Useful tools and resources for small and micro businesses

You’ve got a brilliant product. The next step is to shout it from the rooftops and seek out interested parties. These tools will help you increase lead generation:

1. Leadfeeder: a visitor tracking tool, which can help you see who has been looking at your products. You can then try and find the likely contact within that company on social media to follow up!

2. Sales Navigator: part of LinkedIn, this tool lets you pull together all the people you’d consider to be leads (as they stand on LinkedIn) and monitor their activity without being connected with them. That was you can get to know what they care about and make your first approach more successful.

3. Emailable: type in and verify any email address

4. Typeform: an engaging survey tool that you can customise and add to your site for all vistiors to capture information or contact details

5. Wisestamp: An email signature design tool, you can add in links to sign up pages and social profiles to too

6. Hubspot: Not only are its marketing courses and resources very helpful, but it also provides CRM, marketing and sales tools for free

7. Ortto: Automation of the customer journey for lead nurturing

8. Chummybot: Send automated triggers to your website visitors on key pages to help them stay on or convert.

9. Popupsmart: A simple pop up creator that is designed to flawlessly integrate with your site yet drive action.

10. Outgrow: This clever little company enables you to create a wealth of amazing tools to grab the attention of your visitors and have them giving you their contact details in no time. Create quizzes, calculators and more.

11. Paperform: More than just a form builder that you can match to your brand, Paperform also helps you take bookings and appointments, and take payments (via partner Stripe).

12. Boomerang: a simple scheduling tool designed to help you create email leads. You decide when emails are sent and received so you won’t put off prospects by emailing them late at night.

If you’re au fait with marketing jargon, you’ll probably know all too well that ‘content is king.’ If you’re not the next William Shakespeare or J K Rowling, fear not. Here are some creative tools to help you generate and share exceptional, engaging content:

1. Hemingway: a grammar tool that helps you eliminate complex language, identify errors and make your content readable and digestible.

2. Grammarly: Another tool for spotting errors, as recommended by content writing trainer Claire Winter.

3. Listly: a free platform that gives you access to a plethora of lists. Good for generating content ideas

4. Portent: a useful tool for conjuring up original content ideas and titles

5.  GoodEmailCopy: a handy tool that gives you access to good content examples

6. Medium: one of the web’s most popular blogging platforms that enables you to share inbound content and build your influence

7. Apester: an interactive tool that allows you to create quizzes and fun games to vary your content and make your web pages more engaging

8. Piktochart: a great visual content tool that enables you to design infographics and virtual posters

9. Venngage: similar to Piktochart, great for infographics and there’s a free option.

10. Adobe Spark: a free online and mobile graphic design app to help you Easily create beautiful images, videos, and web pages. Crowdville – the product and service testing company – loves this.

11. Canva: a visual content tool that you can use to create anything from banners to social media images. Kind2, which makes soap free and PH balanced shampoo and conditioner, and Coffee and Kin, which makes compostable coffee capsules, both swear by it!

12. Pexels: vast supply of free stock images

13. Pixabay: free stock image provider

14. Unbounce: design customised landing pages for new startup campaigns

15. Wetransfer: creating a lot of imagery. video and downloadable content? Manage the creation and approval process without using all the space on your mail server by transferring large files via this site.

16. Tinypng: Shrink png or jpg files for social media and content sharing

17. I Love PDF: as above but for pdfs

18. Recordit: Whether you’re producing a product demo or explaining to your team how to do  new process, this tool will record your screen.

19. Storyblocks: For an affordable monthly fee, get all the footage, backgrounds and After Effects templates you need to create incredible videos. It also has an audio and image library.

21. Dissolve: For one off purchases, rather than a monthly commitment, Dissolve will give you the stock footage or imagery that you need.

Once you’ve got a campaign up and running, you can’t rest on your laurels. Analytic tools enable you to keep track of your progress, monitor your performance and see how far away you are from achieving your objectives. In-depth data analysis can provide you with valuable information about specific elements of the campaign and enable you to make changes or improvements. Examples of excellent analytic tools include:

1. Google Analytics: Google’s Analytics tool enables you to access all kinds of information about who is visiting your website, where traffic is coming from, and which pages are most popular

2. HotJar: provides visual interpretations to enable you to track and evaluate user behaviour

3. Userinput: This company lines up real people to review your site and record their feedback on it.

4. LuckyOrange: a useful tool that gives you real-time data related to your site visitors from recordings of their activity and a dashboard of who they are (and where they’ve come from) to polls and heatmaps.

5. Buzzsumo: a content analysis tool that allows you to look at social shares and the popularity of different posts on your website and the pages that belong to competitors

6. Bitly: a free link-shortening and tracking tool that gives you a broad spectrum of visual traffic data interpretations (and you can custom brand the links if you’re willing to pay)

7. SimilarWeb: ideal for keeping an eye on the competition, this tool enables you to ascertain data related to any website

8. SurveyMonkey: got a list of survey participants, prepare your questions on this site and send the link for completion.

A marketing agency for startups will actively encourage you to try and build an email contact list and notify potential customers about your business via this popular channel of communications. If you’re looking to step up your email marketing campaign, these tools will come in useful:

1. Mailchimp: an online marketing tool that enables you to organise subscribers, monitor results and send mail

2. Snip.ly: a handy tool you can use to add a bespoke pop-up link to curated content you send your network to help convert them back to you.

3. MixMax: Find out when people opened and read your emails. Schedule meetings easily with functionality that tells people when you’re free. Apply several signatures. Store multiple email templates. Draft and send later. Email will never be the same again.

4. Klaviyo: email software that allows you to send out customised, targeted emails to up to 250 contacts for free

5. Mailcharts: monitor your competitors’ email campaigns with this sneaky tool

6. Art of Emails: free email template database

7. Really good emails: As above but design ideas.

8. Campaign Monitor: Create and send beautiful marketing emails and then measure their impact with this handy tool.

Getting social can bring serious rewards in the 21st century. To get started, check out:

1. Facebook Audience Insights: You’re not doing facebook properly if you’re not advertising. This ad tool enables you to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests and behaviours.

2. Hootsuite: a hugely popular social media management tool that makes it easy to regulate and monitor campaigns across an extensive network of sites. PR and Marketing agency Unhooked loves this one.

3. Tweetfull: A great way to increase relevant twitter followers is to do tactical following whereby you follow your competitors followers in the hope they follow you back. As it’s a very time consuming process, Tweetfull can do it for you, leaving you time to do more important things.

4. Buffer: Schedule weeks’ worth of social media content on all of your social media profiles at once with this handy and affordable too.

5. Social Bee: This tool does the scheduling for you so you never run out of posts. Just categorise your content and let it do the rest of the work for you.

The top of page 1 on Google has become the holy grail for startup owners. To achieve this mantle, you’ll need to craft and implement an effective SEO campaign. To help you reach the dizzy heights, add these tools to your digital arsenal:

1. KeywordTool.io: use accurate search data to identify suitable keywords

2. Yoast: a free WordPress plugin that helps you optimise your web pages for SEO purposes

3. Google Search Console: a must for SEO beginners, this tool gives you access to a host of useful features including mobile-friendly checks and analysis of site performance

4. Google Tag Manager: a free tool that allows you manage and deploy marketing tags (snippets of code or trackingpixels) on your website (or mobile app) without having to modify the code. The online pharmacy just for men Mens Pharmacy say it’s a must.

5. Diib: a one-stop-shop for your website’s SEO needs, this analytic tool will give you a score out of 100 and highlight areas for improvement

6. Ahrefs: An incredible site for nailing a backlink drive. Find out how to steal backlinks from competitors and rise up the rankings onto page one of google.

7. SiteGuru: This tool checks your website for faults and issues. 

These tools don’t really fall under any of the above headings but they’re very handy for marketing too!

1. Moneypenny: Even if you’re a business of one, let your customers think you have a PA or receptionist with this call answering service.

2. Slack: Hold one on one instant messaging chats or group conversations with your team with this easy to use tool.

3. Asana: a work management platform teams use to stay focused on goals, projects, and daily tasks. This one comes highly recommended by international PR and marketing agency True Six and Calla Shoes, the shoe designer for bunion sufferers.

4. Todoist: Need to get yourself organised but not got a team to coordinate with? Todoist is the bees knees. While it does have collaborative features, the app to laptop synchronicity and easy to enter deadline features make it a lifesaver for those juggling work and life.

5. Toggl: To track time spent with different clients or on different tasks, this app and web-based tool will keep you right. Web design company The Wheel Exists recommended this one and we love it too.

6. Airtable: For creating flexible checklists, organising collections or ideas, and managing customers or contacts all in one place. Comes with templates and you can share with friends and teammates and always see their latest changes. Personal Stylist Tracy Hooper uses this to keep organised.

7. Clear Focus: An app to help you stay focused and be more productive. This was recommended by lifestyle and parenting blogger Sincerely Essie

8. Evernote: Capture and prioritise ideas, projects, and to-do lists, and sync them across all devices so everything you need is always right beside you.

9. Primer: This app from Google gives you bitesize lessons in everything you need to start ad grow your business. And it’s free.

10. Placeit: Take your brand a step further by plastering your logo all over clothing, vehicles, buildings and more. The best thing is you don’t actually have to own a van to do it. Placeit will digitally add your logo to an image of a van and voila! Great for social media imagery.