Software has drastically changed the way we used to work in the past. If you look back a few years, you’ll see that almost everything was done manually. Let’s face it: there are just too many things to do and not enough hours in a day, where at least half of them are spent on eating and sleeping. So, when technology came into being (I’m talking about simple hardware like mobile phones and smart technology like Google), we all collectively breathed a sigh of relief because suddenly the workload became significantly easier.
I’ve been on the inside of a lot of marketing companies. You’d think I’d know them all by now. But, there’s always new software technology popping up and being embraced by marketers. So, I thought I’d share my list of top digital marketing software. The software that I’ve used in projects and recommend to clients. Without further ado:
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.
For a quick recommendation on five free digital marketing tools you can use together, check out our video compilation.
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.
Marketo
Marketo is one of the biggest and most established marketing automation companies, which makes it easy to launch and manage marketing campaigns. Marketo offers everything marketers need including tools for automating inbound marketing, lead management, social media marketing, sales management dashboards as well as analytics. In 2012, the company generated revenue to the value of $58.4 million and was recently registered on NASDAQ.
Vocus
Vocus is a leading cloud-based marketing software which helps with customer acquisition and retention by making it easier for marketers to reach out via social media and other online media channels. Vocus offers a comprehensive suite of tools which integrate social media marketing, search marketing, email marketing as well as effective PR. Vocus reported 2012 revenue of $170.8 million, a 49% increase from the previous year.
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.
Yesware
Yesware is an email platform which makes it easier for salespeople to manage and track emails and thus close more deals. The platform tracks email opens, provides in-email analytics as well as data on user engagement. Yesware syncs seamlessly with CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle CRM saving time and increasing efficiency. Yesware raised $4 million less than a year after its initial seed funding round, making it a startup to watch this year.
Buffer
Overview
Buffer makes managing your social media easy. Nicknames like “The Siri of Social Media” and “Social Media Assistant” have been applied to Buffer. It allows you to optimize your posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, App.net, and Twitter, by scheduling them in advance; Buffer posts them at the best time based on time zone.
Features
- The free trial period for paid plans
- Detailed analytics
- Multiple social networks
- High security with two-step login
- Posts the same message to all platforms or customizes for each
Pricing
Two plans are available for individuals: Individual, which is free, and Awesome, which is $10 per month. Three plans are available for teams and agencies: Small, which is $99 per month; Medium, $199 per month; and Large, $399 per month.
Sprout Social
Overview
Sprout Social provides solutions for social media management, marketing, analytics and customer service. It’s integrated with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and more. You’ll get excellent statistics across all of your interlinked social networking sites. Sprout Social has become an incredible force in the social media world in a short time.
Features
- Social media dashboard
- Link performance analysis
- Can view Twitter follower demographics and contact details
- Discover customers by interest or by location
- Monitor competitor activity
- Customer relationship management tools
- Integrated analytics
- Free trial
Pricing
Offers three plans: Premium, $99 per month; Corporate, $149 per month, and Enterprise, $249 per month.
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.
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.
Wyng (formerly Offerpop)
Overview
Wyng lets you configure and personalize digital, mobile, and social campaigns. It also lets you view and manage user-generated content and much more.
Features
- Integrate with other enterprise platforms, such as Experian and Sprout Social
- Build custom configurations using open-source technology
- Auto-response in real-time
- Customizable templates
- Preview rendering for mobile, tablet and desktop devices
- Real-time reports
Pricing
Contact Wyng to get a breakdown of plans and prices.
Conclusion:
One of the most important factors of online marketing, it involves creating content popular enough to go viral. The algorithms are tailored to reward engaging and niche content, and marketers use this to their advantage with newsjacking and other methods.