Long gone are the days when marketing encapsulated just TV advertisements and colorful billboards on the side of the road. So then, what do people do nowadays if they don’t watch TV and look out the window or listen to the radio whilst in traffic? That’s why it’s important to understand the potential that digital marketing tools can have for your business.
But let’s get back to my previous question: If people aren’t watching TV or listening to the radio, what ARE they doing?
To answer that question, just think about what you usually do when you’re bored. The most likely scenario is that you grab your phone and start scrolling through your social media feed. Or maybe you check your emails to see what’s new there or even go and read a blog post from your favorite blogger or business.
All of these things can be recognized as digital activities. We can see that more than ever, people are spending their time online, and marketers should take advantage of that.
Of course, there are many digital marketing strategies that can be implemented. Some of the most popular online marketing strategies are:
When it comes to online marketing, there are many things that you need to take into consideration. Each digital marketing strategy has its course and regulations, which means that you need to spend a lot of time catering to these needs so your marketing can be successful.
Luckily, many digital marketing tools can help you get the best marketing results. And today, we’d like to show you some of the best options that you have for each marketing department:
One of the most used digital marketing strategies is social media marketing. And when you find out that about 1.3 million new users joined social media every day in 2020, you can see why it’s so insanely popular.
But social media is not easy to manage. When you need to post on different platforms and keep in mind all the different requirements that each platform has, delivering content can become a sinuous task. Luckily, there are some digital marketing tools that can help:
1. SocialBee
SocialBee is a social media management tool that also offers social media concierge services. It is a tool that was designed to help small to medium businesses, coaches, authors, and solopreneurs to reach their social media marketing goals.
The platform that SocialBee offers is user-friendly and allows you to customize your content and choose the day and time of posting. SocialBee gives you the opportunity to start for free and the pricing options start at $19 per month.
All in all, SocialBee is a perfect option for businesses and entrepreneurs that are looking to grow using social media.
2. MobileMonkey
MobileMonkey is a great multi-purpose digital marketing tool. It presents a lot of features that companies can use to grow and market their business, such as chatbox tools, free Facebook lead generator, SMS marketing tools, Instagram tools, Facebook ads, contact growth tools, and much more.
Billed annually, their platform starting price is $14.25 per month, and it can reach $199 per month. They also offer consultation services, which come in three different offers. Their consultation packages start at $449.
If you need a tool that will allow you to talk with your customers in real-time and manage your social media account, MobileMoney is what you need.
3. Keyhole
Keyhole is a great tool for social listening that enables marketers to improve their social media strategy by looking at analytics. Not only that but if you’re using influencer marketing, you will be given the option to track the impact of the campaigns.
The tool’s pricing starts at $79 per month (Standard plan). It also has an Enterprise package, for which you will need to contact the Keyhole team.
You can start using Keyhole’s free trial, no credit card required to sign up, and see if this tool is what you need for your social media management efforts.
Online Reputation Management
Maintaining a good reputation online is vital for any business that wants long-term success. Why? Well, once your reputation is tainted, either by bad reviews or bad publicity, customers will have a harder time trusting your brand, and leads will think twice before purchasing any products or services from you.
This is why having some digital marketing tools that deal with online reputation management is a good idea. Here is our pick:
4. Brand24
Brand24 will assist you in tracking your competition, managing your online reputation, and monitoring your media. They also have some pretty interesting features that allow you to see who is talking about your business and help you better understand your customers.
You can start a trial for free and if you decide you like their tools, their starter package costs $49 and their most expensive package comes at $199 per month.
If you want to manage your brand, Brand24 is the perfect fit for you.
5. Reputology
We all know what a great impact review can have on a business, and Reputology knows that as well. Some of the key features of this tool are 24/7 monitoring, analyzing your customers’ sentiments, measuring performance, responding quickly to reviews from their platform, gathering all the reviews in one place, etc.
The service can be billed monthly or yearly, and the starting point is $180 per month.
When it comes to managing online reviews, Reputology is a tool that you need in your repertoire.
6. GatherUp
To manage your review you need to have some. And we know that getting reviews is no easy task. This is where GatherUp comes into the picture. GatherUp is a tool that grows your business by generating more reviews and managing customer experience.
You have a few packages that you can choose from, depending on the number of your locations. Their price starts at $99 per month and if you have a larger enterprise you can negotiate the pricing with the GatherUp sales team.
GatherUp is a great tool to have for getting customer reviews.
Community Building
Having a solid community of customers and followers is a must-have for any business that decides to take its marketing and selling activity online. To build a strong community for your brand, these are the digital marketing tools you can use:
7. Teachable
If there is one thing that attracts people and makes them stay with your brand that is quality educational content. With Teachable, you can create online courses and coaching sessions that will help your customers understand your business more.
Teachable’s prices start at $99 per month and reach $249 per month.
Using the tools that Teachable provides, your customers will be able to fully enjoy learning about your field, your business, and your services.
Discourse is a fantastic tool that will get you in touch with your customers, patrons, and even your fans. It’s perfect for creating dynamic online communities in which you can get to know your leads and customers better.
There are three distinct packages that Discourse is offering, the first starting at $100 per month and the last being customizable.
So start creating a fantastic customer-business relationship with Discourse.
9. Tribe
Tribe is a community platform, but what makes it special is the fact that it can be integrated into your product. This tool offers a community platform, widgets that can be integrated within your product, and it can connect to other tools that you might already be using.
One of the many things that makes Tribe great is the fact that besides the paid option, it also has a free plan that allows you to understand the product better. Their paid options start at $85 per month and they offer a customizable plan for enterprises.
If you want to increase user retention and educate an awesome community, Tribe is a tool you need to try.
Content Creation
When it comes to creating content, you need to know what kind of content your target market enjoys and consumes. This means that you need to research trends, keywords, and any changes in your audience’s preferences when it comes to content.
Here are the tools we believe are most well-fitted when it comes to researching for your content creation process:
10. SEMrush
SEMrush is a tool that has to offer a lot of features on just one platform. The main things that you’re getting with SEMrush are SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, competition research, and PPC.
You can choose from the Pro, Guru, or Business packages, which are $119.95, $229.95, and respectively $449.95.
With SEMrush, you can be not only on top of your content creation game but also on top of your digital marketing game.
11. SparkToro
Conduct proper research and discover what your audience likes with SparkToro. This tool identifies what influences your audience by checking out millions of social and web profiles and gathering the data that your business needs.
The platform has a free option, but if you want to gain access to more features, then you can select one of its three other plans, the starter, the standard, or the premium. The prices range from $38 per month to $225 per month.
If you want to get a better understanding of what your audience likes and consumes, then SparkToro is a tool you need.
Google Trends is one of the many tools that Google has to offer to the businesses or entrepreneurs that use it. It’s a free tool that can be used at any time to see what are the trends in different parts of the world.
This helps businesses create time-sensitive content based on trends or movements that are popular on social media platforms.
Content should never resume to just words. You also need visual counterparts, such as pictures or videos, to assist you when you’re delivering your message. In fact, 92% of marketers say that video is an important part of their marketing strategy.
But when there are so many digital marketing tools for visual creation, which ones do you pick?
13. Xara
Visual materials shouldn’t resume just to social media posts. They should also be included in the materials you give to your website visitors or your customers. And Xara is the perfect tool for creating professional and interactive documents that will draw the attention of your leads and customers.
It offers a free option, but in case the features that come with it aren’t enough, you can upgrade to the Pro and Pro+ plans, which come at $12.95 and $16.95 per month.
Creating visual materials that you can share with your leads has never been easier than now.
14. Visme
Visme is another great option for the process of creating visual materials for your audience. Weather you’re a professional or a newbie when it comes to visual content creation, Visme has all the tools that you need to create fantastic and engaging visuals, infographics, and charts.
Visme also has a free option, but it also has paid plains that come with more features. With a total of three paid plan options, the prices start at $15 per month.
With the array of tools that Visme has to offer, you will definitely be able to come up with eye-catching visuals that can capture your audience’s attention.
15. Canva
Canva is probably one of the most popular platforms for creating visual content. Its user-friendly interface and the multiple templates it has to offer are some of the main things that attract businesses and entrepreneurs to this platform.
Like the previous options, Canva also has a free plan, but it also presents you with a few purchasable plans that are customizable to the size of your team. The starting price is $119.99 per year and the Enterprise option costs $30 per person per month.
If you want something fast and easy, Canva is a must-have.
Website Building
Your website is one of the most important components when it comes to selling online. It’s the first thing that your leads will see when they interact with your business. It’s also the main component for SEO and PPC, two of the most popular digital marketing techniques.
You need your website to be top-notch, and here are the digital marketing tools that will help you create your desired website.
16. Themeisle
Themeisle is the place where you can look for themes for your WordPress website. Here you can find a handful of great themes, all of which are free and ready to be used at any moment.
Once you find something that you like, you can go ahead and install it on your WordPress and you can start customizing the theme so it fits your business.
Blocksy is a WordPress theme that will give you a great WordPress website without any code. It’s going to make your website look fresh and sleek, and it’s going to make it work fast.
There is a free plan that anybody can install, but the pro options come with more features at $49, $69, and $99 per year.
Blocksy is a good and intuitive theme not only for WordPress newbies but also for people who are a bit more experienced with WordPress.
Search Engine Optimization
By now, everybody knows that if you want people to visit your website, you need to have a great SEO. And to get great SEO, you will need some tools that can help you out. A tool that we have mentioned before is SemRush. This is a fantastic platform not only for content research but also for SEO.
Blog writing is something that can help your website grow, but to fulfill this goal, it needs to be done right. This means that blog posts need to be written with the best SEO practices in mind. This is where Answer the Public comes into play.
Answer the Public allows you to see what are the most searched queries that people have in various fields. Based on these queries, you can come up with high-trafficked article titles.
There is a pro version of this platform which can be billed monthly ($99/month) or annually ($79/month).
This tool is a perfect fit for somebody who is trying to get great SEO results through blog writing.
19. Woorank
With Woorank you can understand your users on a deeper level, grow your website and enjoy success for long periods of time, and get to see your progress over time. The platform has different products that facilitate SEO strategies, like website reviewers, keyword trackers, site crawling, and much more.
Their prices start at €59.99 and they have an Enterprise plan for bigger companies that can be customizable once you discuss with Woorank’s sales team.
All in all, Woorank is an excellent tool for those businesses that look to improve their SEO exponentially, in a short period of time.
Keyword Research
Having a good keyword tool is essential for any business that wants to use SEO or PPC to grow their businesses and get more leads. Here are the tools that I considered best when it comes to keyword research.
20. SECockpit
SECockpit is a keyword research platform that was created for smaller businesses. This tool assists you in finding niche keywords and it gives you accurate information when it comes to traffic, competition, quotes search results, and SEO.
This tool has three packs, the most affordable starting at $39 per month. The other two are priced at $59 and $99 per month.
If you want a platform that will give you keyword ideas and analysis, then this tool is the right fit for you.
With Ahrefs you can discover a lot of keywords, analyze them and see if they have any traffic potential for your business. Once you start your research process, you will get in-depth information about every single keyword that you will find. It also has a pretty nice feature that ranks keyword difficulty.
The monthly price for this starts at $99 and ends at $999 for bigger agencies.
If you want a great keywords tool, but also a site explorer and a rank tracker among other things, then Ahrefs is something you should try.
KeywordTool is a great option because it gives you a lot of options when it comes to keywords and because you have some pretty solid filters that will help you categorize the keywords in ways that are most useful to you.
The platform is free, but it also presents some pro options that are priced at $69, $79, and $159.
So if you want a lot of options when it comes to keywords, this tool is something that you should look into.
Marketing Automation & Personalization
It’s only natural that people would like to make things easier, which is why so many processes have been automated. Marketing is one of the fields that improved considerably once automation processes have been implemented.
To enjoy the benefits of marketing automation, check out these tools:
23. Hubspot
Hubspot is one of those multi-purpose platforms that multiple departments can use. When purchasing Hubspot, you get to pick from several options that include Marketing Hub, the Sales Hub, the CMS Hub, and the Service Hub. The feature that presents marketing automation is Marketing Hub.
The pricing for this feature begins at $45 per month and it can reach $3,200 per month for bigger enterprises.
All in all, Hubspot is a tool your business could benefit greatly from, not only from a marketing perspective but also from a sales and customer service perspective.
24. Marketo
Marketo will help you get measurable results, which in turn will help your decision-making process when it comes to the next steps you have to take in your customer retention process.
Marketo has four different plans and the great thing about them is that they do not have set prices. This means that your sales team will have to contact theirs and you can try to get the best price you can.
If you want to identify and engage the right audience, then Marketo is what you need.
Oracle Eloqua is a tool that can create campaigns that can adapt to unpredictable customers, deploy and simplify campaigns, and assist with segmentation and targeting. These are some of the few things you will be getting when purchasing the marketing automation tool.
To get this amazing tool, you will need to contact the Oracle Eloqua sales department and see what kind of deal you can strike.
Website Analytics
If you don’t know how your website performs, you will not know what needs improvement. This will lead to stagnation and loss of customers. But having a website analytics tool will save you the hassle of wondering if your website is doing well or not and it will tell you for sure.
Here are the tools I recommend:
Google Analytics is a tool from the google pack which allows you to analyze:
The great thing about this is that you can find it in the Google package and it’s free of charge. Although it might take some time to get used to it, this is the perfect tool for both beginners and professionals.
This is a great alternative for Google Analytics. It offers Ad hoc web analysis, flow analysis, predictive analytics, marketing analytics, and advanced segmentation.
Like with other previous tools, your sales team will have to contact Adobe’s to get a price or bargain for a good deal.
This is a great option for businesses that want a bit more than Google Analytics.
28. Mixpanel
This is a tool that offers real-time data insights to SaaS and website owners. These insights focus on how people, customers, and leads alike, interact with a product or service.
Mixpanle has a free option, but it has other plans that start at $25 per month.
This is perhaps a more user-friendly alternative to the former two.
Lead Generation
Every business recognized the importance of drawing new leads in their sales funnel. If you don’t have new leads, the probability of your business growth will be limited. This is why your marketing department should not only concentrate on customer retention, but also lead generation.
Like many other things, we have plenty of tools that can help us increase our number of leads. Here are a few:
29. LeadPages
This tool is great for smaller businesses that want to connect with their customers and increase their number of leads and sales. LeadPages helps you get new leads by creating converting websites and landing pages while giving you insights on how you can grow your business faster.
LeadPages has a Standard, a Pro, and an Advanced option, which are priced at $27, $59, and respectively $239 per month.
This is the perfect option if you’re looking for something that goes well with your website.
With this tool, you can build a list of emails or phone numbers, increase the productivity of your sales team, analyze and improve the prospecting process and automate the emailing process.
Their essential plan is worth €89 per month, while their business plan costs €149 per month. You can always buy more credits for one of their features called Email Finder.
Seeing the number of features this tool has, you can check it out.
31. Leedfeeder
With Leedfeeder you can identify the companies that visit your website, find leads that are ready to purchase your products and create better sales pitches.
You can test the platform using the Lite version and if you like how it works you can simply move on to the paid plan, which costs $55 per month. With so many great features available, this tool is worth trying.
Email Marketing
Email marketing, together with social media marketing, are two of the most successful marketing methods at the moment. So if you don’t have an established email marketing campaign, then it might be time for you to create one using one of the following digital marketing tools focused on email marketing:
32. Mailbird
Here are some of the things that you get when purchasing Mailbird:
When it comes to prices, the plans start at €1.21 per month and they can reach €1.88 per month. You can also pay a one-time fee of €32.5 and enjoy Mailbird for life.
If you’re not sure this is what you’re looking for, you can try Mailbird for free and see if it fits your business.
33. Sendinblue
Sendinblue is another multi-functioning tool. It helps you not only with your email marketing campaigns but also with SMS marketing as well. A few extra features are marketing automation, transactional emails, segmentation, landing pages, and Facebook Ads.
This tool has a free option to it, but it also has paid options. The prices are prone to change, depending on the number of emails you send monthly, but the starting price is $25 per month.
Seeing its free plan, you should give this tool a go and test it out.
34. ConvertKit
Just like Sendinblue, ConvertKit is a great multi-purpose tool. It’s a great platform for email marketing because of its automation features and email designer that helps businesses create simple, yet engaging emails.
ConvertKit also has a free option, and just like Sendinblue, the prices of the paid packages depend on the number of emails your business is planning to send. But the most affordable package is $29 per month.
Customer Service
Giving great customer service is one of the things you have to master to retain customers. There are a lot of ways that you can improve your customer service and using these digital marketing tools, you can stand out from your competitors.
35. Olark
Olark is a live chat where your customers can interact directly with your team. This tool allows you to customize your chats so they match your brand and it also provides real-time chat metrics and access to previous transcripts.
You can get a free trial, and if the platform is to your liking, you can go for any of their plans, which all start at $19 per month per seat.
If you want to integrate live chats into your customer service strategy, then Olark is what you need.
36. HelpJuice
This is a self-service platform where your customers can find answers about your business and products on their own. This is especially helpful if you have a small business and don’t have people available 24/7 to interact with customers.
The starting price for this platform is $120 and the price can go up to $369 per month. As mentioned, this is a great platform for smaller businesses that can’t answer messages or calls all the time.
37. Nicereply
Getting feedback should be a priority for any business that is targeting to retain customers. Nicereply is a perfect tool for this because with it you can get feedback by sending your audience customizable surveys that match your brand.
There are different plans that you can select from, the most affordable one starting at $39 per month.
Nicereply is a great way to get reviews and improve your business practices based on customer feedback.
To make sure that your marketing campaigns are always performing well, you need your whole marketing team to be on board with your digital marketing projects. Not only that, but the productivity levels of your team must stay high throughout your campaigns. This can be quite a hard task to achieve, but luckily there are a few productivity tools that you and your team can use as an integral part of your digital marketing tools collection.
38. ClickUp
With this platform, you can monitor your goals, customize your tasks, build documents and wikis that everybody can use, and you can import and integrate any projects that you already have.
The best thing about this platform is its affordability. It has a free version and if you want to use all of its features, then the price for this tool is just $5 per month.
With so many options to offer, ClickUp is one of the best productivity tools that your team can use.
39. Paymo
With Paymo you will be able to better manage your tasks, create schedules that your team can access and use, and track the time each individual spends working. This tool also offers the option of file proofing, creating bills for your clients, and using Gantt charts.
This tool has a free option that anybody can use, but there are also paid options that possess more features. The paid options are $9.95 per user per month and $15.79 per user per month.
Paymo is another great option when it comes to staying on top of projects and keeping everything organized.
40. Slack
If you’re looking for a communication tool, then Slack is the perfect option for you. On Slack, you have the option to either send a direct message or to create channels with specific groups of people. In case written messages aren’t working out for you, then you can always try calling the person you’re trying to reach.
Slack has four different packages. First, they have the free option and then come the paid options, which are priced at $6.67 per month and $12.50 per month. In case you have a bigger enterprise, you can contact Slack’s sales team and see what you can bargain for.
During a time when working remotely is more and more common, Slack is an essential tool.
Conclusion on Digital Marketing Tools
Conducting successful marketing campaigns might not be an easy task, but it sure gets much more manageable when your team has access to some great digital marketing tools. The best strategy when it comes to creating a bundle of digital marketing tools is researching each tool in depth and selecting the tools that match your needs and your budget.
Guest Post Author Bio
This guest post was written by Ovi Negrean. Ovi is the CEO and co-founder of SocialBee.io, a social media management tool that also offers various concierge services. Ovi and his team strive to help small to middle-sized businesses, solopreneurs, and coaches reach their marketing and lead generation goals by offering them a social media management system with a user-friendly interface. SocialBee’s platform and concierge services can make any business successful on social media without a hassle.
Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash
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