As a marketer, you’re always on the lookout for new tools to improve your marketing strategy and campaign efforts. You’re also probably pretty picky about which marketing tools you choose to invest in. After all, you want to get a good return on your investment…and that means choosing only the best digital marketing tools.
The best digital marketing tools can help you accomplish everything from boosting your SEO to simplifying content creation for social media. As a result, these tools make it easier for marketers to manage campaigns and generate results. They also help you create the kind of content that will keep your target audience engaged with your brand.
Whether you’re looking to develop an email marketing campaign or improve site speed, there are plenty of digital marketing tools available to help marketers grow their business.
Want to learn more about choosing the right digital marketing tool? Keep reading!
Best Digital Marketing Tools To Grow A Business
1. Google Trends
Google Trends shows you the latest trends in any area you’re interested in. Just type the chosen keyword (product, industry name, or something else) in the search panel. You’ll immediately know how much online buzz there is about your topic. If this is yor brand name or a competitor, the information is incredibly valuable.
How this helps
It’s important to know which products or services are popular and trending to come up with better ideas for your own. With Google Trends, you’ll be able to verify whether your business idea is outdated, and if there are a lot of similar offers which may obstruct your success.
2. Ahrefs
The competitive environment is the most important concern when you launch a business. Ahrefs’ set of tools provides you with an opportunity to get to know the competitors in your field. You’ll also learn the source of competitors’ traffic, information about their ranking keywords, backlinks, content features, and a lot of other useful data.
How this helps you
To grow your business, you need to learn from your competitors. For this, you to know their weaknesses and strengths, and beat them within your area of business. Using these data, you’ll have a perfect reference point for your own digital marketing approach.
3. Keywords Explorer by Ahrefs
It’s hard to overestimate how much this tool will help you in creating your marketing strategy. Keywords Explorer’s Database proposes more than 3 billion keywords, updated on a monthly basis. It’s also supported in more than 100 countries.
A few of its standout features:
- Keyword difficulty score: tells you how easy it will be to rank for each keyword
- “Clicks” metric: shows the data about actual clicks for keywords
- Advanced metrics: includes an analysis of return rate, paid clicks, and clicks per search
How this helps you
Keywords play a core role in the promotion process since help searchers find the content they’re looking for. Thus, knowing what keywords users seek more often, you’ll be able to incorporate them widely into your content and make your content easier to find.
4. Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook is the biggest social network in the world. It’s also the most effective tool for targeting your advertising campaign to the right market. Audience Insights gives you demographic data, interests, habits, the devices people are using, and even the household income (for some countries) of these Facebook users.
How this helps you
There’s a saying: “who owns information, owns the world.” When you know your customers’ interests, you can offer them the products and services they really need. Plus, knowing the events which your target audience attend can inspire you to include these activities in your own marketing plan.
5. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo lets you analyze the most shared content on any topic. It allows you to find content in a specific niche by theme, author, or domain. It also makes it easier to monitor your competitors’ social activity.
How this helps you
When you know your target audience, this tool helps you to create the perfect content for them, based on other strong content available. This in turn leads to high engagement, and lets you see the users’ reactions to this content on social networks.
Building a marketing strategy
6. CoSchedule headline analyzer
The names of your products or services, campaign slogan, and content titles – all these are designed to attract customers. This tool helps you to create more persuasive headlines which attract readers and cause them to click for more information.
How this helps you
The tool has great tips to help you to create bright and notable headlines. The more effective your headlines, the more visitors of your resources you will get. The more online visitors, the more more likely that people will buy.
7. WebpageFX’s readability tool
Your best content will be ineffective if it doesn’t suit your target audience. This online marketing tool helps you adapt your texts to the required level of your readers. Just enter your URL in the search block, and you will get the guide for refining your content.
How this helps you
It makes your text readable and understandable for your target buyers. This is important, since nobody will delve into things which are complicated and ambiguous. Make your content more readable, and more people will actually read it.
8. PushCrew (now VWO)
The ultimate goal of your company’s online presence is to grow the audience. PushCrew is designed for exactly this purpose. It lets you send push notifications to your customers, even when they’re not currently on your website. This is a great way to inform people about your new offers.
How this helps you
With so much online noise, every company risks getting lost in the endless flow of information. Push notifications make it easier to remind customers about new products. And with a consistent strategy, this tool gives you the opportunity to transform your “casual” visitors into loyalists.
9. Facebook advertising
We’ve already mentioned the potential of this social network. This tool gives you both an easy and a complex approach to creating Facebook ads. Even at the basic level, it can help you increase audience awareness of your brand, and begin conversations with your prospects.
How this helps you
Facebook advertising helps you create an advertising strategy on the biggest social network, which allows you to reach a large, targeted audience.
10. Eclincher
At a time of extreme social activity, it’s important to maximize the opportunities that social media gives your business. Eclincher helps you automate your social media marketing. It automatically publishes content on all channels, and schedules posts to provide better performance and reception. Moreover, it replies to every reaction on your post on social media.
How this helps you
To implement and control marketing campaigns in a few directions at once is an overwhelming and unrealistic task for most people. Eclincher allows simultaneous promotions possible all over social, and provides easy interaction with the audience.
Analyzing your results
11. Crazy Egg
This application shows you information about your website’s visitors and their interactions with each page.
How this helps you
Using Crazy Egg, you get an opportunity to adjust your online resources to the visitors’ needs, improve navigation, and increase conversion rates.
12. SERPs Rank Checker
Just input your website (or any keyword), and you’ll see where your resource ranks for a particular period.
How this helps you
The tool evaluates your website’s keyword ranks in Google. The higher the rank, the easier it is for people to find you, and the more effective your marketing will be. Thus, by means of SERP, you can measure the efficiency of your positioning and change your strategy if the rank is low.
13. Google Analytics
Google analytics lets you track huge traffics flows, alongside surfacing keywords which visitors use to land on your website.
How this helps you
The availability and visibility of your website are the primary ground for top performance. Google Analytics helps you achieve this by optimizing your web resources.
14. Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer gives an opportunity to make a comprehensive link analysis. It lets you research backlinks, discovers opportunities for link-building, and uncover potentially damaging links.
How this helps you
You know that links are important for promotion. The more “good” links, the better marketing campaign is. But how one can distinguish a good click from spam? Open Site Explorer helps you do this.
15. Facebook Analytics for apps
This might be Facebook’s most powerful analytics tool. Nowhere else you can find such rich demographical data and across-channel analysis. Plus it provides numerous tools for analyzing your performance based on retention and revenue.
How this helps you
Facebook has valuable information about people’s actvities, location, and purchase habits. Its analytics give data about social tendencies that can be very valuable for your marketing strategy.
marketing tools for small business
Google Analytics
Mailchimp
Hootsuite
BuzzSumo
KWFinder
HubSpot
Canva
Ahrefs
Slack
Yoast
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is completely free software that provides valuable insights into who is visiting your website and how they engage with it.
It’s best paired with Google Search Console – another free digital marketing tool that helps you to identify any problems on your site and optimize it for traffic.
Some of the data points that Google Analytics makes available to you include:
The number of visitors to your site by day, week, month, or any time period you choose
Where these visitors are coming from – referrals from other website, organic search, ads, social, or direct
The keywords people are using in Google to find your site
The demographics and interests of your users
How long each user spends on your site and which pages they visit
All this information is interesting, but it’s also vital knowledge that can help you to optimize your website and marketing campaigns (while keeping your SEO efforts low cost).
For example, you might notice through Search Console or Analytics that you’re getting a lot of traffic from a keyword that you lack content covering. Write a blog post optimized for that keyword and watch your traffic and engagement levels rocket.
Getting loads of visitors from Facebook but none from Twitter? Maybe this is a sign you should concentrate your marketing efforts on your main channel.
It’s all about the insights – not just the analytics.
- Mailchimp
Mailchimp
No matter how large or small your business is, email marketing should definitely be a part of your overall strategy.
When a customer signs up to your mailing list, they’re inviting you straight into their inbox. That’s why email marketing on average offers a higher ROI than any other marketing activity.
To get started with email marketing, you need a service that will enable you to capture emails, manage your lists, send out emails automatically or on a schedule, and analyze engagement.
Mailchimp is an ideal choice if you’re just starting out or if you are running a small business. Mailchimp’s basic service is free until your list hits 2,000 subscribers. It offers the main functionality you need without making managing your email marketing too complex.
Plus, Mailchimp now offers a slew of features and digital marketing tools (some under paid plans):
Segmentation and personalization
Landing page builders
Form builders
Audience insights
CRM tools
Predictive insights
- Hootsuite
Hootsuite
There’s no question. You must maintain a presence on social media to remain competitive in the marketplace. You also probably already know that social media can be a huge time sink, even if you’re using it purely for marketing purposes rather than endlessly scrolling.
Luckily, you have digital marketing tools available to cut down on this time inefficiency, like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite provides a central management platform for all your social media channels and allows you to schedule posts in advance so you can get all your social media content for the coming weeks or months ready in one session.
You also get advanced reporting tools to see which of your social media campaigns are working most effectively and use this data to calculate ROI.
You can also track mentions of your brand and manage responses, all in one dashboard.
Hootsuite also offers tools for promoting your social media posts through the platform now as well.
- BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo
Your content strategy shouldn’t consist of wild stabs in the dark as you cover topics you think your audience will engage with.
That’s why 60% of B2B brands with the most successful content marketing have a documented strategy. Meanwhile, only 21% of the brands with the least successful content say they have a documented strategy.
To be successful in content marketing, you need to do your research properly, and this is why BuzzSumo is one of my favorite content marketing tools.
BuzzSumo shows content that is trending across social media based on searched topics. Following your search, you can analyze the results that are returned to see what’s so appealing about them and to get ideas of subjects to write about.
But BuzzSumo is moving beyond just basic content research and viral posts. Today, BuzzSumo offers tons of digital marketing tools like:
Keyword research
Influencer search
Topic-based social media feeds
Content analysis
Crisis management
Brand monitoring tools
- KWFinder
KWFinder
SEO is a fundamental of online marketing and it’s important to get right. Not only should you make sure your site is structured properly and optimized for mobile, the content you produce must also contain relevant keywords that you have a good chance of ranking for in search results.
You need a special digital marketing tool to find those relevant keywords and start your search. You have several options available from the free Google Keyword Planner, to more complex suites of tools like SECockpit.
The more advanced digital marketing tools get quite expensive, with monthly subscription fees starting at $100 or more. However, options like KWFinder offer affordable, accurate, and useful insights at a perfect price point for small businesses.
Just put in a seed keyword and the tool will come back with hundreds of suggestions, search volume data, trends, and a ranking difficulty score for each word or phrase.
Mangools, the brand behind KWFinder, offers plans for individual tools or its full suite which includes a backlink tool, website analysis, SERP watchers, and more inside each one – along with a nice browser extension.
- HubSpot
HubSpot
If you’re running multiple campaigns across numerous marketing channels, not only is it a huge challenge to manage them all, but you also have to figure out exactly what’s working and where to make improvements.
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software solution that enables you to bring all your different marketing channels together, and optimize for more traffic, a higher conversion rate, and better ROI.
The tool includes optimized templates that are ideal for creating landing pages along with other features like live chat and user action events which ramp up your engagement and convert more visitors into customers.
Other features of HubSpot include:
Content optimization tools
Optimized landing pages
Email templates
Marketing automation
Lead management
Analytics
Social media management
The full version of HubSpot has a hefty price tag but small businesses on lower budgets can get started with their free or basic package.
HubSpot has also made the switch from an inbound marketing tool to a complete CRM platform, now offering free and paid sales hubs, customer service hubs, and content management (on top of the free/paid marketing hub).
However, the complete content management platform is only available in paid versions.
- Canva
Canva
You need visuals to keep your audience engaged.
For example, you could use quality photos to keep your readers interested, come up with motivating quote graphics, visualize complex data with colorful graphs, and create highly engaging infographics.
Now, what if I told you that there is an awesome tool that will help you create original, visually appealing content in just a few minutes? Of course, I’m talking about Canva!
Canva keeps evolving, offering more graphic design tools and templates all the time: social media, infographics, marketing posters, business cards, eBooks, and anything else you could possibly need.
And Canva’s free templates (and entire freemium version) are actually useful too!
Use photos already featured on the site, upload and polish up your own images, or even create brand new ones.
Most importantly, you don’t need to have any graphic design experience to create high-quality graphics. With its easy-to-use drag and drop features, Canva arms you with a wide range of photo editing options, color palettes, font combinations, effects, and custom image sizes.
- Ahrefs
Ahrefs
While old-school SEO was all about building backlinks, modern SEO practices are focused on understanding the search intent of keywords you can actually rank for, and building relevant and organic backlinks from authority sites.
With quality links leading to your content, search engines will know how authoritative and trustworthy your website is. That’s why off-page backlink analysis is the backbone of your digital marketing strategy.
Now, even with a plethora of amazing tools, Ahrefs is the one and only for many digital marketers.
With Ahrefs, you can do competitive analysis and see the keywords your competitors rank for in organic search results, find the best keywords ideas, access your backlink data instantly, find content relevant to your niche, keep track of your desktop and mobile keyword rankings, and get alerted whenever one of your competitors gets or loses a backlink.
Ahrefs has improved much over the years, now offering comprehensive tools for:
Website analysis and backlink profiles
Keyword research
Website auditing for keyword gaps and performance issues
Rank tracking to follow your performance over time
Content explorer to stay on top of your niche
- Slack
Slack
In the world of digital marketing tools, the success of any project hinges on the ease of communication between teams. That’s why you should invest in easy-to-use software that provides your team with uninterrupted interaction and data sharing.
One of the most popular team collaboration platforms is Slack. This sweet tool has won the hearts of many digital marketers thanks to its simple data sharing and easy message search options.
Most importantly, Slack can integrate with all major project management, office management, sales, productivity, design, and developer tools, making it easier for you to stay on top of every aspect of your digital marketing campaign.
- Yoast
Yoast
What use are all the hours you spend researching keywords and topics worth if you don’t properly optimize your content? Even the best of us forget things once in a while.
Yoast is one of the best digital marketing tools for optimizing content for SEO because they offer an awesome free version. Yoast will tell you where to place your keyword, how to improve readability, and perhaps most importantly, let you know what you’re doing wrong so you can improve.
With the paid versions, you can add related keywords, search for semantic keywords within the plugin, get instant internal link suggestions, insights, and more.
Try the free version of Yoast for a while to familiarize yourself with the features and audit your site’s content. When you’re comfortable, upgrade to the paid version to boost your content even further.
Conclusion
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