While digital marketing tools will only help you execute a proper strategy (they won’t do the work for you), the right technology stack can really help you zoom past the competition.
Which are the best digital marketing tools of 2021? It’s hard to give you a definitive answer. Why? Simply because I don’t know what the future will be like. But it is safe to say that if you want to be successful in this industry, digital marketing tools are something you can’t live without. Having an effective website is simply not enough anymore. If you want to stand out from the competition, you need to have engaging social media accounts, optimize your content with regular SEO & link building campaigns and much more. And that is only possible with software tools! Here is my list for best digital marketing tools in 2021.
SEMrush
If you’re serious about improving your SEO strategy, you’re going to want to check out SEMrush. SEMrush is a highly effective all-in-one digital marketing tool. This tool offers assistance in performing keyword research, position tracking, and identifying backlink opportunities. You can even use this tool to perform a comprehensive technical SEO audit. SEMrush offers free and paid memberships. With a free account, you are limited in your ability to pull data and use some of the tool’s features. This is why we suggest starting out with a 14-day free trial to explore some of SEMrush’s popular functions.
MailChimp
Price: Tiered pricing, plans start free and range up to $199
MailChimp is an email marketing and social advertising tool designed to automate and orchestrate campaigns.
You can track the traffic garnered from your campaigns — additionally, MailChimp offers multiple integrations with other SaaS companies. The tool is especially powerful for email drip campaigns. Ultimately, it’s a good option for engaging with your audience.
Google AdWords
Price: AdWords run on a pay-per-click model
Google AdWords is one of the most popular options for advertising your business on Google’s search engine results’ pages. Payment is based on either a pay-per-click or pay-per-call structure.
Google AdWords hosts the Google Keyword Planner, where you can research which keywords you want to include in your ad and your other content. You can set budget caps on how much you want to spend. Ultimately, the tool helps you funnel more prospects to your website.
AdWords is an excellent way to display your products or services on Google’s results pages for very specific queries. For instance, let’s say someone searches for “best CrossFit gym in Austin”. Sure, you could work on your SEO and hope to appear organically — but you can also bid on the keyword and appear at the top of the page, enabling you to capture tons of high intent visitors.
HubSpot
HubSpot is an essential tool for all things inbound. 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 also view important KPIs inside each tool’s dashboard. If you’re looking to learn more about inbound marketing, HubSpot Academy offers a large collection of certification courses that will teach you useful information to help you grow your marketing strategy.
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.
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.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a must-have for anyone in the digital marketing space. At first glance, this tool can seem a little advanced, but if you use it to its full capabilities, you will receive a ton of insight on how your customers are engaging with your site. If you’re looking to increase your understanding of Google Analytics, we recommend exploring the Google Analytics Academy. This is a collection of free courses that will help you learn everything there is to know about the platform so you can use it to its full benefit.
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.
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. This covers high-level elements 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.
15. MeetEdgar
Price: $49/month
MeetEdgar is an excellent social media management tool.
Using the browser extension, it can write posts and extract up to five important highlights from your posted content for you to easily share. You can sort your content into categories and decide when you want content shared from each category.
It allows you to schedule posts 24/7, and if your queue runs out, it will mine previous posts and re-share them — which you can start and stop at any time. You can also use MeetEdgar to run A/B tests on your content to find the most optimal language and content for your posts.
MeetEdgar is integrated with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Canva
Canva is a great tool for creating professional-looking graphics. No matter your experience, you can easily use this tool to create social images, CTA buttons, and infographics for free. Canva offers a large selection of templates, clip art, and fonts to help you customize your project. This is the perfect tool for someone who doesn’t have access to more advanced design“>design platforms like Photoshop or InDesign.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an enterprise-level social media management tool that allows users to store and schedule social media content on a variety of platforms. This tool can help you track the performance of your social media content, calculate conversions, ROI and track public conversations about your brand, product, or service. Hootsuite offers a limited free subscription and a free, 30-day trial offer for the professional subscription.
Buffer
Price: Starts free and goes up to $199/month
Managing all your social media marketing in one place can be a huge time saver. Buffer certainly fits the bill with its clean and simple interface and intuitive setup flow. Plus, there are plenty of advanced features for the many social media jobs you need to do.
With Buffer, you get a full social media management solution: plan, create, and schedule your social media posts; follow up on post performance with smart analytics; and engage with your followers from a social media inbox. Plus, you can work together with your team to run all your organic social strategy through Buffer.
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.
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.
Conclusion
With such a large selection of digital marketing tools, it is important to know which ones truly drive results.
The web offers thousands of tools for digital marketers. With such an array of options, selecting the best tools for your needs can be a long and overwhelming process. To make life a little easier that is why we have put together a list of some of the best tools out there.