Digital Marketing is a dynamic field, and it’s critical that you stay up-to-date with new developments in the industry. A modern digital marketer has many different responsibilities and works cross-functionally with all aspects of the business. With so much on their plate, and increasing pressure to perform – they need all the help they can get!
Let’s familiarise you with the best digital marketing tools – they’ll equip you with superpowers, automate communication, save time, optimise performance, and make life easier! Read on to discover the best digital marketing tools for 2019 that can help you grow your business, no matter what size or industry.
Digital Marketing Tools by Objective:
1. Paid Social Media
2. Email Marketing
3. Video Hosting
4. Content Creation
5. Search Engine Optimization
6. Analytics & Data
7. Social Media Marketing
8. Email Automation
9. Content Curation
10. Website Testing
Beyond the world of organic reach on social media sites, there is huge opportunity in running paid campaigns. Over 3.2 billion people are on social media around the world. Social media helps you display your brand in front of millions of active users, targeted and segmented by demographics and behaviors.
Nanigans is a multi-platform performance advertising platform. It looks at acquiring new customers and improving retention at scale through granular targeting, incrementality optimization, and reporting.
Facebook’s Power Editor
Facebook’s own tool is a powerful way to run hyper-specific ad campaigns. A perfect digital marketing tool that is constantly updated, it is a must for any modern marketer running ads on Facebook and Instagram. It is free, detailed, and is capable of driving specific CTAs.
Twitter Native Platform
Another native platform, Twitter ads allows for targeting and segmentation via keywords and active interest. According to AdWeek, “engagement rates” for Twitter ads can be as high as 1-3%, much higher than Facebook’s average CTR of 0.119%.
Email Marketing
Historically and now, email marketing remains one of the most important and effective ways in which you can connect with your customers. With over 6 billion email accounts worldwide, email is a non-intrusive, opt-in method to communicate with your customers. 91% of shoppers want to hear from companies they do business with via email {Sleeknote}
A great starting point for your email marketing strategy, Mailchimp is intuitive and priced based on the size of your email list. They even have a “forever free” plan for less than 2000 subscribers and 10,000 emails monthly – perfect for small businesses and new marketers.
Emma is a fully-loaded email marketing platform, specialising in personalisation and dynamic content. A hands-on customer service team helps you take your email strategy to the next level.
A full-service digital marketing tool, Marketo emphasises on automation and engagement. It is an advanced tool, and email is a part of its full range of its features.
GetResponse is another great tool – it’s smart, flexible and automated. It analyses trends and behaviors from your list to trigger specific messages instantly.
Video Hosting
Video will represent 82% of all IP traffic by 2021 {Cisco}, so it’s a medium that few can choose to ignore. Video content is appealing to consumers, driving awareness, attention, and conversion. A well-planned video content strategy includes getting views and eyeballs on to educational, inspirational, and interesting video content. Popular video platforms other than Youtube {and other social media channels} draw in large crowds of viewers.
Wistia helps brands host, customise, and share videos – focused on driving traffic to your website and custom CTAs. It helps with responsiveness, has automatic video SEO setup, and can protect your content with privacy controls.
Vimeo is Youtube’s closest competitor, and hosts only high-quality content. It is niche, ad-free, and serves a sophisticated audience.
Content Creation
Content creation tools make it easier for you to resonate with your audience. Visual assets are the single biggest contributor when it comes to social media {Ofcom}. While your content may be great, what’s the best way to showcase it to your audience? How do you do it quickly and spontaneously ? Our favourite web-based digital marketing tools for designing purposes that will help you answer these questions and you’ll be at par with the best digital marketing companies.
Visual.ly connects brands and marketers with content creators. It works as an extension to your team, helping you produce infographics, videos, presentations, reports etc.
Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design tool. You don’t need design skills to use Canva – and the possibilities are endless! You can create collateral for social media, infographics, invites, posters etc.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO, allows you to understand how consumers are searching for and finding information about your brand and your competitors online. SEO remains as important and as complex as ever. With so many digital marketing tools available and algorithms and trends that constantly keep changing, we’ve narrowed down to a few tools that will help you ace your SEO strategy.
Take your SEO game up a notch with Moz, an all-in-one set of solutions. Moz offers Moz Pro for keyword research, link analysis and site audits, Moz Local to optimise local SEO, and STAT – a tool to help with SERP tracking.
SEMRush can help you rank better for competitive keywords as well as track how competitors are utilising SEO and SEM. It also offers other built-in digital marketing tools that can help you optimise display advertising, organic listings, and paid search.
Screaming Frog created the SEO Spider software which runs technical site audits. It helps diagnose broken links and various other SEO issues. It is a robust tool that can help gain quick wins by fixing small issues.
Also Read: 10 Most Recommended SEO Tools
Analytics & Data
As the central hub of your digital presence, your website is the best way to track effectiveness of all the campaigns you are running. Website analytics tools and digital marketing analytics tools are essential to understanding where your customers are coming from and their behaviour on your website. Digital marketing solutions all need these analytics and insights in order to be effective.
Over 50 million websites around the world use Google Analytics – a free tool that can easily be added to the code of your website. It has advanced analytics to track where your visitors are coming from, what their journey is, and what they do on your website.
Kissmetrics is an analytics tool that helps fine-tune conversions. It tracks unique user journeys and allows you to segment them based on behavior and importance. One of its most useful features is activity reports that help you drill down the reason for changes in trends.
Adobe analytics is an enterprise-level analytics solution for website analysis. Adobe analytics is powerful, with cross-channel attribution function, pathing, 360 degree customer analysis, and dedicated customer service.
Social Media plays a big part in every brand’s marketing strategy and understanding how to market on different platforms is a key priority. 97% of marketers are using social media to reach their audiences {Lyfe Marketing} Social Media marketing tools make a social media manager’s life easier by helping to schedule social media posts in advance and manage multiple social profiles effectively.
MeetEdgar is an assistant for automating and scheduling evergreen content – it can house a library of your content, divided into categories. Set a schedule for tweets, Linkedin posts, and Facebook posts to post each category at a specified time and date.
Hootsuite is a comprehensive digital marketing tool to manage social media, schedule posts, and manage multiple social media channels in one place. It allows you to delegate to different team members, measure your social media results, answer queries and questions and do some social listening as well.
Email Automation
Email automations help you to create personalized experiences based on how customers interact with your brand. Target the right customer at the right time, and do it with no time investment! {except the initial setup and running}. Some good touchpoints are welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and offer emails – they will increase your bottom line.
Active Campaign is an end-to-end solution for email marketing, email automation and CRM. Create with the campaign builder, tag your audiences for their behaviors and automate welcome emails, trigger emails, sales follow-ups and more.
Hatchback is focused on small-to-medium businesses and automates client communication and lead generation. Hatchback offers a way to stay relevant, engage with clients, and give priority to hot leads.
Content Curation
The purpose of content marketing is to create and share high quality content so your target audience can learn about your expertise. Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising (Content Marketing Institute). Plan your content calendar by using content curation tools that find and select, group and categorise digital content that may be shareable for you in the future. Effective content curation helps position you as a thought leader and is an economical way of maintaining content quality. Automating this task will reduce your effort and support your content strategy:
Feedly collates all your favourite blogs, videos and publications into a feed for easy readability and skimming. You can also read these later, share them to different social media channels, and collaborate with your team to create shared feeds.
Scoop.it is an advanced content engine that monitors the web to curate relevant third-party content. You can create engaging web pages with this content, share on social media, or share privately with co-workers.
Website Testing
Only about 22% of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates {Econsultancy}. Your user experience can improve leaps and bounds by tracking user behaviour on the website and making small, impactful changes. Optimising your site for conversions is long-term in nature and website testing tools help you spot your quick wins and major roadblocks.
Unbounce is a tool to build and publish landing pages quickly. An easy drag-and-drop builder helps you build fully customisable landing pages which can increase conversion through A/B testing, experiments, and forms.
An enterprise-level solution, Optimizely is a scientific way to run experiments in creating digital experiences. It combines tools for visual creation and robust targeting to reach groups of users, run tests, and validate findings.
Hotjar is a behavior specialist – tracking user journeys through heatmaps and recordings. This helps determine where there are gaps and opportunities on the conversion funnel, backed by real user behaviour and clicks.
Many of these above listed tools can help you achieve your objectives and help you learn a lot! Prioritise the ones that your business needs the most and sign up for a free trial or two.
This list is just some of the tools we love – there are many more available to the modern marketer, and new ones are being released daily. Which is your favorite digital marketing tool? Which tool gives the most bang for its buck? Which tool can’t you live without? Which tool is too pricey to be used in the long-term? We love hearing from marketers on-the-job. Share with us below in the comments.
Techmagnate is a leading digital marketing solutions and SEO services company. Looking for help? Have some questions? Get in touch with us here.
Must Read: Digital Marketing 101 : Building a Digital Marketing Plan in 2020
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