By the time you’re finished reading this another 20 online marketing tools will have popped up to vie for your attention. It’s easy to get lost in the sea of marketing tools, so consider this post as a bit of a life preserver, here to show you the ones worth checking out.

We, of course, recommend a well-made animation video, but here are 11 other marketing tools you can use to help promote your small business.

ActiveCampaign

Everyone’s default setting is “short on time” these days, so if you can automate something, that’s a huge bonus. ActiveCampaign allows you to automate the little marketing elements that take up so much time like emailing, follow up emailing, site tracking and event tracking.

Answer the Public

If you know what it is that your customers are searching for, you will be much better prepared to answer those search queries with content on your site. Thanks to Ask the Public, you can now find out what people are searching for in relation to a given keyword. Simply enter a keyword and this free tool tells you what questions people are asking in regard to that keyword. You can then shape your content strategy accordingly.

Canva

Images drive marketing and this free tool allows you to create magnificent images on an easy-to-use platform that comes with ready-made templates for a variety of posts. You can completely customize everything if you need to.

It features plenty of free photos and graphics, all which resize without hassle, and thousands more available for only $1 a pop. If you want to use your own images and graphics, you can upload those, too.

Facebook Audience Insights

The more you know about your audience, the easier it is to deliver meaningful, value-added messages to them. Facebook Audience Insights provides you with aggregated information about the audience you select, including: geographic info, demographic info and purchase behavior.

For example, you can see how many people in your target audience live near you and what their interests are by choosing your location. You can then target them with content specifically designed for them.  

Google Keyword Planner

If you run Adwords pay-per-click campaigns, then Google Keyword Planner is a must have. Use the Keyword Planner’s search volume calculator to get an idea of how many people searched for a keyword, for each month of the previous year. Combine that with location targeting and you can get a rough estimate of how many impressions you can expect to get for that keyword in your region. These are not 100% accurate, but it will give you an idea of what you could be targeting.

And that’s just one way to use this tool. It has many other amazing features to explore while planning a PPC campaign.

Moz Local

Small businesses with a brick and mortar location need to make sure customers can find that location. This can be difficult if your business has moved, which many small businesses do as they grow.

You can make sure all your listings and contact information are correct and consistent across the internet with Moz Local. Use it to check sites like Yelp and other listing sites and if you see inconsistencies in your business listings, you can pinpoint them quickly and get them rectified.

Moz Open Site Explorer

If you fancy yourself to be a bit of a corporate James Bond, you can enter a link to a competitor’s site into the Moz Open Site Explorer and see what sites are linking to that page. This is useful for discovering new linking sites that your competitor’s might know about that you haven’t discovered yet. Or, you might see they’re getting linkbacks from influential sites and it may inspire you to try and get some link love from those same sites.

Optimizely

Optimizely essentially gives you the ability to A/B split test marketing campaigns so you can ascertain which ones to focus on, and which ones to drop. Their plans are multi-level and flexible depending on what you want to test.

Scre@mingfrog SEO Spider Tool

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is a website crawler that you can download and use to find easily fixable SEO issues on your site. Things like broken links, duplicate content and missing meta data will be a thing of the past with Scre@mingfrog. Crawl up to 500 pages with the free version.

Siteliner

If you’re leery about downloading things, Siteliner works much the same as the Scre@mingfrog tool, but it’s all web-based.

YouTube Director for Business

We all know video is going to continue to be more important in marketing, so the YouTube Director for Business iPhone app will be incredibly helpful to people who aren’t really savvy with their video skills yet. It gives you a step by step process to follow to make impactful business videos.

With over 130 ready-to-use templates, the app tells you exactly what shots you need for each video. It tells you what to shoot, how to frame shots and what to say during those shots. You can also use it to upload videos directly to YouTube. And even though we obviously prefer animation here at WizMotions, we know there is room for all kinds of business videos on the internet. 

Take your marketing to the next level with these 11 tools. Many of them are free or have free trial periods and even the paid ones are completely reasonable.

What marketing tools do you use in your business? Let us know in the comments. And in the meantime, click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much your video will cost. (You don’t even need to talk to anyone!)