Investment in marketing is key to the success of any business, small or large. With more than 3.4 billion people accessing the Internet in 2016, it is a solid opportunity for businesses to extend their reach and present their marketing message in front of a wider audience. The question is – can your business achieve this and still save time? In truth, digital marketing is cost-effective when used the right way; otherwise, it can greatly consume your time and lead to overspending. Thus, it is important that every business employ effective Internet marketing tools to boost their chances of success. The top 15 are listed below.

1. Moz Local

Online listings are vital to the success of your business, especially if it’s a small business, since they provide you a marketing platform for free. However, if the mere thought of maintaining numerous listing across different sites is enough to make you break out in a cold sweat, fear not, as Moz Local simplifies this process. All you need to do is submit your details and the tool will manage your entries on several directory sites. Moz Local ensures your local customer base have no trouble finding relevant information about your business with the simple click of a button.

2. Canva

Heard the expression – show, not tell? Well, that’s the general rule of the Internet, since sites with visually engaging images and graphics tend to attract more visitors. You need to put in that little bit of extra effort to liven up your content with eye-catching charts and infographics. However, if you’re hard pressed for time and cannot learn how to create them, Canva comes to your rescue. This tool specializes in jazzing up your services and products, making you seem like a pro without too much effort.

3. Buffer

Navigating the murky waters of social media marketing isn’t a walk in the park, but the job becomes infinitely easier when you have a great marketing tool at your disposal. Buffer is a great tool for small businesses that want to handle multiple social media profiles at the same time, thereby saving time. It supports Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn platforms for free.

4. Answer The Public

This marketing tool is available completely free of cost and will add more value to your content strategy. It can be used to determine questions and subjects pertaining to the primary keywords you wish to rank for. You then need to try and answer as many of these questions as you can, deriving the information from the available content. In this manner, when search engines begin to look for the websites with the best information on a particular topic, your site is not just going to attain a higher rank, but it’s also likely to convert more visitors since all the important questions will be answered on your site.

5. Open Site Explorer

You need to understand your link profile as well as that of your competition if you want to build up domain authority. Open Site Explorer is instrumental to this process as it allows you to copy and paste the URL of your competitor, and figure out which sites are linking to them but not to you. This will guarantee your win in each SEO campaign!

6. Title Generator

Are you out of ideas when it comes to the content of your business? Thanks to this amazing tool, writer’s block is a thing of the past. Just the press of a button is all that’s required for this tool to produce some interesting and highly shareable content ideas that will attract visitors to your site. This is a good tool to drum up some excitement regarding the content of your website.

7. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog allows you to crawl more than 500 pages for free. There is also a paid version available, and it’s worth it if you’re interested in finding pages with missing mea data, broken links, duplicate content at the URL level, and auditing your redirects. No wonder this is one of the go-to tools in the industry.

8. Keyword.io

Every good business campaign will rely on keyword research. This efficient tool provides keyword ideas that allow you to understand what keywords you need to target for your site to attract more visitors. Though there is a free version available, the paid version gives you access to significant metrics such as search volume or keyword competitiveness.

9. Google Keyword Planner

This keyword tool from Google is an amazing resource if your business wants to launch a pay-per-click campaign. When you’re setting up your Adwords campaign, this tool will prove to be your best friend! You can use different features, like the search volume calculator. You can enter keywords and understand the number of people searching for the same one every month for the past year. You can combine this with location targeting to estimate how many monthly impressions the particular keyword will get in your area.

10. Facebook Audience Insights

You won’t find a better tool for conducting content and market research. There are many options in Facebook Audience Insights that you can toggle through to view specific demographic information regarding your target audience. It assists in the creation of new content for your audience.

11. Siteliner

Siteliner allows you to track down duplicate content quickly and effectively. This tool has a limit of the number of pages you’re able to crawl, but this doesn’t really matter. All you have to do is place your website URL into the search bar, and you will get lots of actionable data, such as unique content, duplicate content, internal links, average page size, etc.

12. FollowerWonk

FollowerWonk is an effective business marketing tool, especially for small businesses. This is great for identifying vertical influencers and pitching press on Twitter. You can think of FollowerWonk as a one-stop shop for detecting Twitter bios, optimizing your follower base, and comparing social profiles.

13. Pixlr

Still using Photoshop? Well, it’s time to step into the modern era and upgrade to Pixlr. This is a simple, online image-editing tool that is compatible with almost all Internet browsers. It enables you to filter, crop, resize, or improve images for posting on your website.

14. Canned Responses

When you’re handling a business, the last thing on your mind is email management. However, the problem starts when your inbox is in a state of disarray and you need a quick tool for the job. Gmail Labs has a tool called “canned responses” that allows you to setup messages, the same copies of which you have to send to multiple people at regular intervals. This allows you to respond faster to inquiries, as you’re no longer caught up with responding to the same messages again and again. This saves a lot of time in the long run.

15. SugarCRM

Sugar Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a tool that allows you to manage the entire organization’s interactions with sales prospects, clients, and customers. This is much more than an address book containing basic information, like your client’s email address and customer name. SugarCRM serves as a roadmap that results in business success via scheduling follow-ups, psychographic information, converting leads into deals, and setting reminders.

These tools are the best in the industry when it comes to marketing your business without wasting any of your time. Quick and effective, the results are almost instantaneous and will promote the growth of your company.