If you’re looking for useful digital marketing tools to take your performance up a few notches, you’ll find an overwhelming number of choices. So
many, in fact, that it can be challenging to determine which ones are right for your business.
When you search for recommendations online, you’ll find dozens of blog posts that claim to recommend the best of the best. These lists can be even more confusing. Each one has their favorites, and with a few exceptions, they rarely agree.
The problem is you can’t be sure all recommendations come from personal experience or that they’ll work for you. The good news is that you don’t need to waste time and money trying out tools only to find they may or may not be helpful to your team.
We created a list of useful digital marketing tools that we have tried and tested. And because they work for us, we use them every day! So, you can trust that these tools will positively impact your business, too.
9 Useful Digital Marketing Tools
Of course, there may be other tools that work just as well for your business. Still, our updated list of 9 profitable and useful digital marketing tools will help you create a technology stack to take your strategy to the next level.
Let’s dive in…
1. Semrush– Digital Marketing Research and Search Engine Optimization
Are your ads and organic content not reaching your target audience or getting the engagement you need?
Gone are the days when you could stuff your copy with keywords to get it to rank.
Ranking high on Google is now an art and a science. It starts with research to determine what content grabs your target audience’s attention. You then must consider how to present that information to make them want to find out more.
Semrush has become one of the most useful digital marketing platforms for optimizing paid and organic content. That includes both websites and social media.
Semrush offers over 50 tools for keyword research, search engine optimization (SEO), and search engine marketing (SEM). These tools will help get traffic flowing to your ads and organic content. Moreover, there are many competitive market research features to help you create and monitor your data-driven strategy.
Here are some key things you can do with Semrush:
Keyword Research
Content Optimization
Competitive Research
Semrush also has social media content management tools for posting content and getting analytics, along with paid advertising tools to improve ad performance.
No matter what areas of your digital marketing strategy fall flat, Semrush will deliver the data you need to refine them.
2. OneSignal– Push Notifications
Looking for a way to reach out to customers wherever they are? OneSignal allows you to do just that.
OneSignal’s push notifications let you send messages to your audience via mobile phones, web browsers, email marketing, apps, and SMS.
If you don’t already have a push app in place, you’ll quickly find OneSignal is one of the most useful digital marketing tools for increasing customer engagement.
3. Zapier– Seamless App Integration
Do you ever wonder if there is a better way to send and transfer data and information from one app to another, other than manual uploads or paying thousands to have an API custom coded?
Zapier is that better way.
Zapier helps solve a problem that plagues businesses that use multiple proprietary applications that don’t integrate natively.
Zapier integrates with roughly 3,000 apps, significantly improving workflows. It will greatly reduce your data silos, saving you both time and money.
We love this useful digital marketing tool because it reflects our belief that true marketing power and automation come when data from key marketing platforms, channels, and tools can talk to each other and be accessible in places your teams need it to be. Zapier is an excellent and easy-to-use tool that won’t just help your team be more effective. It will also ensure your funnels keep flowing from one platform to another.
4. Canva– Visual Communication
Infographics allow you to present information to your audience in a fun and exciting way. However, many small businesses stick to simple images because they don’t have a graphic designer on hand.
Enter Canva, one of the most useful digital marketing tools for design.
Canva is a powerful tool that provides easy-to-use design tools to create professional-looking graphics without the skills needed to build them from scratch.
The graphics tool lets you design landing pages, social media graphics, posters, logos, and presentations with drag-and-drop ease. You also have thousands of templates, images, and content ideas at your disposal to create your stunning designs.
One of our favorite features is the easy-to-use background remover tool, which allows you to remove backgrounds without using fiddly layer masks found on high-end image editors.
Canva’s features don’t stop with graphic design. Canva also has excellent project management features that design teams can use to collaborate and organize their work. These include:
5. Intercom– Smart Customer Service and Marketing Communication
These days, marketing goes beyond one-way communication with text, images, and video. Businesses are increasingly using chatbots and automated messaging to answer queries from prospects and customers.
Automating customer and sales services makes it affordable for businesses to provide 24/7 assistance and reduce call wait times. Research shows this enhances customer satisfaction, captures more prospects, and boosts conversions.
If you haven’t jumped on AI chatbots already, it may be because you feel only corporations with deep pockets can afford them.
Fortunately, several companies provide these solutions at an affordable price.
The one we like to use is Intercom. They provide advanced communication solutions with bots, chatbots, and interactive product tours. Their services help you to do the following:
The website features multiple testimonials. One Intercom client said Intercom’s services helped reduce call wait times from 2 hours to 2 minutes. It also increased customer satisfaction from 83 to 95%. Another client said it improved their revenue by 30%. Those are the kind of improvements you have to take seriously.
6. AnswerThePublic– Search Listening
We’ve talked about the growing popularity of voice search before.
With AnswerThePublic, you can get insights into online searches that people make every day. It’s one of the most useful digital marketing tools for analyzing consumer searches. That’s because it lets you reach the growing number of prospects searching via smart speakers and other mobile devices.
To understand what interests your target audience, just type your keyword into the AnswerThePublic’s website search engine. You’ll get related questions and phrases that people are typing into search engines like Google.
The data is presented visually on a circular graphic. The graphic’s layout can be compared to a bicycle wheel. It shows the keyword in the center hub, with spokes extending out to the related questions and phrases displayed on the rim. The spokes indicate how your keyword relates to your search results.
It also provides a list in alphabetical order. Plus, you can download the results as a spreadsheet CSV file. Once you know what search queries to target, you can offer content that’s more likely to engage and convert your audience.
We recommend AnswerThePublic for marketers looking for content ideas that are highly relevant to their businesses. But knowing what people search for can also inspire companies to develop products and services that people really want.
7. Sprout Social– Social Media Management, Scheduling, and Optimization
Creating social media posts and scheduling them for the appropriate times every day is a poor use of your time. Sprout Social lets social media marketers publish and schedule posts across multiple platforms. This useful digital marketing tool will drastically reduce the amount of time you spend on social media posting.
The platform also offers analytics to optimize the performance of your social media content. You can find out how posts and social media campaigns are performing. It also tracks trends hashtags to help you discover new customers.
8. Wicked Reports– Revenue Attribution
Wicked Reports is powerful marketing attribution software designed with e-commerce in mind. It provides excellent insights from all your marketing data across different channels.
Wicked Reports allows you to do the following:
One caveat: Wicked Reports provides powerful insights across all channels. So, unless it integrates with all your existing platforms, some data will be left in silos that you will have to analyze separately.
In that case, you won’t enjoy the full benefit this useful digital marketing tool offers.
That said, it may even be worth switching out incompatible platforms with those that integrate with Wicked Reports. The improved ROI from integrating your marketing analytics into one platform may justify the price tag.
9. Asana– Project Management
Have you ever struggled with effectively? Asana has become one of the most useful digital marketing tools for project managers. They use it to keep organized, communicate priorities to their teams, and ensure deadlines get hit.
Asana comes into its own for coordinating multistage projects.
Here are some reasons we like it:
Final Thoughts
We can vouch for these profitable and useful digital marketing tools because we use them at Viral Solutions every day. So, if you’re overwhelmed by all the choices available to you, consider taking a step back and focusing on these first.
In addition, when shopping for new software, make sure to create an integrated technology stack with platforms that work seamlessly together. Creating silos of data within each platform will only make it harder to collaborate and lead to inefficiency and missed opportunities. The tools you use should make your job easier, not harder! The problem is unless you are building a marketing system from the ground up, you’re likely to have some existing tools you want to keep. You may also have found a perfect tool that’s not compatible with others in your arsenal. That is where Zapier comes to the rescue. It can integrate more than 3,000 different apps to work as one platform.
By integrating new and legacy software, you’ll reduce how many apps you need to buy. And you may also be pleasantly surprised by how much easier and more effective your marketing efforts become!
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About Lindsey Perron
As Thomas’ daughter, Lindsey was introduced to the world of sales and marketing at an early age. Curious about what her dad did, Lindsey would jump at every opportunity to help and ride along on sales calls. Always quick to take charge and lead the group—a trait that has only grown with time—Lindsey was frequently told by her parents that she was destined to be a manager or CEO of some sort. While working toward earning her bachelor’s degree in human services from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Lindsey interned with the UW Office of Equality and Affirmative Action and served on several councils, which gave her the opportunity to develop her persuasive writing skills, researching skills, problem-solving skills, project management skills, and more. After working as the lead teacher of the 4-year-old room at the local daycare center, Lindsey decided to switch gears and join the Viral Solutions team. In her position, Lindsey is able to help clients think through an end goal and reverse engineer it into the steps needed to achieve it.
When she’s not working, Lindsey loves spending time with family, be it traveling somewhere together or just hanging out at home.
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