9 Essential Marketing Tools for Small Teams

Competing with bigger companies with larger teams is no easy feat for a small business. Often, founders run a tight ship and only have a few employees to gear toward marketing activities. However, just because you have a small team doesn't mean you can't contend with the big boys.

Over the years, many marketing tools have arrived to help small teams operate on the same levels as bigger ones. Today, we will explore nine essential tools that can help increase your footprint across all your online marketing channels.

What is a Marketing Tool?

What do we mean when we talk about marketing tools? And how do they help you in the ever-changing, turbulent world of marketing?

Marketing tools are the various means you and your team use to help promote and spread your business. In the age of technology, marketing tools come in several forms, including email marketing software, content marketing platforms, and more.

Each one offers you a way through which your business can connect with your current customers and form bonds with new ones. Using the ideal combinations of tools, your team can help your business grow and thrive, standing out from the pack and building a loyal fanbase.

Benefits of a Marketing Tool

Following are some of the advantages of marketing tools:

• Run more effective marketing campaigns 
• Get better segmentation of your customer data
• Provide fast and efficient customer service
• Minimize wasted marketing spend
• Track engagement and ROI via analytics

All these things can be hard to achieve without marketing automation.

The 9 Essential Marketing Tools

Marketing tools for small teams come in all shapes and sizes, so identifying the best options for your business can feel like an uphill battle. To make things easier for you, we’ve broken down a few marketing tools that are a must-have for any business. P.S. We’ve organized the tools by marketing categories so that you know what areas they can cover for your team.

1. Team Collaboration

Team collaboration software has seen a boom in the last few years as home working has fragmented and split normally unified teams. By providing systems that can keep all team members up to date on project progress, collaboration software helps create the feeling of working in an office even when no two people are in the same room. These systems use shared network drives, live folder updates, group video, and text messaging options, and project planning interfaces to create this feeling.

One of the best team collaboration tools is Troop Messenger, which can be used as a work, business, and instant messaging software for both remote and office work. This unified business collaboration software syncs your files and conversations across different platforms uniformly. Let your team collaborate on a single screen!

2. Landing page

Landing page tools are pieces of software that help you get leads and new customers. They do this by letting you create optimized pages with images, funnels, and CTAs. You can use these pages to grow your email list, sell or promote a product or service, or promote different sorts of offers.

Unlike complex design software, landing page software allows you to design pages with little to no code required. This makes them practical and accessible for your team. Below are some options you can look into:

• Unbounce for less tech-savvy teams
• Leadpages for selling products on a webpage

3. Social media management

Social media has been a great medium for businesses ever since it first appeared. What better way to spread your message than by having your customers talk about you in a way all their friends will see? With the average person having 338 friends on Facebook and 707 followers on Twitter, even a single positive comment on your business will immediately get in front of hundreds of people.

However, planning, scheduling, and sending content out through various social media platforms requires time and manpower. For small teams, social media management and tools are a great equalizer. These tools can streamline your workflows and help you build a cohesive social media presence. 

Some of the best ones are:

• Adobe's social content scheduler: You can easily create, plan, preview your content, and schedule posts across numerous social media channels, which helps you save time and develop your brand.
• Buffer: It has a suite of features for publishing, scheduling, engagement, and analytics.
• SocialPilot: It is a budget-friendly tool that helps you manage and schedule posts on seven different social media.
• Hootsuite: This tool lets you connect to over 35 social networks and bulk-schedule posts.
• Mainpage.me: It allows users to create a mini-landing page with multiple links so that it’s easier to connect to marketing materials and content from the link in the bio on social media.
• GaggleAMP: An employee advocacy platform that helps employees engage on social media with the help of curated content and engagements from their employer, business partner, or other stakeholders.
• SocialBee: this social media management tool allows you to easily schedule your posts in a calendar-like view and customize them for each social media platform (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google My Business, and TikTok) and benefit from a Canva integration inside the post editor as well." 
• Social Champ: An all-in-one social media management tool to create, edit, schedule, publish, and track social media content for their profiles with premium features, such as Bulk upload, Auto RSS, Workspace, and more!
• Later: One of the best social media management tools and links in bio platforms allows you to manage your social media accounts, create engaging content, and publish it on all platforms. With their new AI features but also scheduling tools like their YouTube scheduler, Later is the solution for marketers and community managers. 

4. Cold outreach tools

Everyone remembers cold calling – where companies would constantly call your home without having had any prior contact with you to sell you things. Like all other things, cold calling has evolved for the 21st century through cold outreach. Taking the same concept, you research prospects who are a good fit for your business, find the email then reach them through email and other means.

But when you have a small team, finding a large number of relevant prospects (identifying key decision-makers among them) can seem like a daunting task. That’s why cold email outreach tools and email searching tools like Voilanorbert and Hunter.io have grown popular. These tools make it easy to find the right contacts, derive their email, and compose outreach campaigns with dynamic content, scheduled follow-ups, and tracking.

5. Email marketing tools

Email marketing tools are ideal for managing and organizing your email campaigns. An email has a lot of moving parts, so it can be time-consuming for small teams to streamline workflows. Email platforms give them a one-stop shop for all their needs.

Mailerlite, Omnisend, and Easysendy are three of the most popular email marketing software you can create concise and effective email campaigns that run automatically. Alongside these, for nonprofit organizations, there are specialized tools available. A prime example is Virtuous, a renowned nonprofit marketing automation software. Virtuous offers a variety of features geared specifically for nonprofits, including CRM, fundraising, and volunteer management tools. These functionalities help nonprofits create more responsive donor experiences and grow their giving potential, making it a valuable addition to the suite of tools a small marketing team might consider. By following up on their collected data regarding conversion and click-through rates, you can easily measure what is working and what needs improvement. Plus, you can motivate hesitant shoppers by sending basket reminders or offering specialized one-time offers for incomplete orders.

Transactional email and bulk email both need to be managed with professional software so bounced email is processed and your email reputation stays solid. Your bulk email should always make it to the intended recipient your domain reputation can be saved by DMARC report checking and tracking. But not all transactional email is sent through an email tool. For your eCommerce tool or CRM, you can integrate with one of the free SMTP servers that are available. 

6. Analytic tools

Whether working online or in-store, the number one resource for anyone running a business is data. Data allows you to make sense of your efforts but collecting, analyzin3g, and converting it into digestible reports might be too big of a task for your team. Therefore, it’s wise to invest in business analytics tools designed to provide quick insight into your business.

Here are a few analytics tools that are ideal for small teams:

• Mixpanel is useful for tracking customer behavior and KPIs across mobile apps and websites.
• HubSpot is ideal for managing sales and CRO (conversion rate optimization) efforts.

7. Accounting

Accounting is a core aspect of a small business’s operations, but having an accounting department is a privilege only a few companies get to enjoy. Thankfully, accounting tools are available to help you figure out that side of things and prepare for the tax season. In fact, there are tools that are making tax digital for hospitality businesses, retail, and construction industries, etc. to name a few.

One of the best accounting tools for small businesses is Inuit Quickbooks. It allows you to track income and expenses, capture and organize receipts, send estimates, run reports, send invoices, and receive payments. Here are some ways by which you can bill a client effectively with advanced plans, you can track time, count inventory, and even do full-service payroll. Quickbooks also integrates with Square, PayPal, and Shopify.

Another solid choice is Waves, which offers free accounting services, including transaction- and invoice-management. This tool, however, lacks project management and time-tracking capabilities. Waves could be for you if you are working as a solopreneur or just have one-to-two employees.

Ultimately Less Accounting is a popular solution among small businesses. Its intuitive platform and customer support are what users love about this software solution.

If your team uses cryptocurrencies as a way of payment a good tool you can use is the bitcoin calculator, it’s a simple tool to help you stay up to date with the current price of BTC. 

8. Employee onboarding

Onboarding tools help improve your employees’ experiences while working for your business. They offer consolidated, easy-to-use content that ensures your staff quickly gets to grips with your business and becomes better equipped to deal with anything your customers may throw at them.

There are many great employee onboarding tools available for small businesses. You can start with Boardon, which allows you to create custom onboarding content. This can range from informative articles and interactive quizzes to YouTube videos and digital walkthroughs. Once you’ve built the content, add your employee’s details and send an invite.

If you're looking for automation in the onboarding journey, Zavvy is the answer. Zavvy's automated workflow starts from the time you input your new hire data in your HRM tools. Invitations will be sent out and all the pre-and onboarding steps will run on autopilot on Slack or Microsoft Teams. Insert links, videos, and fun quizzes from third-party platforms (e.g. GoogleDrive and YouTube). No need to manually email the next to-do or nudge the new hires to keep going. Zavvy takes away this mundane stuff for you.

9. Search engine optimization tools

Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is an emerging system that allows you to help search engines, such as Google or Bing, find your business. When a customer searches on one of these search engines, the engine will trawl across the internet looking for any references to their chosen search words. Any website that matches or contains them will return to them, which means that you can plan your website around providing those specific words or phrases your customers might use to find you.

SEO optimizing tools exist to help you carefully thread your site pages with the words and phrases necessary to pull in your desired customers. They provide you with comprehensive lists of popular and common terms and keep track of those that may be broken or ineffectual to your cause. Check out options such as Ahrefs and Keywords Everywhere.

Empower your team with marketing tools

Even though the business landscape has changed, marketing maintains its position as a key focus for many firms. To ensure your employees are able to keep up with bigger companies’ marketing teams, make sure to equip them with the tools designed to improve their productivity. From team collaboration to search engine tools, there’s a variety of software you can get to make your personnel’s lives easier.