SEO
20 Marketing Tools for a Small Business & Their Best Feature

There are thousands of marketing tools, but only a few fit the bill for small businesses. Some you may already know; others you should consider using.
We’ll outline how to use the best feature of each tool so that you can get started on delivering some real marketing success today.
Sounds good? Let’s get into it.
Google Analytics is a free tool that provides a 360-degree view of the performance of your website.
It is suitable for tracking sales, conversions, the best source of visitor traffic, how people interact with your website, and insights into your audience.
The mobile app provides these reports instantly in the palm of your hand.
With Google sunsetting the old version of Google Analytics, here’s a beginner’s guide to setting up GA4.
Pricing
How to view monthly comparison reports with Google Analytics
Follow these steps:
- Download the app on App Store or Google Play
- Log in and select your property
- Select the date range in the upper left
- Select month > Last 30 days > Compare > Preceding period > Save
This view ensures you compare all metrics with the previous time period.
Intercom is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps businesses build, automate, and scale customer relationships. It includes email marketing, chatbots, social media management, and CRM features.
Intercom is suitable if you’re looking to answer visitors’ questions via live chat, keep them interested in your products or services, and turn them into customers.
Pricing
- Price range: from $74 per month
- Free tier: yes
How to use it
- Select Operator
- Select Qualification
- Choose data fields
- Add response rules
ConvertFlow is an online marketing platform that helps you convert website visitors using CTAs, landing pages, forms, quizzes, surveys, and personalization.
It is suitable for most websites, including e-commerce, service, and software businesses.
According to Statista, e-commerce conversion rates vary between 0.6% and 5.5%—or expressed differently, around 94% of website visitors leave without taking any action.
You can use visitor segmentation to help you identify who visits your site, ask them one or two questions to determine what they’re interested in, and provide them with a CTA to encourage them to enter your sales funnel.
Pricing
- Price range: $0–$300 per month
- Free tier: yes
How to use visitor segmentation and a CTA
Before getting started, ensure the ConvertFlow script is added to your website’s <head> section.
- Add your website
- Go to Dashboard
- Create a CTA
- Choose a template, e.g., visitor segmentation, sticky bar, pop-up
- Preview and use template
- Name it and create CTA
- Customize
- Add a form to step #2
- Connect step #1 to step #2 using confirmation actions
- Save, publish, and preview
- Launch


ConvertKit is an easy-to-use online marketing platform that helps small businesses and individuals grow their audiences using email marketing, forms, and landing pages.
Its landing page feature works well for small creative businesses, such as those run by marketers, coaches, writers, etc.
Pricing
- Price range: $15–$2,599 per month, depending on the number of subscribers
- Free tier: yes
How to use it
To use the landing page feature, follow these steps:
- Grow > Landing Pages > Create New
- Landing Page
- Filter by Profile
- Choose any profile template
- Click each component and customize
- Click Publish and add to your social media profile or embed the page in your WordPress site
https://youtu.be/g6fy9ixlDAs?t=88
Calendly is an online scheduling tool that allows business owners to create appointments, meetings, and events, send invitations, and manage bookings.
Calendly is ideal for those who provide professional, IT, recruitment, beauty, and marketing services.
Pricing
- Price range: $0–$20 per user, per month
- Free tier: yes
How to use it
- Log in
- Create > Event Type
- Create a one-on-one or group event
- Provide event name, location, and instructions
- Set the event date, time, and schedule
- Set additional options such as invitee questions, workflows, notifications, and confirmation page
- Turn the event on
- Select Account > Share your links > Choose the option to email or embed on your website
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd8qzy0UUXc
Revue is an editorial newsletter service owned by Twitter itself.
Connecting Twitter with Revue is suitable for any business that wants to encourage users or followers to subscribe to its additional content by clicking its profile and the “subscribe” button.
Pricing
How to use it
- Sign in to Revue with your Twitter login
- Select Account Settings > Integrations > Connect Now (under the Twitter logo)
- Click Create and write out a subject line for your first newsletter
- Copy/paste or write the body copy of your email newsletter
- Preview it
- Schedule it
- Share it
- Repeat steps #4 to #8
📣 We’ve got big news. (You’re really going to like this.)
Starting today, your followers can subscribe to Revue newsletters directly from Tweets in their timeline.
This is already enabled for all Revue writers on desktop and mobile web, with iOS and Android to follow soon. ✨ pic.twitter.com/6eBxvGWyxH
— Revue (@revue) October 22, 2021
TryInteract is an interactive marketing tool that helps you create online quizzes that generate new subscribers and leads, segment your audience, and drive website traffic.
TryInteract is best suited for those building brand awareness or have pages with less commercial intent that don’t get any conversions.
Pricing
- Price range: $29–$209 per month
- Free tier: no
How to use it
- Create New Quiz
- Select a category from the filter
- Hover over template > Preview > Use Template
- Customize the quiz color
- Change the quiz questions and answers
- Click the Lead Generation option to connect quiz respondents and answers with your CRM or marketing platform
- Choose Publish
- You can share the quiz link in an email campaign, in a social post, or as a website post or announcement bar
Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer identifies millions of keywords and topics, their ranking difficulty, and their traffic potential.
It is suitable for small businesses that wish to find and target low-competition and easy-to-rank opportunities that drive more organic search traffic.
Pricing
- Price range: $99–$999 per month
- Free tier: no
How to use it
This involves quite a few steps and requires an understanding of some concepts and metrics. Your best bet is to follow this step-by-step video tutorial:
Calculoid lets you build and add calculators to your website with little technical know-how.
Its calculator templates suit businesses that require custom quote forms.
Pricing
- Price range: $0–$99 per month
- Free tier: yes
How to use it
- Open Keywords Explorer
- Search for “calculator”
- Go to the Matching terms report and apply filters (words related to your business, KD, etc)
- Get relevant ideas for calculators
- Sign in to Calculoid
- Create a new calculator
- Choose a relevant template
- Customize the fields and calculations
- Add submission form (if you wish to capture leads)
- Publish to your webpage using the embed code or WordPress plugin


Ahrefs’ Content Explorer is a search engine containing billions of pages, all with SEO and social metrics.
The Content Explorer feature is suitable for small businesses that wish to earn backlinks without investing in email outreach campaigns.
Pricing
- Price range: $99–$999 per month
- Free tier: no
How to use it
- Use this report link or go to Content Explorer, enter
keyword AND (“statistics” OR “checklist”)
, and select “In title”; remember to replace “keyword” with a seed keyword - Sort by Referring Domains
- Select Exclude Homepages
- Use any other filters, e.g., I filtered by DR 20–30 and found 111 referring domains to an “SEO checklist for lawyers”
- Identify a common theme among pages
- Create page content containing the most frequent statistics or checklist items (refer to Canva checklist instructions below)


Trello is a project management platform similar to Basecamp or Asana. It lets you create boards with lists, add cards to those lists, assign tasks to other users, track progress, and collaborate with others.
It is suitable for anyone who manages or is involved in digital marketing or SEO campaigns.
Pricing
- Price range: $0–$17.50 per user, per month
- Free tier: yes
How to use it
- Register or log in
- Create a new board
- Customize the board
- Add colleagues or clients
- Build a workflow
- Add tasks and to-do items
- Set deadlines
- Repeat for the next project
Canva is an online tool where you can create images without being a graphic designer.
The Content Planner tool from Canva allows you to create and schedule posts ahead of time for your social channels from within its design platform.
This is ideal for companies that want to repurpose their website content or simply grow their social media presence.
Pricing
- Price range: $0–$12.99 per month
- Free tier: yes
How to use it
- Go to Canva Content Planner
- Press “+” next to a date
- Select a graphic you have already created or create a design
- Choose a destination, e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc
- Write a caption
- Schedule post
- Repeat
https://youtu.be/ebqqPnMEZwk?t=328
Microsoft Clarity, similar to Crazy Egg and Hotjar, is a free online tool that helps you analyze, understand, and improve your site performance and user experience using heatmaps and user recordings.
It helps website owners understand how users found their websites, what they did, what they did next, and why they left the website.
Pricing
How to use it
- Sign up or log in
- Go to settings, copy the code, and add it to your website’s <head> section
- Leave for a few days until data has been collected and return to Clarity
- Look at the heatmaps of top pages and see how far users scroll down the page or compare different page versions and see how users scroll and click
- Share with your web team or developers and ask them to implement solutions to any identified problems


Grammarly is an online grammar checker, spell checker, and plagiarism detector; it can also help with your writing style, sentence structure, and word choice.
Grammarly is useful for people who want their website copy to be clear and well written.
Pricing
- Price range: $0–$12.50 per user, per month
- Free tier: yes
How to use it
- Create a Grammarly account or log in
- Select Apps
- Click the Chrome Store link and install the extension
- Click the icon in your browser and change the settings to suit
- Go to the program where you have written your content
- Click the icon and action the suggestions


Wordable is a tool that allows you to export your content created in Google Docs to your WordPress or HubSpot website, which has saved Ahrefs a ton of time.
– Do you write your content in Google Docs?
– Does your blog run on WordPress?
I hope you’re using @wordable_io 🔥 then, because if not – you’re sesiously missing out.
Our content team at @ahrefs has been using this tool for at least 2 years now and it SAVED US TONS OF TIME!
— Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 (@timsoulo) January 13, 2022
It is suitable for anyone who regularly produces and publishes blog posts and articles.
Pricing
- Price range: $49–$999 per month
- Free tier: no
How to use it
- Log in and connect to Google Docs
- Connect your website
- Import and export your documents
✅ Clean HTML, remove <span> & <font> tags
✅ Auto Table of Contents anchor ID links
✅ Resize, compress, and upload images
✅ Optimize image file names & alt text attributes
✅ Nofollow and/or open links in a new tab
✅ Bulk exports in 1-click
✅ https://t.co/rz0qsumZ4t pic.twitter.com/FqxDwtuyMu— wordable (@wordable_io) May 6, 2022
Otter.ai records and transcribes audio conversations and meetings on your desktop or mobile device by using artificial intelligence.
Interviewing and recording customer interviews have helped me write better copy for the customers’ service pages.
Otter.ai provides better playback and editing features than “voice typing” with Google Docs; you can press the “play” button to listen back and edit any copy errors.
Pricing
- Price range: $12.99–$30 per month
- Free tier: yes
How to use it
- Log in or register
- Select Record
- Press the “stop” button when you are finished
- When the conversation is processed, press the “play” button to listen back and edit any copy errors
Google Forms is a useful, free tool for creating survey questions and distributing and analyzing your survey results.
Pricing
How to use it
You’ll need a good-sized audience, such as your email list or social media following.
Let’s say you want to survey others about Google Ads. Here’s what to do:
- Create a Google Form with your questions
- Include fields for the respondent’s name, email address, website, social addresses, and questions you want to ask
- Send the Google Form to your social account or email list
- Analyze your responses


Canva has hundreds of predesigned checklist templates you can customize for your customers (without being a design expert).
Pricing
- Price range: $0–$12.99 per month
- Free tier: yes
How to create a linkable asset with Canva
- Visit Canva templates here or here
- Use the filters to find a template and open it up
- Add your checklist items and descriptions
- Change the colors and fonts to match your brand
- Download, share with customers, or add to your webpage


A large part of Ahrefs’ success has been attributed to our educational content.
Our training academy features courses on using Ahrefs, how to grow your traffic, SEO training, and the best of our YouTube videos.
In total, we have over 20 hours of educational content.
Pricing
How to do it
- Upload your video to your YouTube account
- Design and add your thumbnail to your video (use a Canva template)
- Press the “share” button underneath the video
- Copy the link or the embed code
- Add to your webpage


BrightLocal provides a suite of online marketing tools for local businesses that help them rank high on local search results, deliver accurate business information, and generate and manage customer reviews.
The reputation management feature is suitable for any business with a multi-channel presence that wants to generate more positive reviews of its products, services, and brand.
Pricing
- Price range: $8–$79 per month
- Free tier: no
How to use the reputation management feature
- Customize your template
- Set up email and SMS that go to customers asking for reviews
- Add review sites, e.g., Google My Business, Facebook, BBB, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Yelp, Trustpilot, etc
- Import customer details and send email/SMS to ask for a review
- Create a list or carousel widget and add it to your website to display all reviews
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G9BLDVAXHg&t=1200s
Final thoughts
We’ve chosen ways to help you improve your marketing game; pick the marketing tools that work for you and use our suggestions to implement their best features.
Got any questions about using these tools? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
How We Used a Video Course to Promote Ahrefs (And Got 500K+ Views)

Creating and selling educational courses can be a lucrative business. But if you already have a product to sell, you can actually use courses as a marketing tool.
Back in 2017, about two years after joining Ahrefs, I decided to create a course on content marketing.
I had a very clear understanding of how an educational course would help me promote Ahrefs.
- People like courses – Folks like Brian Dean and Glen Allsopp were selling theirs for $500 to $2,000 a pop (and rather successfully). So a free course of comparable quality was sure to get attention.
- Courses allow for a deeper connection – You would basically be spending a few hours one on one with your students. And if you managed to win their trust, you’d get an opportunity to promote your product to them.
That was my raw thought process going into this venture.
And I absolutely didn’t expect that the lifespan of my course would be as interesting and nuanced as it turned out to be.
The lessons of my course have generated over 500K+ in total views, brought in mid-five-figures in revenue (without even trying), and turned out to be a very helpful resource for our various marketing purposes.
So here goes the story of my “Blogging for Business” course.
1. The creation
I won’t give you any tips on how to create a successful course (well, maybe just one). There are plenty of resources (courses?) on that topic already.
All I want to say is that my own experience was quite grueling.
The 10 lessons of my course span some 40K words. I have never attempted the feat of writing a book, but I imagine creating such a lengthy course is as close as it gets.
I spent a tremendous amount of time polishing each lesson. The course was going to be free, so it was critical that my content was riveting. If not, people would just bounce from it.
Paid courses are quite different in that sense. You pay money to watch them. So even if the content is boring at times, you’ll persevere anyway to ensure a return on your investment.
When I showed the draft version of the course to my friend, Ali Mese, he gave me a simple yet invaluable tip: “Break your lessons into smaller ones. Make each just three to four minutes long.”
How did I not think of this myself?
Short, “snackable” lessons provide a better sense of completion and progress. You’re also more likely to finish a short lesson without getting distracted by something.
I’m pretty sure that it is because of this simple tip that my course landed this Netflix comparison (i.e., best compliment ever):
2. The strategy
With the prices of similar courses ranging from $500 to $2,000, it was really tempting to make some profit with ours.
I think we had around 15,000 paying customers at Ahrefs at that time (and many more on the free plan). So if just 1% of them bought that course for $1K, that would be an easy $150K to pocket. And then we could keep upselling it to our future customers.
Alternatively, we thought about giving access to the course to our paying customers only.
This might have boosted our sales, since the course was a cool addition to the Ahrefs subscription.
And it could also improve user retention. The course was a great training resource for new employees, which our customers would lose access to if they canceled their Ahrefs subscription.
And yet, releasing it for free as a lead acquisition and lead nurturing play seemed to make a lot more sense than the other two options. So we stuck to that.
3. The waitlist
Teasing something to people before you let them get it seems like one of the fundamental rules of marketing.
- Apple announces new products way before they’re available in stores.
- Movie studios publish trailers of upcoming movies months (sometimes years) before they hit the theaters.
- When you have a surprise for your significant other (or your kids), you can’t help but give them some hints before the reveal.
There’s something about “the wait” and the anticipation that we humans just love to experience.
So while I was toiling away and putting lessons of my course together, we launched a landing page to announce it and collect people’s emails.


In case someone hesitated to leave their email, we had two cool bonuses to nudge them:
- Access to the private Slack community
- Free two-week trial of Ahrefs
The latter appealed to freebie lovers so much that it soon “leaked” to Reddit and BlackHatWorld. In hindsight, this leak was actually a nice (unplanned) promo for the course.
4. The promotion
I don’t remember our exact promotion strategy. But I’m pretty sure it went something like this:
I also added a little “sharing loop” to the welcome email. I asked people to tell their friends about the course, justifying it with the fact that taking the course with others was more fun than doing it alone.
I have no idea how effective that “growth hack” was, but there was no reason not to encourage sharing.
In total, we managed to get some 16,000 people on our waitlist by the day of the course launch.
5. The launch
On a set date, the following email went out to our waitlist:
Did you notice the “note” saying that the videos were only available for free for 30 days? We did that to nudge people to watch them as soon as possible and not save them to the “Watch later” folder.
In retrospect, I wish we had used this angle from the very beginning: “FREE for 30 days. Then $799.”
This would’ve killed two birds with one stone:
- Added an urgency to complete the course as soon as possible
- Made the course more desirable by assigning a specific (and rather high) monetary value to it
(If only we could be as smart about predicting the future as we are about reflecting on the past.)
Once it was live, the course started to promote itself. I was seeing many super flattering tweets:
We then took the most prominent of those tweets and featured them on the course landing page for some social proof. (They’re still there, by the way.)
6. The paywall
Once the 30 days of free access ran out, we added a $799 paywall. And it didn’t take long for the first sale to arrive:
This early luck didn’t push us to focus on selling this course, though. We didn’t invest any effort into promoting it. It was just sitting passively in our Academy with a $799 price tag, and that was it.
And yet, despite the lack of promotion, that course was generating 8-10 sales every month—which were mostly coming from word of mouth.
Thanks to its hefty price, my course soon appeared on some popular websites with pirated courses. And we were actually glad that it did. Because that meant more people would learn about our content and product.
Then some people who were “late to the party” started asking me if I was ever going to reopen the course for free again. This actually seemed like a perfectly reasonable strategy at the time:
7. The giveaways
That $799 price tag also turned my free course into a pretty useful marketing tool. It was a perfect gift for all sorts of giveaways on Twitter, on podcasts, during live talks, and so on.
And whenever we partnered with someone, they were super happy to get a few licenses of the course, which they could give out to their audience.
8. The relaunch
Despite my original plan to update and relaunch this course once a year, I got buried under other work and didn’t manage to find time for it.
And then the pandemic hit.
That’s when we noticed a cool trend. Many companies were providing free access to their premium educational materials. This was done to support the “stay at home” narrative and help people learn new skills.
I think it was SQ who suggested that we should jump on that train with my “Blogging for Business” course. And so we did:
We couldn’t have hoped for a better timing for that relaunch. The buzz was absolutely insane. The announcement tweet alone has generated a staggering 278K+ impressions (not without some paid boosts, of course).
We also went ahead and reposted that course on ProductHunt once again (because why not?).
All in all, that relaunch turned out to be even more successful than the original launch itself.
In the course of their lifespan on Wistia, the 40 video lessons of my course generated a total of 372K plays.




And this isn’t even the end of it.
9. The launch on YouTube
Because the course was now free, it no longer made sense to host it at Wistia. So we uploaded all lessons to YouTube and made them public.
To date, the 41 videos of my course have generated about 187K views on YouTube.
It’s fair to mention that we had around 200,000 subscribers on our channel at the time of publishing my course there. A brand-new channel with no existing subscribers will likely generate fewer views.
10. The relaunch on YouTube [coming soon]
Here’s an interesting observation that both Sam and I made at around the same time.
Many people were publishing their courses on YouTube as a single video spanning a few hours rather than cutting them into individual lessons like we did. And those long videos were generating millions of views!
Like these two, ranking at the top for “learn Python course,” which have 33M and 27M views, respectively:
So we decided to run a test with Sam’s “SEO for Beginners” course. It was originally published on YouTube as 14 standalone video lessons and generated a total of 140K views.
Well, the “single video” version of that same course has blown it out of the water with over 1M views as of today.
I’m sure you can already tell where I’m going with this.
We’re soon going to republish my “Blogging for Business” course on YouTube as a single video. And hopefully, it will perform just as well.
The end
So that’s the story of my “Blogging for Business” course. From the very beginning, it was planned as a promotional tool for Ahrefs. And judging by its performance, I guess it fulfilled its purpose rather successfully.
Don’t get me wrong, though.
The fact that my course was conceived as a promotional tool doesn’t mean that I didn’t pour my heart and soul into it. It was a perfectly genuine and honest attempt to create a super useful educational resource for content marketing newbies.
And I’m still hoping to work on the 2.0 version of it someday. In the past four years, I have accrued quite a bit more content marketing knowledge that I’m keen to share with everyone. So follow me on Twitter, and stay tuned.
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