21 Free Marketing Tools for Small Business: 2023 (UPDATED)

The biggest challenge for Small businesses is visibility and acceptability, coupled with competing with the giant and midsized market players. Traditionally small business has relied on word of mouth marketing and repeat customers, but now in 2021 if a small business is not marketing themselves efficiently online, the chances are they will struggle to survive.

Enter online marketing tools for small businesses.

There is a storm of thoughts that cross our mind before we even begin with online marketing; What will be the budget, How much it’s gonna cost me? Is it worth investing online? How will I ever measure its success?.. the list is endless

Here are some tools that you can invest in as a small business owner without burning your bank account

Online Business Listings and Profiles Tool for Small Business

1. Google My Business

A free and simple tool by Google to list business entity online and build visibility in Google Maps and Google Search in your local, plus outstation community. Apart from showcasing your listing, you can

• Create a free website
• Give product and pricing details
• Contact your customers and reply to reviews
• Measure and Optimize engagement levels of your business by tracking insights

An optimized profile on GMB (Google My Buisness) a good way to rank higher in google search results. By adding attractive product/service pictures, videos, updating visitors about special offers, etc. you can bring life to your Google business page.

2. Bing Places for Business

Just like Google my Business, Bing Places for business is offered by Microsoft and you can list your business by creating a free business profile, share important updates, promote products and services, message your customers. Follow these simple steps to your you small business on Bing

• Claim your small business
• Complete your small business’ profile
• Verify your small business listing

3. Facebook Page/ Groups

The most important social profile is by far Facebook, as a small business owner, you cannot miss having a business page under the right business category. Creating a Facebook page or groups will help you connect with your audience easily and give them instant updates. Maintaining an active business profile is necessary to get the best out of the Facebook audience. You can

• Create Business Page/Groups
• Give Business details
• Upload Pictures/ videos/
• Run promotion (paid)

4. Twitter

The art and science of 140 characters are your bet if you can match up to its aggression. Quick updates, hashtags, defines the Twitter audience who is constantly on a lookout for new stuff. There are 330 million monthly users on Twitter and hold a big opportunity for small businesses.

5. Manta

Manta is a great platform aimed to help millions of small businesses get found by more customers. As a verified small business owner on Manta, you can look out for your target customers. There are a variety of services offered by Manta like local search optimization, social media assistance, to help your business get found online.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Business

Interacting you your audience is important for any business to gain customer trust. Social media can make your work easy by reaching out to customers in seconds who is not even located in your geographical region. But managing these social media channels is a challenge in itself, especially if you are maintaining a profile on more that one social network. Here are a few tools to swiftly manage your social media presence.

6. Google Alerts

Again a free tool by Google that sends notifications in your email when there is content doing rounds on the web about your small business venture or products or services that are specific to your business. You just need to create email alerts about the topics/ your business and subscribe to it. You can select the geographical region that you want updates from and also set frequency of mail alerts.

7. Hootsuite

Though its paid tool but has some freemium version to it as well. With the free version, you’ll have limited access to this social media post management tool to update your multiple profiles in one go. You can schedule your posts and track engagement with Hootsuite insights.

8. If This Then That – IFTTT

Personally its one of my favourite tools. It is a free web-based service to create chains of simple conditional statements as the name suggests, called applets. You can pair various devices, applications and get notified for all the actions about your small business venture.

9. Buffer

Buffer can help you organize your small businesses by scheduling posts on various social networking platforms. It is again a freemium tool, with a limit of 10 posts for each social network with its free version. You can choose to upgrade to paid version for the additional feature set like analytics.

10. TweetDeck

With the rise of Twitter rose TweetDeck 🙂 a very powerful tool to manage your Twitter profile and give all the information in one screen, Twitter timeline, mentions, direct messages, lists, trends, favourites, search results, hashtags, or all tweets by or to a single user. You can give your followers a personalized experience, manage your tweets and followers list very efficiently with TweetDeck.

Content Marketing Tools for Small Business

11. WordPress

The most powerful content management system for any business is WordPress, period.

Both big and small organization use WordPress and swear by its ease of use and user-friendly interface, even a layman can grasp WordPress just by looking at it for a few minutes.

60% of the CMS market share and 30% of world’s websites is ruled by WordPress, and by knowing these numbers, it should come not come as a surprise that Growth Veda also runs on WordPress 🙂

12. Grammarly

I swear by this tool. Grammarly can save you a lot of embarrassment while writing content. It corrects your vocabulary, sentence formations, capitalization, tenses, in toto; its everything that our English grammar teacher taught us but we failed to apply in our writing 😀

Small businesses can benefit from Grammarly and make it an integral part of content editing. There are more features with the paid version but a free version gives you a decent feature set to get your content right.

13. Canva

Canva is free editing software that can help you make attractive posters, banners, and all sorts of graphics. As a small business owner, you can amp up your design game and make awe-inspiring illustrations and displays for your website, articles, and social media.

The free version of Canva comes with a lot of preloaded design templates, and you’ll never fall short of ideas and enhance your design skills in no time once you have a grasp of Canva.

However, with Canva Pro you can supercharge your team’s productivity and creativity with everything they need to produce professional content, collaborate effortlessly and achieve their goals faster.

Canva Pro also comes with a 30-day FREE TRIAL

14. Hubspot Blog Topic Generator

An attractive headline is the first way to enter the mind of a reader. Hubspot offers a free blog topic generator that can give you headline suggestions as per the keywords entered by you. Plus you can use it for content idea generation as well.

14. Pexels – Free Stock Photos

With an array of free stock photos, Pexels is a tool that you cannot afford to miss. Free stock photos from Pexels can be used as creatives for your website, blogs, and social media.

You even have the option to download it at the size that you need it.

All images are high resolution and of the best quality. You can even visit the photographer’s profile and view their images, stats, and total downloads and even choose to donate them. Needless to say, most pictures in this article are from Pexels.

Email Marketing Tools for Small Business

15. MailChimp 

Email marketing technology is used by more than 80% of B2B and B2C companies. Implementing an engaging email marketing strategy is critical for the success of businesses.

You can create/ add email lists, create beautiful marketing emails, and track the activity of your campaigns like open rate, link click rate, active subscribers, unsubscribed members, etc.

With Mailchimp free plan you can have a 2,000 subscribers list for 12,000 emails per month. And for small businesses gathering an email list of 2000 subscribers will take some time, so till then enjoy the best email marketing software for small businesses.

16. MailJet

With the free version of MailJet you get

• Unlimited Contact
• Full API Access
• Advanced Email Editor
• Advanced Statistics
• 6,000emails/month with 200 emails/day

Just enough for small businesses

17. Sumo

Sumo is the host of huge marketing automation tools for businesses. Its email list building tool can help your business to collect emails from your website visitors. With the free version of sumo list builder you get

• 200 Subscribers
• Basic Email Integrations
• Pro Design Tools

Search Engine Optimization Tool For Small Businesses

18. Google Analytics

Your technical SEO cannot afford to miss Google Analytics. A free and powerful tool by Google is mostly considered to be an analysis tool by many, but if used from an SEO perspective it leverages your marketing strategy by helping you identify your most valued organic keywords or the best traffic source channel to your website or service page, user behaviour on the website, and more valuable metrics

Installing google analytics is the first thing that a business owner can do in order to collect all the valuable information from day 1 of the website launch.

19. Google Search Console

Again a free tool from Google, it provides webmasters to check indexing status and optimize the visibility of their websites. With reports about indexing status, search queries, crawl errors and penalties, you can dive deep into fixing the technical SEO of your website as a small business owner.

20. Yoast SEO Plugin

Your WordPress website will be incomplete if it does not have the Yoast SEO plugin installed. Installing and configuring Yoast on your WordPress site can help you gain higher search rankings, it will prompt you to make all necessary changes and highlight improvements that can be done on the page.

21. MozBar

To gain visibility into the SEO health of a website MozBar is a great tool. Install it as your browser extension and see the domain and page authority of websites in your niche, and your competitors for free.

To make sure that digital marketing is working for small business owners it is necessary to do it in the right way. The tools above will help your marketing automation and give your business a boost that it needs.

Did you use any of the tools above, or would like to recommend more that do share in the comments section below.

Bonus Tool For Small Businesses: Messaging & Chatbot

22. Mobile Monkey

MobileMonkey will connect you to your customers with automated website chat, SMS and Facebook. It will allow you to

• Create Chatbots
• Interact with your customers with ease and without spending much time on replying to every message with automation
• Segment your audience and design your marketing plan strategically
• Grow your contact list and drive more conversions

And much more value add features to amp up your game!

MobileMonkey is the only platform that allows marketers to make Facebook ad bots, SMS bots, and native webchat bots in one place.

It’s the fastest-growing free Facebook Messenger marketing platform. MobileMonkey makes marketing automation for the Facebook Messenger channel really straightforward.

There is a free version for using MobileMonkey and it also offers a free trial.

P.S: I will be adding more to the list. Stay tuned for more updates. Cheers…!!!!