17 Jun
Now you can see a great evolution in marketing tools and the technology that goes hand in hand with it. Because of which many marketing tasks are simplified and automated.
Promoting products & services, generating leads, driving sales, and improving brand image using various marketing tools and techniques is what defines the life of a marketer. We found some tools to be highly effective while many others were only so-so and the remaining tools were a total waste of time, I must say.
Hence, here we have a list of invaluable digital marketing tools that you can use to maximize your digital marketing efforts and make your business more efficient.
What are marketing tools?
Marketing tools are tools that marketers use to help them boost sales. They are techniques, strategies and materials to help sell products or services. Most businesses use several different types of technologies for different purposes, such as analytics, advertising or even social media marketing.
It’s essential that you are set up for success when starting or growing your business, and digital marketing software can help you automate and manage many of the time-consuming manual tasks. By doing so, you’re free to focus on the most crucial parts of scaling your business.
Reasons to use marketing tools
1. Improves customer engagement and increases revenue
Predictive marketing analytics can save companies money by honing marketing efforts and eliminating campaigns that don’t resonate with shoppers. Analytics can increase conversions with personalized, well-targeted marketing that turns shoppers into buyers. Predictive marketing analytics are particularly helpful in B2B sales, where customer acquisition is often more costly than in B2C. Predictive analytics can sharpen a company’s cross-sell, upsell, or renewal options.
Customer lifecycle analytics (one of the subsets of marketing analytics) can convert one-time purchasers into repeat customers, building greater value from existing customers. Analyst firm Gartner states that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one; it makes sense to cultivate loyal customers.
2. Helps smaller ecommerce merchants stay competitive
Large ecommerce companies like Amazon and Netflix use predictive marketing analytics and recommendation engines to offer customers suggestions for additional purchases. Personalized product recommendations can only be ascertained using predictive analytics. Data scientists are now able to generate machine-learning algorithms that provide real-time, personalized offers for different customers. With the introduction of affordable SaaS solutions, smaller ecommerce companies can now use such tools.
3. Facilitates more sophisticated segmentation of data
The popularity of using social media and location-based messaging for business means that companies have more sources of information on leads and customer preferences.
Putting all the sources together allows marketers to gather valuable insights. This translates into more sophisticated segmentation, which in turn sharpens the marketing message. As a result, campaigns are more successful at conversions, and budget and resources are focused on who in the market will buy.
4. Identifies promotions that are better targeted to customers
Algorithms can predict a shopper’s response to a marketing communication, the impact on customer behavior, and any incremental impact of multiple messages. These algorithms allow marketers to choose the best campaign message for each individual and determine the best mix of marketing communications.
5. Minimizes wasted marketing dollars
Knowing what techniques and what marketing channels work best for each customer lets companies carefully target communications rather than randomly bombarding prospects. With predictive analytics, marketers can determine where to advertise and how to improve email and direct mail campaigns. This results in fewer wasted marketing dollars.
6. Improves lead scoring
For B2B marketers, better lead scoring is probably the most prominent use of predictive analytics. Lead scoring is a methodology that ranks prospects on a scale that represents the perceived value of each lead to the organization. To determine lead scores, a company gathers information about prospects to estimate their likelihood of taking a desired action, usually purchase intent. Other measurements include customer lifetime revenue, profitability, and promotion response. Sales departments use scoring to assign priorities to leads for sales contact and follow up. Model-based scoring has proven to be more accurate than manual formulas.
Email marketing and lead nurturing tools
You can connect with your audience in a meaningful way. Email Marketing by Ascend allows you to create beautiful mobile-optimized emails based on customizable designer-made templates. You can let users know of your online store discounts, events or add value with personalized automated emails, including the contact’s name.
To optimize these email campaigns, you will have access to your open and delivery rates, clicks and engagement, so you know exactly which type of content your audience best responds to. A tip to send you off with is to make sure you build trust by using a professional email address with a custom domain name.
Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service. It enables you to reach the right person at the right time. By curating a path for each customer, you can have different rules like branching points and delays that deliver relevant messages.
This is an easy to use platform and affordable too.Mailchimp recommends automated emails as opposed to bulk emails, reporting a 93% increase in open rates and a 174% increase in click rates when using this type of marketing tool. MailChimp also provides triggering emails like password recoveries or signup confirmation to assist customers when they need it.
Marketo has a full suite of digital marketing solutions aimed to nurture your leads and customers. If your business has a sales team, Marketo is known to increase sales productivity with their inbound and outbound marketing engagements. It develops and sells marketing automation software for account-based marketing and other marketing services and products including SEO and content.
This platform allows you to give reps a prioritized list of the highest-scoring leads to more effectively and consistently improve their sales performance. Another benefit of Marketo is that they have over 500 integration partners, so you can avoid connectivity challenges and enrich your data environment.
Social media marketing tools
Authentic engagement is key for an effective social media marketing strategy. Platforms such as Buffer let you publish, analyze and engage all in one platform.
Buffer is a software application for the web and mobile, designed to manage accounts in social networks, by providing the means for a user to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, as well as analyze their results and engage with their community.
Their platform allows you to work together with your team to plan, preview and schedule your upcoming campaigns. Using Buffer also lets you reply to comments, prioritize important social media conversations, and even get alerted about negative sentiment reactions, so you are always in the know and on top of your social media game.
Hootsuite empowers its users to connect with their audience by keeping an eye on the latest social conversations and trends. They even let you know when you’ve been mentioned by brand name, even if a social user did not tag your handle in the post, which is great for staying on top of timely mentions and buzz happening around you.
The platform’s social analytics easily tell you what is working so you can do more of it. By seeing the data for each post you can create better content in the future that your followers and potential customers will love. With Hootsuite you can:
- Save time by scheduling posts across all your social networks in just a few clicks. Automatically schedule your content and review posts in a simple calendar view.
- Produce quality content that delights your audience and reaches more people. Access your image assets directly from the Hootsuite dashboard to make regular posting easy.
- Keep an eye on the latest social conversations, trends, and brand mentions. Quickly respond to comments from an inbox that combines all your conversations from supported social networks in a single thread.
- Social analytics dashboard shows your top performing content and gives personalized insights on why it’s working.
If you’re all about making data-driven decisions, Iconosquare will give you peace of mind when it comes to your social media marketing. When promoting content in the form of ads, Iconosquare can integrate with it and provide you with analytics on those paid campaigns. Furthermore, their actionable analytics let you visualize the metrics that are most important to you, such as.
Another great aspect of this program is that there is a multi-profile management ability, which lets you manage multiple brands and companies’ accounts in one dashboard. This advanced feature is especially valuable for digital marketing agencies and freelancers working with several clients. It helps you monitor your content performance and channel growth, as well as you can schedule posts.
Website analytics and data reporting
Wix Analytics is one of the most crucial marketing tools available for getting information about your website. Every published Wix website has Wix analytics built into the dashboard. There, you can track your traffic and understand where your visitors come from, which days and time are most popular and see where on your site they spend the most time.
An extra benefit of the system is that you can get to know your customers and understand how they are growing over time. Additionally, Wix Analytics offers you personalized suggestions based on your site’s performance, with specific actionable items to boost traffic and engage with visitors.
When it comes to analyzing data for your business in one place, Google Analytics has the digital offerings you need. What differentiates this product is that it gives you access to Google’s unique insights and machine learning capabilities. Among other things, you’ll be able to set up conversion modeling, run behavior reports and conduct data visualization. It also lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google marketing platform brand. Other platforms by Google that can also be great for making marketing decisions are Google Search Console, used for understanding your site’s search traffic, and Google Trends, one of the best web trend tracking tools available in the market.
Kissmetrics is a powerful web analytics tool that delivers key insights and user interaction on your website. It defines a clear picture of users’ activities on your website and collects acquisition data of every visitor.
Their online solutions are split between SAAS businesses and e-commerce companies. What sets Kissmetrics apart is that their data is less focused on sessions and is tied to a real person, allowing you to track a user’s full customer journey across devices and discover their drop-off points on your site. If you want to know which features on your site are the most valuable, this software will also permit you to do exactly that.
CRM software
No digital marketing toolset is complete without a CRM. CRM stands for customer relationship management, which helps you manage your company’s relationships with existing customers and potential customers.
CRM by Ascend allows you to capture leads and convert them into customers by streamlining your workflow. You can use it to track leads and set priorities to follow up with so that you never miss a lead or a chance for you to connect with your customers. The goal is to allow you to build lasting relationships, which can be done with live chat, forms, landing pages, inbox, contacts, automations and a lot more.
The main goal of HubSpot’s CRM is to grow and nurture your database. Their different online products offer professional-looking landing pages that the CRM will automatically enrich and track each contact once a lead is submitted.
Furthermore, their bulk emails can get personalized from the contact data based on your CRM. Once you review the analytics of how they interacted with the campaign, you can track trends and drive more conversions.
Salesforce CRM lets you keep track of every interaction, the ones that have already happened or need to happen. The software allows you to filter the contacts in your database to find the ideal prospects and decision-makers within a company. By speaking to the right people, you can get more leads.
Website testing
Optimizely provides digital experience platform software as a service. The Optimizely DXP platform provides A/B testing and multivariate testing tools, website personalization, and feature toggle capabilities, as well as web content management and digital commerce.
Optimizely is an experimentation platform that helps developers build and run A/B tests on websites. This is to achieve validation for conversion rate optimization efforts. You can create a variety of Optimizely experiments for your webpages using the dynamic or basic features that come with the service.
With this in mind, Optimizely created software that provides the means to run better experiments across both frontend layouts and backend logic. Their digital marketing tool gives you real-time web testing data so you can make confident adoptions to your business website. A reason to run these types of tests is so you can move and experiment with key parts of your site and optimize for the best performance.
2. Visual Website Optimizer (VWO)
Visual Website Optimizer is there to empower your online performance with A/B testing experimentation designed for growing your business. They pride themselves on measuring the impact of their tests by aggregating metrics such as leading and lagging indicators that can stop bad experiments early on.
Furthermore, VMO’s software is friendly for both technical and non-technical marketers, allowing you to launch new experiments in minutes that combine different modes of experimentation. Once you’ve got some tests under your belt, manage your experiment pipeline in a centralized place. There, all your co-workers can also get access to the status of the tests.
With the power of Hotjar, you can easily understand how users experience your website through heatmaps and behavior analytics. Heatmaps allow you to visualize user behavior as they show you where users click, move and scroll on your page. Through these insights, you can see what elements attract attention and where users’ attention drops and use this data to run A/B tests and observe behavior changes based on your experiments.
Hotjar allows companies to understand what people see and do on their website, while also helping them figure out how and why they’re using it.
Lead capture and conversion tools
With Ascend’s Lead Capture tool, you’ll gain access to numerous ways to capture leads on your website. You can let visitors reach out to you with the help of a form builder where they can get in touch, subscribe and stay informed. You can also engage visitors and close deals with live chat that lets you communicate with visitors in real-time. By giving instant answers to your visitors, they can more likely turn into customers.
Combining Ascend’s Lead Capture with the landing page builder will let you publish pages such as events, webinars or ad campaigns and ensure they’re a success.
Landing pages are essential marketing tools as they can fine-tune the conversion paths and simplify workflows for marketers. Instead of leaving visitors to wander around your site, they can stay on a page tailored to your promotion or product with no exit path. Unbounce’s goal is to enable you to make the most out of your landing pages.
To ensure you’re maximizing each landing page’s potential, Unbounce has built-in features such as two-step opt-in forms, custom thank you messages, redirects and gated content.
Advertising programs
AdRoll uses sophisticated audience targeting to enable you to identify those most likely to become repeat buyers and get in front of them with your ads. You can get your message to a specific demographic but also target them based on interests and hobbies.
But that is just the start. AdRoll also lets you target by context and lookalikes. After you get in front of the right audience and bring leads to your site, the platform has other relationship-building software and features available, including rich analytics and email marketing.
Google Keyword Planner allows you to choose the right keywords to get your Google Ads seen by the most relevant customers. To best research and select your terms, this site will discover new queries by suggesting keywords related to your selected phrase, products or services.
Their research tool also gives you insights into how often certain words are searched and how the searches have changed over time. Lastly, you can get bid estimates from the Keyword Planner to best determine your advertising budget.
You don’t have to be an expert to start advertising on Facebook. Their simple self-service platform makes your life easier. Because there are more than two billion people on Facebook every month, marketers have a huge audience pool to reach. Even more so, you can serve your ads across Instagram and Facebook’s Audience Network and Messenger within the same campaigns across all devices in just a few steps.
Video marketing tools
Wistia makes it easy for you to find, engage and grow your audience. This platform is known for offering a great viewing experience from anywhere as they provide super-fast high-quality videos. They also have video SEO capabilities that aim to make smarter ads for you on search engines and social media to get more views and grow your business.
Marketers love Wistia because their videos work with marketing automation integrations and heatmap insights. This means that measuring play rates and rich analytics will allow you to better shape your video marketing strategy.
Content creation platforms
Canva is an online design and publishing platform with a wide range of features and templates that allow you to design complex things simply. Assets you can easily create or customize include presentations, videos, social media posts, posters, logos, flyers and a lot more.
With the goal of making design accessible to anyone, the platform offers free plans for individuals and small teams. Canva also has enterprise and more advanced options for businesses who need more resources and more sophisticated features to match their content marketing goals.
Marketers rely on BuzzSumo to understand what content works best for their industry and product category. Their platform has four key components: discovery, research, influencers and monitoring. While this software does not fall precisely into content creation, it does relate to content success. They hope to aid you with finding out the information you need to be an amazing content marketer.
Wouldn’t you agree that getting trending topic ideas, indexing billions of top blog posts, tracking what is happening online and automating your workflow with their API can save you time to produce even better content? We do too.
Communication and collaboration systems
A communication service such as Zoom can allow you to connect and express your ideas to get more done together. While Zoom is most known for their HD video and audio collaboration, they also offer chat, phone systems, APIs, video webinars and more. Furthermore, it has built custom solutions and features for different industries such as education, finance, government, and healthcare.
The last thing you do with Slack is slack off. Their business solution is a new way to communicate faster than email, and it’s even more focused than chat. On Slack, you can bring your whole team together and sort your channels by projects to make sure tasks are always organized, questions are being answered and important marketing decisions are being made together.
As if that was not appealing enough, hear this – Slack Connect lets you work on projects with other companies, so you can close deals or build something new together even faster.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools
Moz provides SERP tracking technology, including daily rank tracking, to always be up to date on how you’re showing up to users and when. Their intelligence metrics is a feature business owners treasure because it keeps them informed and organized. From their all-in-one SEO platform to areas for keyword research, local SEO, enterprise SERP and even an API, you’ll be able to find the specific offering you need to achieve your search engine goals.
SEMrush’s platform does not just guide marketers with SEO, but also includes a long list of digital capabilities for competitor research, content marketing, PPC and social media marketing in the same place.
Their strength lies in the fact that they can help you uncover millions of national and local keywords, analyze any domain’s backlinks, and even run technical SEO audits. Their product is so popular that over 7 million marketing professionals have already used SEMrush, likely because it combines both data and strategy, any marketer’s dream.
Digital asset management
Dropbox centralizes your team’s content to improve productivity, deliver completed projects and use advanced features such as electronic signatures so you can sign those external contracts faster. Lastly, Dropbox integrates with apps like Zoom, Slack, Adobe Photoshop, Google Docs and Asana to make your work life even easier.
Therefore using software such as Dropbox makes sense for keeping everything organized, such as documents, cloud content and even web shorts.
Google Drive makes it seamless to store, share and collaborate on files and folders. Their technology is accessible from any mobile device, tablet or computer. What is neat about their collaboration apps is that Docs, Sheets, and Slides all let you work together in real-time with no need to migrate from existing tools. All your work and changes in these platforms are automatically saved, so you never have to worry about losing unsaved work.
Furthermore, Google’s AI and search technology assists you and your team to find files up to 50% faster. When you search for the files you need, Google finds it at an unmatched speed and even predicts what you’re looking for to find the most relevant content on your drive.
Customer service
Zendesk is a powerful force that lets you connect and understand all of your customer data. Plus, it’s flexible and customizable too. It aims to make customers happy through a conversational customer service experience that is connected across any channel. Their platform lets you customize your customer experience and connect with their CRM platform called Zendesk Sunshine.
The company’s software uses AI-powered automations and dynamic workspaces so your team can work faster, smarter and with more efficiency. But Zendesk’s communication help channels don’t just fall under chat, there are also options for tickets, email, phone, help center or communities.
Productivity and project management software
Trello encourages teams to work better together. Their goal is to enable you to reach new productivity peaks through their boards, lists and task cards. Trello says they don’t just support you to manage projects and organize tasks but build team spirit by using goal setting and milestone events. We all know how hard we marketers work, it’s nice to have a technology that brings us together and celebrates even our small wins.
Asana’s most valuable feature is their ability to set strategic goals and track progress in one place. And because good things take time, there is a timeline feature that lets you build Gantt charts in just a few minutes.
To better manage workloads between team members, a feature exists that lets you see how much work team members have across projects. In addition to giving you the full picture of a project, Asana lets you understand people’s workload so you can make the best decisions for upcoming task distribution.
Monday.com is great for easily visualizing your most important data. Their software identifies bottlenecks in real-time, optimizes campaign spend and showcases the success of your team.
The platform makes it easy to communicate in the context of a project, and allows for effortless collaboration with vendors and other teams. Customers have even stated that Monday.com has allowed them to be 30% more efficient at delivering hundreds of campaigns that were seen by millions of customers.
Blogging
1. Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator
Hubspot’s blog ideas generator thinks of ideas for you to blog about so your time can be saved for writing and less for planning. Simply enter 1-5 nouns to get started and press on “give me blog ideas.” Once you sort through the suggestions and have a great starting direction of what you will write about, try to relate the topic back to one of your products or services to best use your blog as a marketing acquisition channel.
You can set your ideas in motion and post your thoughts on Medium. They have a large audience of 170 million readers that can increase clicks and traffic to your site. Whether it’s a standalone piece, a blog or a publication, your work is welcome there. The best part: if you choose, you can get paid for your writing when members read your stories. Also, there is a big creator community through Medium, which can also open great networking and cross-collaboration opportunities for your growing business.
Wrap up
In today’s modern age, the use of innovative tools at work is a must for every marketing professional. The tools that are listed above are among the top marketing tools that every marketer should use.
With the right tools at your disposal, you can streamline your marketing campaigns and automate a ton of tasks in the process. Any combination of the tools above can serve as the foundation for a solid digital marketing stack. Don’t be afraid about test-driving and going through trials to find what works for your business and budget.