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For small businesses to survive in the digital marketing space that is becoming competitive by the day, they need advanced marketing tools to boost growth. Creating more awareness, driving high-quality traffic, and generating leads and sales depend on the marketing tools you use. While you may be using marketing tools in your business, it’s important you know that not all marketing tools are the same.
Some move the needle faster when it comes to achieving a particular marketing goal. Let’s assume you are a coach and want to have more potential clients book appointments with you. There are advanced marketing tools that can make that happen. The same is true if you want to automate your social media marketing or create professional videos for your audience.
Sounds interesting?
Then stick around because I have collated 7 advanced marketing tools, some of which I use as a small business owner to boost growth. I aim to introduce them to you and show you how valuable they can be to your business if you decide to give them a try.
1. SimplyBook
This is one of the advanced marketing tools small business owners can use to set up an online booking system so that potential customers can schedule appointments to buy the services they sell. The interesting thing about SimplyBook.me is that it is designed to accommodate all service-based industries. So whether you are an event planner in Texas, a business coach in London, or a fitness trainer in Vancouver, it has all the features you need to get your audience to book an appointment and pay for your service.
For example, you can create your own mobile-optimized booking website and integrate it with your existing website. This is cool because many people use their mobile phones to browse, and it will be a turn-off to them if your booking site doesn’t respond perfectly on smaller screens. If you have a huge presence on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, SimplyBook supports you to accept bookings directly from your social media, including apps you specifically designed for your clients.
You get notifications when clients book or cancel appointments, and have custom features like coupons and gift cards, personalized emails, and Google reviews all to help you generate quality leads that can convert to sales. In addition, you can accept payment via different methods like PayPal, Stripe, cash, or card via its POS system.
2. Adobe
This is one of the most advanced marketing tools I have come across when it comes to creating visuals. If you are a small business that wants to boost your growth with visual content, especially on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, Adobe is your go-to marketing tool. I like the free video editing feature that allows you to convert images to videos for free and edit them with intuitive tools that make it polished, so your audience is interested and engaging with it when it pops up on their feed. You can also use Adobe Acrobat to create professional-looking appointment confirmations for SimplyBook and Calday. More than that, you can create and send contracts using Adobe Sign that clients can sign electronically.
Recently, it launched an AI content creation app that inspires you to create content, schedule, and publish on different social media platforms with ease. And even if you’re a beginner with no idea of where to start, there are plenty of templates for any type of visual content you want to create. Just choose a template, edit it, and customize it to suit your needs.
3. ProofHub
Managing projects effectively is a common challenge small businesses face especially when working as a team. You need to have all your projects in one place while ensuring effective communication and collaboration with your team to deliver on the project.
There are plenty of project management tools out there, but ProofHub offers more advanced features and capabilities. For example, it has features like board views which help you monitor and visualize project progress, identify bottlenecks that can hinder the fast delivery of the project, and also create a unique workflow.
There is a report dashboard that tells you where a project stands and the efforts of individual team members in ensuring the project is completed within the estimated period. I like the custom roles feature that allows you to decide who gets access to what. All these are what make project management easier while helping you deliver satisfactory services to clients.
4. Simplymeet
For small businesses that handle large volumes of appointments, Simplymeet.me is an advanced tool you can use to manage appointments and create a meaningful connection with your potential clients. I like the Admin app that allows you to access your bookings and add new ones. It has client-friendly features that support effortless scheduling of meetings, and also allow your audience to self-book meetings by selecting any of the available times you have set.
It integrates with tools like Google Calendar, iCloud Calendar, Outlook/Office 365 Calendar, and other popular calendar apps. For those clients that want to schedule video conferences with you, Simplymeet supports integration with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet so they can generate video conference links for every meeting.
5. Semrush
If you plan to grow your business with Google, then you will need an advanced SEO tool like Semrush. Many small businesses that don’t have money for paid traffic leverage SEO to drive traffic to their website.
Although it requires hiring professional SEO services and patience to yield results, I highly recommend it. You can start by using the free plan Semrush offers to do keyword research, identify easy-to-rank and valuable keywords for your business, and publish blog posts on them.
It also has features that help you research your competitors and take a clue from the SEO strategy that is working for them. For example, you get to see money keywords they are ranking for, sites linking to them, their monthly organic and paid traffic, etc.
6. SalesCloser AI
Artificial intelligence is helping small businesses automate tasks and actions that lead to sales.
SalesCloser AI is one of those advanced AI marketing tools that help businesses build AI agents that are capable of handling Zoom and phone calls, scheduling, and other tasks that humans do with the aim of potential customers making purchases.
The interesting thing about this tool is no coding skill is required, and it is specifically built to reduce your expenses and increase ROI.
So whether you are tech-savvy or not, you can close sales faster. With this tool, you have less need for customer support agents that add to the recurring expenditure of your business.
Instead of having 5 human customer service agents, you have 2, and you use AI to handle the tasks the remaining 3 would have done. No matter your industry, niche, or field, this tool will boost the rate at which you close sales.
7. Coupler.io
Small businesses rely on analytics to make informed decisions that fuel their growth. If you are looking to boost your business’s performance, you will need a good reporting tool that will help you track important metrics and effortlessly access real-time insights. That’s where Coupler.io comes in handy.
Coupler.io is designed to streamline data integration and reporting, making it easy to gather information into one centralized dashboard. The platform allows you to export data from Google Ads, Hubspot, Shopify, Mailchimp, and other popular business apps to various destinations such as spreadsheets, data warehouses, or BI tools. With its user-friendly interface, you can automate reporting tasks and focus on analyzing data.
The tool also features automatic data refresh on a schedule, ensuring your data is always up-to-date and accurate. Additionally, its data stitching capability lets you combine data from different sources into a single sheet or table, making it easy to join reports, merge survey responses, or unify time-tracking data for comprehensive analysis.
Final thoughts
As a small business that wants to grow at a faster rate, you need advanced marketing tools to move the needle. You can’t outdo your competitors or dominate your niche in the digital space by using the average marketing tool that other small businesses use. I have shown the 7 advanced marketing tools that can help your small business grow faster. Some of them have a free version and also offer a free trial. You don’t have an excuse not to give them a try and see how they can boost the growth of your business.
Author bio:
Chuks Chukwuemeka is a freelance SEO for SaaS brands. He loves writing articles on digital marketing and learning new things about SEO. Connect with him on LinkedIn.