From snail mail to email marketing and from flyers to banner ads - we've experienced a full evolution in marketing and the technology that goes hand in hand with it. Today, a lot of monotonous marketing tasks are simplified and automated. This means that after you create a website, you'll be at a fork to choose from dozens of marketing tools, such as those provided by Wix, to make your business most efficient.
Since the list of invaluable digital marketing tools is far from short, in this article, we've gathered the 40 best marketing tools you can use to maximize your digital small business marketing efforts.
What are marketing tools?
Marketing tools are technologies that companies can leverage to promote their products, goods and services. Most businesses use several different types of technologies for different purposes, such as analytics, improving customer acquisition cost advertising or even social media marketing.
It’s essential that you are set up for success when starting or growing your business, and digital marketing software can help you automate and manage many of the time-consuming manual tasks. By doing so, you’re free to focus on the most crucial parts of scaling your business.
Best marketing tools
Email marketing and lead nurturing tools
With the assistance of powerful email marketing campaigns, you can connect with your audience in a meaningful way. Email Marketing by Wix allows you to create beautiful mobile-optimized emails based on customizable designer-made templates. You can let users know of your online store discounts, events or add value with personalized automated emails, including the contact's name.
To optimize these email campaigns, you will have access to your open and delivery rates, clicks and engagement, so you know exactly which type of content your audience best responds to. A tip to send you off with is to make sure you build trust by using a professional email address with a custom domain name.
02. MailChimp
MailChimp uses marketing automation to enable you to reach the right person at the right time. By curating a path for each customer, you can have different rules like branching points and delays that deliver relevant messages.
The platform recommends automated emails as opposed to bulk emails, reporting a 93% increase in open rates and a 174% increase in click rates when using this type of marketing tool. MailChimp also provides triggering emails like password recoveries or signup confirmation to assist customers when they need it.
03. Marketo
Marketo has a full suite of digital marketing solutions aimed to nurture your leads and customers. If your business has a sales team, Marketo is known to increase sales productivity with their inbound and outbound marketing engagements.
This platform allows you to give reps a prioritized list of the highest-scoring leads to more effectively and consistently improve their sales performance. Another benefit of Marketo is that they have over 500 integration partners, so you can avoid connectivity challenges and enrich your data environment.
Social media marketing tools
04. Buffer
Authentic engagement is key for an effective social media marketing strategy. Platforms such as Buffer let you publish, analyze and engage all in one platform. From a single dashboard, you can plan your content for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
Their platform allows you to work together with your team to plan, preview and schedule your upcoming campaigns. Using Buffer also lets you reply to comments, prioritize important social media conversations, and even get alerted about negative sentiment reactions, so you are always in the know and on top of your social media game.
05. Hootsuite
Hootsuite empowers its users to connect with their audience by keeping an eye on the latest social conversations and trends. They even let you know when you've been mentioned by brand name, even if a social user did not tag your handle in the post, which is great for staying on top of timely mentions and buzz happening around you.
The platform’s social analytics easily tell you what is working so you can do more of it. By seeing the data for each post you can create better content in the future that your followers and potential customers will love.
06. Iconosquare
If you're all about making data-driven decisions, Iconosquare will give you peace of mind when it comes to your social media marketing. As their new slogan says, “Make your life as a social media marketer way easier.” When promoting content in the form of ads, Iconosquare can integrate with it and provide you with analytics on those paid campaigns. Furthermore, their actionable analytics let you visualize the metrics that are most important to you.
Another great aspect of this program is that there is a multi-profile management ability, which lets you manage multiple brands and companies' accounts in one dashboard. This advanced feature is especially valuable for digital marketing agencies and freelancers working with several clients. Iconosquare offers scheduling of posts and videos for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn content via the publishing feature, and the ability to “spy” on your competitors strategies and market with the benchmark competitor tool.
Website analytics and data reporting tools
07. Wix Analytics
Wix Analytics is one of the most crucial Wix marketing tools available for getting information about your website. Every published Wix website has Wix analytics built into the dashboard. There, you can track your traffic and understand where your visitors come from, which days and time are most popular and see where on your site they spend the most time.
An extra benefit of the system is that you can get to know your customers and understand how they are growing over time. Additionally, Wix Analytics offers you personalized suggestions based on your site’s performance, with specific actionable items to boost traffic and engage with visitors.
08. Google Analytics
When it comes to analyzing data for your business in one place, Google Analytics has the digital offerings you need. What differentiates this product is that it gives you access to Google's unique insights and machine learning capabilities. Among other things, you’ll be able to set up conversion modeling, run behavior reports and conduct data visualization.
Other platforms by Google that can also be great for making marketing decisions are Google Search Console, used for understanding your site's search traffic, and Google Trends, one of the best web trend tracking tools available in the market.
09. Kissmetrics
Marketing analytics is the specialty of Kissmetrics. Their online solutions are split between SAAS businesses and e-commerce companies. What sets Kissmetrics apart is that their data is less focused on sessions and is tied to a real person, allowing you to track a user's full customer journey across devices and discover their drop-off points on your site. If you want to know which features on your site are the most valuable, this software will also permit you to do exactly that.
CRM software and digital marketing tools
10. CRM by Wix
No digital marketing toolset is complete without a CRM. What is a CRM? You might ask. CRM stands for customer relationship management, which helps you manage your company's relationships with existing customers and potential customers.
Wix allows you to capture leads and convert them into customers by streamlining your workflow. You can use it to track leads and set priorities to follow up with so that you never miss a lead or a chance for you to connect with your customers. The goal is to allow you to build lasting relationships, which can be done with live chat, forms, landing pages, inbox, contacts, automations and a lot more.
11. Hubspot CRM
The main goal of HubSpot's CRM is to grow and nurture your database. Their different online products offer professional-looking landing pages that the CRM will automatically enrich and track each contact once a lead is submitted.
Furthermore, their bulk emails can get personalized from the contact data based on your CRM. Once you review the analytics of how they interacted with the campaign, you can track trends and drive more conversions.
12. Salesforce CRM
From pipeline and opportunity management to marketing automation and help-desk solutions, Salesforce aims to offer the CRM solutions every business needs. Their products and offerings vary and can be customized for different business sizes. For example, it’s been reported that their small business solutions can scale customer growth by 27% and boost customer satisfaction by 42%.
Salesforce CRM lets you keep track of every interaction, the ones that have already happened or need to happen. The software allows you to filter the contacts in your database to find the ideal prospects and decision-makers within a company. By speaking to the right people, you can get more leads.
Learn more: Small business marketing
Website testing and auditing tools
13. Optimizely
Having a good digital site experience is a top priority for marketers. With this in mind, Optimizely created software that provides the means to run better experiments across both frontend layouts and backend logic.
Their digital marketing tool gives you real-time web testing data so you can make confident adoptions to your business website. A reason to run these types of tests is so you can move and experiment with key parts of your site and optimize for the best performance.
Visual Website Optimizer is there to empower your online performance with A/B testing experimentation designed for growing your business. They pride themselves on measuring the impact of their tests by aggregating metrics such as leading and lagging indicators that can stop bad experiments early on.
Furthermore, VWO's software is friendly for both technical and non-technical marketers, allowing you to launch new experiments in minutes that combine different modes of experimentation. Once you've got some tests under your belt, manage your experiment pipeline in a centralized place. There, all your co-workers can also get access to the status of the tests.
15. Hotjar
Several Wix marketing integrations such as Hotjar are available to you as a user. Simply go to the app market to add it to your site. But why do so? With the power of Hotjar, you can easily understand how users experience your website through heatmaps and behavior analytics.
Heatmaps allow you to visualize user behavior as they show you where users click, move and scroll on your page. Through these insights, you can see what elements attract attention and where users' attention drops and use this data to run A/B tests and observe behavior changes based on your experiments.
Lead capture and conversion business marketing tools
Wix users who use lead capture solutions get up to 20 times more leads. With this Lead Capture tool, you'll gain access to numerous ways to capture leads on your website. You can let visitors reach out to you with the help of a form builder where they can get in touch, subscribe and stay informed. You can also engage visitors and close deals with live chat that lets you communicate with visitors in real-time. By giving instant answers to your visitors, they can more likely turn into customers.
Combining Wix's Lead Capture with the landing page builder will let you publish pages such as events, webinars or ad campaigns and ensure they're a success.
17. Unbounce
Landing pages are essential marketing tools as they can fine-tune the conversion paths and simplify workflows for marketers. Instead of leaving visitors to wander around your site, they can stay on a page tailored to your promotion or product with no exit path. Unbounce’s goal is to enable you to make the most out of your landing pages.
To ensure you're maximizing each landing page's potential, Unbounce has built-in features such as two-step opt-in forms, custom thank you messages, redirects and gated content.
Advertising programs
18. AdRoll
Is it your priority to find more customers for your online store? Then this next marketing tool is for you. AdRoll uses sophisticated audience targeting to enable you to identify those most likely to become repeat buyers and gets in front of them with your ads. You can get your message to a specific demographic but also target them based on interests and hobbies.
But that is just the start. AdRoll also lets you target by context and lookalikes. After you get in front of the right audience and bring leads to your site, the platform has other relationship-building software and features available, including rich analytics and email marketing.
Google Keyword Planner allows you to choose the right keywords to get your Google Ads seen by the most relevant customers. To best research and select your terms, this site will discover new queries by suggesting keywords related to your selected phrase, products or services.
Their research tool also gives you insights into how often certain words are searched and how the searches have changed over time. Lastly, you can get bid estimates from the Keyword Planner to best determine your advertising budget.
Facebook and Instagram Ads by Wix lets you promote your store products on Facebook and Instagram in just a few simple steps. Wix makes it easy for you to create, run and track results from your Facebook ad campaigns in one place.
After you create a Wix account for your eCommerce website, go to your site dashboard and under the marketing tools section, connect your Wix Store directly to your Facebook Business page. Then create your ad, choose your audience, set a budget and hit launch. You can manage your ad campaigns in your website's dashboard and see how your ads are impacting your store's performance and sales.
Video marketing tools
21. Wix Video Maker
Did you know that your site is 53x more likely to rank on the first page of Google if it includes a video? Also, landing pages with video can increase your conversion rate up to 80%. But before spending thousands of marketing dollars on video production costs, consider much simpler options such as the Wix video maker, one of our free business tools.
Wix Video Maker enables you to instantly make a video you can promote anywhere in just 4 easy steps. Whether it's promo videos, product demos, social posts, or something else, a video maker is perfect for telling people what's new, announcing a sale, celebrating a milestone, and sharing exciting updates.
22. Wistia
Video marketing software Wistia, makes it easy for you to find, engage and grow your audience. This platform is known for offering a great viewing experience from anywhere as they provide super-fast high-quality videos. They also have video SEO capabilities that aim to make smarter ads for you on search engines and social media to get more views and grow your business.
Marketers love Wistia because their videos work with marketing automation integrations and heatmap insights. This means that measuring play rates and rich analytics will allow you to better shape your video marketing strategies.
Content creation platforms
Not all social media posts are created equal, so you need to have well-designed social media visuals to promote your business in a professional way. Because we know how busy you are, we have built a platform where you can create effective social posts - even from your mobile device.
Wix Social Media Graphics will step up your visual game by providing you with hundreds of beautiful templates you can freely customize to fit your brand. Choose a background, add your text and use graphics to create a result you're happy with.
24. BuzzSumo
Marketers rely on BuzzSumo to understand what content works best for their industry and product category. Their platform has four key components: discovery, research, influencers and monitoring. While this software does not fall precisely into content creation, it does relate to content success. They hope to aid you with finding out the information you need to be an amazing content marketer.
Wouldn't you agree that getting trending topic ideas, indexing billions of top blog posts, tracking what is happening online and automating your workflow with their API can save you time to produce even better content? We do too.
Communication and collaboration systems
25. Zoom
Being a rockstar marketer also means you're often collaborating cross-functionally or working with a team of some sort. Therefore a communication service such as Zoom can allow you to connect and express your ideas to get more done together.
While Zoom is most known for their HD video and audio collaboration, they also offer chat, phone systems, APIs, video webinars and more. Furthermore, it has built custom solutions and features for different industries such as education, finance, government, and healthcare.
26. Slack
The last thing you do with Slack is slack off. Their business solution is a new way to communicate faster than email, and it's even more focused than chat. On Slack, you can bring your whole team together and sort your channels by projects to make sure tasks are always organized, questions are being answered and important marketing decisions are being made together.
As if that was not appealing enough, hear this - Slack Connect lets you work on projects with other companies, so you can close deals or build something new together even faster.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools
27. Wix SEO
How good is a site that no one can find on search engines? Not very, which is why good SEO is a must-have for every business. At Wix, sites are backed by a solid infrastructure that meets the needs of search engines, giving you a strong SEO foundation to compete in organic search. For instance, Wix SEO gives you a list of customized, actionable items to ensure your site's organic performance is always optimized.
Even more so, you have the freedom and flexibility to customize your site's meta tags, URL slugs and canonical tags so you can influence your SEO results. We also want to maximize your productivity, so there are time-saving features such as bulk 301 redirects, instant Google indexing and meta tags you can use across multiple pages.
28. Moz
Moz provides SERP tracking technology, including daily rank tracking, to always be up to date on how you're showing up to users and when. Their intelligence metrics is a feature business owners treasure because it keeps them informed and organized.
From their all-in-one SEO platform to areas for keyword research, local SEO, enterprise SERP and even an API, you’ll be able to find the specific offering you need to achieve your search engine goals.
29. SEMrush
SEMrush's platform does not just guide marketers with SEO, but also includes a long list of digital capabilities for competitor research, content marketing, PPC and social media marketing in the same place.
Their strength lies in the fact that they can help you uncover millions of national and local keywords, analyze any domain's backlinks, and even run technical SEO audits. Their product is so popular that over 7 million marketing professionals have already used SEMrush, likely because it combines both data and strategy, any marketer’s dream.
Digital asset management
30. Dropbox
As marketers and business owners, you have countless digital files, assets and content that you need to store, share and manage. Therefore using software such as Dropbox makes sense for keeping everything organized, such as documents, cloud content and even web shorts.
Dropbox centralizes your team's content to improve productivity, deliver completed projects and use advanced features such as electronic signatures so you can sign those external contracts faster. Lastly, Dropbox integrates with apps like Zoom, Slack, Adobe Photoshop, Google Docs and Asana to make your work life even easier.
31. Google Drive
Google Drive makes it seamless to store, share and collaborate on files and folders. Their technology is accessible from any mobile device, tablet or computer. What is neat about their collaboration apps is that Docs, Sheets, and Slides all let you work together in real-time with no need to migrate from existing tools. All your work and changes in these platforms are automatically saved, so you never have to worry about losing unsaved work.
Furthermore, Google's AI and search technology assists you and your team to find files up to 50% faster. When you search for the files you need, Google finds it at an unmatched speed and even predicts what you're looking for to find the most relevant content on your drive.
Customer service tools
32. Wix Live Chat
We live in a time and place where we want things instantly, including answers. With the advantages of a real-time communications tool such as Wix Live Chat, you can give site visitors instant service and increase their satisfaction and boost your conversion rates.
Another exceptional feature is that, by downloading the Wix Owner App, you can receive a notification when someone arrives to your site so you can be available to them for support. More than that, you can stay on top of all your chats on the go to not miss an opportunity to close more deals in real-time. Furthermore, you’ll be able to manage all conversations in one place, as you can use your live chat inbox to reply to chats from Forms and Facebook Messenger.
33. Zendesk
Zendesk aims to make customers happy through a conversational customer service experience that is connected across any channel. Their platform lets you customize your customer experience and connect with their CRM platform called Zendesk Sunshine. The company’s software uses AI-powered automations and dynamic workspaces so your team can work faster, smarter and with more efficiency.
But Zendesk’s communication help channels don't just fall under chat, there are also options for tickets, email, phone, help center or communities.
Productivity and project management software
34. Trello
Trello encourages teams to work better together. Their goal is to enable you to reach new productivity peaks through their boards, lists and task cards. Trello says they don't just support you to manage projects and organize tasks but build team spirit by using goal setting and milestone events. We all know how hard we marketers work, it's nice to have a technology that brings us together and celebrates even our small wins.
35. Asana
Hitting deadlines is a walk in the park, thanks to Asana. Their most valuable feature is their ability to set strategic goals and track progress in one place. And because good things take time, there is a timeline feature that lets you build Gantt charts in just a few minutes.
To better manage workloads between team members, a feature exists that lets you see how much work team members have across projects. In addition to giving you the full picture of a project, Asana lets you understand people's workload so you can make the best decisions for upcoming task distribution.
36. Monday.com
Marketers are visual people, and Monday.com is great for easily visualizing your most important data. Their software identifies bottlenecks in real-time, optimizes campaign spend and showcases the success of your team.
The platform makes it easy to communicate in the context of a project, and allows for effortless collaboration with vendors and other teams. Customers have even stated that Monday.com has allowed them to be 30% more efficient at delivering hundreds of campaigns that were seen by millions of customers.
Blogging tools
37. Wix Blog Maker
Are you using a blog as one of your marketing tools? If you’re not, it would be wise to do so. Businesses have a lot to gain when creating a blog, such as increasing their exposure, building brand awareness and driving new site visitors. In fact, companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month than those who don't blog.
When it comes to Wix's blogging tools, you have free business blog templates and a Wix Blog Name Generator, so you can easily launch with a boom. Built-in features include integrated SEO features to increase your blog's visibility on search engines, and the possibility to add multiple writers and editors so your whole marketing team can contribute their creative ideas. And not to forget, there are even options to schedule blog posts for the future to plan your content calendar in advance.
Want more blog topic suggestions? Hubspot's blog ideas generator thinks of ideas for you to blog about so your time can be saved for writing and less for planning. Simply enter 1-5 nouns to get started and press on "give me blog ideas."
Once you sort through the suggestions and have a great starting direction of what you will write about, try to relate the topic back to one of your products or services to best use your blog as a marketing acquisition channel.
39. Medium
To grow your business, you want to make sure you have a good story to tell and people to hear it. This is why you can set your ideas in motion and post your thoughts on Medium. They have a large audience of 170 million readers that can increase clicks and traffic to your site.
Whether it's a standalone piece, a blog or a publication, your work is welcome there. The best part: if you choose, you can get paid for your writing when members read your stories. Also, there is a big creator community through Medium, which can also open great networking and cross-collaboration opportunities for your growing business.
Marketing Tools FAQ
What are marketing tools?
Marketing tools are resources that companies can leverage to promote their products, goods and services effectively and track their progress.