Marketing has undergone a lot of changes over the past decade. We’ve seen numerous different advertising techniques, and at this point its impossible to say what will work and what won’t in regards to marketing. That said, we can provide you with some tools that we think will aid in your success when running marketing campaigns.
Here is a list of marketing tools available for digital marketers out there. These are the best digital marketing tools that will help you to improve your business through effective digital marketing strategies.
Sprout Social
Hey, you can’t blame us for putting ourselves on the top of the list!
That’s because Sprout Social is the ultimate control center for any business looking to translate its social presence into actual results.
As a social media management platform, Sprout helps businesses organize their content calendar and assets in one place. This allows you to publish and schedule your content across multiple platforms, all timed to perfection based on when your followers are most active.
Beyond social media management features, Sprout makes it easy to collaborate with colleagues and customers alike. Our Smart Inbox gives you a bird’s-eye view of all of your social messages so you can respond thoughtfully and in a timely manner.
Oh, and don’t forget about Sprout’s full suite of social analytics.
Optimizing your content’s performance doesn’t have to be a guessing game as Sprout identifies your top-performing posts and the success of your social campaigns. Coupled with robust social listening features, you can uncover trends, hashtags and opportunities to engage with new customers.
HubSpot Marketing
Price: Free to $3,200/month for enterprises, depending on your plan
HubSpot has several tools to help you grow your business, no matter what stage you’re at.
Starting out, there are several tools available for free. You can set up web forms, popup forms, and live chat software for lead capture. Then, you can send email marketing campaigns, pipe all of your data into the free CRM, and analyze site visitors’ behavior.
When you expand into the paid tiers, things get really sophisticated with advanced marketing automation.
From managing your content and social media to tracking emails and connecting with your leads, HubSpot is an all-in-one solution — although it works well with other point solutions you may use (Typeform, HotJar, etc.).
Ultimately, the tool allows you to:
- Grow your traffic, convert leads, and prove ROI for your inbound marketing campaigns.
- Shorten deal cycles and increase close rates with the provided sales tools.
Mixpanel
“It’s really easy to use and set up. It gives me deeper insights into my analytics than anything else.
It gives me a holistic view of how my marketing is performing in addition to Google Analytics. When I tag campaigns with UTMs, I can see the performance of it all the way through to purchase and retention.”
Sid Bharath, Saas Marketing Consultant @ Sidbharath.com
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.
Loomly
Loomly’s self-described “brand success platform” is a tool that’s ideal for smaller social teams looking to organize and collaborate on content.
Built-in calendars, deadlines and workflows make both scheduling and brainstorming content a breeze. As an added bonus, Loomly actually curates fresh content ideas for users based on trending topics and Twitter conversations.
The clean, no-frills interface is easy to navigate and friendly to users who might not be the most tech-savvy. The affordability of the platform is enticing for solo businesses and smaller agencies looking to wrangle their social presence.
Hotjar
“One of my favorite digital marketing tools is Hotjar — it’s an analytics & feedback program that allows marketers to track user behavior on the site. The program helps you identify the information behind behavior by leveraging powerful tools like site heatmaps, screen recordings of your user and surveys/feedback polls. As a digital marketer, having a tool like this helps me measure the effectiveness of a website design while allowing me to build solutions that increase conversion of the site! I’ve been using it in our latest e-commerce launch of MSafe, a direct-to-consumer home safe brand.”
Dean DeCarlo, President @ Mission Disrupt
Digital Marketing Tools for Conversion, Marketing Automation, & Personalization
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
Audiense
We’ve talked time and time again about the importance of social listening for identifying trends and potential customers.
Tools like Audiense take listening to the next level by helping companies both identify and segment their social media audiences. Doing so makes it easier to run laser-targeted ad campaigns and likewise dive deeper into your customer personas. Digging into demographics, personality straights and beyond, you’d be surprised at what you can learn from social alone.
Audiense’s platform focuses primarily on Twitter, making it great for B2B brands interested in prospecting and B2C companies looking to understand more about their target audience.
Email marketing tools
Email represents arguably the most tried-and-tested, scalable marketing channel available to modern companies. As such, email solutions are a staple of Internet marketing software for businesses big and small.
From list-building and improving deliverability to coming up with awesome offer campaigns, let’s look at some tools that can break down your customer data and put a good chunk of your marketing efforts on autopilot.
Ahrefs
Price: Tiered pricing, ranging from $99 to $399
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool to help you punch up your website traffic. They have data for around 150 million keywords in the U.S., and even more for 150 other countries.
Ahrefs is great for competitive analysis, allowing you to check out who is linking to your competitors, what their top pages are, and more. You can see where their content ranks and, using the Content Gap tool, identify key weaknesses for your content areas.
The Top Pages tool lets you see which pages get the most traffic, and you can see the amount of traffic going to competitors’ sites.
Ahrefs is one of my favorite SEO tools. It constantly impresses me with features I use daily, and I learn about new features all the time. It’s easily the most robust product in this space.
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.
SendGrid
SendGrid offers a full suite of email marketing services, many of which are totally friendly to novices and email veterans alike.
For example, the platform offers flexible design options via visual, drag-and-drop editing, coding or a combination of both. In-depth deliverability and performance analytics are also built into SendGrid, cluing marketers in on which messages are performing and what needs work.
We know: there are more email marketing solutions out there than we can count. That said, a big upside of SendGrid is the forever-free plan for up-and-coming businesses as well as scalable pricing that matches your needs as you grow your list.
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.
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.
lemlist
lemlist is unique among our email marketing tools because the platform is primarily focused on deliverability. Emphasizing the best times to send your messages (and how often) for the sake of more opens and clicks, lemlist is awesome for optimizing your existing campaigns.
Rather than second-guessing your marketing pushes, lemlist can be an eye-opener in terms of how to warm up your list.
Additional features include personalization tools to make your outreach emails sound less spammy and follow-up email sequences to encourage more replies from cold prospects.
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.
Moosend
Moosend is among the most user-friendly and affordable of our digital marketing tools, representing a surprisingly robust email solution for those just beginning to build their list.
Codeless campaigns, simple automations and easy-to-read reporting are all built into the platform. Paid users can also take advantage of landing page features, including mobile popups and countdown timers.
CONCLUSION
There are plenty of different tools for you to tackle your marketing problems head-on — you just need to decide where to focus first. Which tool works best with your company structure and ultimate goals?
Any combination of the tools above can serve as the foundation for a solid digital marketing stack. Don’t be shy about test-driving and going through trials to find what works for your business and budget.
With the right tools at your disposal, you can streamline your marketing campaigns and automate a ton of tasks in the process.