Are you looking to launch your own business? Are you wondering what the best ways are to connect to your target audience online? The world under the internet has changed the advertisement game in many ways, but most of all, it has made digital marketing accessible to everyone; it has leveled the playing field.
With the help of digital marketing tools today, you can have a global reach for your new startup company without colossal money investment. But it’s important to know what tools you have to use and where you can get the most value for money. Different digital marketing tools serve other purposes, and so you need to know what suits you best in order to stay ahead of your competition.
So what tools are out there that you can use to your benefit? What features can you access in order to give your budding startup a fair fighting chance? In our detailed guide on the digital marketing tools tried, tested, and recommended by experts, we can help you put your best foot forward!
Digital Marketing Analytics Tools
Unless you have big investors left, right, and center, chances are you probably don’t have a marketing analytics team. How do you assess how your customers received your products? What’s working and what’s not comes down to analyzing the numbers -and there are some pretty amazing tools that can help you do just that.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is one of our favorite marketing tools for analysis. The services MixPanel offers are great at translating exactly what the statistics mean in terms of user behavior. Mixpanel uses a bunch of tools to simplify the statistics in a way that you can catch a quick glance at a pie chart and get the gist of things. This type of data representation and visualization is a handy tool, especially for beginners, in figuring out what’s working without getting bogged into numbers.
It offers three different plans; free, essential, and enterprise. You can progressively test out each one and check if it works for you.
Hotjar
Hotjar is one of the best user-friendly tools out there. It uses innovative tricks like heat mapping to translate raw statistics and numbers into easily digestible and meaningful patterns. We recommend this especially for people who aren’t significant in accounting and analysis and may be new to business startups.
The heat mapping system is a creative means of representing what people are inclined towards and how they are behaving on your website. Another fun feature is that Hotjar allows you to spectate what a standard user experience looks like on your website. It then highlights the most common parts of your website that people are having trouble with. It does this by tracking the user activity and when the customer got frustrated and left the website. This allows you to make surgical and thought-out changes.
Google Tools for Digital Marketing
Google has really evolved into a digital tech giant. Long gone are the days when its primary claim to fame was an efficient web browser search engine. Today you can easily access some pretty excellent, efficient, and valuable digital marketing tools that they have put out.
From the Data studio to google forms, you have many thrilling tools to spark up your website as well as know exactly how your target audience is reacting. Some of these tools have so many innovative features that will make you excited for your new business.
Google Alerts and Google Trends
As the names suggest, Google Alerts serve to alert you on content that is related to your business so you can be the first to reach it. Google Trends are pretty simple, a tracking app that detects and informs you of consumer patterns for products in the same ballpark as yours. This includes things like what they are searching for and where they are getting stuff from
Google Data Studio
Google Data Studio is essentially a combined platform for all your Google-based digital marketing tools. No one feature of marketing is independent or unaffected by the others. What people are searching for in your niche is directly linked to what elements of your website work well. Google Data Studio connects these different elements to give an overarching picture of your business. The reports that Google Data Studio will give you will certainly be comprehensive and effective.
Google Forms
While user patterns and trends can divulge critical information about how your customers are feeling, there’s no substitute for reaching out to your customers for their direct feedback. Google Forms are on such a platform that lets you design and send out -for free- your user surface. The days of hiring a survey service are ancient now.
Google Forms are also filled with different creative options for you to design the ideal survey, and its simplicity makes for quick but effective surveys. Similarly, Google Forms can create graphs and bar charts for the survey results to give you a creative means of evaluating your survey results and design the best user experience.
Google Search Console & Google Analytics
From knowing where your target market is finding out about you and which places your traffic is being generated from to even optimizing your SEO scores, this feature by Google is a true game-changer. The Google Search Console and Google Analytics are a must-have because of the important services they offer are.
If you’ve always wondered where the top results page is generated from for anything on google, these tools are your answer. You can use these to figure out what content words to use and in what quantity and order to bring your website to the top of the bunch.
Digital Marketing Tools for Design, Social Media, and Video
Creating a brand involves setting up an online presence where people can get an idea of what you are selling and compare your services with other competitors in the market. With the growing competition on online platforms, digital marketing tools that are made for design, social media, and video optimization can set your web pages apart.
Upfluence
Upfluence is what’s commonly called a “Software as a service,” or SaaS for short. It’s one of the must-have tools for the growing market of consumers: Gen Z. You cannot underestimate how much of an impact Influencers have on expanding the outreach of your products and pushing your page into the limelight.
There’s just one catch, though: influencers themselves have specific target audiences and niches. Having a random influencer unrelated to your product market is a waste of money. You can use Upfluence to find the best people to be the faces and spearheads for your campaigns.
Tube Buddy
If your specific brand or product relies on video broadcasting sites like YouTube, then you need a marketing tool designed specifically to optimize video content. While you will find quite a few videos and specifically video search optimizing services, but Tube Buddy is a reliable pick. From the end screen templates to the ability to copy and replace in bulks, Tube Buddy can save you precious time.
Iconosquare
Having a presence on social media platforms is imperative in today’s world of marketing. But even with that, there are ways you can make your approach more effective. Looking to blow up into a big page on Instagram? Iconosquare is the way to go. This service is tailored to social media efficiency and will give you optimal post timings and post-activity generation statistics, among many other features.
Hootsuite
For a modest price of $29/month, Hootsuite gives you a lot of power over how you manage your online presence. You can use its tracking and calculation features to locate, with great accuracy, where on the internet you’re line of products is being discussed the most. Additional features like calculating Return on Interest (ROI) and conversions can help you make informed decisions.
Canva
The most effective web pages are one’s that the user immediately trusts; that’s when they’ll feel comfortable in spending money or time. The best way to develop user trust is to have a modern and professional website that is designed for your particular product. Besides, having a brand identity and bringing it into your webpage is important in building a loyal customer base. The way you optimize your webpage is through Canva. From infographics to gifs, you can use this tool to create the most appealing website. The best part is, the easy-to-use interface makes Canva accessible to everyone -regardless of past designing experience.
Buffer
Another great social media optimization app for your use is Buffer. It gives you all the information you need, from when to post and what to post for maximum activity and engagement. The best way to use Buffer is to search up what timings are ideal for posting on different sites like Twitter, Instagram, and G+, etc., and coming up with a schedule to work with.
Digital Marketing Tools for Productivity
Starting a business or a startup is not an easy task, especially if you don’t have 10’s of people designated to different teams. You may not have an assistant whose job is to keep track of your work deadlines and meetings etc., but as it turns out, there are marketing tools to do just that and more.
Airtable
Airtable achieves the perfect balance between creative features to maximize efficiency and simplicity so that you don’t find yourself lost among a plethora of features. It functions like a google spreadsheet, where each column has a dedicated formula of sorts. But it packs much more in its simple structure. From automated processes that you can edit, like functions for columns on excel sheets, to a room for customization, Airtable will streamline a lot of your work.
Boomerang for Gmail
Boomerang is a plugin for Gmail, which is a pretty handy tool to improve your focus. It’s hardly the case that you are running a business and also have a well-organized email. Even so, there’s no avoiding cluttering emails that you simply don’t have time to respond to. Boomerang lets you remove some emails that don’t need your immediate attention and allows you to zero in on your time-sensitive tasks.
BuiltWith
Have you ever come across a feature on some website that you found incredibly convenient? If you want your own customers to have a more convenient experience on your website with that plugin, Builtwith can help you. With Builtwith, you are a click away from figuring out the secret plugin that’s making other websites work.
CallRail
CallRail’s services are a must-have for businesses that depend on quality phone calls and customer leads. It’s truly a game-changer because for the small and affordable prices of a CallRail package, you can streamline the calls and cut out the excess, unnecessary calls. You’ll save up on an insane amount of time and money with their analytics.
Hunter
Any small business needs connections to enter the market. Being connected to important, influential people can be the helping hand they need in standing on their own two feet (or four pillars). Hunter.io lets you find the relevant people and gives you their managerial emails.
Ontraport
Think of Ontraport as your actual office because it brings all the productivity features under one roof. Some of the coolest features of Ontraport include organizing payment systems, setting up and categorizing notes, and having a systematic email outreach. One of the most effective features that Ontraport offers is follow-ups. If you have a big business launch coming up, you can arrange all your prospects, from different emails to scheduling meetings, using Ontraport. Working with Ontraport makes everything seem seamless.
Slack
If you’re familiar with Discord, you might be familiar with the Slack outlook and functioning. Slack is great for team projects because of its communication features. You can set up different channels to facilitate communications. Select which team members join which server/channel, and you basically have an online office. You can also reach out to other individual members through the in-built messaging features.
Trello
Trello is another great team management platform where you can distribute tasks and responsibilities in an organized and efficient manner. You can allocate deadlines to certain tasks and create topic cards. You can add notes and instructions to these topic cards, and the members can mark them complete when they’re done with their work. Best of all, Trello is free to use, making it a great pick for new startups looking to cut corners wherever possible.
Steam
In the same branch as Trello and Slack, the Wise team is an organizational teamwork platform. It’s particularly good for small groups that are spread out across the globe. You can connect to each other for discussions and sharing information. Additionally, you can section off your duties into smaller tasks and have regular follow-ups.
Wordable
If your work revolves around writing content and blogs, then Wordable is going to be a lifesaver. If your work involves WordPress, you might be familiar with the pain of spending long hours uploading your formatted works from Google Docs to WordPress. The wordable app will save you that time and suffering by uploading that same content at much faster rates.
Yesware
Yesware works as an add-on, much like Boomerang. Yesware makes email-based work much more efficient in terms of following up or pursuing leads. The add-on itself is a pretty simple, easy-to-use software that works for everyone.
Digital Marketing Tools for Keyword Research, SEO, and SEM
Put yourself in the shoes of an average internet user. When you’re looking for a product online, and you search for a bunch of keywords, you usually stick to the first page. Maybe you go to the 2nd one just in case. But it’s very natural for average users to trust the top 10 results. So how do you get your webpage to the top 10?
Unbounce
Unbounce comes with built-in templates and a very easy-to-use drag and drops function that takes away from the complexity of hardcoding. From dedicated landing pages and dynamic text that varies with regions to being incredibly SEO friendly, Unbounce is perfect for people who aren’t tech-savvy.
SEMRush
SEMRush is a pretty handy paid service that is optimized for SEO and PPC purposes. Additionally, it offers SM optimization services as well as competitor research.
SE Ranking
When it comes to mastering SEO and keeping tabs on different factors like competitor articles, finding the best, most relevant keywords, SE Ranking is your best bet. SE ranking analyzes similar content that is posted by your competitor articles and uses that to generate the most appropriate keywords. This ensures that your content is not only engaging but also works well with the Search engine results.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog, like SE Ranking, is a brilliant and incredibly powerful tool for making your content search-engine friendly. It comes up with the most fitting keywords and metadata analyses to ensure that your webpage is at the forefront of your product market.
Nightwatch
Nightwatch takes search word optimization to the next level, using updated data visualizations, custom reports, the latest segmentation, and effective filtering abilities. Nightwatch really is the SEO tool of the future.
Moz Pro
When it comes to meta Search engine friendliness, there’s little competition for Moz Pro. What sets it apart is its superior algorithmic page authority. This enables you to establish and increase domain authority. For base-level optimization, you can search a keyword, and it will cook up a generic difficulty. But you can use additional features to determine the page authority scores of the other high-ranking articles.
Moz Open Site Explorer
Entering the digital marketing industry, you’ll quickly realize that having all your eggs in one basket is not the way to go. By that we mean, you want to be visible over several links so you can have a greater outreach and impact. Moz Open Site Explorer allows you to insert a page’s URL that you wish to keep track of and comes up with an extensive report of all the websites that link back to you.
Mangools
If you’re starting out with SEO work, Mangools is a great place to start. SEO terms and technicalities can be complicated and confusing. Mango is essentially an SEO research application and tracker that is cloud-based. And while Mangool’s services might not be a great pick for high-end SEO work, you can still have a decent presence on the internet. One of the best features of Mangools is that the keywords identified aren’t too saturated either.
Majestic
Link building is a vital part of SEO work. The Majestic Chrome Tool is a strong decision-making tool that lets you dig deep into different URLs and their individual strengths.
Keywords Everywhere
The Keywords Everywhere is an amazing and convenient tool for quick SEO keyword searches. What’s surprising about this is that, despite the amazing services, the Keywords Everywhere plugin is free to use. This plugin also has other pretty exciting features that are just a click away, like monthly traffic search, competitor article links, and CPC.
AnswerThePubliccom
AnswerThePublic, as the name suggests, is a digital marketing tool that gives you precisely what the public is typing to answer their questions. This is the most direct way for you to figure out what keywords you should be using for SEO purposes. Best of all, AnswerThePublic also offers free services that you can use easily. Just type in your question, and you’ll get the list of questions.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is known for its ability to narrow down the top competitors in a product market and, more specifically, what article of that competitor is fairing the best out there. This allows you to keep track of the keywords and type of content that is being received the best.
Digital Marketing Tools for Conversion, Marketing Automation, & Personalization
As part of a business, you are looking to replace as much work with a machine as possible both to increase efficiency (saving time) and to increase time for creative work for people. Additionally, personalizing the user experience is a great marketing strategy in building a loyal user base. Overall, from a business perspective, you are looking to maximize time conversion, minimize the labor-intensive tasks by automation, and personalize the experiences of your customers. And there are plenty of handy marketing tools that you can utilize to do just that.
ActiveCampaign
If you’re new to business relations, you might not know that Customer relationship management (CRM for short) is a field in itself that deals with effective ways to communicate messages to people who are interacting with your product. At ActiveCampaign, one of the ways you can automate this function is through email responses. The algorithms develop and nurture tailored responses, which will save you a huge amount of time -especially if your website or product relies greatly on customer communications.
However, you don’t go ahead making an excel sheet for every small thing because the initial time investment of figuring out functions doesn’t justify the small output. Similarly, if the description of use doesn’t fit your usage, then you may not find this worth your time.
Albacross
While many different digital marketing tools can help you work out where you’re getting a lot of user interaction from, Albacross goes a step ahead and lets you get information to reach out to users visiting your website. The best part about Albacross is that, although it seems like you’ll need a bunch of coding and tech info, you really don’t. The comprehensive and complex mechanism of Albacross will start working immediately after you’ve completed the signup process. You can expect several leads to visitors every day, which you can follow up on to guarantee yourself a customer who might be interested.
ContactOut
Think of ContactOut as a mixture of Upfluence and Albacross; it hooks you up with different people and influencers by providing you their contact information. These are things like their work phone numbers, manager numbers, or email addresses. ContactOut is a brilliant tool for outreach and expansion, especially for small businesses who want to tap into a larger market through influential individuals with large fanbases.
You might be wondering what sets ContactOut apart from other similar outreach tools like the aforementioned Albacross and Upfluence. The simple answer is that their methods are much more effective than the other similar tools, i.e., ContactOut will bring you contact information that most other platforms miss out on. This is also usually the most effective way of reaching out to influencers. What makes ContactOut an even better digital marketing tool for beginners is that you can get a generous amount of contact information from simply using the free feature. If you like ContactOut, you can go for a paid subscription.
HubSpot Forms
HubSpot is an online form builder that can be hooked up to several CRM and email marketing tools like ActiveCampaign that we talked about earlier. HubSpot also has its own HubSpot CRM that’s also free. The free HubSpot forms version is decent enough and has a lot of the useful and relevant features already stored. You can sign up for the paid subscription if you liked the services, but the free version should fair just as well for new users.
Leadfeeder
Associated with Google Analytics in providing optimal data, Leadfeeder is another app that will connect you to those visiting your websites. There’s a particular effort in connecting you with the companies that are viewing your website so you can reach out to any big names you see and strike a good deal. Plus. It not only tells you the IP address of these companies but goes ahead and pulls up more information on the points of contact there.
MailChimp
As a digital marketer, you will love MailChimp’s creative and eye-catching layouts that are autogenerated. These layouts are made for email CRM campaigns and are tried and tested to be incredibly efficient.
Mailerlite
Mailerlite is a similar email optimizing and automating tool that’s great for CRM. With Mailerlite, you can easily reuse previous email marketing campaigns by using their simple and easy drag and drop function to make some tweaks.
Marketo
Marketo automating tools are very efficient in generating leads that would take much more time, money, and effort otherwise. This is a great tool for businesses looking to blow up in a short amount of time.
Nickelled
Product demos are usually a good way to get your users comfortable in using your product. But if you are just starting out, giving out free products might not be a viable option, or maybe the nature of your products doesn’t warrant a tester product. Nickelled essentially offers guided tours in the process of your production to give your users a “sense” of what to expect.
Pardot
Pardot packs in a bunch of marketing features which makes it a great option for users who don’t want to get a subscription to 20 different digital marketing tools. Not only does this work as a tracker for your leads, but it also gives you an analysis of what type of content is generating the most profitable leads. This gives you vital information in putting out the optimal content to take the edge over your competition.
PersistIQ
PersistIQ stands out mostly because of its clean, professional, and most importantly, user-friendly interface. It fast-tracks the path to sending out emails but supercharging the content and organizing it into different categories for the fastest progress. This is especially useful if you find yourself sending out similar emails to different companies because you can keep track of each of them thematically.
Proof
Proof has a uniquely creative way of using automation and data to increase efficiency. The service works on the idea that when there are people waiting in line for a product, let’s say a cookie, and the line is a very long one, there’s a high chance that the cookie is good. Proof applies this same phenomenon to website traffics and uses that information to assess the type of content that is fairing well.
Unless
Unless is a great option for people whose product varies greatly across different individuals. For this type of service, Unless offers personalization and automation of content based on weather, time, location, etc.
Zoho SalesIQ
Users feel valued when they see a live chat feature because it gives them reassurance that their questions will be answered immediately. Zoho SalesIQ is not the first or sole live chat feature out there, but it’s one of the best ones that are also free.
