Updated on March 23, 2023
Leading a marketing team within a small business can be an awarding and adventurous experience. You have a lot of space to get creative and experiment as opposed to the rough procedures big companies have in place.
Although, it can be challenging to get your teammates on the same track and follow the progress you are making with outreach strategies as well as social media. Luckily, to make your life easier and your job more delightful, there are different tools you can use to automate and optimize your work.
Let me introduce the list of marketing tools you must have as additional team members in 2021. Relying on these apps will not only free up your schedule but will keep you prepared for any upcoming changes in your working environment.
Working remotely? No longer an issue.
New employees need time to get adjusted? Not anymore.
Let’s start from the beginning.
1. Infinity
Every team needs an efficient management tool. Infinity was created as an all-in-one tool for the smooth workflow of any team.
Infinity allows you to:
- track the progress of your team members,
- set daily goals,
- keep notice of the emails send out and received,
- store all your contacts in one place,
and so much more.
How is Infinity different from marketing tools like Asana and Trello?
Infinity was originally created by a team that wasn’t happy with the project management tools they were using. Their intention was to design and develop an app that will have all the features the other apps were missing, and that’s exactly what they did. But hey – if you’re interested to follow in their footsteps – here is a guide on how to create an app from scratch.
Infinity has 6 different views, allowing you to track your progress related to your projects, but also your personal road. Kandan boards allow you to manage different stages in the project, Lists are where you keep your to-dos, and the Gantt chart is designed to suit the major projects.
Key Features
- Infinite Customization – Adapt your workspace to fit all your needs.
- Flexible Structure – Organize boards and folders however you like.
- Priority Control – Set priority range to the tasks you assign.
- Six Views Available – Lists, Tabel, Gantt, Calendar, Form, Columns.
- Activity Log – Check everyone’s doings.
- Import And Export Data – Upload or download your boards as CSV.
- Time Management – With Clockify integration you can keep track of working hours.
- Grade Permissions – Give out different roles to your teammates to define what they can and cannot do.
- Zapier Integration – To keep you connected with all the other apps you use.
- Mobile App – Bring your work in your pocket for all-time access.
2. Toggl Plan
Delivering projects in time without overwhelming your team seems like a near-impossible thing. It isn’t. Toggl Plan helps you plan, organize, and get work done without burning your team out.
With Toggl Plan’s simple, drag-and-drop timelines you can plan tasks, assign them to your team members, and set milestones for your project. The timelines provide clear, visual overviews of who’s doing what and when.
Not only does it bring clarity to your team, but also helps you as a small business owner. You can clearly see if who in your team is overwhelmed and who can take up more work. That way you can easily adjust your plans, hire more people or take on more projects.
Pricing: Toggl Plan comes with a 14-day free trial. Plans start at just $9 per user per month.
Key Features
- Drag-and-drop project and team planning timelines.
- Clear visual overviews of work plans and team workload.
- Color-code milestones for better visual clarity.
- Collaborate on tasks using file attachments and comments.
- Manage task workflows from the timeline or use Kanban boards.
- Recurring tasks.
- No learning curve. Get started in less than 2 minutes.
3. Sales.Rocks
When it comes to collaboration between marketing and sales teams, Sales.Rocks is your go-to tool. Sales.Rocks goes beyond everyday ways of sale and makes sales experience as fun as marketing.
How so?
The Sales.Rocks database reveals full profiles for over 115 million companies and over 200 million contacts. This exhaustive database contains an ever-growing collection of data from more than 213 countries around the world.
With this kind of tool, you can level-up your sales levels regardless of your company’s niche. Knowing what you are looking for, simply use the filters to narrow down your search and open the list of enterprises and individuals to make your pitch to.
Moreover, Sales.Rocks has an easy-going automation system for both personalized emails and Linkedin outreach. On top of that, you can add it as a Chrome extension, and always be one step ahead of your competitors.
Key Features
- Refined Company Search – If a business exists on Earth – Sales.Rocks knows about it.
- Contact Search Software – Nobody will be out of reach for you.
- Sales Toolkit – Everything you need for achieving greater results in one place.
- CRM Integrations – Build quality relationships and reward loyal customers.
4. Aritic Pinpoint
Aritic PinPoint is a full-stack marketing automation software platform for the marketing operations teams at small and medium businesses.
It helps you to build relationships with leads, automate marketing campaigns and convert leads to paying customers easily.
Aritic PinPoint is an all-rounder when it comes to automated marketing. You can integrate with one and all existing services you have been using. Sign up with PinPoint to reach out to a broader and bigger global market.
Try this simple yet powerful tool for all your marketing needs. In case you have any suggestions, PinPoint has a separate ‘feedback’ section wherein you can post your feedback details. PinPoint is very serious about its users and hence makes it a point to improve every minute.
Aritic Pinpoint’s Lite Plan starts at $19/month
Key Features
- Integrations with popular websites, tools, plugins, and mobile apps to trigger seamless automation campaigns
- Get cloud-based file storage to upload, save and manage your images, assets, and other files essential for your campaigns
- Create, upload, and save lead magnets to leverage your SEO strategy
- Track and monitor how social campaigns and ads perform.
- Track browser information and nurture anonymous visitors who show interest in your brand with retargeted ads
- Trigger SMS and push campaigns for mobile users, together or separately with native plugin integrations
- Nurture and retain your inquisitive visitors using a chatbot to answer initial queries and also capture visitor details
5. Miro
Miro is an excellent tool to add to your marketing toolset, especially if you are a remote team. This is a digital whiteboard designed to help your team brainstorm and keep all your ideas from being forgotten.
Add text, images, diagrams, sticky notes, spreadsheets, or draw on the board, just as you would on a physical one. Insert prototypes and make graphs to help you organize your team flow.
Miro comes with a set of templates to help you get started, depending on what you are working on. The board is unlimited – you have infinite space to work on many ideas simultaneously, and forever keep your creative plans in one place.
Key Features
- Infinite Board – Forever keep your ideas, and let them grow.
- Real-time collaboration – Enable all your teammates to participate in the brainstorming session at the same time.
- Integrations – Miro allows you to integrate your work on Google Drive, Sketch, Invision, Box, Jira, and others.
6. Zoho Suite
Zoho is already a well-known brand supporting small businesses across the globe. If you haven’t tried it yet – now is the time.
Zoho offers different types of solutions for all your needs. Use Zoho for your email campaigns, build relationships, schedule follow-ups, and share all documents with your team.
With Zoho Analytics you can track your progress and measure the success of your business on a weekly, monthly, and yearly level. Zoho has its own CRM in place, along with the software for generating surveys, store contacts, and connect with social platforms.
Zoho helps you host a meeting with your team members and easily add it to everyone’s calendar. Their ShowTime solution helps you host not only webinars and conferences but also training when you want to equip your teammates with new skills.
With all tools in place for your marketing campaigns, Zoho provides elegant solutions for all communication endeavors you will get to.
Key Features
- Email & Collaboration (Mail, Sheets, Drive, Documents, Chat)
- Sales & Marketing (CRM, Campaigns, Surveys, Bookings)
- Finance (Books, Invoices, Checkouts)
- Human Resources (Recruit, People)
- IT & Help Desk (Identity Management, Catalyst, Service Desk)
- Customer Service (Desk, Assist)
- Custom Solutions (Creator, Flow, Office Integrations)
- Business Intelligence (Analytics)
7. Visme
Whether your team focuses on content marketing or social media, the key to winning your potential partners over is your visual representation. Visme is online design software that helps you and your team create astonishing visuals, always following the standards of your brand.
Visme offers simple solutions for creating graphics and videos for your social media and your blog. But, Visme is much more than simple design software.
This online app includes your whole marketing team in the process of creating everything you need: a media kit for your outreach campaign, compelling presentations – still and interactive, printable documents to include in your live pitch.
On this platform, you can also visualize any data you wish to share. Create charts, graphs, and infographics to attach to your email and publish on your website.
Key Features
- Export Visuals – Visme allows you to export your visuals in any form you want, embed them on your site, and share them directly with your partners.
- Exhaustive Library – Visme has a large number of photos and icons you can use in your design for free.
- Preset Templates – For every visual design, Visme saves your time with simple, knock-out templates to get you started.
- Resources – Everything you need to learn about current trends in design and visual marketing is introduced to you in articles and videos by experts in Visme.
8. Respona
To execute efficient marketing strategies, you need to get on top of building new partnerships. Respona is a new outreach tool that will bring your link-building experience to a whole new level.
With Respona search engine, you can easily find good-ranking websites to pitch your proposals to. This engine implements the SEO filter and tells you straight away which companies are worth your attention.
To begin your outreach campaign, select the sites, blogs, and media pages you wish to connect to. Then, move to the next step – finding out the perfect address to slide your email.
Most outreach specialists use Google search engines and then an app such as Hunter to reveal the email addresses of the person in charge. Respona implements both of these engines and saves you a lot of time.
Finally, when you have your mailing list, it is time to customize the emails and click send. Respona offers you the possibility to personalize each email and up to three follow-up emails. Simply send out the first batch, and schedule the rest.
Key Features
- Upload Your Emails – You can upload the CSV list of your contacts for the campaign.
- Search Engine – Filter relevant contacts to make a new list.
- Extensive Contact Database – Respona has over 400 million contacts to reveal to you.
- Email Templates – Choose your campaign and send out emails and follow-up emails.
- Personalize Emails – Respona software finds the quotes from the articles you selected and helps you make a more personal first step outreaching.
- Organization Solutions – Store your campaigns and opportunities in folders, and optimize your process.
More Help On The Way – [Additional Marketing Tools]
In case you need any extra help to make your teamwork more smooth, here are some additional marketing tools you can give a try:
9. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is another term for efficient teamwork. Make flawless social media coverage with the only marketing tool you will ever need.
CoSchedule allows all of your teammates to automate all processes related to posting and responding to requests. Create the best and most authentic content calendar and have insight into every single activity on all your accounts.
I would also recommend checking out RecurPost, which is a CoSchedule alternative with similar features offered at an affordable price.
10. Sprout Social
With Sprout Social on your side, you got your social media accounts covered. This single tool will help you manage your social presence, customer satisfaction, measure engagement, and keep your marketing strategy on your palm.
With this marketing tool, you will always be the first to know about the upcoming trends and get on top of them before anyone else does.
11. Facebook Business Suite
Business management on Facebook is nowadays easier than it ever was before. It makes us wonder how we could ever live without the Business Suite tool and app.
Organic traffic and Facebook ads are still important aspects of marketing for any company, no matter how big or small. Social media representation is one-half of our brand’s authority. For inspiration – here is an interesting article on New Year’s social media marketing ideas for startups.
With this tool, you can now follow your analytics on both Facebook and Instagram, schedule posts years ahead, and much more.
12. Google Analytics
For any serious team, Google Analytics is a must. Even if you use Ahrefs, Moz, Smerush, or other digital marketing tools, this marketing tool coming from Google is the key to making your major decisions.
Track your engagement, visits, and views. Get precise info on your audience’s demographics and interests. Discover who your potential partners may be, and go prepared for new Google ad campaigns.
13. Biteable
Biteable can create professional-quality social media videos — even with no prior experience! It is an easy-to-use, video-making platform.
This browser-based tool lets marketing teams reap the benefits of professional-grade social media video content without having to invest a significant amount of time and money.
Pro-tip: Video is the ticket to share-worthy social media content. But the most important part of your video marketing is the video intros you have few seconds to captivate your audience before they skip the entire video.
14. PhotoADKing
PhotoADKing lets you create professional marketing materials, social media posts ads, & short marketing videos using their premade templates.
The editor allows you to customize a number of templates, including flyers, posters, business cards, logos, and brochures & pamphlet templates among others.
It helps individual marketers & small businesses to create worth-sharing designs for promotional materials without having to invest much in hiring a professional graphic designer.
15. Postoplan
Postoplan is another great tool to take your social media efforts to the next level.
It uses AI to help you edit images, schedule posts at the most effective time, and manage paid advertising.
In addition to scheduling posts in the traditional channels such as Facebook. Twitter, LinkedIn etc, Postoplan also supports Facebook Groups, Google My Business, WhatsApp, and Telegram. This makes it a unique all-around tool.
However… marketing tools work only as good as the people behind them.
These marketing tools won’t work without the knowledge and expertise of the marketing professionals behind them.
Is your marketing team ready to take your small business into the competitive waters among the big sharks in your industry?
If you are not so sure, an additional thing to consider would be an investment in training programs and courses.
Small businesses can grow only as much as the passion and expertise of the people that drive them forward. And when it comes to digital marketing, SEO is more important than ever. There is no better way to reach brand awareness and attract organic traffic to your website than SEO. The truth is, it takes time and effort to learn Search Engine Optimization and stay on top of the ever-evolving SEO landscape.
So if you are pondering on the thought, here is a list of the top 10 best SEO courses & online SEO training programs that you can choose from to advance your employees’ career in 2021. On the other hand, while your marketing team is expanding their knowledge on the subject, you might also consider outsourcing services from nationally recognized search engine optimization experts. The choice is yours!
Courtesy of:
Nina Petrov (Visme) is a content writer, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. She starts the day scrolling her digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her white little bunny tends to reply to your emails when she is on vacation.