Essential Marketing Tools Your Business Needs. And A Few You Don’t.
If you’re like EVERY small business owner I’ve spoken to, you’re constantly assessing if you really need to pay for that marketing tool or if the free version will suffice. Or maybe there is a better tool out there you haven’t tested? Do you even need this type of tool at all?
The marketing technology landscape can feel is overwhelming, with new tools launching every week and promises of innovative AI shortcuts and integrations across every channel. But here’s a truth: you don't need every marketing tool available.
In fact, I’ve spoken with a few other marketing experts who run their own independent businesses and even THEY get by with duct-taping things together with free tools for a while. It’s not a bad thing…it’s a thoughtful approach to how you invest in your business’s growth.
So, what do you actually need? Here are the tools I would consider investing in.
Website Builder and Management Tool
Yes, you need a website. You cannot convince me otherwise.
Your website is your digital storefront, your welcome mat, and the representation of your business online. It serves as the central hub for your digital marketing efforts. A good website builder makes it easy to create a professional-looking site without needing coding skills.
Top Recommendations:
Squarespace: Easy, beautiful, design-focused templates that look professional out of the box. Excellent for creative businesses, restaurants, and service providers who want a polished, modern website without requiring extension customization.
Wix: User-friendly drag-and-drop builder with extensive customization options. Strong app marketplace and good SEO tools. It provides more customization than Squarespace, which is great for businesses wanting more control over their site design.
Shopify: The gold standard for e-commerce businesses. While primarily an online store builder, it also creates excellent business websites with powerful inventory management, payment processing, and marketing tools built in. If you plan to sell products online, skip the others and use Shopify.
WordPress.com: Flexible platform that grows with your business but will require more website backend knowledge to build it successfully. Free plan available, with paid plans offering more customization and professional features. Great balance of ease-of-use and functionality.
Website Analytics Tool
This one is pretty essential to everything you do. Understanding how visitors interact with your website is crucial for optimizing your marketing efforts and improving conversion rates. But here’s the thing…you can't improve what you don't measure.
Top Recommendations:
Google Analytics 4: This is THE Web Analytics Tool you need. It’s not perfect but it’s table stakes. It’s FREE, comprehensive, and industry-standard. While there's a learning curve, the insights into user behavior, traffic sources, and conversion tracking are invaluable. Set it up so it can collect data now, even if you don’t know how to interpret that data yet.
Hotjar: Complements Google Analytics with heatmaps and session recordings that show exactly how users navigate your site. Great for identifying friction points in your customer journey. There are other heatmapping and Conversion Rate Optimization tools out there, but Hotjar has a solid free version to start and it’s more powerful versions are still cost-effective.
Social Media Management Tool
Consistency is key in social media marketing, but manually posting across multiple platforms is time-consuming and inefficient if you’re going to be on every platform. A good social media tool saves hours each week while maintaining your online presence.
Before I get into social media management tool recommendations, it's worth noting that if you're only active on 2-3 channels, it may be easiest to manage posts directly in the platform and skip a separate Social Media Management tool all together. This is especially true if two of those channels are Instagram and Facebook. Meta's Business Profile is actually quite powerful by itself and it's completely FREE. You can schedule posts across both platforms, manage community engagement, create posts for team members to review and approve before launch, access basic analytics, and even run ads - all from one dashboard.
However, if you're managing multiple platforms beyond the Meta ecosystem, need advanced scheduling features, or want more robust analytics, a dedicated social media management tool becomes worth the cost.
Top Recommendations:
Buffer: Clean, straightforward interface with excellent scheduling capabilities. Their free plan covers 3 social accounts, making it perfect for small businesses just starting out. And the paid-tiers are still highly affordable with powerful features like AI assistance and Advance Analytics.
Sprout Social: Premium option with exceptional customer service and detailed analytics. Best-in-class social listening and engagement tools, plus beautiful reporting dashboards. Higher price point but worth it for businesses serious about social media ROI.
Hootsuite: More robust features for businesses managing multiple brands or clients. Strong analytics and team collaboration features, though it comes at a higher price point.
Note: Even if you're not actively posting across all social media platforms, I recommend claiming your business profile on each of the major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and even Pinterest if relevant). This ensures you secure the handle you want and provides credibility when potential customers search for your business online.
Email Marketing Platform
Email marketing remains one of the highest ROI marketing channels, delivering an average return of $42 for every dollar spent. For small businesses, it's your direct line to customers without algorithm interference.
The email marketing landscape in particular has SO MANY options that it's easy to get overwhelmed. The make matters worse, the tool recommendations vary significantly based on your business's industry and specific needs. Some platforms excel for e-commerce (like Klaviyo), while others shine for powerful automations (like ActiveCampaign). So here are the ones I'd recommend getting started with based on common small business needs:
Top Recommendations:
Mailchimp: Perfect for beginners with its intuitive interface, generous free plan (up to 2,000 contacts), and built-in automation features. The drag-and-drop email builder makes creating professional campaigns simple. This is a go-to for small business owners who may not feel the most comfortable in the marketing technology landscape.
Klaviyo: The gold standard for e-commerce businesses. Powerful segmentation based on purchase behavior, abandoned cart emails, and seamless integration with Shopify, WooCommerce, and other platforms.
ActiveCampaign: Best for businesses needing sophisticated automation workflows. Combines email marketing with CRM features and advanced behavioral triggers, though it has a steeper learning curve.
ConvertKit: Ideal for content creators, coaches, and service-based businesses. Excellent automation capabilities and subscriber tagging system help you send more targeted, personalized emails.
Flodesk: Perfect for visually-focused businesses and brands that prioritize beautiful designs. Custom and stunning email templates and simple flat-rate pricing make it popular with creative entrepreneurs, though it has fewer automation features than other platforms.
HubSpot: Excellent for businesses wanting an integrated marketing ecosystem. Free plan includes basic email marketing, and paid tiers add advanced features like A/B testing and smart content. Works seamlessly with HubSpot's CRM and other marketing tools. While Hubspot is great, this tool tends to be used by mid-size and large businesses due to it’s extensive features and integrations…and it’s hefty price tag at scale.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System
A CRM helps you track leads, manage customer relationships, and ensure no potential sale falls through the cracks. Even simple contact management can significantly improve your sales process through personalization and automations.
Top Recommendations:
HubSpot CRM: Robust free tier with contact management, deal tracking, and basic automation. Scales well as your business grows. However, as I mentioned in the Email Management Tools section, this tool tends to be have a heftier price tag at scale.
Monday CRM: Part of Monday.com's work management platform, it offers sales pipelines, contact management, deal tracking, and email automations. Great for businesses already using Monday for project management or those who prefer a highly visual, customizable approach to CRM.
Pipedrive: Intuitive visual sales pipeline that makes it easy to track deals and follow up with prospects. Excellent for sales-focused small businesses.
NOTABLE MENTION: All-In-One Small Business CRM System
If you're a small business just starting out or a solo entrepreneur, you may be able to skip the separate CRM and Email Marketing tools and look for an all-in-one small business tool that helps you track leads, manage proposals, send invoices, manage client workflows and include a personalized customer portal. Many of these tools have automations as well, that with a little elbow grease to get stood up, they can save countless hours in helping you scale your business by onboarding your clients and handling the administrative follow-ups.
The trade-off with all-in-one systems is that individual features may not be as robust as specialized tools, but for small businesses prioritizing simplicity and efficiency over advanced functionality, these platforms can be game-changers.
Tool Recommendations:
HoneyBook: Designed specifically for creative entrepreneurs and service-based businesses. Combines CRM, project management, contracts, invoicing, and client communication in one platform. Strong automation workflows help streamline client onboarding from initial inquiry to project completion.
Dubsado: Comprehensive business management platform that excels at lead capture, proposal creation, contract signing, and payment processing. Highly customizable workflows and branding options make it perfect for businesses wanting a professional, cohesive client experience.
Bonsai: Tailored for freelancers and small service businesses, particularly those in consulting fields. Offers contract templates, time tracking, project management, invoicing, and tax preparation tools. The integrated workflow from proposal to payment makes it ideal for solo entrepreneurs and small teams. Less creative customization available but it gets the job done.
(Daily) Design and Content Creation Tool
Daily digital marketing content creation doesn’t require extensive design knowledge or expensive tools anymore. While I still recommend hiring a talented graphic designer to help you build your brand identity or bring big and bold creative visions to life, modern design tools make it easy to create daily social media posts, presentations, and marketing collateral that look polished and aligned with your brand.
Top Recommendation…yep, only one:
Canva: User-friendly with thousands of templates for every marketing need. Free plan includes most essential features, with Pro plan adding brand kits and advanced functionality.
Adobe Creative Suite, including Adobe Express, is still incredibly powerful for professional graphic designers, creative teams, and those needing precise control over creative elements. The graphic designers I hire for brand identity still use Adobe tools. However, I've noticed that most small businesses can do quite well with Canva alone. Canva has become an incredibly powerful tool, and after its major update in early 2025 that introduced a comprehensive suite of AI capabilities, it now surpasses the Adobe suite for typical small business marketing needs.
Project Management
While having a good project management tool isn’t specific to Marketing efforts, there are a handful of project management systems that help keeps campaigns organized and have many built-in templates for marketing activities to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Top Recommendations:
ClickUp: FREE and highly customizable all-in-one workspace that can handle everything from simple task lists to complex project workflows. Includes time tracking and goals.
Trello: Simple, visual approach using boards and cards. Perfect for small teams or solo entrepreneurs managing content creation and multiple deliverables.
Monday.com: In my experience this is VERY similar to ClickUp. It offers visually appealing project management with colorful, intuitive boards and excellent team collaboration features. Strong automation capabilities and integrates well with other business tools, plus offers CRM functionality.
Asana: More robust features for complex projects and team collaboration. Excellent for businesses with multiple people involved in marketing efforts. Like Hubspot, this tends to be highly favored by mid-sized teams due to it’s robust features and integrations, but the price tag makes it expensive quickly.
Local Listings Tool
While not a “tool” per se, businesses with physical locations or those serving specific geographic areas it’s absolutely crucial to have an online presence across local directories and review platforms. These local directories, like Google Business Profile and Yelp builds local SEO visibility and customer trust. Consistent business information across all platforms helps customers find you and improves your search rankings.
Top Recommendations:
Google Business Profile - Absolutely essential and completely free. Manage your Google listing, respond to reviews, post updates, and track how customers find your business. This should be your starting point for any local business.
Yelp for Business - Free platform to manage your Yelp presence, respond to reviews, and access customer insights. Particularly important for restaurants, retail stores, and service businesses where Yelp reviews heavily influence customer decisions.
Marketing Dashboards and Reporting Tool
I was on the fence about whether to include this section or note dashboard tools as something to skip. A good dashboard tool pulls data from all your marketing platforms to give you a complete picture of what's working and what isn't, which is crucial to successfully grow a business.
Ultimately, I decided to include it on the "worth the cost" list if, and only if, you know how to interpret data (or you’re working with a Marketing Strategist who does), are wanting to make data-driven decisions, and are using a free or low-cost tool. For small businesses, you don't need highly powerful BI tools that are also costly like Tableau or enterprise-level solutions that are designed for large companies. However, the two tool recommendations below are free or relatively inexpensive (especially if you're partnering with a marketing strategist who already has access to these tools), and therefore they're worth the cost. Otherwise, rely on the dashboards built into Google Analytics and your social media tools.
Top Recommendations:
Google Data Studio (Looker Studio) - FREE tool that connects to Google Analytics, Google Ads, social media platforms, and other data sources. Create custom dashboards and automated reports without any cost, though it requires some setup time.
AgencyAnalytics - Professional-grade reporting platform with 60+ integrations and white-label capabilities. Excellent automated reporting features and client-friendly dashboards make it ideal for businesses that need to share performance reports with stakeholders, and the cost won’t break the bank!
Tools You Can Skip (For Now)
While these tools might seem appealing, most small businesses can succeed without them initially:
Marketing Automation Platforms (Advanced): Tools like Marketo or Pardot are powerful but overkill for most small businesses. Start with basic email automation in your email platform before investing in complex marketing automation systems.
Expensive Social Listening Tools: While brand monitoring is important, premium tools like Brandwatch or Mention can cost hundreds per month. Start with free Google Alerts and social media native analytics before upgrading.
Multiple Analytics Tools: Don't fall into the trap of using five different analytics platforms. Master one comprehensive tool (like Google Analytics) before adding specialized tracking tools to your stack.
EXPENSIVE Dashboards and Data-Visualization tools: Like I mentioned above, there are many free or cheap Marketing Dashboards and Reporting tools that provide more than enough features to help you visualize and interpret your data. Don’t invest in costly data visualization tools too early. These can always be added later when your team and your data-driven decision making has grown.
Starting Your Marketing Tech Stack
Mastering marketing basics before adding complexity to your tech stack is key. Afterall, successful marketing comes from consistent execution of fundamentals, not from having the most tools.
The goal isn't to have the most sophisticated marketing technology stack, it's to have the right tools that help you move the needle for your business. Your customers don't care what tools you use behind the scenes. They care about receiving value, and having great experiences. Focus on tools that help you deliver on these expectations. Start small, measure results, and scale thoughtfully as your business grows.
If you’re looking for help in evaluating your current marketing tech stack and choosing which tools are right for growing your business, contact me. I offer marketing consultations that can help you overcome your current challenges and tee you up for ongoing success.
