Digital marketers are at an impasse. If they use the internet to promote a business in any capacity (which is virtually everybody, at this point), this means they’re in competition with virtually every website on Earth. At the time of this writing, that’s around 1.9 billion websites.
If you narrow the focus to only include businesses, that’s still millions of companies. Presently, there are around 32.5 million businesses in the United States alone.
If a business owner hopes to stay in business — not to mention excel — they need to spread the word about their product or service. Digital marketing is no longer optional if you want your business to succeed.
The trouble is that a lot of business software can be downright expensive. Even more, with so many software companies transitioning to SaaS models, digital marketing software can become another monthly expense, almost like a second rent.
The good news is that you don’t need to spend thousands of dollars to access powerful marketing tools, especially if you make them your own! We’ve put together a list of valuable digital marketing APIs that you can use to create your analytics engines, messaging platforms, and research tools.
Digital Marketing APIs
Audience Segmentation APIs
Let’s face it — digital marketing varies a lot from place to place. Different countries and cultures have different values and customs, for one thing. They’ve all got their own economies, their own slang, their own history, and a hundred other things you need to keep in mind if you want your digital marketing to connect.
It can even influence mundane details like when social media messages are posted, or emails are sent. 6 AM in London is 10 PM in San Francisco or Seattle, after all.
For these reasons, audience segmentation is a popular need for digital marketers. The ability to segment your audience by location is often necessary if you have a broad audience.
There are a number of free Geolocation APIs that let you keep track of where your audience is located. For example, Ipstack is a free API for finding the location of an IP accessing a website, for instance. Even better, Ipstack makes that data available in both human-readable street address format as well as by latitude and longitude, which is useful for integrating with other map software.
Other Geolocation APIs include IPGeolocation and IP-API.
Analytics APIs
There are times in life when hunches, intuition, and good ol’ fashioned gut instincts matter. But even if you’re going with your gut, you still need to back up your hunches with hard data to give you a clear picture of what’s working and what isn’t.
This means that analytics is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing, especially in today’s data-driven economy. Unfortunately, it also means that analytics software and solutions can be expensive.
Quintly is a deep, useful, and versatile tool for social media analytics. It extracts extensive marketing data from your social media followers from all of the major platforms, from Facebook to Instagram to YouTube to TikTok. Even better, all of this data is available via numerous API endpoints.
If you’re looking for a more cost-effective analytics solution, Zoho Reports is well worth a look. Zoho Reports is a deep, powerful analytics tool that digs deep into your data and makes it universally available.
Zoho Reports can analyze data from over 250 different sources. Once you’ve selected your data source, there are numerous visualization options and dashboards.
Considering that Zoho Reports offers a free plan, as well as a relatively affordable lowest tier, consider giving this analytics API a spin to see what it’s capable of.
For another excellent analytics tool with a free tier, check out Mixpanel. Mixpanel is another powerful tool that offers everything from dashboards to data visualization to audience segmentation and data integration.
You can do virtually anything you want with your data, thanks to numerous APIs. These APIs make working with data more automatic, with pre-made solutions for importing large quantities of data, custom formatting, queries, and more.
Last but not least, another analytics API is FullStory.
Social Media Monitoring APIs
Powerful digital marketing tools have upped the ante for eCommerce. Never before have customers’ expectations been as high as they are today. People expect world-class customer service, and they expect it now.
Now factor in the impact that negative press can have on a business or brand. It’s no coincidence that word-of-mouth advertising annually drives $6 trillion in global sales. 83% of companies rely on word-of-mouth advertising to increase brand awareness.
Considering how powerful word-of-mouth advertising can be, it’s no surprise that bad press can harm your business. It doesn’t even have to be true — a false claim on social media could cause real damage.
Monitoring solutions can help digital marketers visualize what people are saying about their brand. For example, Mention is a real-time monitoring API that crawls social media and the web and alerts you anytime someone mentions your brand.
This way, you’re not stuck Googling your own business to know how your brand is perceived. Even better, you’re able to put out fires as soon as they happen. A dissatisfied customer is far more likely to be appeased if you address their issue early. In fact, you could turn a dissatisfied customer into a passionate brand advocate, transforming potential lousy press into good reviews!
SEO APIs
If you have much experience with digital marketing, you likely know that SEO tools can be expensive. Even the cheap plans on sites like Moz, AhRefs, or SEMRush can cost hundreds of dollars a month. This leaves website admins in the unenviable position of either having to pay out for an SEO specialist or, perhaps just as bad, conduct their search engine marketing campaigns in the dark.
This makes SEO Explorer a cause for celebration for those looking for affordable SEO services. Seo Explorer offers free tools for keyword research, competitor research, and backlink checkers. Even better, the backlink checker can create detailed URL reports, profiling the sites the backlinks are coming from.
Granted, SEO Explorer’s API isn’t available for the free tiers but it’s still quite affordable by SEO tool standards. The free site is still useful, as well, so SEO Explorer is well worth a look if you’ve been looking for SEO tools.
Messenger APIs
Last but not least, you need some sort of Messenger API if you want to communicate with your customers without having to open a program every time. Luckily, nearly every major messaging platform has an API at this point. Consider integrating with APIs from Facebook Messenger, Twitter, or Slack.
There are also plenty of APIs to help automate email campaigns. For example, SendGrind has an API with a free plan that lets you send up to 100 emails a day at no charge. We also reviewed other email APIs here.
Marketing Tools and APIs
The good news is when you’re working with APIs, you can build your own marketing tools. If you know your way around programming, you could construct a custom marketing stack to handle everything from automation to analytics and all points in-between.
Even better, you can do so without having to spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars every month on proprietary software!
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