Implementing a successful content marketing strategy is the key to attracting your target audience and maintaining the engagement rate. Whether you’re just starting out or have been kicking around the business for a while, it never hurts to evaluate and see if your content strategy is up-to-date and engaging enough for your audiences. To help you out with that, you need to find the best online marketing tools to manage the wide scope of your marketing demands.

There are plenty of online marketing tools you can use to grow your business, but it’s also important to know which marketing tools work best for your business in terms of helping you achieve your primary goals. If you’re focusing on growing your small business, keep on reading as listed below are the best online marketing tools to grow your business.

WordPress

If you’re at the beginning of building your business’ website and is looking for a web development tool that lets you do everything on your own and is still within your budget, you may need to consider WordPress as it comes in handy in this scenario.

WordPress is a free, open-source content management system (CMS). It’s a popular web development tool for both developers and ones that have zero experience with websites. Although WordPress is initially known as a web blogging tool, it now holds the potential to build an interactive website. Not only this platform is free, but it is also easy to set up and has a user-friendly interface, so there’s no HTML or web design experience required. You can even choose the many options of free website templates that are designed to create an interactive website that suits your business.

However, building a visually pleasing website is just not enough as your website needs Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to make it more visible. And with WordPress SEO plugins, you can easily optimize your site content to achieve higher rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs) through its modification suggestions. 

Google Analytics

When you’re doing an online marketing strategy, you’ll want to know how your work is received by the audience. But how can you know if your website is attracting the right people? Or whether or not the site puts your business's best foot forward? The answer lies in Google Analytics. 

Google Analytics is a free marketing tool offered by Google to help businesses measure a number of key metrics to better understand their customers’ behavior including web traffic, if it’s organic or from other referral links, how long the visitors stay, to how site users’ experiences impact conversion or retention. This data is vital knowledge that can later be used to enhance your marketing strategy. 

Hootsuite

These days, staying on top of your social media game has become one of the vital aspects of business. Not only do you need to consistently create relevant content to connect with your audience, but most importantly, you need to know what type of content works best. This is where social media tools like Hootsuite can be a real game-changer. But when it comes to choosing the right social media tools, remember to look for tools that have the ability to analyze important metrics. 

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that covers the work of a social media manager—planning, scheduling, and monitoring social posts. This tool does not only allow you to manage multiple social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, but also lets you schedule content release months in advance. Hootsuite also provides in-depth views of how your social media strategy is working, which is useful for you to analyze your content performance across all your social networks.

Mailchimp

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies to promote businesses. This type of marketing offers an average Return of Inverstment (ROI) of 122%, which is higher than other marketing types of marketing strategies. To use this marketing strategy, you will need an email marketing tool like Mailchimp that is designed for businesses to reach out to their target market.

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service that allows you to manage your mailing lists to create custom email templates. They even have an automation feature that lets you deliver messages based on who your customers are and how they interact with your business. 

If you’re just starting out, you don’t need to worry about the fee as Mailchimp is offering free service until you reach 2000 subscribers. No wonder this tool was voted in 2020 as TrustRadius’ Top Rated for both Email Marketing and All-in-One Marketing software categories.

Canva

Remember the last time you decided to engage with a brand on Instagram because their visual content looked appealing to you? Well, most of the time, if a business’ visual content is engaging, it gets a click, like, share, or comment on social media. Without the right visual content that stimulate your online growth, your message might not be getting heard. 

A survey conducted by Demand Gen Report finds that 91% of buyers prefer visual and interactive content over traditional format. And since our brain processes visuals up to 60.000 times faster than text, it is only natural for businesses to incorporate the right visuals to help boost attention and retention. But the case is, you just started your small business and don’t have a graphic designer on your team just yet. Worry not, because this is where Canva can be particularly useful.

Canva is an online graphic design software that has a huge collection of templates you can use for marketing collaterals, infographics, and other design products. With Canva, you can easily design visual content without having to download programs to your computer.

Slack

When we’re talking about marketing tools, it’s not only about the ones that will directly help you in generating sales, but it’s also about ones that allow you to easily organize business projects. Because making effective communication is also an integral part of building a successful business. According to PMI’s Pulse of Profession Report, having effective communication leads to a higher likelihood of successful projects. While, on the other hand, the report also reveals that two in five projects fail to meet their goals due to ineffective communication.

When you’re building a team for your business, especially when the situation doesn’t let you see each other face to face, you need a communication and project management tool to keep your (remote) team engaged. This tool acts as the central hub for your team’s internal and external collaborations where seamless streams of communication happen simultaneously. One of the most famous communication tools is Slack.

Slack is a workplace communication tool designed to replace emails. Instead of having a one-off email chain, this tool allows you to chat with your team, as well as share files, privately through DMs or through organized channels (group chat) that are easy to create, join, and search. What makes Slack is an even better communication tool is that it integrates with other third-party applications you’re using, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Asana, Mailchimp, and many more.