Arguably, the success of any digital marketing campaign depends on the quality of tools in a marketer’s or your marketing team’s arsenal. With the right tools, you can supercharge your marketing efforts and increase your customer loyalty.
But there are hundreds of digital marketing tools today, and choosing the right one for your tech stack can be overwhelming. In this guide, I researched the best marketing software and selected the best for marketing campaigns.
Key Takeaways
- Digital marketing tools are a must-have for every business looking to make the most of their marketing spend
- Different tools cater to various use cases. There are social media marketing tools, search engine optimization tools, content marketing tools, etc.
- Investing in getting the right combination of software for your tech stack is crucial if you want to outperform your competitors and provide customers with the best customer experience
- Using the right digital tool can snowball your marketing efforts and multiply your ROI
- To choose the right software for your digital marketing campaigns, analyze the functions and calculate the monetary benefits
Top Social Media Marketing Tools
Social media marketing is a vital part of every marketing strategy. Here are three must-have tools to position your brand for success:
Facebook Business Manager
Price: Free
Facebook Business Manager (also called Meta Business Manager) helps to manage and organize your Facebook and Instagram business pages, ad accounts, pixels, and catalogs in one place. It allows you to delegate tasks to team members without the hassle of linking your personal account or sharing login details.
As Facebook describes, it is a ‘one-stop-shop for managing business tools and assets and employee access to the assets.’
Benefits:
- It enables you to manage multiple Facebook Ad accounts and pages in one location
- It fosters effective team management. On Facebook Manager, you can easily assign rules to your team members
- Also, it allows you to share access with multiple people without sacrificing security or privacy
- It enables you to grant and revoke access to your business assets at will. This mitigates the fear of losing your business page when working with third parties
- Access to insightful and real-time customer data, for instance, their demographics
Hootsuite
Pricing: Starts at $99/mo
Are you looking for a platform to manage all your social media accounts in one place, schedule posts, track engagement, and analyze campaign performance? Then you’ll absolutely love Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is an all-in-one digital marketing software that integrates with almost all social platforms. It is easy to set up and use and has side-by-side feed columns on the main dashboard.
Personally, I love how Hootsuite allows users to stay ahead of the curve. Access trends about your business, competitors, or topics and discover the best way to integrate the data into your social media marketing campaigns.
Advantages of Using Hootsuite for Social Media Management
- Access rich analytics for informed decision-making. This unique analytics feature lets you see how well your campaigns perform
- Easily identify your top-performing posts in an instant. On the ‘Post performance’ section, you get an in-depth overview of your best-performing posts
- Track essential metrics like shares, clicks, mentions, retweets, total followers, etc. This helps you to see how your social platforms are performing and how to improve accordingly
- With Hootsuite’s ‘Best time to publish’ feature, discover the best time and day to schedule your post for maximum reach and high engagement.
Buffer
Price: Free and Paid Plans
Buffer is another exceptional marketing tool for scheduling content on social networks. It’s an intuitive and affordable social media management tool (compared to other tools in this category) which makes it enticing for small business owners.
With the continuously changing algorithms, stay ahead of the curve with real-time insights and trends that position you for long-term success. Although your options on the free plan are limited, it’s still perfect if you’re just starting to grow your audience.
Advantages of Using Buffer for Social Media Management
- Easily share posts on different platforms at once. Instead of creating custom schedules for each platform, you can edit the posts individually and post them simultaneously
- Easily integrate Buffer into your browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera) to share articles you love or download relevant images directly to your social media platforms
- It integrates seamlessly with popular marketing tools like Google Analytics, Canva, OpenAI, Unsplash, etc. This allows you to streamline your marketing efforts and get the most out of your social campaigns
- Publish once and manage everywhere. You can manage your social media from any device and browser. This flexibility is helpful for agencies and business owners who perform many tasks simultaneously while their managing social media accounts
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Top Email Marketing Tools
For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you get 100% ROI. Here are three email marketing tools that will save you time and money:
Mailchimp
Price: Free and Paid Plans
Mailchimp is one of the best email marketing software on the Internet today. It is an all-in-one tool for creating and managing email lists. The best part is that it’s perfect for businesses of all sizes and industries. Whether you’re a hobbyist trying to test the waters, an eCommerce business owner, or a content creator, you’ll definitely find the right plan perfectly tailored to your needs.
Benefits of Using Mailchimp for Email Marketing Campaigns
- I found the segmentation feature most helpful. Mailchimp allows users to organize and segment their list based on various criteria – demographics, open rate or click rate, purchase history, interests, etc.
- The drag-and-drop editor allows you to create professional email campaigns. Add fonts, colors, images, social media platforms, buttons, etc.
- From the dashboard, you can monitor campaign performance. You’ll also find a ‘View Report’ for each campaign that will provide more detailed insights into your campaigns
- I love how Mailchimp allows users to integrate popular marketing platforms like WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify
Constant Contact
Price: Starts at $12/mo
Constant Contact is an email marketing, social media management, and lead generation platform. It provides a wholesome approach to growing your audience online. You’ll find a ton of functionalities to create click-worthy emails, segment contacts to improve engagement and track vital metrics to optimize campaigns. You’ll love the intuitive interface, well-defined sections, menu, visually-appealing campaign reports, and more.
I got attracted to Constant Contact’s distinctive email marketing feature – brand template creator – that allows users to create a branded email marketing template.
Advantages of Using Constant Contact for Email Campaigns
- Just like Mailchimp, create personalized and professional-looking email campaigns without using a single line of code. Constant Contact offers a variety of editable templates, fonts, images, and colors to help create visually-appealing email campaigns
- It has a super intuitive interface, creating an enjoyable user experience
- What’s marketing without analytics? Constant Contact gives detailed and real-time analytics on all your email campaigns. You can segment customers based on their behavior and discover actual ways to improve
- Seamlessly integrate other marketing platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Facebook and other social media, Gmail, Canva, etc., to streamline business operations
Next is…
Sendinblue
Price: Free and paid plans (starts from $25/mo)
Sendinblue (now Brevo) is another email marketing software with cutting-edge tools for nurturing customer relationships. They provide a complete CRM suite for omnichannel marketing – email marketing, SMS campaigns, targeted landing pages, signup forms, WhatsApp campaigns, and more.
Reasons Why Sendinblue Is a Good Option for Businesses of All Sizes:
- Streamline your email marketing operations by integrating other third-party apps and plugins like Zoom, Salesforce, Shopify, Hubspot, Facebook Lead Ads, etc.
- Unlike other platforms that charge based on the contacts in your database, Brevo plans are based on the volume of emails you send. The free plan allows you to send up to 300 emails daily, which is excellent
- Create an experience your audience will love. Brevo prides itself on having branded editable email templates with built-in image editing tools
- The segmentation feature is also top-notch. This enables you to send personalized emails to specific contacts based on their behaviors and interests
Top Content Marketing Tools
Content, they say, is king. Marketing the right content increases your brand visibility, builds awareness, and connects with your audience exactly how they want you to. Listed in this section are three tools to help you get started:
Grammarly
Grammarly is one of the most popular content creation and editing tools. Over 30 million people use this software daily to improve the quality of their content. Yes, me too. Grammarly is designed to help produce high-quality, unique, and error-free content.
However, it’s not only for writers and bloggers. Grammarly can be used by marketing teams, web publishers, product managers, and even students.
Benefits of Using Grammarly for Content Creation and Editing
- Grammarly is mainly known for providing grammar suggestions and corrections. It churns out the verbiage and ensures that your business content is free from errors
- I love how it restructures sentences, making them simpler to read and digest. This helps to enhance content clarity and coherence without sacrificing your brand tone
- The interface is user-friendly and highly intuitive. It seamlessly integrates with third-party applications, including web browsers, email marketing tools, graphics design tools, and more
Canva
Pricing: Free and Paid Plans
Are you looking to create visually-appealing graphics for your content without hiring a graphics designer or spending eons creating from scratch? You’re just in luck! I love how Canva allows anyone to create compelling designs without prior designing skills.
Advantages of Using Canva for Creating Graphics and Visual Content
- Canva is incredibly user-friendly. The drag-and-drop feature, combined with the uncluttered interface, makes designing fun. There are simply no limits to what you can create using Canva
- You’ll find a ton of already-designed templates to create A-grade graphics for your content. There is also a plethora of stock images, elements, fonts, shapes, stickers, videos, etc., to add to your graphics design
- Maintain consistency on all your designs using the branded kit feature. Here, you can add your brand fonts, colors, logos, icons, and more to create branded graphics
Lastly…
Buzzsumo
Pricing: Starts at $119/mo
Buzzsumo is a useful all-purpose tool in a marketer’s toolkit. It’s stacked with so many features – marketing, sales, PR, data analytics, etc. – that you may get overwhelmed trying to figure things out. For clarity’s sake, I’d focus on how you can utilize this tool in your content marketing process.
The first feature that jumped right at me was the content analyzer tool for finding the best-performing headlines for various content. As a digital marketing specialist, I appreciate software that reduces working hours without sacrificing work quality.
Reasons why BuzzSumo Is Helpful for Content Ideation and Analysis
- When you enter a search term in Buzzsumo, you get the most shared and engaging content on that topic, including related topics. You’ll also get detailed information on the average engagement rate for each social network, date, and content type. This can be very useful in choosing the right topic to write about
- With this tool, you can find key influencers in your industry and discover what they’re talking about and the type of content that they share with their audience
- The trending tab gives you unhindered access to what’s happening around the digital world. As a pro user, you can select up to 10 custom topics to stay up to date with your industry trends
- Another feature you’ll definitely love is the content analysis tab. You can gain real-time insights into your content performance and focus on how to optimize accordingly
Top SEO Tools
SEO positions your business website where your customers find solutions: search engines. Here are the top SEO tools to help you get started:
Ahrefs
Pricing: Starts at $99/mo
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset. In their own words, they are ‘everything you need to rank higher and get more traffic.’ They provide users with all the functionalities needed to increase search engine results page visibility.
First, there’s the site explorer feature that analyzes the overall SEO health of your site. The content explorer feature also allows you to examine high-performing content in your industry, almost similar to Google Search Console.
Benefits of Using Ahrefs
- Access to a comprehensive database of best-performing keywords, backlinks, and website metrics
- Gain insights into your competitor’s content strategy. You can check the ranking history of any keyword and compare it with your competitor’s page
- Like Buzzsumo, Ahrefs has a Content Explorer tool that provides a comprehensive list of content on that topic, including social media shares. Although this tool isn’t as robust as Buzzsumo Content Analyzer
- The site audit feature is one of the best compared to other tools specializing in technical SEO. It scans your website for technical issues like broken links, missing meta descriptions, etc.
Semrush
Pricing: Starts at $199.95/mo
Semrush is another popular SEO and content marketing tool that provides comprehensive insights on improving your on-page SEO performance. Whether you want to analyze your site’s health or discover keywords with high-ranking potential, Semrush delivers all you need to get started.
The first thing that caught my eye was the user-friendly dashboard. You’ll see an uncluttered display of your organic and paid traffic here. I love that it integrates effortlessly with social media platforms to track brand mentions (absent in Ahrefs). They provide other SEO features like a backlink checker, domain overview, keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis, and more.
Advantages of Using SEMrush for SEO Audits:
- Semrush offers tools for content marketing, Search Engine Optimization(SEO)/Pay Per Click, marketing insights, and keyword research, among others
- Semrush provides a comprehensive website analysis that helps to identify technical issues affecting your business website ranking
- The ‘keyword research’ feature provides information on the competition, keyword volume, and ranking difficulty
Google Analytics
Pricing: Free
Google Analytics is a tool that enables website developers and marketers to track and analyze website traffic metrics. The best part is you can see how users interact with your site, what they’re mostly searching for, conversion rates, and other metrics.
Why Google Analytics Is Important:
- Allows marketers and website owners to track and analyze different demographic data of visitors, such as gender, age, and interests
- Measures website performance – traffic volume and conversion rates. This information is crucial for making informed decisions
- By analyzing user behavior, marketers and website owners can identify users’ pain points and areas of improvement, like optimizing page load times, simplifying navigation, or updating content
Benefits of Using Digital Marketing Tools
There’s no limit to what you can do with the right marketing tech stack. Here are some of the benefits of using marketing tools in your campaigns and potential use cases:
Improved Efficiency and Productivity
Technology is sporadically advancing. Artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, and other technologies are now integrated into business operations to improve efficiency. For instance, GPT technology opened new possibilities for automating idea generation and content creation processes. The fun fact is we’re just getting started.
How Car Next Door Used Buffer to Streamline Business Process
Car Next Door is a car-sharing platform that allows customers to hire vehicles online. Before using Buffer for social media management, they used spreadsheets to organize the content creation process. This was really clumsy and monotonous. Buffer helped to streamline their content creation and scheduling process while providing insights to the best-performing ones.
Increased Audience Reach and Engagement
Before global digitalization, traditional marketers relied on door-to-door marketing and physical mailing systems. This process is tiring and gives no means of tracking campaign performance.
In fact, 68% of marketers believe digital marketing is more effective than traditional marketing. And thanks to online marketing tools, businesses can reach larger audiences and spur engagements without spending millions on traditional advertisement.
How Australian Business Grew Website Traffic by 75% YoY
Traffic is the new gold. Australian Business Jacaranda Finance suffered a severe decline in website traffic due to Google’s recent updates. But they were able to recover – exceedingly – by implementing data-based and customer-centric content creation. All these were made possible using SEMRush. They used this tool to:
- Conduct site and content audits
- Target long and short-tail keywords with high-ranking potential
- Create SEO-focused content brief using the SEMRush SEO content template
- Track ranking efforts
- Create and distribute social media content
They didn’t just organically generate a 75% increase in website traffic and ranked 1st place for 1022 keywords. Impressive!
Read more on how to improve website traffic.
Better Analysis and Data-Driven Decision-Making
Access to data-rich marketing insights is invaluable. With the right marketing tools, you can track marketing campaigns effectively and make informed decisions to improve future campaigns.
Thanks to AI, businesses can uncover rich, quality, and real-time analytics from their business data using digital marketing tools. Instead of focusing on vanity metrics, these tools provide digestible and visually-appealing data presentations from marketing campaigns. The analytics generated help businesses make strategically-informed decisions on optimizing campaign performance.
How Erika Heald Uses Buzzsumo Data-driven Insights to 3X Social Media Traffic
Erika Heald is a marketing consultant for SaaS startups. Before using Buzzsumo, generating insights into content trends on Twitter and client customer data was a hassle. With this marketing tool, she was able to analyze your customer’s existing content to decipher the best-performing content and make data-driven decisions. The results? She tripled the social media traffic and conversions for the brand.
“What I love is that I’m able to use data, thanks to BuzzSumo, to help people better understand who their audience is and where they’re actually engaging with content.â€
Erika Heald, Marketing Consultant
Enhanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Great brands today have one thing in common: they’re highly consumer-obsessed. Therefore, brands must adopt winning strategies, practices, and technologies to outperform the competition to manage and improve customer interactions across platforms. CRM tools help to facilitate these interactions, store customer information, manage campaigns, and more in one place.
How Constant Contact Helped Soluna Garden Farms to Stay Connected With Customers
Amy, the owner of Solana Garden Farms, expounds, ‘One email can go a long way.’ I completely agree, especially after learning how Constant Contact snowballed sales using the Constant Contact CRM suite. Initially, their business was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Their sales reduced drastically, too, and they had to pause all in-person sales. But after integrating email marketing, they sold out!
Factors to Consider When Choosing Digital Marketing Tools
How do you choose the right marketing tool for your business? What are the key factors that come into play when selecting one? Listed below are the first four to consider:
Cost
Cost is one of the most vital factors to consider before choosing any tool for your tech stack. Evaluating the benefits such a tool offers your business is imperative before making commitments. Always put function first.
“…When you’re looking for a tool, do an independent evaluation of every company and pit them against each other—let them identify each other’s weaknesses and then pick the one that works for your specific ROI.†Craig Greiwe of Rogers & Cowan shared with Forbes.
Pricing Models for Digital Marketing Tools
Since there are many digital marketing tools on the internet, it’s vital to be familiar with the pricing models offered by each:
- Freemium model: Here, the basic features of the tool are free and premium ones aren’t
- Tiered subscriptions: this is common among most SaaS platforms. Here, subscribers pay depending on their desired features
- Flat rate subscriptions: This is also subscription-based pricing. Here, users play a fixed amount for a specific duration
User Interface and Ease of Use
The user interface is one of the obvious reasons to consider when choosing digital marketing software. The reason is simple: choosing a tool with little learning curve will make your life easier. I love tools that provide clarity and need only a little technical experience before starting.
Major popular tools today have modern interfaces. Here are some popular examples:
- Canva, as I highlighted earlier, is well known for its beautiful and eye-catchy interface. You’ll find pre-designed templates that can be customized to any taste. This makes it attractive to users with limited design experience
- Mailchimp is another tool popular for its user-friendliness. It has a shallow learning curve, and users new to the platform can quickly grasp its functionalities. You’ll even find a great ton of resources to facilitate the learning process
- Hubspot is a great CRM platform that prioritizes customer experience. It provides various tools for managing and improving marketing, sales, and customer relationships. I love how users can scale as their needs expand
Integration With Existing Systems
Data interoperability between marketing systems is essential to tap into broader customer insights and provide a seamless and cohesive experience. In addition, by integrating systems, businesses can access a holistic view of customer data across multiple systems.
Common Integration Issues and How to Avoid Them
- Lack of APIs or Documentation. Ensure the provider has proper documentation or enables alternative integration methods, like database integration
- Data security and privacy concerns. Implement robust security strategies for product data during integration
- Lack of in-depth beginner guides and support. Thoroughly check through the provider’s platform for the level of support provided
Availability of Customer Support
No matter how skilled we are, we still need help at some point. And when we do, what’s the quality or reliance of the support we’d be getting? Customer support is undeniably an important feature and a must for every software you’ll be purchasing. The right digital software provides multi-channel support to users and non-users and is available 24/7.
There are different types of customer support channels:
- Email support
- Live chat support
- Phone support
- Community/developer support
- Knowledge base and documentation
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Conclusion
The digital landscape keeps evolving, and newer tools are being released to enable marketers to provide personalized customer experiences and lead globally. These digital tools have revolutionized marketing, and the future of technology in marketing is enviably promising. Keep checking this page, as I will update it occasionally with the best marketing tool that’ll save you time and money.
Next Steps: What Now?
- Define your marketing objectives and create SMART goals to make the most of your tech stack
- Stay abreast of industry trends and advancements in marketing technology to remain competitive
- Adopt the right storytelling techniques to craft compelling content that’ll attract your audience
- Learn how affiliate marketing can impact your business revenue
