Digital Marketing Toolkit
Check out our list and reviews of some of our favorite and most recommended digital marketing tools for small businesses.
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Michal Rutkowski
- Marketing Toolkit
Best Digital Marketing Tools For Small Businesses
Over the years, I have used and continue to use dozens of different marketing tools and platforms.
Throughout these experiences, I’ve narrowed down a list of marketing related tools and platforms that I absolutely love. I’ve decided to pass along my experience and share my opinions on these tools and platforms.
*Note, there are many other tools that didn’t make this list, primarily due to their particular shortcomings. This is just a shortlist of the ones that I like the most, or which I think provide the most value or are most beneficial for small businesses. Also note, we may receive a commission if you you make a purchase through any of the links on this page. Nevertheless, these are my completely genuine and sincere reviews of these platforms.
Utility:
- Simplybook – (Online Scheduling)
- Tidio – (Website Chat)
Website
One of the most important digital components for a business is it’s website. In addition to being highly functional and aesthetically appealing, a website also needs to perform well. My recommended tools are based on covering these key areas.
There’s no question that WordPress is among the best systems to build a website on. But to get a WordPress site to be highly functional and visually appealing is no easy feat. That’s why using a WordPress website / page builder such as Elementor is a good option.
What Does It Do?
- Drag & Drop Website Builder: Elementor is a Drag & drop visual website page builder that allows you to build beautiful and highly functional websites without coding.
- Add Useful Functionality To Your Website: It comes with dozens of elements that you can add to any page – such as photo galleries, tables, buttons, maps, and much more.
- Quick & Easy Design: It also comes with a wide array of pre-built templates and sections to make it easy to to create an elegant design with ease.
What I like About It
Over the years, I’ve used countless WordPress page / website builders. None truly come close to being as good as Elementor in my opinion.
- It’s highly intuitive: The second you use it, you realize how easy to use and intuitive it is. To add a section you literally drag and drop. To resize columns, you can drag them to the exact size you want. To duplicate a section, you simply right click and press duplicate. Advanced options are intuitively located and easy to comprehend. Everything just makes a lot of sense, which makes it perfect for first time users or those that don’t have that much coding / web development experience.
- Makes building websites quick and efficient: The feature that I love more than any other is the copy and paste capability. You can literally copy any section or element and paste it to any other page on the site. I can’t stress how useful this is. With most other page builders, to add an existing section to another page is a complicated and tedious process. With this feature, it takes two seconds – literally right click and copy & paste.
- It’s pretty good on page loading speed: The main drawback to using any WordPress page builder is that it has an impact on your website’s loading speed. However, if you just use Elementor out of the box without too many additional plugins & integrations, you can achieve good page loading speeds.
- Tonnes of addons: Elementor has become a very popular page building system. Because of that, a lot of plugins have integrations that work directly within the Elementor interface. Additionally, there are a lot of plugins that offer a wide suite of addons specifically for Elementor. These addons allow you to add much more sophisticated functionality – such as image heatmaps, animated headings, calendars – to name a few.
- Easy to optimize for desktop and mobile devices: At this point, basically all of the major WordPress page builders allow you to edit the mobile version of your site. What I love about Elementor, though, is how you can very precisely fine tune your mobile designs. Going back to how intuitive the whole interface is, you can switch to mobile editing mode and precisely adjust all of the details (margins, padding, font-size, etc.) for every part of the page. Then, you can simply copy the style of one element and paste it onto others, eliminating the need to make fine adjustments to each section individually. Again, this just makes editing your site so much quicker and efficient than other page builders.
What I Dislike About It
Elementor is the WordPress website builder that I recommend above all others.
There are just a few very minor drawbacks with it. All things considered, however, these drawbacks are very minor. When you consider how frustrating it can be to use other website builders, compared to how smooth and seamless Elementor is, these drawbacks are indeed very minor. Nevertheless, I’ll mention them here:
- Pagespeed could get bogged down by add-on plugins: As mentioned, the fact that there are so many third party Elementor “add-on” plugins out there is great for achieving highly advanced functionality. However, the downside of a lot of these add-on plugins is that they can significantly negatively impact your website’s page loading speed. So, unless you’re highly advanced in optimizing page speed, you often need to choose between additional functionality and a speed optimized website.
- Not that responsive to feature requests: Although the platform basically has all of the features that you would need to build a good website, there are some additional features that would be nice to have, that the developers have been slow to implement (you can sift through many Github pages of users requesting different features to no avail). Overall, this isn’t a big deal personally, but just know that the developers generally don’t seem to be as keen to add new features that some users specifically request. With that said, however, Elementor is constantly expanding it’s features – you can see by just navigating to it’s “experiments” tab to see all of the new things that they’re incorporating.
- The prebuilt templates could be expanded: The pre-built templates that come with Elementor are overall pretty limited. For more robust pre-built template options, you need to get a third party add-on like Starter Templates. This again isn’t necessarily a big deal, but it would be good to see some more templates come out of the box with the Elementor platform.
WP Rocket
What Does It Do?
WPRocket is a website speed optimization plugin for WordPress. Simply put, it helps make your WordPress website load faster.
Page loading speed is one of the most important factors for SEO, so having a quick loading website is one of the most important things to have. Some of the functions that the tool covers include:
- Page Caching: Caching is one of the most essential areas that need to be covered for a well optimized site.
- Media Optimization: Optimize how CSS and Javascript files are loaded, including minifying, deferring, and more.
- Advanced Options & More: WPRocket covers a whole range of different aspects and options including database optimization, CDN integration, and much more.
What I like About It
WPRocket has been around for several years and is regarded as being among the best page speed optimization plugins, and for good reason. Some of the things that I like about it include:
- Covers most speed optimization factors: It performs and applies most of the page speed optimizations that you need in one powerful tool.
- Integrates with Cloudflare: There is an add-on that allows you to connect the tool to Cloudflare directly, which can take your core website speed performance metrics to another level.
- Provides a lot of documentation and guides: The tool has a lot of guides and information about every single aspect and function that it provides. This is particularly helpful for achieving optimal results and for debugging if you ever come across any issues.
What I Dislike About It
- Doesn’t convert images to next-gen formats: One of the key aspects for improving page speed is to convert your images to a next-gen format (for example: from .jpg to .webp). However, the tool doesn’t offer the capability to do this, and you’ll have to integrate another plugin in order to convert images to next-gen formats.
- Some functions have stayed long in beta testing: One of the tool’s most effective features in reducing website bloat is its “removed unused CSS” feature. This feature, however, was in beta testing for a considerable amount time, and is still not perfect, as it may cause some minor rendering issues on the site. Nevertheless, if you tweak this function properly, it can provide incredible improvements for page speed.
SEO / Search Engine Marketing
The purpose of an SEO tool should be to provide data to help make informed decisions to improve a website’s organic performance. Among the data that’s needed are things like keyword metrics, position tracking, competitor analysis, and more.
Mangools
What Does It Do?
Mangools is an all-in-one SEO platform that provides the most fundamental information and capabilities that you need to do SEO.
- Keyword Research: You can see how many monthly searches a keyword gets in a specific location; what’s the average cost-per-click in Google Ads; what websites currently rank organically for that keyword; make organized lists of keywords.
- Keyword Tracking: You can track your website and see how it ranks for specific keywords over time.
- Search Results Preview: You can see how the Google search results page looks like for any keyword in any location, both as an image or as a neatly organized list.
- Website & Competitive Analysis: You can see how your website or competitors perform on different SEO metrics and get a breakdown of links that point to the site.
What I like About It
Fundamentally, the most essential functions that you need out of an SEO tool are keyword research, keyword tracking, and website analysis.
Mangools does all of this very well, and more. In addition, some other things that I love about it are:
- Low Cost: It provides all of the essential functionality that you need for a very low cost, compared to other similar tools which are way pricier.
- Light-weight, fast, and responsive: A lot of tools are very bloated and take long to load as you use them. Mangools is super light weight and everything loads incredibly fast.
- Intuitive & Easy To Navigate: Everything just makes sense. There are no redundancies or bloated functions that you wouldn’t need. Everything is well thought out and intuitive.
What I Dislike About It
Truly and sincerely, the Mangools suite of tools is one that I unequivocally love and I believe is perfect for what it does.
Yes, it doesn’t provide the same depth of capabilities for keyword research such as tools like SEMrush or aHREFs.
However, it provides the core functions and does most of what you need to do to make strategic and informative decisions for SEO and SEM.
With the quality of information, super fast and intuitive interface, and at a cost that’s a fraction of competitors, it is truly the most essential tool that I recommend above all others.
Graphics / Social Media / Ad Design
Whether it’s for social media posts or for display ads, creating visual graphics is an integral component of digital marketing. Additionally, tools like social media scheduling platforms are instrumental in helping make social media management more efficient.
Creatopy
Whether you’re making posts for social media or creating display ads, well designed graphics are an integral component of success.
What Does It Do?
Creatopy is an ad design platform that lets you easily create beautiful visual ads and graphics.
- Create graphics for Google Display Ads: Create aesthetically appealing Google Display Ads across different sizes.
- Create graphics for social media: Optimize how CSS and Javascript files are loaded, including minifying, deferring, and more.
- Create animated or static ads: WPRocket covers a whole range of different aspects and options including database optimization, CDN integration, and much more.
What I like About It
- Provides hundreds of pre-built templates: To speed up the ad design process, the platform offers hundreds of pre-built templates that can be used and customized.
- Quick & simple to edit many ad sizes at once: When designing ad graphics, you typically need to create a handful of designs for different sizes and dimensions. Rather than having to manually design each size individually, the platform allows you to insert elements that adapt for each individual size.
- Comes with a lot of creative elements: The tool offers a wide range of different items and elements that you can insert into your designs, including shapes, icons, illustrations, stock photos, and much more.
- Exports to HTML5 & AMP ad format: You can export your designs into HTML5 or AMP format, which is necessary for making custom animated display ads. Beyond just exporting to these formats, it also crops and compresses elements, in order to meet strict file size requirements.
What I Dislike About It
- Designing requires a bit of fine tuning: Although the interface that allows you to create individual layers that are then transformed into different sizes is very useful and effective, it does often require you to tweak each size individually to make the elements display properly.
Publer
What Does It Do?
Publer is a social media post scheduling tool which allows you to create and schedule social media posts to a wide range of different platforms.
Rather than manually posting to each social media profile, many brands and businesses use social media scheduling tools instead. These tools allow you to prepare and schedule posts ahead of time, and they automatically post to your accounts at the date and time that you choose.
- Schedule social media posts: Publer allows you to create and schedule posts to your business’s social media accounts.
- Posts to a wide range of social media platforms: The tool allows you to post to several different social platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more. Additionally, it also allows you to schedule Google My Business posts, which is a feature that a lot of the competitor platforms don’t have and is one that is very useful for local businesses.
What I like About It
- Competitively priced: A lot of social media scheduling platforms come at high monthly costs with lots of restrictions. Publer is priced at a standard monthly cost which is significantly lower than a lot of major competitors. If you want the most capabilities and functionality while paying a reasonably low monthly cost, Publer is an excellent option.
- Schedule different types of posts: In addition to being able to post to multiple different social media platforms, it also lets you post to specific formats, such as Instagram posts, stories and reels.
- Location tags & follow up comments: It allows you to add additional attributes to your posts, such as location tags (for the platforms that support this feature). Additionally, you can do things like add follow up comments, which lets you automatically comment on your posts after a set amount of time, which is a practice that some like to use on certain platforms.
- Adjust posts for different platforms: With Publer, you can create one post and post it to multiple different social media platforms. Alternately, you can take that post, and tweak it for each platform. This is great for making subtle changes so that your post is optimized for each given platform (i.e. by including hashtags for some platforms and not others), without having to individually create separate posts for each platform.
What I Dislike About It
Overall, the functionality and requirements that you need out of a social media scheduling tool are pretty straightforward. For the most part, you really just need to be able to set up and schedule posts to different social profiles. Publer fulfills this, along with many other features mentioned above.
All in all, there really aren’t any drawbacks to the tool in my opinion. It does what it fundamentally needs to do, and additionally has a range of additional features, all at a low monthly cost.
Utility / Business Tools
Simplybook
What Does It Do?
Simplybook is an online booking system that allows businesses to easily take customer appointments online.
- Take customer bookings: Rather than having to take appointments the traditional way (over the phone or through a website form), Simplybook allows customers to make appointments automatically on your website or personalized booking page.
- Create different services and availability: You can create separate services with their own availabilities & time slots, and allocate those services to different staff members.
- Accept payments: The platform can also take customer payments directly, adding greater efficiency and helping in reducing no-shows.
What I like About It
- Allows you to easily manage your services and bookings: A business may have several services that may be available at different days & times and performed by different staff / team members. You can manage all of this easily, by creating different services, adjust their availabilities, and allocate them to different team members. The tool also allows you to be very dynamic. If something comes up, you can easily cancel appointments, or you can block off availability so that others aren’t able to make appointments for the times you blocked off.
- Create a customized layout for your booking page: The tool allows you to create a well designed and professional looking page where customers can make bookings. On this page, you can add various widgets & information (hours, contact info, maps, etc.) to further improve the customer acquisition process. Additionally, you can customize the format of how customers choose their appointment dates and times, from a simple drop down list to a neat table or calendar.
- Embed booking widget directly on your website: If you want to keep visitors on your website, you can place the booking widget directly on any page of your website instead.
- Integrates with other platforms: Simplybook also integrates with the booking / appointment scheduling features of other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business. This then allows you to manage and maintain all of your bookings all in one place.
- Acquire customer reviews on the platform: A very neat feature of the tool that may be overlooked is it’s customer review feature. You can set it up so that after a customer’s appointment, they receive an automated e-mail notification asking for them to review their experience. These reviews are then shown on your business’s booking page. Then, when future customers go to your booking page to make an appointment, they will see all of these past reviews. By seeing these past reviews, this can greatly increase the likelihood that future customers choose your business and complete the appointment process.
What I Dislike About It
Overall, the tool is excellent for what it does. There are only very limited downsides, which are almost insignificant. Nevertheless, some of them include:
- Some customized customer info doesn’t show in notification e-mails: Depending on your business and the services it offers, you may need to collect additional information from customers when they make bookings. Thankfully, Simplybook does allow you to create custom fields and collect any info that’s needed. However, the drawback is that this custom info doesn’t show in notification e-mails, the way that standard information and appointment details do. Instead, you have to log in to the platform to view this info, which may be a bit tedious.
- It’s built-in customer review feature may take away reviews from other platforms: As mentioned above, the tool has a built in feature which prompts customers to make a review after their appointment has been completed, which then shows on your business’s booking page. This is undoubtedly a fantastic feature. However, one potential downside to this, is that it may reduce the likelihood that a customer leaves a review on other platforms. After a customer already leaves a review on your booking page, they may not want to go ahead and leave another review on other platforms, which may be of more importance to you.
- Doesn’t support virtual appointments: One of the bigger drawbacks of the tool is that it doesn’t allow you to create virtual appointments. That is, it doesn’t have the capability of allowing customers to schedule an appointment, and carry it out through video call. Some other platforms on the other hand do have this feature. This could be a drawback if you need to facilitate virtual appointments. However, if all of your bookings take place in person, then this isn’t an issue.
Tidio
For a business, communicating and engaging with prospective customers is essential. One of the best ways to do so is with an online chat integration.
What Does It Do?
Tidio is an online chat system that allows businesses to add an online chat widget to their website.
- Chat in real time with website visitors: When added to a website, Tidio enables a chat icon at the bottom of the screen of your website, which allows visitors to chat with you.
- Enable chatbots: The tool offers a sophisticated chatbot component, allowing automated communication with website visitors.
What I like About It
- Well built interface: The back end of the platform is very well built, with everything that you need being easy to find and navigate.
- Powerful chatbot / automated capabilities: Chatbot functionality is a very important feature of any online chat tool. A chatbot essentially is an automated system that automatically communicates with and responds to customers. This is especially important if an actual person isn’t available to communicate and respond with the customers. You can get very specific and advanced with the tool’s chatbot features. For example, you can have it ask the customer a question, and based on their response, you can have it provide different responses. Or, you can provide different responses or questions based on where the person is located, what device they’re using, and more. This is just scratching the surface, there is an incredible amount of value that a chatbot can provide, and Tidio’s chatbot capabilities are very robust.
- Compatible with Instagram & Facebook messenger: You can connect your Facebook and Instagram pages with the tool, so that you can respond to any messages that you get on those platforms directly on Tidio. This is a great feature which can help organize a lot of your client messaging interactions all in one place.
- Integrates with other marketing tools: The tool has built in integrations that allow you to connect it with other tools. For example, with it’s Mailchimp integration, you can automatically pass along customer info into different audiences, which you can then serve e-mail campaigns to. Furthermore, with it’s Zapier integration, you can connect the tool to a whole range of other marketing tools.
- Provides information on users actively browsing your website in real-time: You can see a list of everyone who is on your website at any given time, and you can even see what page they’ve viewed or are currently viewing. This extra layer of information can help make for smoother interactions, by knowing exactly what the person has viewed or may be interested in.
What I Dislike About It
In my opinion, Tidio’s shortcomings are also very limited and really don’t have any effect on what the tool is meant to do. Nevertheless, some of the very minor drawbacks include:
- List of users actively browsing the site may be inaccurate: As mentioned, having the ability to see who is currently browsing your website and what pages they’ve viewed is quite useful. However, this functionality may be slightly flawed, as often it shows people who are supposedly browsing your site, who actually visited it several hours or days prior. The reason for these individuals showing as current active visitors is likely because they’ve left your website open in another browser tab. Thankfully, the tool does show when the visitor arrived on your site, so you can be certain that the list of visitors that arrived more recently is in fact accurate.
- Limited widget customization options: The tool allows you to customize the look of the chat widget that shows up on your site. However, some of the customization options are a bit limited. For example, you can only change the color profile of the widget to pre-set hues, rather than selecting your own. The drawback of this is that you can’t change the widget’s color to your brand’s colors. For the most part, this is largely a very minor drawback.
