Small Business Marketing Software

Buyers guide

With marketing software becoming ever cheaper and easier to deploy, businesses are finding themselves in the market (pun intended) for a new or updated system. This is especially true of small and midsize businesses (SMBs), who are adopting marketing software at a rapid rate.

Smaller companies may have avoided spending money on such software in the past, either because they lack a dedicated marketing department or the resources to afford a marketing system. These days, though, you'd be foolhardy not to invest in marketing software that can allow your business to run its own marketing campaigns without any outside help—even if your marketing “department" is just one person.

“Small business marketing software" is not a specific type of marketing software, so much as it is a general set of marketing software that caters to smaller businesses with fewer monetary and marketing resources.

This guide will help you pick the best marketing software option for your own small business.

Here's what we'll discuss:

What Is Small Business Marketing Software?

What Makes Small Business Marketing Software “Small"?

Common Features of Small Business Marketing Software

Key Considerations

What Is Small Business Marketing Software?

Marketing software (as we note in our marketing software Buyer's Guide) helps organizations perform the following functions:

• Attract new customers and visitors
• Turn customers into leads that can be nurtured through the sales funnel
• Create and run dedicated marketing campaigns through a variety of channels
• Deliver marketing and promotional materials (via email marketing, social media etc.)
• Surface insights about customers to improve marketing efforts
• Automate time-consuming, repetitive manual tasks

What small business marketing software does, then, is provide these features on a smaller scale to smaller businesses. In practice, this doesn't look any different from any other type of marketing software; it's just a matter of which features you choose and the size of your budget.

What Makes Small Business Marketing Software “Small"?

Rather simply, small business marketing software is just marketing software that is used by a small business. What differentiates it as “small business" software is that smaller businesses won't be looking for the expansive software suites provided by some vendors, and will instead want to choose between tighter, more focused packages that provide only the key features needed by a small business.

Small businesses may not need all of the features of a larger organization, at least at first. In fact, many companies may simply be looking to automate marketing tasks or to have a dashboard through which they can track their email marketing campaigns and manage their social media. Fortunately, many vendors will let you decide what features you want as a part of your package, so that you don't need to spend money on functionality you're not yet ready to utilize.

Most vendors don't cater specifically to small business, but they will provide beginner packages for small businesses which can be upgraded at a later date, as that business grows. This means that you need to not only find the perfect marketing software vendor for your business, but also explore their offerings to find the exact right set of functions and features for your own specific needs.

Common Features of Small Business Marketing Software

Below is a table listing some of the most common features of small business marketing software.

As discussed above, these are features that will be a part of marketing software for all business sizes, but that small businesses will find particularly useful. Other features will be available as a business grows, which you can learn more about in our marketing software Buyer's Guide.

As you can see, a great deal of marketing software focuses on creating and managing campaigns, as well as tracking and analyzing the success of those campaigns. A tracking and reporting page of that kind may look like this:

Key Considerations

Other factors to take into consideration when picking the best small business marketing software for your business include:

• Integration with other systems. Marketing doesn't stand on its own, and neither does marketing software. You can run the most noteworthy marketing campaign in the world, but it won't translate into revenue unless you tie that marketing together with your sales process. That's why it's crucial that you check on the integrations between your marketing software and other systems you use, especially any customer relationship management (CRM) software or sales force automation software. The information from your marketing software needs to be accessible and transferrable across all sectors of your business, so check with your vendor to make sure you'll be able to do so smoothly and easily.

• Cloud-based software vs on-premise software. Though it's somewhat outdated today, some big businesses with large-scale marketing departments may house their own marketing software on-premise. This requires higher start-up costs, space to keep hardware and IT resources to implement and maintain both hardware and software. With extremely rare exception, marketing software for small businesses will be provided and accessible through the cloud. This will be both cheaper and easier for you, since it won't require tech resources and will cost you less up front to get the software on-boarded for your marketing team.