Digital marketing has become a critical skill to have in today’s increasingly tech-centric world that plays out across digital platforms. For businesses, it is a skill that could make or break your success.
In this feature, we are going to explore some of the best digital marketing tools you should be using in the New Year 2020. Compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing has, to a great extent, leveled the playing field and made the cost of entry into the market much more relaxed and affordable to the masses.
Any business worth it’s salt must have a presence across the digital platforms. To be very competitive, they also need a highly trained and experienced digital marketing specialist. That is someone who can help the business leverage on various digital ‘assets’ to grow its visibility online, get more leads, and rake in higher sales figures.
However, as mentioned earlier, digital marketing has made the playing field equal. Hence, just about anybody with any budget can deploy a marketing campaign across digital and online platforms.
Speaking of which, this article is going to explore some of the best tools you can use to run an effective digital campaign. They come highly recommended by experts across the various fields of digital marketing and are as follows:
Best Digital Marketing Tools
- HubSpot
HubSpot is your one-stop-shop for all your software for customer service, marketing, and sales solutions. Thousands of both small and big businesses rely on HubSpot for various software to automate and make the running of their business flawless.
HubSpot CRM software – which also comes in the free version – has helped countless businesses scale up their operations. Thanks to HubSpot, many businesses can now focus on the running of their activities while letting the social media aspects run on auto-pilot mode.
2. Salesforce
Salesforce CRM has become ubiquitous with customer information and activity management for thousands of businesses across the globe. This tool allows you to store names of your customers, alongside their contact details, and get metrics on their website visits, email, and phone calls.
This tool also allows you to automate repetitive tasks so that you find more time to focus on what matters most for your business.
3. Canva
I won’t be politically incorrect and say ‘these days people have a higher attention deficit.’ No, I won’t say that, but instead, I will say that ‘these days there are just too many education, information, and entertainment content competing for the attention of one individual.
Yes, in this smartphone and always online age, someone can get bogged down by information overlord. As a marketer, that is a very terrible thing because you are trying to send more information to a target who is already bored and tired of getting more information.
If anything, your target is trying to avoid reading whatever you are posting. Cough, cough ‘ad-blockers and VPNs.’ it, therefore, falls upon you to be conspicuously different and interesting in the midst of the sea of other marketers trying to get their attention.
The solution is Visual Marketing. If you are going to post anything online, make sure it is visually attractive, and it will attract the attention of the target consumer — the more attractive, the more successful your marketing endeavor.
Statistics has it that consumers retain up to 80% of what they see, and just 20% of what they read. So make your post have graphics, pictures, and videos. One tool you can use to achieve that is Canva.
Canva allows you to customize pictures with filters, give plain text highly graphic outlook, create images from scratch, design the background, and use stock photos. It also provides image size dimensions for the various social media platforms, and using drag-and-drop, you can create stunning images.
4. Slack
Statistics have it that more than six million use Slack daily. You often hear people say ‘Slack it to me,’ giving this tool a ubiquitous status. Sort of like ‘Google it,’ meaning it is a winning product.
Slack is an efficient project management tool, which addresses the shortcomings of emailing when collaborating on a project. This tool brings everyone into the same room – though each team member working remotely – and answers and questions can be given instantly with everyone on board.
5. ThriveCart
Most businesses are now running online. As a small business, you might not have the resources to hire a super web designer nor the resources to keep such a highly advanced e-commerce site running.
Guess what! You might not need to incur all those expenses. Simple add-on tools like ThriveCart can integrate a shopping cart to your digital platform, which can then be integrated into Infustionsoft to collect customers’ payments on your website.
It comes complete with 1-click upselling, A/B test performance capabilities, and funnel building. ThriveCart is a nifty and affordable tool that will enable you to deploy your e-commerce site fast and at a fraction of the cost.
6. Traackr
In our previous post, we talked about finding affiliate marketers as one way of becoming a ‘rock star’ digital marketer. Traackr is a tool that will go a long way in helping you achieve that goal.
Traackr enables you to find influencers and run an analysis of their following, engagements, and how much of an opinion shapers they are in their given space and community. Based on that insight, you can select the best influencer market with regards to your budget.
Influencer marketing is currently one of the most trending marketing strategies, but don’t take the plunge into it blindly. Analytics tools like Traackr will help you make a decision that will yield the most ROI to your business.
7. KWFinder
KWFinder is a stellar SEO tool by Mangools that helps you with keyword research. It comes packed with tools designed to help both newbies and experienced SEO marketers get insights on keywords ranking on search engines.
Some of the key features, including the ability to find long-tail keywords for a specific geographical location, exact search volumes for keywords, and the difficulty level to break grounds using a specific, highly competitive keyword.
8. SEMrush
While Google Analytics does give you reports on organic and paid search performance on the search engine. The report, to some people, can be too detailed and complex that you miss out on getting the real insights you need to make informed SEO and PPC campaigns.
SEMrush addresses these shortcomings by Google Analytics by giving your analytics results and reports in an easy-to-digest format. Hence, less time is spent understanding the analytics and more time spent executing the insights from the analytics.
9. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a must-have tool for an SEO expert looking to grow search engine traffic to their website. It helps you in running research on your competition and keeping tabs on your niche keyword market. By using Ahrefs, you get to know why your competition is ranked higher, and how best to improve your ranking fast.
00. BuzzStream
As the name suggests, this tool helps you manage all the buzz around you; your relationships, influencers, research, and so on. All within a singular platform, easily and efficiently. This tool also helps you discover contact information, their social media accounts, and your website metrics.
11. Hotjar
The Hotjar tool gives you analytics and reports on your website traffic and visitors’ activities. You get useful metrics such as the site visitor numbers, heat maps, click maps, and scroll maps, among others.
Hotjar also enables you to run feedback polls and surveys from visitors to your site. From which, you can derive further insight on how best to run your marketing campaigns.
12. Moz
With Moz, you get advanced website analytics like site audits, keyword research, and backlink analysis. Moz also gives you custom reports that could help you in your search engine marketing endeavors.
It also comes with the Keyword Explorer feature, which gives you insight on the best choice of the keyword to target in your workflow. In essence, which are the best keywords you should be trying to rank for, instead of shooting blindly, into the game of SEO ranking.
13. Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a tool that gives you insider tips on how to get your site ranked high for a given keyword on Google Search. This tool gives you reports such as traffic to your site based on Search and suggests ways you can fix issues that may be hurting your SEO ranking.
Based on insights from Google Search Console, you can optimize your site content and boost your SEO ranking significantly. The tool also allows you to submit your sitemaps and URLs for crawling.
14. ConvertKit
With ConvertKit, you can automate your email marketing and, by effect, grow your online audience. This tool is particularly important to bloggers as it allows them to enable their audience to sign up for email updates on new content that can lead them to the desired landing page. ConvertKit also helps you create professional-standard landing pages from templates, where you will drag-and-drop to tweak the platform.
15. Grammarly
Writing good English is not as easy for most of us as we may want to think. Especially when you are pressed for time and want to reply to that email quickly, put up that post on social media, or post a blog.
If you are going to produce content that is readable and engaging, Grammarly is a must-have tool for an error-free, grammatically correct, and plagiarism-free copy. It is quite embarrassing to put out written content with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and a difficult copy to read.
16. Todoist
Todoist is a team management tool where you can create a to-do list then assign it to members of your team. The tool allows you to give different colors to the various tasks, which makes distinguishing one task from the other quite fast.
17. EngageBay
EngageBay is your one-stop-shop for all digital marketing management tools. From this platform, you can manage your marketing, sales, and customer service needs. This stand-alone tool handles marketing automation, email marketing, live chat & helpdesk, free CRM & sales.
18. Animoto
If you want to create professional-standard slideshow videos complete with music and engaging effects. Animoto is the tool you are looking for as it can give your slideshow various effects and custom text.
19. Zapier
Zapier proves very useful to digital marketers with various online services, which they would wish to manage from a single platform. Thereby, be able to automate tasks with triggers and actions.
20. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is another useful tool if you are looking to build up your email subscribers list. This tool is commonly used with WordPress blogs and website owners. It has intriguing email opt-in templates and an easy to use interface that enables you quickly and easily convert email opt-in forms.
21. AgoraPulse
As a social media marketer, you will be running marketing campaigns across different platforms; Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, among others. It can get a little overwhelming moving from one platform to the next. However, with the AgoraPulse tool, you can manage all your social media accounts from one platform. You can schedule posts, view your engagement metrics, engage your followers, and run surveys and competitions.
22. MailChimp
If you are looking to automate your email marketing and social advertisement campaign, then MailChimp has you covered. In addition to that, you can also track the traffic gained from your marketing endeavors. This tool also has multiple integration options into a lot of other SaaS companies’ tools.
23. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is particularly essential to SEO and PPC Campaign marketers. Especially when they want to establish how their target customers are searching for information online. This tool will enable you to run a search and find a wide range of keywords (and ideas of keywords) your potential customers used to search information linked to the product or service you are selling.
24. MeetEdgar
Managing your brand’s social media image is never a simple task. That is largely because social media, by itself, is a universe on its own. The dynamics therein are much different and constantly changing.
With MeetEdgar, a robust social media management tool, you can handle all your social media activities from one place. That is to write a post, schedule it if the queue runs out, MeetEdgar will mine your previous posts and re-share some of them. This tool also allows you to run A/B tests on content before posting them on social media. This tool comes at a premium price of $49 monthly.
25. Buffer
Buffer is another stellar social media management tool, which works in much the same way as MeetEdgar above in addition to giving you analytics on the postings. Though it starts as a free tool, but premium features come with tiered pricing ranging from $0 to $199 monthly.
Avid users praise Buffer for its simplicity; you can find your way around and get started in a matter of minutes. However, super users will need to subscribe to its more advanced premium features, which include analytics, among others.
26. WordPress
At the end of 2019, WordPress powered 34% of all websites on the internet. Proving that quite indeed, it is a stellar content management system (CMS). WordPress has come a long way from when it was only known as a blogging tool to become a versatile CMS for businesses.
Even big corporations like Microsoft, CNN, USA Today, Facebook, and Sony rely on WordPress to disseminate their content out to the market. That only goes to show you how capable WordPress has become over the years.
27. HARO
HARO is a critical tool for journalists, bloggers, and content marketers. This tool acts as a one-stop-shop for news from various outlets. From this single platform, you can work out what’s happening in your niche market of interest from all the relevant sources.
From there, you can then curate content having a backup of multiple credible sources that you can reference. Big-time news outlets like Mashable, New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune have their journalists subscribed to this tool.
28. Feedly
Feedly is a leading content creation platform where you can aggregate new publications and articles from various sources to read in one singular platform. This tool is particularly ideal for content marketers and bloggers who would like a singular platform, from which they can curate their next big content.
29. Google Analytics
Powered by the biggest search engine, Google Analytics is a very powerful analytics tool. A quality that has made it quite popular among digital marketers around the world. This tool provides you various relevant reports on key metrics about your users, where your marketing campaign came from, where it currently stands, and which marketing channels are most effective.
30. Lumen5
We mentioned earlier, people these days don’t like to read much. So if you are a blogger, you are fighting an uphill battle. However, that need not be the case thanks to Lumen5 is an AI-powered tool, which matches the content of your writing to related images. Then uses those images to create a video.
31. Buzzsumo
It is essential that you create content that resonates with your target audience. That sounds a lot easier than it actually is in reality. Buzzsumo is a tool that enables you to track mentions of your business, that of your competitors, and keywords relevant to your industry.
As it works out, Buzzsumo can enable you to discover relevant and most shareable content that will most likely entice your target audience.
32. Hootsuite
Hootsuite has made a name for itself in being the go-to-tool for enterprise users looking for a software to manage their social media. It is also one of the most popular and powerful social media management tools currently in the market.
With Hootsuite, you can work with your team to store approved content in the cloud and have them scheduled to post at given times. You can schedule multiple posts at once to post across all your social media platforms; alongside relevant hashtags and keywords.
Hootsuite has tiered pricing, starting at $29 monthly to as high as $599 monthly for the enterprise users.
33. Ubersuggest
When looking for new keywords, related to the main keyword that you are pushing out, Ubersuggest got your back. It goes further to tell you the search volume of a given keyword.
34. Brand24
With Brand24, you can keep tabs on the keywords relevant to your business. As well as get notified when your brand/business is mentioned online. In addition to knowing when your competitors also get mentioned.
35. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is one of the most powerful full-scale web analytics tools out there. This tool helps you understand, segment, and engage your customers, depending on how they interact with your website. Giving you a deeper understanding of your customer behavior.
To marketers, Kissmetrics has proven critical in tracking the journey of customer conversion. Armed with that knowledge, marketers can better understand how to tweak the conversion process for higher effectiveness while making the process more user-friendly for the customers.
36. Sendible
If you are looking to collaborate in promoting several brands on social media, Sendible is a tool that will help you do that effectively. It facilitates planning, collaboration, engagements, and sharing of analytics among the team members.
It supports a wide array of platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook Ads, Google My Business, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. With Sendible, you can also manage blogging platforms such as WordPress, Medium, Tumblr, and Blogspot.
37. Tweepi
Want to grow your following on Twitter? Then get on Tweepi, a tool that helps you grow your followers on Twitter and build up your brand visibility on the micro-blogging platform. Stats show that there are at least 1.75 million professional Twitter users who use Tweepi as their go-to tool for all matter Twitter tweeting, retweeting, and brand promotion.
It is also a great search engine; you can find users by their full names, location, interest, company name, and other relevant criteria.
38. Socialbakers
Some have described Socialbakers as a one-stop-shop for all your social media management needs. It comes packed with advanced publishing options and is being used by some big names in the corporate world including Samsung, Vodafone, and Airbus.
This tool helps you in identifying your marketing personas and the type of content that will resonate well with them. You also get to manage all your social media accounts from one platform, something that goes a long way in boosting your marketing strategy.
39. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another stellar social media management tool used by thousands of brands and organizations around the world. This tool helps you zero in on your target audience, understand what they want, and help you build up content that resonates with the audience.
It is a scalable tool with features, including social listening, social analytics, social publishing, and automation. One particularly handy feature is the unified inbox, where you can send and receive messages across all your social media channels.
40. Everypost
We have stated several times that visual content gets more traction than a block of text. Everypost is another tool that helps you curate visual content from different sources. Then you can schedule them to post across your social media platforms.
41. Quuu
There is information overflow online, so much so that it seems like noise. Quuu, is a content creation tool that helps you turn down the noise and concentrate on content that matters.
That is content with high engagement and resonates well with your target audience. That is how people who consistently keep getting high engagement and become influencers and social media do it.
As a cherry on top, you can also integrate Quuu into other tools like Hootsuite, HubSpot, Buffer, and Socialbee.
42. Brand24
If you want to be social on social media – respond to people talking about you – then Brand24 is one tool customized to enable brands to socialize. You get instant notifications when you are mentioned on any of the social media platforms, forums, blogs, news outlets, videos, and other forums.
The notifications come in the form of mentions feed where you see the context of where you are mentioned and can choose how to respond appropriately. This tool is quite ideal if you want to keep a keen eye on your brand’s image out there, and being social on social media, is taking things into your own hands and having a say in how the brand is perceived.
43. Screaming Frog
For technical SEO audits, very few tools compete with Screaming Frog. It is a leading SEO Spider website crawler used in Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu systems. It is the go-to tool for thousands of SEO companies and agencies.
Screaming Frog allows you to crawl the URLs of the given websites, retrieve key elements, and audit the technical and onsite SEO metrics. This tool comes in both a free and paid version.
44. AnswerThePublic
There is a lot of interest around Search Engine Optimization, and there are half-truths and outright lies out there. So you can imagine how many people out there are stranded, confused, regretting, and all sorts of things.
Well, AnswerThePublic is a tool created to bring all these people with questions around keyword ranking into a commonplace. Then experts and those who have learned the hard way can share their experiences and educate their peers.
This tool will be particularly important for content creators, who can pick up on a question that is being asked by many people. Then create a blog or how-to article answering such questions. In a nutshell, AnswerThePublic would be very important to bloggers and journalists in general.
45. SpyFu
Want to keep tabs on how your competition is getting ahead of you in terms of SEO ranking? SpyFu enables you to download the best keywords being used by your competition. Armed with that knowledge, you can better strategize your SEO marketing to make your site even more competitive.
SpyFu will tell you every keywords your competition has bought on Ad Words, all the organic rankings they have obtained, and every variation they have done on the Ads they have run in the last 13 years.
46. pCloud
Long gone are the days of data loss. These days, the cloud handles much of our storage needs, and pCloud is another cloud storage solution that helps you keep your most sensitive files secure.
With pCloud, you get to organize your files into folders, give other people controlled access to the given folders and files. Help you work together on given projects, perform data backup, stream off audio, and video files.
47. Unbounce
Looking to convert more leads and bump up your sales? Unbounce helps you create custom landing pages that will help you do just that. This tool has a drag-and-drop builder that you can use to design and develop the landing page, especially useful when your website simply can get the sales numbers up.
48. Instapage
Instapage provides an end-to-end solution when you are looking to create a post-click landing page. It has been praised to help users get as much as 400% conversions. A skillful marketer will ensure that a click-through on their Ads lands the prospective customer to the most relevant easy user experience page.
49. Landingi
Running a good marketing campaign is the first step towards high sales, and a good landing page is the ultimate point of conversion. Landigi is a landing page builder used for creating custom landing pages. You get the first 14-days free access with full features, after which you are required to make a purchase.
It is an easy to use landing page builder, given it requires zero coding skills. Meaning just about anyone can use it to craft up a landing page quickly.
50. Leadpages
Landing pages are an integral part of digital marketing, and Leadpages is a tool that can help you create one easily. In fact, it is the go-to tool for 40k+ small businesses owners looking to build flawless websites, pop-ups, alert bars, and landing pages.
This tool allows you to connect with your target audience using integrations such as form builders and Facebook ad builders.
Article provided by, The Digital Marketing Recruiter – a recruiting firm focused exclusively on filling digital marketing positions throughout the USA
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