All of us who work with digital marketing, know that digital marketing is an industry that is developing very fast. Therefore, the more knowledge we have of various tools and techniques that are used in the industry, more successful will be our progress as professionals. In short, it seems useful to have a list of useful tools for digital marketing so we can always stay ahead – no matter what – of the competition.
So, here are the best digital marketing tools out there!
Digital Marketing tools for Social Media
Doing Social Media marketing is hard without using appropriate Social Media tools. Today, there are many different types of Social Media tools. Some of them include:
- Scheduling
- Analytics
- Content creation
- Mentions
- Easy integrations with other tools
Since all of these are quite important, many modern Social Media tools have incorporated all these features and benefits into single platforms.
That being said, when choosing a Social Media tool, look for the one that has the most features included.
Buffer: The best Digital Marketing tool for Social Media
Even though there are many different types of Social Media tools, I decided to include one that is popular among many social media professionals.
Buffer is definitely one of the most famous Digital Marketing tools for Social Media out there. One of the biggest reasons for that is the fact that Buffer is free if you are managing a single business.
So if you are not managing Social Media accounts for multiple companies, Buffer is your best bet!
Buffer features
Buffer has many features. Some of them are free, some of them are premium and require little investment.
Here is what I like the most about Buffer:
- All Social Media accounts in one place
- Super easy Social Media scheduling
- Detailed Social Media analytics
- Multiple team members
- Sharing content right from where you find it
- Sharing parts of content such as images
- Excellent customer support
- Social conversations in your inbox
- Easy integrations with other tools
Also, I really like how Buffer describes its business values.
Digital Marketing tools for CRM and Email Marketing
Email Marketing and CRM are two types of must-have Digital Marketing tools. Collecting contacts and generating new leads is one of the most common goals for every modern Digital Marketing professional.
Managing these contacts, and engaging them further until they become customers, is much easier when using the right CRM and email marketing tools.
While CRMs are as popular in the world of sales, email marketing tools are reserved just for marketers.
Here is my favorite email marketing tool and Digital Marketing tool overall.
HubSpot: The best Digital Marketing tool for CRM and Email Marketing
HubSpot, the mother of inbound marketing, is my favorite digital marketing company in general. Not only that they have built an awesome digital marketing tool, but they are also the founders and the biggest educators in the world of inbound marketing.
Consequently, their tool is now known as the most complete and most robust digital marketing tool out there!
HubSpot features
I have started using HubSpot around 6 months ago. Even though it wasn’t so easy to set the thing up, once you do that, your job as a digital marketing becomes uncomparably more productive, effective and much more fun!
I often say that “there is nothing you can’t do with HubSpot”! Everything you imagine, you can make it work inside of HubSpot. Its robustness has made it the leading digital marketing tool in the world.
Some of my favorite HubSpot features include:
- Forms
- Landing pages
- Lists and segmentations
- Smart lists
- Call-to-actions
- Beautiful reports and analytics
- Workflows and flawless automation
- Collaboration with sales and customer success
- Endless integrations
- The best customer support ever!
Check all the other HubSpot features for marketing!
The problem with HubSpot is that it is VERY expensive. However, if you are a startup, you can get a very good deal.
Interested? Check out HubSpot for startup plans.
Best Digital Marketing tools for design
Design is one of the most important components of Digital Marketing. If you are like me, not so talented for design, you know how frustrating it can be to design something that actually looks appealing.
Images, captions, infographics, slideshares, videos can have a huge impact on how successful your digital marketing strategy is.
That being said, investing in design can have a significant payoff.
Thankfully, there are tools that make design easier and not so time-consuming.
Canva: The best Digital Marketing tools for design
I believe that many of you, even if you are not in marketing, have heard of Canva. Businesses from across the world, and people in different professions use it on a daily basis.
This tool is extremely easy to use. With all the templates ready to use, it can take seconds to create a beautiful blog cover, Social Media post, eBook cover, brochure or a poster.
Canva comes is a free version that is enough for many people (especially when used for private purposes). However, if you want more features, templates and team members, try Canva for business. The monthly cost is $12.95.
Canva features
In Canva, you can design anything that you think of…and it’s fast and easy!
Some of the main features I like about Canva include:
- Custom image resizing
- Pre-defined Social Media image sizes
- Saved brand colors
- Free templates, images, infographics, ebook covers, icons and many more
- Folders
- Sharing with team members
Best Digital Marketing tools for Customer Acquisition and Support
Customer acquisition…who doesn’t want that?
If you are a Digital Marketer and work with your sales team, I believe that acquiring new customers is your biggest common goal.
There are many Digital Marketing tools made to acquire new customers. In fact, most of them claim to do that.
However, there is one famous one that does that through its chatbot.
Intercom: The best Digital Marketing tool for Customer Acquisition and Support
Many people consider Intercom as customer engagement and customer support tool. However, Intercom offers much more than that.
Since it has a variety of different features, Intercom is used by both marketing teams and customer support teams.
In marketing, Intercom can be used to turn your website visitors into leads.
When visitors come to your website, that means that they are interested in your product, services, or that they have simply landed on your resources such as blog or eBook. With Intercom and a little bit of creativity, you can capture these visitor’s contact information and further engage with them through Intercom.
Intercom features
Intercom offers 3 different modules for: customer acquisition, customer engagement and customer support.
The customer acquisition module is mostly used by marketers, and some of the main features include:
- Live chat
- Visitor tracking
- Messenger visibility
- A/B testing
- Numerous integrations
- Analytics and reporting
HubSpot Marketing
Honourable Mentions
SEMrush: The best Digital Marketing tool for SEO
I have been using SEMrush for a year and a half now. I absolutely love it!
With SEMrush, I managed to grow the number of monthly website sessions from 0 to over 250,000.
Before I started, I didn’t think this was possible. I thought this process would last much longer.
In addition, we grew our number of keywords rated top 100 on Google from 0 to over 32,000.
Check out my 2019 SEO Guide!
SEMrush features
SEMrush is one of the most complete SEO tools out there. Some of my favorite SEMrush features include:
- Keyword research
- Competitor research and comparison
- Backlinking projects
- Brand monitoring
- Social Media tracker
- Site audit and healthiness
- Content analyzer
- Organic research
- Display advertising
- Product listing ads
Check more SEMrush features!
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.
For a quick recommendation on five free digital marketing tools you can use together, check out our video compilation.https://www.youtube.com/embed/WlfKH173PXA?feature=oembed
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.
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.
Proof
Price: Tiered pricing based on the volume of your website traffic, starting at $24/month
Proof connects to your CRM or website and uses social proof to boost conversions on your site. They implement social proof messaging (i.e. “25 people are viewing this post right now”), reviews, and videos geared towards targeted customers once they visit your site.
The popular Live Visitor Count and Hot Streak notification features boost customers’ perception of your brand, and lets prospects get a look at how other people respond to your product. Additionally, it’s super easy to install — you just copy and paste their pixels into your site.
You can identify your visitors and examine their journey throughout your site, which can help optimize your site design for higher conversions. It integrates with an impressive amount of other software systems and is optimized for mobile.
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.
Yoast
Price: The Yoast plugin for WordPress is free, but the paid premium plans range based off the number of sites you need monitored
Yoast is a very popular plugin that works with both Gutenberg and the Classic editor in WordPress. Yoast is an excellent tool to help you optimize your content for search engines.
Yoast helps you choose cornerstone content, focus keywords to help you rank, individual content URLs, and internal links for an additional boost. The plugin also evaluates your page readability and gives it a Flesch Reading Ease score.
It’s updated to reflect Google’s algorithm every two weeks, so you can always stay up-to-date on your SEO.
Slack
Price: Free for small or medium companies, custom pricing for enterprises
Slack is one of the favored communication services in business today.
It operates in channels designated for certain information, so business conversations don’t get distracted or cut-off by tangents about where everyone wants to go for team lunch. It facilitates, de-silos, and focuses collaboration between employees and teams.
It’s an excellent tool for networking and meeting others in the digital marketing space, and gives you the freedom to join or leave channels as needed.
Because it’s such a popular communication channel, it has wide-ranging integrations with plenty of other tools. You can tack on a seemingly unlimited amount of integrations and Slack applications to make the tool even more powerful — for instance, many teams will pipe in A/B test results, analytics notifications, new customer or transaction notifications, or even sales or customer support bots. While undeniably powerful, Slack is easy to start using immediately.
Conclusion
I’ve been a digital marketer for numerous years now and have learned a ton along the way. One of the most important things I’ve learned is the use of tools to help me grow my business. There are a lot of different tools out there so choosing which ones to use can be overwhelming. In this article, I’m going to talk about the best digital marketing tools that I’ve discovered over my years as a marketer. These might not be the standard old school SEO ranking page tools, but they will help you grow your business by being more efficient and effective with your time. Every day is a gift.