emails. This pricing structure makes it easy for growing businesses to scale up with the platform.

Building email campaigns has always been simple with Mailchimp, as there’s a drag-and-drop platform with templates for various email campaigns, although some of the better ones are locked behind paid plans. But there’s still a lot you can do with some creativity. Like WordPress, this is one of those marketing tools that has yet to miss.

Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to create and send email campaigns. (Source: Mailchimp)

My thoughts on Later Social

Social media marketing tools have evolved since I started using them, but Later Social is the one I recommend most for small businesses and beginners. It’s the easiest one to navigate, and the main interface is a content calendar that makes it easy to schedule content in advance and get a birds-eye view of your posts — super helpful if you’re running multiple campaigns at once.

One thing I’ve also found helpful is the note-taking feature in the calendar, which is great for leaving notes to yourself or to team members, for example, if certain posts are part of a larger campaign. There’s also a Canva integration — good news if you’re a Canva user — so it’s a more seamless process from design to publish. Another point goes to the unified social inbox for letting me reply to messages from various platforms from one screen.

More than anything, though, it’s Later Social’s ease of use that sold me on the platform. Setting up an account and connecting my social profiles took about 10 minutes, after which I could immediately start posting content.

Later Social’s best feature: the content calendar and planner. (Source: Later Social)

My thoughts on SproutSocial

SproutSocial is a helpful tool for keeping track of all those social media mentions and comments and gauging how online audiences perceive your brand. But I won’t say it’s the easiest platform to navigate.

But if you handle a large social media following and get plenty of notifications and comments, that’s exactly what SproutSocial’s built for. It’ll monitor your brand mentions and even track the most commonly associated keywords with your brand.

SproutSocial is the social media platform for businesses with a brand and established following, whereas Later Social is more geared towards beginners. SproutSocial is also mostly for analysis, whereas Later Social is for content creation and scheduling.

So this is something that will be a better fit for bigger businesses that need a more efficient way to handle lots of mentions and comments, for example, if you also use social media for customer support.

SproutSocial consolidates all your social media analytics for easy viewing, but you’ll still need to interpret your own data. (Source: SproutSocial)

My thoughts on Klaviyo

Klaviyo has always been one of my favorites, a top AI marketing tool. It’s particularly unique for its customer service widget, Klaviyo Service, that acts as an AI sales agent for your Shopify store. It learns from customer behavior to give personalized product recommendations.

However, it’s only available for Shopify stores at the moment. If you don’t have a Shopify store, you can still use Klaviyo’s email and SMS lead-nurturing workflows for sending abandoned cart emails or personalized purchase reminders.

If you’re new to automated workflows, Klaviyo has some templates in its library, although all the most important ones, like those cart abandonment workflows, are unfortunately locked behind paid plans. Honestly, there’s not much you can do on the free plan beyond sending emails and text messages, so you’ll need to upgrade to get the most out of the platform.

It’s still one of the best marketing tools for small businesses with an online store, though, as its workflows are super helpful for nurturing leads until they convert into customers.

Build lead-nurturing workflows with Klaviyo. (Source: Klaviyo)

My thoughts on HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the more advanced tools on this list, but it’ll be helpful for any team that handles large volumes of leads. HubSpot has long been a leading sales and customer management tool, and its marketing automation software is particularly helpful for automatically sending emails to leads based on specific triggers, such as when they fill out a form or visit your website.

The main drawback with HubSpot is that it’s not as easy to navigate as some of the other tools in this guide, but it’s still worth exploring if you have leads coming from your website, social media, and multiple other sources.

HubSpot can organize all those leads in one platform and send them emails automatically. Just set up your automation rules, and HubSpot will handle the rest. It’s a better CRM than Zoho for bigger teams, as its automations can also alert team members when leads take specific actions.

Like I said, HubSpot will probably have a longer learning curve just because it’s a more advanced platform, but there are handy guides to help you navigate around and build your first workflow. Unfortunately, though, HubSpot’s automations, as of writing, can only send emails to leads, so it will only be most useful if email is your main method of marketing communication.

HubSpot lets you build automated workflows for nurturing leads into customers. (Source: HubSpot)

My thoughts on Plai

Setting up digital ads can sometimes be a pain if you’re new to them, but a platform like Plai helps make the process easier. It consolidates all your ads into one management platform, from Google to social media so that you can manage, track, and optimize them all in one place.

Plai also uses AI to optimize your ads automatically. However, it isn’t always accurate, both because of the general unpredictability of the ad landscape and because it’s AI and it’s bound to make some mistakes.

I still find it helpful, though, because it takes away the bulk of the A/B testing work that’s always necessary with digital ads. However, so far, it only does this for Google and Facebook Ads. For other ads, you’ll still need to do your own A/B testing. But if Google and Facebook are your biggest ad platforms, it’ll be a lot of help.

The AI also learns about your business to help set up campaigns tailored to your brand, if you don’t know where to start, depending on whether you need traffic, leads, or conversions.

It does tend to rely heavily on AI, and where it ultimately fails is in generating images for display ads. They’re not exactly great and tend to look, well, AI-generated, so I recommend using your own ad images.

Plai uses AI to create and optimize your digital ads automatically. (Source: Plai)

My thoughts on Loopy Loyalty

Loopy Loyalty is a loyalty program software made especially for small businesses. I debated a lot about which loyalty program software to include in this list, but I ultimately settled on this one because of how fuss-free and easy it is.

Loopy Loyalty lets you create digital loyalty cards that customers can save to their Google and Apple Wallets. But that’s also its biggest disadvantage — it’s only applicable to people with accounts on those digital wallets.

I still find it a good software, though, because aside from its simple setup process that doesn’t require API integrations (unlike other platforms), stamp cards are the easiest way to start building loyalty programs, and Loopy Loyalty digitalizes the entire process.

Unfortunately, there is no free plan, but for $25 a month for one unlimited loyalty program, it costs less than other similar software, which can go upwards of $100.

Another thing I like about Loopy Loyalty is that it sends location-based notifications, meaning when customers are near your store, it can send notifications about their rewards to encourage them to make a visit — though, unfortunately, this specific feature is only available on iPhones.

Create and customize your digital loyalty card with Loopy Loyalty. (Source: Loopy Loyalty)

My thoughts on TrueReview

Customer reviews are a part of post-purchase customer engagement, and TrueReview offers an easier way to prompt the process. You can automatically request reviews from customers after they’ve completed a purchase, and importantly, respond to them from inside the platform. It even offers AI-generated responses, although I’d still edit them first as they still have a sense of “robotic-ness” to them.

What I like most about TrueReview is the convenience it offers. It consolidates all your reviews across different profiles — a wide range, from Google to Trustpilot to Redfin — and makes them much easier to manage. It’s also a very simple tool to navigate in general that’ll help increase the number of reviews your business gets and keep customers engaged.

I have no qualms with the tool itself. My main complaints are with its plan limits. You can only request up to 250 reviews a month on the first paid plan, and no plans offer unlimited reviews, which means you’ll need to choose your reviewers wisely.

Additionally, review requests are only sent via email (and SMS on higher plans), not through social media, which is a drawback if you primarily market on social media. Still, it’s one of the most convenient platforms for responding to reviews, which is a fundamental part of building customer loyalty.

TrueReview consolidates reviews from various platforms, allowing you to respond to them all easily. (Source: TrueReview)