Marketing software, website and ecommerce services for small businesses

Small businesses can also benefit from using software to help them promote their business more effectively. Marketing software tools include those for design, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, managing workflow, ecommerce and websites and issuing communications including email and print.

Canva offers custom templates and designs that users can personalise to their needs. Templates are included for both social, online and printed formats. There is a free service available with 250,000 templates to choose from and hundreds of thousands of photos and graphics to use.

Pricing starts from £10.99 per month including VAT for a team of up to five people. The paid-for version of Canva is called Canva Pro and this includes everything available for free plus a brand kit, one-click Magic Resize, 420,000 templates and designs and 75 million photos, videos and graphics. It comes with 100 GB of cloud storage for your designs.

Team members using Canva can work on designs at the same time, making it easy and quicker to finalise marketing content.

The Adobe Creative Cloud includes 20 plus apps and services for photography, video, web, UX and more. This includes:

Squarespace offers a full range of services across website design, management, ecommerce stores and email. Squarespace offers numerous templates to help you professionally design your website or blog. In addition, there are also in-built search engine optimisation tools and guides to help your site rank with search engines such as Google. Squarespace lists six steps to creating a website:

1. Choose a Squarespace template – all are responsive to various devices
2. Use their website builder to personalise pages, menus and navigation to match your brand
3. Then style fonts, imagery and margins to also match your brand
4. Review your design across web and mobile devices
5. If you need one create a logo using the logo maker from Squarespace
6. Add a custom domain – so your website URL is aligned to your brand

If you are selling products online then you can also use Squarespace to add a check out process and to document your inventory on your website.
Squarespace also offers an analytics package to help you track visitors to your site.
The business package from Squarespace costs £15 per month when purchased on an annual licence. It includes a free custom domain, free SSL certificates to site security, unlimited storage, SEO features, free design templates, unlimited contributors, website analytics and fully integrated e-commerce services. Those on the business plan will also pay 3% on all transactions made through their Squarespace e-commerce site. The basic commerce pricing package is £20 per month when an annual licence is purchased. It includes the same features as the business plan plus some extras and there are no transaction fees.

GoDaddy allows you to search and buy domains and also includes a website builder. GoDaddy is one of the giants in this space with more than 80 million managed domains. You can build a basic website for free using GoDaddy’s website builder with their one-month free trial. Other features include SSL certificates, custom domains, 24/7/365 support by telephone or chat, email marketing, appointments features and ecommerce listings.

Pricing for GoDaddy starts at £6.99 per month with an annual licence for the basic package up to £19.99 per month with an annual licence for the ecommerce package.