Having the right digital marketing tools can make a massive difference to your bottom line, by allowing your sales and marketing teams to execute faster, at a larger scale, with better information, and with a more targetted approach. While digital marketing tools won’t replace the need for a solid underlying marketing strategy, having the right technology stack to implement that strategy can go a long way toward cutting costs while reaching more people.
Some types of tools are foundational for every business, such as an email marketing platform (e.g. Mailchimp). However, other tools are more specialized and can streamline your efforts with a particular form of marketing.
In this article, we’ve outlined 7 of the top digital marketing tools that every business should take a look at, which will help take your marketing execution to the next level.
1. Followerwonk
If you use Twitter to market your business, Followerwonk is worth checking out. It scrapes Twitter Analytics to give you more information to optimize your approach. You can do things like – identifying Twitter accounts that you want to target, refining a Twitter content strategy, optimizing your approach to posting, and researching follower demographics to make sure your Twitter game is on point and resonates with people.
Interesting features:
- Interface makes it easier to follow and unfollow
- Monitor follower gains and losses over time
- Guidance on when is the best time to tweet
- See which tweets engage best
Cost:
Free plans, and paid plans $29-$79 / month
2. Hubspot
HubSpot is one of the leading overall marketing platforms and includes a variety of sales and marketing tools such as a CRM. It has several free tools (as well as paid tools) to help you manage contacts with Hubspot CRM, create pop-up forms, set up live chat support, run email marketing campaigns, and measure website visitor behavior.
There are also great tools for content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. And to cap it all off there are tons of integrations to help connect it to other tools that you use for your sales and marketing.
Overall it can be a helpful tool for nurturing leads, shortening deal cycles, and increasing your conversion rate.
Interesting features:
- Form automation
- Email automation
- Omni-channel marketing automation
- ABM tools and automation
- Live chat
- Landing pages
Cost:
Certain limited access for free. Paid plans range significantly based on your needs, and go up to $3,200/month for enterprise.
3. Ahrefs
Let’s face it, SEO can be complicated and confusing, even while also being completely vital for every business with a website. Ahrefs is a suite of SEO tools that both simplifies things and also does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Ahrefs is great for analyzing your competition – easily identify their best-performing page on their website (so you can emulate it), check out the content that they are using to rank and for what in the search engines, and identify the source of backlinks to their site.
They have data for 150 million keywords in the U.S. and even more worldwide. Its “top pages” tool helps you identify that are getting the most traffic.
I especially love the “content gap” tool because of how it points out shortcomings and low-hanging fruit in your current content strategy. Overall this is one of the most comprehensive SEO tools out there.
Interesting features:
- SEO dashboard
- Site Explorer
- Keywords Explorer
- Site Audit
- Rank Tracker
- Content Explorer
- Domain Comparison
Cost:
Main plans are $83.33 – $399 / month
4. Yoast
Yoast is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for SEO that both identifies opportunities and helps automate a lot of the tasks involved. Use it to identify keywords to target with your content, create customized content URLs, and even measure the Flesch Reading Ease score of your content to gauge how easy it is for people to read.
One of the big reasons that SEO can be challenging is how it’s constantly changing. Well, that’s not something you have to worry about with Yoast, because it’s actually updated every two weeks to reflect Google’s current search algorithm.
Interesting features:
- Keyword density
- Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease scores
- Prior Keyword usage
- Keywords for Subheaders
- Permalink Cleanups
Cost:
The main Yoast WordPress plugin is free, but paid plans for extra features are $99 annually.
5. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo Is an amazing content marketing tool, specifically on the content research side of things. Use it to easily identify the best-performing content for specific keywords, pick out the top influencers in your industry, and reach out to them more efficiently.
Check what topics and what content is trending, and help measure the performance of your own content with Buzzsumo‘s content analytics and social mentions.
Interesting features:
- Competitor analysis
- Content curation
- Trending Content
- Social post performance
- Social listening / identify influencers
Cost:
Limited access to certain tools for free, and paid plans range $99 – $299 / month.
6. Proof
We all know that the classic customer testimonial will never fully go out of style when it comes to marketing – in fact, social proof is probably more important than ever with the prevalence of social media. Proof is a tool that helps increase conversions on your website through the use of various forms of social proof.
Proof connects directly to your website and can dynamically display real-time social proof metrics like Live Visitor Count (“10 other people are viewing this post right now”), customer testimonials, and videos specifically geared towards the current website visitor. You can also use the Hot Streak notification feature to show prospects how other people respond to your product. You can identify your different types of visitors and examine their entire customer journey throughout your site and optimize your site design for higher conversions.
It’s also easy to use without a web designer, since setup only requires the adding of a pixel.
Interesting features:
- A/B testing
- Conversion Analytics
- Recent Activity notification
- Live Visitor Count notification
- Hot Streaks notification
Cost:
Tiered pricing based on traffic volume, starting at $29/month for 1,000 monthly visitors .
7. Typeform
Typeform is an excellent way to make the most of your lead generation forms. It’s an extremely aesthetically pleasing platform that allows you to create a dynamic experience out of any form, survey, or quiz.
Starting from any of their many templates gives you a form that instantly looks great. The forms are also uniquely designed to ask one question at a time, making it more like a dynamic conversation, which has been shown to have higher conversion rates than typically survey layouts. This also gives you the ability to customize the form as the prospect progresses with built-in conditional logic. Ask targeted follow-up questions based on how they responded previously. Speak directly to each individual prospect as they go through.
Interesting features:
- Great graphic design and included templates
- Conditional logic
- Can make both simpler and sophisticated forms for a variety of use-cases
- Dynamically tailor the experience as someone goes through
- Can take payments
Cost:
$25 – 99 / month
Hopefully you found 2-3 of these tools promising and worth exploring further. It only takes one impactful marketing tool to be a game-changer in your business (when it’s the right tool). While we were wrapping up this article about 7 digital marketing tools from areas like social media, influencer marketing, lead forms, and SEO, we saw how we should keep going and share more great tools from other areas of marketing.
So we’ve created a follow-up to this first article, with 8 even more amazing marketing tools.
These 8 other tools are from other important categories in digital marketing like:
- Presentation platforms
- User experience / conversion optimization
- Outreach marketing
- Marketing automation
- Landing pages
Keep reading here:
8 even more awesome digital marketing tools
And if you’d like us to release additional articles in this series about top marketing tools, shoot us an email and let us know! support@slidecast.com
