Check out our top 5 paid marketing tools for small businesses! These are just some of the tools we’ve used personally and found very effective and affordable. Enjoy this list of some of our favorite tools and why we like them.

1. Canva Pro

Canva Pro is the premium version of Canva’s design tools. They offer a very user-friendly design suite chock-full of templates, fonts, and graphics. If you upgrade to their pro plan, you get more complex graphic elements alongside a larger collection of stock photos, audio, and video. When you are working with specific branding guidelines, the pro account will also allow you to upload and use custom fonts!

Experienced graphic designers might still find Canva a little too restrictive due to a high level of user friendliness. For more complex designs Adobe Photoshop (seen above) is still our top pick. But the additional templates, stock photography/video, and 100GB of cloud storage for Canva Pro make the $9.99/mo price a great value. By comparison, Photoshop in its most basic form will also run you $9.99/mo, but without any of the extra templates, fonts, or stock photography, and has a considerably steeper learning curve. Either way, having a solid content creation tool is a must for small businesses.

2. Plausible Analytics

Plausible is an open-source, privacy-centric alternative to Google Analytics. Don’t get us wrong, Google Analytics is a MUCH more powerful tool when it comes to actually analyzing data. But for many clients and situations, the level of data provided by Plausible is perfectly useful.

Plausible provides a simple, clean dashboard that offers up the most common web analytics people are looking for. There is no need to create custom reports or dig through layers of navigation; consequently, the script that you add to the code of your websites is much smaller than Google Analytics. This means your page will load faster! As an open source, privacy-centric analytics tool, you and your user’s traffic data is not shared or sold, as with Google. The downside? It isn’t free like Google Analytics. Plausible starts at a quite affordable $6/mo for 10k views or less, which still makes it a great option for a small business or someone looking to have more control over their privacy.

3. RivalIQ

RivalIQ is a social media analytics tool. The service offers data insights to help you plan your social strategy. Their advantage is their “Competitive Landscapes,” dashboards that aggregate social media performance data and updates from your competitors in one spot. This allows you to benchmark your social media performance, pick up new tips and strategies, stay on top of social trends through social listening, and compare your posts and stories. 

RivalIQ is a very powerful tool for social media managers looking to take their performance to the next level. The main value of the service is the power it gives you to strategize–being able to see your competition’s top posts, hashtags, bio updates, engagements, and more from a bird’s-eye view. This is a unique perspective that would normally take a ton of research. RivalIQ starts at $199/mo for 5 companies worth of tracking (which includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin analytics). 

4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a post scheduler and social media planner. It helps you save time by scheduling multiple posts on multiple social accounts simultaneously, as well as manage messages and engagement all from the same spot. Some of our favorite features are Hootsuite’s numerous learnings, webinars, and templates available. We also like that you can schedule unlimited posts. They truly are a one stop shop for developing a robust social media presence. Hootsuite starts at $49/mo (there is a limited, free account if you want to try it, though).

Depending on your needs, Buffer is an alternative we also recommend. It has a more robust free plan, along with a much less expensive $15/mo entry level offering. Buffer doesn’t offer the same level of education and support that Hootsuite does, but might be more appropriate for smaller or lower-volume social media needs. 

5. Mailchimp (Essential plan)

Mailchimp has been around now for 20 years, so they must be doing something right. They are an e-mail marketing platform offering a nice variety of tools and automations. They offer a wysiwyg and/or code based editor so you can design your own e-mail templates, or choose from one of their ready-made designs. Their tools allow you to create newsletters, marketing e-mails, transactional/reminder e-mails, and more. You can even use their editor to create basic websites and landing pages! Mailchimp integrates with many tools and platforms. Since they have pedigree, we’ve personally found less of our e-mails hit the spam folders when sent through Mailchimp as opposed to some of the other options out there. 

Mailchimp DOES have a free tier (you can check out our top FREE marketing tools list here), but unfortunately you aren’t able to schedule e-mails in advance so it isn’t all that helpful. Also, their advanced customer journey features are locked behind a second paywall. But overall, the features and reliability of their “Essentials” plan (starting at $9.99/mo) is our top pick for a small business marketing tool.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed some insight into some of our favorite paid marketing tools for small businesses. If you are a small business or professional looking for marketing help, consider hiring a small business digital marketing agency like INGKY! We will leverage our tools and experience to do the marketing for you, so you can focus on running your business. Check out what we do, and if you’re interested in a free quote, contact us today!