If you run a small business or are thinking of running one, you need to have a set of tools. By tools, I mean digital software and tools that can ease your business growth. Any business in the current digital age needs to rely on many digital tools to even perform its mundane tasks. For any business, you need critical thinking, tools, and a lot of work.
In this article, I will try to list down a set of tools that are must-haves for small businesses. These tools can help you track, manage, and grow your business in an organized manner.
Every tool I mention in this article can serve a different purpose. Hence, I am categorizing the tools into the following major sets.
Branding and Design Tools
Lead Generation Tools
Analytics Tools
Marketing And Market Research Tools
1. Branding And Design Tools For Small Businesses
A. Namelix
This is an amazing tool to generate your business names or project names. It is powered by AI and allows you to enter a few words to use them for generating business names. You can use it for generating your startup/company name. You can use it for generating your product name.
The tool also allows you to filter a lot of settings that will help you get better recommendations. It is truly using the power of AI to its full potential.
Official Website: Namelix
B. Canva
This is one tool I am assuming you must be familiar with. This tool lets you design amazing graphics and images with minimal effort. It includes a lot of templates, design elements, and a massive library of fonts. The tool has a drag-and-drop feature that would allow you to create your designs in no time. So, if you are a business that is not working with professional designers – Canva can come to the rescue!
This tool comes with a free and a premium plan. Honestly, even the free plan provides a lot of amazing features that would be enough for most businesses.
Official Website: Canva
C. 99Designs
This website allows you to connect with graphic designs from across the globe. You can sign up and have your brand designed by professionals. You can ask for a logo design or an entire brand identity pack from them. You start by creating a brief of what you want. You are then connected with professional designers to understand your goal. Only then after work on your project starts.
As many professional graphic designers can design for your brand, there is no fixed pricing. The pricing would depend on the work you want from them.
Official Website: 99Designs
D. Knowem
This tool allows you to check your brand name for the use of your brand, product, personal name, or username instantly on over 500 popular and emerging social media websites. Designing a brand name is not enough if it is not registered with you. You should be aware if that brand name exists or not.
Designing a brand name only to know that it is not available is quite disappointing. Using this website, you can help yourself with a lot of pain and check if your chosen brand name exists or not.
This is a freemium tool. You can check the availability for free. However, if you want Knowem to register the brand name for you, there are charges.
Official Website: Knowem
2. Lead Generation Tools For Small Businesses
A. Lead Leaper
Lead leaper allows you to navigate through the entire LinkedIn profiles and fetch email addresses for you. You can then use the emails for cold reach outs and bulk emailing. Any business can require you to reach out to prospects or leads. This tool helps you to find out their email address along with phone numbers if available.
It has an entire dashboard to manage the leads and prospects you find using it. Moreover, they also provide a browser extension that is quite handy to quickly find emails and pursue your leads.
It is a freemium tool. You get a daily limit of searches that you can use. It is 100 emails free per month. But, if you want to upscale your numbers, you can opt for a premium version.
Official Website: LeadLeaper
B. Adapt.io
The second tool in the list is Adapt.io. This tool works similarly to LeadLeaper. You can use the tool to find the email address and phone numbers of your prospects and leads from LinkedIn.
This tool also provides its own dashboard along with a browser extension to find your contacts. You can also integrate this tool into your CRM and manage it there. They provide a flexible API for this purpose.
This tool is also a freemium tool. You get 100 emails free per month as a limit. Beyond that, you need to check out their pricing models and purchase the premium service.
Official Website: Adapt.io
C. Hunter.io
This tool lets you fetch email addresses from any website you visit. It is not meant to find emails from LinkedIn. The above two tools can help you fetch emails from LinkedIn. But this tool can help you fetch emails and contact numbers from any website you visit. This tool also provides a browser extension for quick searches along with flexible API for your CRM integration.
This tool is also a freemium tool. It allows 25 searches per month. By 25 searches, it means 25 websites. Each website can fetch you multiple emails also.
Official Website: Hunter.io
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3. Analytics Tools For Small Businesses
A. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is hands-down one of the best analytics tools out there in the market. It lets you measure all activities for your online website or application.
You can measure the pageviews you record, the number of online users, active users, the countries from where the users come, and much more. It even lets you record insights into your customer base. You can know how much time a user is spending on your webpage, how they interact with the webpage, whether they click on your links or not, and so on.
For small businesses and startups, the free version of Google Analytics would suffice.
Official Website: Google Analytics
B. HotJar
Hotjar is also one amazing tool that provides you with a lot of key features helping you analyze your customer base better. Apart from the features you will find in Google Analytics or some other tool, it provides a unique set of features.
HotJar lets you
- See user screen recordings about how they scroll and behave with your website
- Generate heatmaps to visually understand your customer insights
- Interact with users through automated surveys and feedback forms as well.
Official Website: HotJar
4. Marketing And Market Research Tools For Small Businesses
A. HubSpot
It is a great tool for inbound marketing and leads management. You can use it to manage your inbound leads along with multiple extra features that make it quite useful.
It includes tons of features such as cold email for marketing, SEO, landing page automation, and marketing automation. Moreover, it has tons of special tools that allow you to utilize your social media for marketing.
The premium version is quite useful for small businesses as well. However, if you are just starting out, the free version may also suffice for basic marketing needs.
Official Website: HubSpot
B. Statista
This is the best tool you can ever get for market research on this planet for now. It has more than 800K records of different companies and their factual data. The data metrics include their revenue, employee structure, their funding amount, and much more.
You cannot get enough of using this tool. By using this tool, you can simply get every information about a company from scratch. All the data is categorized by industry and country. You can put filters and check all companies within a particular industry or within a particular country. You can filter them by revenue share, vendor share, profit, and loss margins, and whatnot!
Official Website: Statista
A BRIEF TABLE FOR ALL THE TOOLS
Branding and Designing | Namelix | Generate business names using AI | Freemium |
Branding and Designing | Canva | Generate graphics and images | Freemium |
Branding and Designing | 99Designs | Hire professional graphic designers | Freemium |
Branding and Designing | Knowem | Search copyright for your brand. | Freemium |
Lead Generation | LeadLeaper | Find leads and emails from LinkedIn | Freemium |
Lead Generation | Adapt | Find leads and emails from LinkedIn | Freemium |
Lead Generation | Hunter | Find emails from any website | Freemium |
Analytics | Google Analytics | Analyse your user base | Freemium |
Analytics | HotJar | Analyse your user base | Freemium |
Marketing and Market Research | HubSpot | Marketing and Automation | Freemium |
Marketing and Market Research | Statista | Market Research | Freemium |