Do you want to know the best digital marketing tools in 2021? This article describes all effective online marketing tools that can help your business grow. Its purpose is to prove that modern online marketing is not just advertising and social media but also a new technology and advanced software.
HubSpot
HubSpot is an essential tool for all things necessary for executing a seamless inbound marketing strategy. At SMA, we use HubSpot as our CRM and CMS, as well as for email marketing, blogging, social media and to build landing pages. You can even review important KPIs using HubSpot’s new and improved analytics tools. If you’re looking to learn more about inbound marketing, HubSpot Academy offers a large collection of free certification courses that will teach you useful information to help you grow your marketing strategy.
Screaming Frog SEO
Screaming Frog is an easy-to-use SEO crawling tool. This tool provides important SEO-related information about your site that you can download and keep on file for reference. Screaming Frog covers everything from basic on-page SEO elements to more high-level insights like HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
We like to use Screaming Frog to help identify any site errors that may be impacting SEO. You can link this tool with others like Moz or Google Analytics for even more information.
Instant Survey
Cost: Free
Instant Survey’s continuing adaptation and development are just accessories to the fact that it performs one basic task extremely well: collecting customer feedback. From real-time results to random assignments for answer order, even seasoned marketers will find exactly what they’re looking for.
Instant Survey is currently in beta and, for now, free for both the basic and pro versions. In the future, the pro version is likely to jump up to $10/month, but for many small businesses the basic version will provide many of the features you’ll need.
All in One SEO
Price: Starts free, paid plans start at $49.50/year
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is a top-rated plugin for WordPress websites, with over 2 million installations. The tool includes a variety of features designed to help you optimize your site and your content for search engines.
This tool provides an actionable checklist that helps you focus on fixing errors and making common adjustments to maximize click-through rates. Additionally, with AIOSEO, you can complete a whole-site audit, optimize pages for WooCommerce, and even improve your local SEO.
Census.gov
Cost: Free
While querying your existing customers can be useful, brand new companies (and even established names) can always benefit from understanding the clients they haven’t made yet. This is where the US Census comes in. From information about median income and population distribution to detailed facts like computer and internet use, there is no shortage of useful tools to help paint a picture of potential customers.
But the Census doesn’t just document people. Detailed information about industries, employment, trade, and so on can help your business understand the greater context of your market. Between these exhaustive statistics and a bevy of research articles on the data itself, there’s no question that whatever you’re looking for, you’ll probably find it here. Did we mention it’s free?
Survey Anyplace
Price: Free trial available | Pricing starts from $33 per month
If you’re looking for a powerful lead generation tool, Survey Anyplace is a software your marketing team should consider.
With their ReportR pack, respondents can walk away with a personalized PDF report based on their answers immediately after completion. They also integrate smoothly with your existing marketing stack either via webhooks, Zapier or Integromat. So you can easily transport leads through to your CRM or email marketing tool and start building nurturing campaigns.
Canva Business
Price: Plans start free, $12.95/month for teams, or custom pricing for enterprises
Canva is a drag-and-drop design platform that allows users to create images using custom pictures, icons, shapes, and fonts from the Canva catalog. It offers an aesthetically-pleasing, simple way to design your own logos, presentations, images, or graphs based off your team’s needs.
Additionally, Canva cuts out the need for an experienced designer and enables you to create the exact visual you have in mind using their vast image collection.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a research and monitoring tool that can help identify trends around specific topics. This tool can help you generate blog or social media ideas, create high-performing content, monitor your brand’s performance, and identify influencers you may want to consider partnering with. Though BuzzSumo is a paid tool, you can register for a free 7-day trial to test it out before committing to a subscription.
Google Analytics
Price: Free
Google Analytics is the gold standard for website analytics. Nowadays, it’s hard to operate as a digital marketer if you don’t have some level of Google Analytics expertise.
At its most basic level, Google Analytics can show you who is coming to your website, from where, and on which pages they’re spending most of their time. Beyond that, you can set up goals to track conversions, build an enhanced ecommerce setup, and track events to learn more about user engagement.
Truthfully, barely a day goes by that I don’t use Google Analytics. To learn more, check out The Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics in 2019.
BuzzSumo
Price: Paid plans start at $79/month
BuzzSumo is a unique content research tool that identifies top influencers in your industry and helps you connect with them.
You can look up trending topics and define the scope of your search to generate both evergreen content, or trending content aimed at your desired audience.
From there, you can look at your content’s analytics and social mentions, and then measure performance accordingly.
Frase
Frase is an awesome content optimization tool that every digital marketer needs in their back pocket. Frase uses AI to provide advanced content insights that can help boost your search visibility and your web traffic. Use Frase to optimize your existing content or help you write new and improved content.
Content research can take hours. Frase automatically provides an intelligent outline for almost every topic across the web. In seconds, Frase provides a list of related topics, headers, FAQs, statistics, recent news, and interesting facts that you can use to quickly build a powerful piece of content.
Frase is a paid tool, but they do offer a free trial so you can test it out before making a commitment.
Survey Monkey
Cost: Free and paid plans
Survey Monkey is one of the other top choices for conducting surveys to learn more about your audience. It offers the ability to make and send surveys, as well as sophisticated data and analytics that can help you make better decisions based on the results.
Like Instant Survey, they offer a free basic version, but they also have a couple other plans for anywhere from $25/month to $85/month that provide more useful features, such as custom themes, rich data, and unlimited questions and responses.
HostGator Web Hosting
Cost: As low as $3.95/month
We know, we know, it’s a shameless plug, but we had to include it. A key part of running any successful marketing campaign is using your website to its full potential. To do that, you need a web host you can rely on.
HostGator offers a variety of hosting plans for small businesses. You can choose WordPress hosting to easily get your blog up and running or you can get a dedicated server to handle huge influxes of web traffic. Whichever plan you choose, our team is available 24/7/365 to help.
Google Keyword Planner
Cost: Free
Keyword research is one of the most important steps in any SEO strategy (as well as any PPC strategy), and Google Keyword Planner is one of the most essential tools available to do it. And like the other Google tools on this list, it’s entirely free.
It allows you to research how popular and valuable different keywords are based on how frequently they’re searched in Google and how much businesses spend on them in Google Adwords. This can help you expand your list of relevant keywords beyond the ones you brainstorm yourself in order to better shape a content strategy.
There are plenty of other keyword tools out there you can use, but between its low, low price (free) and the wealth of data Google’s able to access in providing you the tool, it’s the best one to start with.
Trello
Price: Paid plans range from free to $20.83 per month for enterprise
Trello is a content management tool that many organizations use for brainstorming and strategizing content — in fact, we use Trello at HubSpot to know when our blog posts are scheduled for publication.
The reason Trello is so appealing is that it’s free for small teams and businesses, and it provides a visual way to brainstorm and schedule content online — even if your team is remote or global. Additionally, it’s easy to assign multiple employees to a card, so you know who’s in charge of writing, editing, or adding CTA offers to a post.
Users can create cards and include notes on the card topic, as well as create deadlines and assign topics to certain teams. Trello facilitates collaboration and provides clarity on projects in the pipeline.
Google Analytics
Price: Free
Google Analytics is the gold standard for website analytics. Nowadays, it’s hard to operate as a digital marketer if you don’t have some level of Google Analytics expertise.
At its most basic level, Google Analytics can show you who is coming to your website, from where, and on which pages they’re spending most of their time. Beyond that, you can set up goals to track conversions, build an enhanced ecommerce setup, and track events to learn more about user engagement.
Truthfully, barely a day goes by that I don’t use Google Analytics. To learn more, check out The Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics in 2019.
Conclusion
Being a successful online marketer is more than just blogging and outreach. There’s so many things you need to take care of and grow your business. Digital marketing tools or just digital marketing is now used as a whole that joins together different internet-based capabilities toward the aim of helping companies achieve business objectives and gain competitive advantage.
Whether you’re a seasoned SEO or beginner that is looking for free digital marketing tools in 2018, then you should definitely check out this post. It’s full of SEO tools, PPC tools, social media tools, analytics tools and other types of digital marketing software! Best Digital Marketing Tools 2021