Building a viral online brand no longer depends on hiring teams of experts or even spending huge marketing budgets.
With the right digital tools or apps, small creators can now make their products and services go from oblivion to viral sensation.
The key is to know the right tools to use and how to deploy them in your digital creating and marketing efforts.
In this post, we’ll look at some of these digital tools and apps to help you start turning your small business into a viral online brand.
Let’s get right to it.
Why Small Businesses Need Digital Tools
One of the biggest mistakes many small businesses make online is thinking that having a website or social media presence is enough to get visibility online.
Nowadays, that is no longer possible, as online visibility can no longer be earned passively by just existing via a digital platform.
It is now earned by factors such as speed and consistency of posting, smart data use in creating relevant content, and using automation to save time and achieve content efficiency.
Small businesses must therefore go beyond just existing online to start leveraging available digital tools such as AI, workflow automation, and algorithmic content distribution to increase their chances of getting better reach and engagement.
A recent market research reveals that more than 80% of small businesses globally are now willing to leverage automation tools to stay competitive.
This means that creators who choose not to leverage these available tools are likely to struggle for relevance and be left behind.
If you are ready to start optimizing the online presence of your small business or creativity, then the following tools will help you.
Design and Branding Tools
Canva
With Canva, you can start accessing templates for all your creative designs such as logos, social media posts, infographics, and thumbnails.
Their templates could help businesses to maintain brand consistency, which has been found to improve business value over time.
They also offer an AI Magic Studio helps fast-track creative design workflows such as text-to-image and video background manipulations.
VistaCreate
Want to go from graphics design to marketing visuals? Then you can simply switch from Canva to VistaCreate.
VistaCreate can help you create a variety of digital ads, and short-form content for platforms like Instagram reels and stories.
Looka
Look at that! Looka helps you leverage AI to generate brand-aligned logos that match provided colors, fonts, and icons.
Social Media Management Tools
Buffer
With Buffer, creators can schedule posts across social media platforms and analyze content performance.
This way, creators are able to see content strengths and weaknesses, and tweak content to achieve maximum visibility and engagement.
Later
Later is perfect for creators who are focused on visual content such as videos, reels, infographics, and carousels.
With Later, creators can create powerful visual marketing campaigns that are optimized with hashtags and captions to get more reach and engagement.
Notion Calendar
With Notion Calendar, creators can automate the tracking of all their content plans in one place.
Creators are able to track their content campaigns on each social media platform, visualize publishing timelines, track posting activities, and plan new campaigns.
If you want to keep track of all your content creation activities as a solo creator or part of a small team, then Notion Calendar is the way to go.
Content & Copywriting Tools
Copy.ai
Copy.ai is a popular content assistance AI tool for creators to create short copies for ads, captions, and product description.
This helps to speed up content marketing efforts, but also creates brand uniformity in terms of adapting the brand voice and aligning keywords to the brand industry.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a useful tool, especially for bloggers, digital marketers, and text-heavy content creators who want to automatically detect and remove grammatical errors from their content copies.
With Grammarly, you can get all your text content to flow naturally and read smoothly. The tool also offers a premium AI rewrite feature that rewrites and repurposes content while incorporating your brand voice and industry keywords effortlessly.
QuillBot
Looking for a quick rewrite, pivot, or repurposing content for different marketing campaigns? You can use QuillBot to quickly do all that and come up with content that still carries your original message.
Automation and Workflow Tools
Zapier
Zapier is one of the most popular automation tools for creators and small businesses to automate repetitive online tasks.
With Zapier you could schedule social media posts and automate lead entries into your email list.
IFTTT (If This Then That)
IFTTT is a simpler version of Zapier for automating social media posting and tracking content tasks. You could opt for IFTTT instead of Zapier if you prefer a no-code automation tool with basic customizations.
Notion & ClickUp
If you’re looking to optimize your digital productivity as a small business, then you can use the combination of Notion and ClickUp.
With both tools, you can perform several digital tasks from one place, such as branding, executing ideas, and tracking communication and marketing channels automatically.
Video Creation & Editing Tools
CapCut
CapCut is a sort of household name when it comes to video editing for small creators.
It is popular for editing videos in multiple formats, especially short-form, while boasting a host of viral-inducing features such as filters, captions, and animations.
This is an ideal tool for creators looking to create highly-engaging video contents for digital marketing and online entertainment.
Descript
Descript is an AI script-to-video tool that helps creators quickly create and repurpose videos via script editing.
Creators could create multiple videos from a single recording by editing video content for different coverages such as webinars, podcasts, and even viral short clips.
Pictory
For creators looking to bring their text content to life or repurpose them into different formats to target new audiences, Pictory is the way to go.
With Pictory, users can automatically turn published articles into video formats for digital marketing, especially short-form videos.
That means, you could automatically start repurposing your blog posts into short videos for social media platforms like Instagram reels, TikTok, and YouTube shorts.
Email and Marketing Tools
MailerLite
MailerLite is a very affordable email marketing tool, specially made for small businesses, solo creators, and freelancers.
With MailerLite, you could create intuitive landing pages, organize surveys, and automate all your email marketing campaigns all in one place.
ConvertKit
Creators who are focused on content marketing can leverage ConvertKit newsletter-style branding to reach target audiences and boost visibility.
The tool makes it easy to promote content-based offers in a seamless way and can be integrated with platforms like Gumroad and Patreon.
Substack
Yet another great tool for content marketers looking to reach audiences via brand storytelling.
Substack offers functionalities for a blog-newsletter publishing style, which could be strategic in building a brand that stands out as thought leader in your chosen industry.
Analytics and Optimization Tools
Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
GA4 is an essential tool for creators looking to track the performance metrics of their content and digital products.
With Google Analytics, you can track and analyze metrics such as user engagement, performing pages, and audience demographics.
These metrics could help you refine your marketing strategy, find new audience opportunities, and replicate high-performing content.
Hotjar
Hotjar is an essential UI/UX tool for content creators who want to track how readers interact and engage with their content, and leverage that information for optimizing user experience.
With Hotjar’s heatmaps, you can see visual markers showing users’ interactions with your website, such as clicks, scroll, and dropoff pages.
This could provide important feedback for creators and platforms to design and optimize pages that keep users engaged and improve conversion.
Metricool
Metricool is an all-in-one analytics platform for creators to track web performance across websites, social media and ads.
This could be great for catching trends early and learning how online audience choices evolve.
It could also be used by freelancers and virtual assistants managing multiple clients accounts and digital marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Small brands will find these digital tools useful as they can be leveraged to build important aspects of a digital brand such automation, visibility, and analytics.
According to a Gartner study, small brands can improve their digital marketing efficiency by at least 45% if they use at least three digital tools.
This has been found to help streamline repetitive tasks so that creators are able to free up time to focus on more creative tasks.
FAQs on turning your small business into a viral online brand
Which automation tool is best for beginners?
Many of these digital tools are great for beginners, especially some like Zapier, which offers automation and templates for integrating other useful apps.
What’s the best free design tool for small business branding?
Canva is a popular choice among beginner designers, as it offers a free basic plan to start with, and hundreds of templates to start designing in minutes.
Do I need both Buffer and Later?
It depends on your needs. Both tools are great for scheduling posts and analytics but Later is more focused on visuals and media content types such as videos and infographics.
Buffer’s strengths lie in helping creators analyze performance to find opportunities for improving content.
Can these tools work on mobile?
Yes, almost all the tools highlighted work on mobile and can be used by small creators and freelancers on the go.
