The right tools can make it easier to plan your marketing strategy but also improve the results you get from your activity
Leveraging tools can help you plan your marketing strategies more easily, but they can also help you improve your plan’s results. But there are so many tools today that it can be difficult to pick the right ones. Meanwhile, picking the wrong tools would lead to waste of money – and precious time.
Talkwalker
To help here I recommend the free Talkwalker Alerts service from the social listening service Talkwalker. Talkwalker’s Free social search also monitors mentions of your brand, hashtags and competitors on social media.
Feedly
Although RSS isn’t “in vogue” as it was 5+ years ago, I still find there’s no substitute for using this as a listening post for developments in your industry. I am recommending Feedly because it’s the most popular – so you can see by the ‘voice of the crowd’ which posts are most popular.
Although feed readers aren’t in fashion they are the most efficient way to scan the latest news in different categories. So if you don’t use them try out Feedly – our analytics shows it’s still one of the most common referrers to Smart Insights – do bookmark us!
Zest
Zest.is is another download that’s particularly useful for digital marketing, it’s a Google Chrome extension that collects suggested content from users.
Hootsuite and Buffer
I’ve used Hootsuite for posting updates to social networks and reviewing what others are saying for nearly five years now. Hootsuite and Buffer are comfortably the most popular free tools for posting and reviewing social media updates, you probably use them.
But Hootsuite is great as a way of keeping tabs on competitors and influencers too. If you use Twitter lists you can have a stream for each of these which is more practical than following everyone.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is often mentioned as a free service that can be used to find influencers via their Twitter bio, but this limits it as these examples show. Most marketers I know wouldn’t know of the top 3 ‘influencers’ here, instead, they are being rewarded for the use of auto-follow bots.
Right Relevance
For me, Right Relevance is a tool that identifies both publishers and influencers, as this example shows. It is still over-dependent on the text in the bio though, so it’s useful to try different alternatives.
Still, I’m interested to know alternatives readers use here – please share via @SmartInsights.
Google Trends
Google Trends is also an essential tool for understanding seasonal search behaviour trends in different countries in real-time.
Sprout Social
If you’re using social media accounts to reach your audience, there’s one popular site called Sprout Social that offers social media management, advocacy and analytics software for businesses.
This site lets you communicate more effectively with customers on social channels, employing social media management tools that provide you with faster communication tools by allowing you to monitor, respond, and collaborate more quickly.
For example, Sprout Social will collect social mentions from different networks, putting them in one place, and making it easier for you to manage your responses when your account has been mentioned or when you receive follower comments. It also allows you to schedule your content across platforms and add analytics.
The Sprout Social plans include a 30-day free trial period.
Pros: It offers a free trial.
Cons: Reports can be lacking in depth.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics — I can not say enough about the importance of using Google Analytics. Numbers are the marketer’s dream. We use numbers to help us make a determination. So what sort of determinations does Google Analytics help with? Site traffic, landing pages, locations from where users use your site. These are all key factors in determining the health of your site and marketing strategy.
Where are people coming from? Is it Organic traffic from Google? Social traffic?
You can learn a lot about your site, as well as your audience. This is a vital tool to analyze how your website is performing, and not surprisingly, it’s among the most popular analytics platforms available today. There’s always some digital marketing training you can take before hiring an agency.
Pros: If you want a better understanding of your users and what works (and doesn’t work) on your website, this is not only a great tool but impressively, a free one. Google Analytics is a freemium service, and money is charged for proprietary features and functions.
Cons: There’s a lot here so it can be overwhelming. Google offers a free course to help teach you how to use it. Check it out here.
SEMRush
Any business that posts blogs on their website wants to be sure that their blogs don’t just sit out there in cyberspace, but that people actually find them. SEMRush can help you get those results.
When it comes to SEO, you really need an all-in-one marketing tool to be able to not only do your keyword research but also help you track how your site is doing: whether that’s by tracking keyword positions, site analytics, or backlinks; SEMRush really is an all-in-one platform for SEO and your website’s visibility and analytics.
You can also use SEMRush to review organic search rankings for your keywords and see what competitors have done.
SEMRush has a monthly fee.
Pros: It really has a lot to offer.
Cons: It can take some time to learn the program
BuzzStream
Buzzstream is an effective tool for finding influencers and potential prospects. While browsing the web you can add new bloggers, websites, and social profiles to your database. You can conduct outreach that will look and feel personal.
BuzzStream is a great way of keeping track of your conversations because this service automatically saves your emails and tweets. You can set reminders so you can follow-up on each discussion, that way you won’t lose track of that conversation. This is the ideal way to prioritize your most important contacts.
This is a highly effective platform for doing research as well. Buzzstream offers different pricing plans for users.
Pros: You can try it for free. You can use the prospecting tool to find potential prospects. It’s great and easy-to-use.
Cons: Only searches for contact information which can be limiting.
ActiveCollab
ActiveCollab is a great, task management tool to help you organize your client work or your work in general. It’s a good platform to use to be able to make sure everyone is on the same page or same task.
You can comment right in the platform, and assign tasks for anyone on a given project. When it comes to marketing, tasks, and organization is a must. With team collaboration and time tracking, you can make sure everyone is on the same page.
Pros: This allows collaboration which is perfect for any working environment.
Cons: Even though it’s easy to use, the search functionality is really poor and unable to find the task you are looking for most times.
Facebook Business Manager & Facebook Insights
Facebook business manager is the perfect way to maximize the use of your Facebook business profile. You can run campaigns, check analytics, and truly utilize all that Facebook offers, whether it’s checking on an ad or previously boosted post or creating an ad from scratch; this tool is something you can really use in your social media arsenal.
With Facebook Insights, you can successfully track user interactions. Anyone who is an admin on your page can use this tool to see how followers are responding to your Facebook Page, then track the number of active users you have. This is an ideal way to better understand how your page is performing.
Facebook Insights lets you determine the best time of day to post or the best day of the week, and what kind of content has been the most popular.
Pros: Facebook Business Manager is free with a business account.
Cons: The interface is not intuitive; so it can be easy to get lost.
Hotjar
“Connect the Dots with One Powerful Solution” is the theme for Hotjar, which allows marketers to gain insights into how users are behaving on your website.
That includes heatmapping – heatmaps are a great way to understand what users want and care about, and what they do while they’re on your site – and recordings of user interactions with your site.
Through those recordings, you can observe the moments in the browsing process when users get frustrated and abandon their search and leave.
It also shows you the content that they spend the most time with. Hotjar also allows you to pose questions to users and get direct answers about how they’re interacting with your site.
Hotjar offers pricing plans for businesses of all sizes.
Pros: Hotjar gives you insights into how your site can be optimized in the future.
Cons: It’s a large site that can affect your load time.
LinkedIn Programmatic Ads
If you’re doing paid advertising, a good option is Programmatic advertising. It’s the use of software to automate your media purchase, so your ads get displayed automatically, based on data.
Programmatic media buying solutions let you cut down on the amount of time you spend searching for the right networks to advertise on. A good tool for this is LinkedIn Programmatic Ads, which can process a lot of data from your audience.
LinkedIn allows you to promote your company updates to targeted audiences on desktop, mobile, and tablet. This is a way to deliver your content directly to the most viewed professional news feeds. It’s also a way to deliver personalized messages that drive more conversions than email.
Pros: Your ads can easily be relevant to the people you’re targeting.
Cons: It can take some time to learn how to use.
AdRoll
Display Retargeting Tools are increasingly popular today, particularly retargeting ads that follow web users from one site to the next. Retargeting is an increasingly popular tool for drawing customers back to your site to make a purchase.
A good site to use for this is AdRoll, which provides you with access to more than 500 ad exchanges, including most of the major social media networks.
Pros: Marketers who have used AdRoll in the past have reported as much as a 265 percent lift in sales.
Cons: With AdRoll, you pay for ad space, and AdRoll retains a small percentage for serving your ad. Your total spend is the cost of buying ad space to deliver your ads.
Wyng
Organic Social Media Tools are popular, and for good reason. Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly active users, Twitter has 320 million and Instagram more than 700 million.
Not surprisingly, marketers are looking for an edge to cut through all that online traffic, and as a result, social media management tools have become common ways to improve engagement.
One useful engagement marketing tool is Wyng, which helps transform the way brands can engage and convert mobile and social consumers.
Wyng has different pricing plans.
Pros: They have a built-in analytics dashboard that monitors how each campaign is performing, and they help boost engagement through hashtag campaigns, contests, referral programs and more.
Cons: Wyng has different pricing plans. However, it can be pricey.
Google Search Console
Google, Google, Google — they are THE search engine! What’s great is that they know it, and offer the tools you need to improve your site and get ranking on search. If you succeed; they succeed.
If you don’t utilize the tools that they offer, you are doing yourself a disservice. Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a great platform. You can utilize reports in order to help you measure your website’s performance and traffic.
With Search Console, you can add a sitemap which can help your site get crawled by Google Bots, as well as tell Google to recrawl a site or pages that you just reoptimized.
As Google says, this will “make your site shine in Google Search results.”
Pros: It’s free.
Cons: It can be a bit confusing (particularly with the semi-new update) but it’s worth it once you get the hang of it.
Google Ads
To continue the long list of marketing tools that are made by Google, you have Google Ads (previously Google AdWords). Google Ads is a great way to promote your site, services, or page. With Google Ads, you can promote your brand and company, finding relevant users and increasing conversion rate.
Pros: You can get a pretty good click-through rate if you do it right, reaching your intended audience.
Cons: Navigation and cost (for ads) can be quite wonky and pricey.
Conclusion
I hope this compilation is useful, what do you find most useful of the digital marketing tools we have covered here and other tools we don’t?
Marketing planning software gives companies the tools to plan, track, and even predict marketing campaign success. All of these features are available to your entire team in cloud applications that are accessible from anywhere. Collaborative tools allow analysts, creative designers, project managers, and other team members to work together with access to shared data. Companies can also set budgets, define goals, and measure progress with greater accuracy and ease.