7 Marketing Tools for Small Business Growth in 2025

I recently had coffee with a friend who owns a small business and doesn’t have much experience with marketing. He is a professional coach with a lot of good business ideas and his one-to-one work was so effective that he wanted to expand. We started talking about how he could grow his newsletter and I asked, "How many people receive your newsletter now?” He said it was a few hundred.

I asked what he used to send the newsletter and he said “My email.” I eventually learned he was manually pasting newsletter content from a Word document into a single Gmail email and sending it to one person at a time. Every week.

I asked, “Where do you store all the email addresses of people who want to receive your newsletter?" He said his “contact list.” 

After some more questioning, I learned he meant the contact list on his phone. I was shocked that this was something someone would do. He was equally shocked when I showed him there was a tool that would let him save a bunch of email addresses and individually send them all a newsletter with one email. Showing him HubSpot’s email tools and CRM was just as mind-blowing to him as his current method was to me. 

I start with this story to share that sometimes I have this curse of knowledge working for a marketing company. Not all small businesses have a lot of marketing knowledge.

In 2025 especially, many small businesses are struggling. Today’s buyers are more hesitant than ever to make a purchase. They are scared of being scammed or, worse, just making a poor choice.

Businesses aren’t just competing against each other—they’re also competing against indecision. The key isn’t just proving that you’re better than competitors—it’s demonstrating that you are trustworthy and have their best interest in mind, not just your bottom line.

The right marketing tools can bridge that gap, helping you build trust, connect with consumers, simplify your process, and deliver results. 

However, navigating today’s marketing technology landscape can feel like standing in a “Tools R Us.” Especially with the rapid emergence of AI technology, there are just so many options available that it’s hard to know where to start. 

How do you find the time to stop and learn what you should be using? You don’t want to waste time trying out a bunch of tools, but on the other hand, you want to make your processes more efficient. 

We often say things like, “You should require your team to research AI tools and figure out what they can use,” but looking at the hundreds of tools available, and knowing the landscape will only continue to grow, can be paralyzing. 

Selecting the right marketing tools is like trying to pick the best toothpaste from a wall of options. They’re all toothpaste. They all do relatively the same thing, right? How can you possibly choose one over another? 

With more than 14,106 marketing tools available—a staggering 27.8% year-over-year growth according to Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape—it can feel like you’re in that toothpaste aisle wondering where to start or what to prioritize. 

As we navigate the overwhelming landscape of marketing tools, especially in the era of AI, it’s essential to focus on what will truly move the needle for your business. It’s easy to get distracted by the sheer number of options available, but a strategic approach starts with the basics. For small businesses, the foundation lies in clean, organized data and efficient processes. Once that foundation is set, the right tools can amplify your efforts and accelerate growth.

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at seven essential tools that can streamline your marketing, enhance your strategies, and help you stay ahead of the competition.

Editor’s Note: Heads up — This article includes affiliate links for HubSpot and Vidyard, and IMPACT may receive compensation from them. This in no way affects the examples/tools featured.

7 marketing tools to propel small business growth

Whether you’re looking to optimize your email lists, improve communication, or analyze data more effectively, these tools are designed to work in harmony with your existing marketing, empowering your business to thrive in 2025 and beyond.

1. HubSpot

Referring back to the story at the beginning, one of the most impactful steps small businesses can take to enhance their marketing efforts is organizing their email lists within a centralized platform. HubSpot enables you to communicate effectively with your audience, ensures compliance with legal opt-in requirements, and allows recipients to manage their preferences with ease.

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a comprehensive, multifaceted tool that you can start using for free. From email marketing and conversational bots to list segmentation and social media management, HubSpot Marketing Hub does it all. In my experience, it’s one of the easiest platforms to learn, making it accessible to anyone, regardless of technical expertise.

For small businesses, HubSpot offers an additional advantage: It grows with you. Instead of starting with a beginner-focused tool and later migrating to a more advanced platform, HubSpot allows you to scale seamlessly, consolidating all your marketing efforts in one place. With its extensive integration ecosystem and compatibility with tools like Zapier, HubSpot can work seamlessly with the platforms you already use.

While all of this sounds great, it’s important to note that HubSpot’s wide range of features can feel overwhelming at first. Figuring out the right plan for your needs may take some time. Fortunately, experts like us at IMPACT are here to help you identify the best HubSpot plan for your business.

Getting started is the most important step. To maximize your return on investment (ROI) with HubSpot, it’s important to stay organized. My best tip for this is to implement a clear naming convention for lists, campaigns, and assets from the moment you get started. Decide whether you’ll include dates, event names, or use abbreviations for recurring items. Consistency will save you time and keep your HubSpot environment tidy as your business grows.

Finally, don’t overlook the value of HubSpot’s community and learning Academy. These resources, which are included for any paying customers, are invaluable for small businesses, offering guidance and support to help you succeed.

HubSpot offers a free version as well as paid tiers such as Starter ($20/month), Professional, and Enterprise. There’s a plan for every budget and business size, making it a flexible and scalable solution for your marketing needs. Need help choosing? 

2. Canva

Canva is a game-changer for small business marketing. Gone are the days of needing to master the Adobe Creative Suite just to edit a photo or create a professional design. Canva makes visual content creation accessible for anyone—no design experience is required.

The human brain processes images around 60,000 times faster than text and 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. This is why using images and visual elements can elevate your messaging, enhance engagement, and help build trust with your audience. 

Canva makes it easy to create eye-catching, branded visuals without outsourcing to a designer, allowing you to move quickly and efficiently. Consistent, on-brand colors and designs communicate professionalism and reinforce your brand identity. 

What sets Canva apart is its user-friendly and powerful features that simplify design work for small businesses. The background remover allows you to quickly eliminate backgrounds from images, a task that would typically require more complex tools like Photoshop. Canva also offers a broad selection of templates for social media posts, animated stories, and videos, allowing you to create dynamic, engaging content instead of just static images.

For businesses that need to design across multiple platforms, Canva’s Pro version makes resizing designs effortless, adjusting content to fit various formats with a single click. The Brand Kit feature in the Pro version keeps your logos, colors, fonts, and other brand assets organized in one place, ensuring consistency across all your designs. Additionally, Canva allows you to generate and integrate QR codes directly into your designs, streamlining the creation of marketing materials or paying for another tool to create QR codes. 

With so many templates and options available in Canva, it can be tough to stay focused on the job at hand. I recommend going into Canva with a goal of something you need to create. Don’t just wander around aimlessly or hours later you’ll be so deep in the templates you’ll need a ladder to get out. There’s just too much at your disposal to scroll through all of it. You have to have a plan when you get started or you’ll likely get overwhelmed by the options. 

Canva also integrates with various tools allowing you to streamline your workflow. You can even share your designs directly to Slack or other platforms with a simple click.

To maximize ROI with Canva, keep in mind you can upgrade and downgrade your account as needed. You also have the ability to pay for specific elements when necessary, instead of an entire plan. For example, if you only need a Pro feature like a particular font or image, you can pay for that one element without committing to the entire Pro plan.

Canva offers a free version with plenty of features to get started. For more advanced options they also have a pro option for $12 - $15 per month, as well as custom enterprise pricing for teams of 20 or more.

3. Vidyard

Building trust with your audience becomes effortless when you put a face to your brand. Video offers a unique opportunity to let potential customers see, hear, and know you before any in-person interaction, establishing familiarity and trust from the start.

Vidyard is a versatile tool for sharing trust-building marketing content on your website, in emails, and even for sales conversations and internal communication.

Vidyard also provides robust video analytics, so you can track the performance of your videos and adjust your strategy based on real data. This helps you refine your approach and improve your video content over time.

While Vidyard has many powerful features, small businesses may encounter challenges with limitations on the number of videos they can produce and branding restrictions, especially in the free version. However, Vidyard integrates seamlessly with popular marketing platforms like HubSpot, making it an excellent choice for businesses already using these tools. The integration enhances your video strategy and data tracking, providing greater value with minimal disruption.

To maximize ROI with Vidyard, encourage your sales team to use it as well. They can send personalized video messages to prospects, helping to build relationships and close deals faster. Additionally, make sure to regularly analyze video performance and use the insights to refine your content strategy and maximize engagement.

Vidyard Chrome Extension is 100% free! As your video content needs expand, Vidyard's paid plans start at $59 per user per month, unlocking additional features and customization options.

4. ChatGPT and DALL-E

AI is no longer a concept of the future—it's here and transforming the way businesses operate. With tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, you can get simple tasks done faster and unlock new creative opportunities. These tools go beyond content writing; they’re also great for brainstorming, ideation, and exploring topics you might not have considered before.

What sets ChatGPT and DALL-E apart is their ability to adhere to specific voice, tone, and branding guidelines, ensuring that the content aligns perfectly with your brand’s identity. You can even create a custom GPT tailored to meet your unique business needs. Plus, having image and text generation in one makes the content creation process even faster.

Despite the impressive capabilities of these tools, small businesses may face a challenge: taking the AI-generated content at face value. While these tools provide a strong starting point, the output often requires refinement to truly capture your brand's voice and ensure its effectiveness (and not sound like a robot wrote it!).

AI features are increasingly being incorporated into various platforms, and ChatGPT and DALL-E can be easily integrated with tools like HubSpot through APIs or Zapier, enabling smooth workflows and better overall efficiency.

To maximize ROI with ChatGPT or DALL-E, be sure to ask the tool to ask you questions to dig deeper into your ideas and get more targeted content. For even better results, check out our webinar with Cary, where we dive into how to get the most value from ChatGPT and DALL-E.

The typical cost structure starts with a free version, with paid plans ranging from $20 per month to $200 per month, plus team pricing options. This flexibility makes it accessible to businesses of different sizes and needs.

5. Pixel Compress

Large images can significantly slow down the performance of your website and emails, resulting in longer page load times and a negative user experience. Research from Google shows that websites taking more than three seconds to load can lose up to 53% of mobile users, underscoring the importance of optimizing images. Similarly, slow-loading images in emails can lead to lower engagement rates, with 42% of email recipients deleting messages if the images don’t display properly. Pixel Compress helps address these issues by reducing image sizes for faster load times and improved overall performance.

What sets Pixel Compress apart is its ability to compress images for both web and email use. Images are processed and placed in a queue for review, making it easy to ensure that each image is optimized correctly. This feature is especially useful for businesses that need to quickly prepare multiple images for digital content.

Small businesses may face challenges when using Pixel Compress, particularly if their original images are too small. In these cases, image quality could suffer during compression, requiring businesses to upgrade their images rather than simply relying on compression. Additionally, the optimization results and analytics can feel technical and may require a learning curve to fully understand the metrics.

Pixel Compress integrates extremely well with platforms like HubSpot, making it seamless to incorporate optimized images into your marketing campaigns.

To maximize ROI with Pixel Compress, consider subscribing to the paid version only when needed, and switch back to the free version during quieter periods. This strategy helps you optimize costs while still benefiting from image compression when necessary.

Pixel Compress offers a flexible cost structure, including a free version and paid plans ranging from $30 per month to $600 per month for agencies.

6. Grammarly

In today’s digital world, poor grammar and typos can severely damage your credibility, making you appear unprofessional and untrustworthy. Clear, error-free communication is vital for building strong relationships and maintaining a positive image. Grammarly ensures that your content is polished and professional, elevating the perception of your business.

What sets Grammarly apart is its unique ability to adjust tone, rewrite full sentences, and offer personalized suggestions tailored to your writing style. It works across most tabs and apps, following you around as you type to provide real-time feedback. Additionally, Grammarly offers a new "Authorship" feature that tracks your writing process, categorizing text sources automatically as you type or paste them into a document. This feature can distinguish between text that is typed by the user, pasted from a browser-based source, or pasted from an unknown source, such as a private browsing window. It can even identify AI-generated text and offer rephrasing suggestions. This level of detail makes it incredibly effective for keeping track of your writing workflow and ensuring consistency.

While Grammarly is incredibly powerful, small businesses may encounter a few challenges. Sometimes the tool might not fully understand what you're trying to convey, suggesting corrections that aren’t quite accurate. The pop-up interface can also get in the way if you’re using multiple apps that draw over other content. Additionally, the subscription fees may feel costly if you're primarily using it for specific tasks like grammar checks or limited prompts.

Grammarly integrates seamlessly with platforms like HubSpot, making it a versatile tool that works well within your marketing stack. 

To maximize ROI with Grammarly, take advantage of its full capabilities. Adjust the writing tone to suit your brand voice, update your style guide, and set up the tool properly to fit your needs. The desktop version offers more comprehensive features than the browser-based integrations in email or Google Docs, especially if you're looking for a deeper level of content refinement. Additionally, using the AI generative text feature can help improve writing flow and make your content even more compelling.

Grammarly is free, although the features are limited. You may want to invest in the premium version which starts at $12 per month if billed annually, as it scans for more nuanced grammar issues that can weaken the quality of your writing.

7. Kickbox

Maintaining clean and optimized email lists is critical for protecting your sender reputation – which is your ability to send emails that land in people’s inboxes. Many small businesses overlook the risks of sending mass emails to poorly maintained lists, especially those filled with outdated or invalid addresses. These oversights can harm your domain’s reputation, leading to emails being marked as spam, frequent bounces, and undeliverable messages. Ultimately, this results in lower deliverability rates, meaning even legitimate emails might land in spam folders or go unseen entirely.

This is why maintaining your email subscriber list hygiene is so important. Protecting your sender score is equally vital, especially as your business works to build trust with its buyers.

Kickbox helps safeguard your email campaigns and protect your sender reputation by preventing hard bounces and ensuring emails are sent to valid addresses. By reducing the risk of sending to incorrect or fraudulent email addresses, Kickbox ensures your emails are delivered effectively, reaching the right audience and minimizing the likelihood of being marked as spam. This leads to more successful email marketing campaigns and helps maintain your credibility as a reliable sender.

What sets Kickbox apart is its easy drag-and-drop upload feature, real-time API, and flexible pricing. The platform allows you to quickly and efficiently clean your email list, helping to maintain its quality. If Kickbox can’t provide a definitive result for an email address, they offer a refund for that credit, or you can choose to re-verify the address at a later time, ensuring you get the most accurate data possible.

Small businesses might face a few challenges when adopting Kickbox, particularly during the initial setup and integration phase. It's easy to forget to use it consistently, or you may not want to accept the results if it leads to a smaller, more refined email list. However, cleaning your list is crucial for long-term success, and this tool can help avoid costly mistakes by keeping your email campaigns targeted and effective.

Kickbox integrates seamlessly with commonly used marketing platforms, including HubSpot, which makes it easy to incorporate into your existing email workflows.

A great example of how Kickbox benefits small businesses is when you receive an email list from events, sponsorships, or other sources and need to clean it up before launching campaigns. Following COVID, many businesses struggled with outdated email lists due to job changes or layoffs. For instance, IMPACT’s marketing team used Kickbox to clean and verify our contact lists, ensuring our emails reached the right contacts, ultimately improving our deliverability and campaign effectiveness.

To maximize ROI with Kickbox, it’s important to understand email deliverability best practices. Once you clean your list, be conservative with sending to risky email addresses that might negatively affect your sender reputation. This will help ensure that your emails continue to reach your audience and maintain high engagement rates.

The pricing is based on the number of contacts, with volume discounts available, making it scalable for businesses of all sizes.

Honorable mention: Fathom

Fathom deserves an honorable mention for its remarkable capabilities, especially when it comes to AI-driven call summaries. It's an incredibly efficient tool that starts off free, making it accessible for businesses of all sizes. Whether you're conducting content brainstorming sessions, interviews, or client calls, Fathom can automatically generate detailed summaries, allowing you to focus more on the conversation and less on taking notes. This feature is invaluable for streamlining content creation, capturing key insights, and ensuring that important points aren’t missed. 

Embrace marketing tools to accelerate your growth

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, small businesses must remain agile and adapt to the ever-evolving marketing tools and technologies available. The key to success is to avoid the “set it and forget it” mentality—AI and other marketing tools evolve quickly, and staying on top of these changes is crucial.

Instead of paying for a tool only to fall back into old habits, fully embrace its capabilities to unlock its true potential. Start by taking advantage of free trials or versions to test new tools before committing. Experimentation is the best way to discover what works for your business, so don’t be afraid to try new things.

My one piece of advice for you would be to automate and speed up the tasks you don’t enjoy. Marketing tools are designed to make your life easier, so leverage them to handle repetitive, time-consuming tasks. This will free up your time to focus on what truly drives your business forward.

By embracing the right tools, you’ll stay ahead of the competition and set your business up for continued growth in this digital age.