In the world of digital marketing, there is a wide and growing range of digital marketing tools designed to help you to be more organized and efficient.
This wealth of choice is great news for marketers, but it can also be quite overwhelming. With such a wide choice of tools, it can be difficult knowing which ones are the right option for your digital marketing strategy.
So I’ve created a list of the digital marketing tools we use on a regular basis. These tools have all achieved a wide user base and have positive reviews, and solid customer testimonials.
They may not have all the features and functions of some of the more expensive digital marketing tools out there. But for us, these provide the best bang for the buck.
The best digital marketing tools we use:
Now let’s take a deeper dive and look at each one:
When it comes to an effective content strategy, having a calendar and content management tool is the forcing function of making sure the strategy is adhered to.
DivvyHQ is a full content management platform designed for teams and marketers managing a lot of content. We use Divvy to manage content across all our clients. And since we deliver dozens of articles each week, this tool helps us to stay on time and keep things on track.
DivvyHQ helps you automate and simplify your content marketing, organize your teams, streamline your processes, plan and create your content, and measure its performance.
Divvy has also been voted the best content marketing tool for four years running in the Content Marketing Institute content tech survey.
We like it because it’s an all-in-one tool that has much of the functionality of other tools out there but for a fraction of the price.
Email marketing is an important part of your overall content strategy, and MailChimp is one of the most popular tools for managing mailing lists and managing your email communications.
From the MailChimp dashboard, you can see a quick overview of all your campaigns and monitor important metrics, such as open rate and subscribe rate.
You can also track how subscribers are engaging with your content and create segments of subscribers based on engagement, such as visiting your website or sharing your content on social media.
My favorite part of Mailchimp is the ability to send automated RSS newsletters like the one we send out to our 10,000+ subscribers nearly every day!
Hootsuite is a social media marketing management tool that makes it easier to manage all your social media content across several platforms.
Hootsuite enables you to schedule your social media posts in advance, and it can even determine the best time for sharing content for optimal engagement.
The tool connects with over 35 social media platforms, and you can see all your posts in one place on your dashboard for easy management. A powerful analytics platform makes it easier to gather audience insights and track the performance of your social media content.
My favorite part of Hootsuite, like Mailchimp, is the ability to automate the sharing of new posts to your audiences on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram via RSS feeds.
BuzzSumo is a useful tool for finding the most shared content across several social media platforms. Not only can you track your own content, but you can also follow your competitors and general content in your industry to get content ideas and examine the formats of successful content.
BuzzSumo also makes it easy to identify influencers who share content in your niche. Building a relationship with these influencers can be an effective strategy to reach a wider audience and build your brand awareness.
It may seem obvious, but we couldn’t end this list without including the world’s most popular CMS: WordPress. WordPress powers 35 percent of all websites, ranging from small personal blogs to huge websites for multinational corporations.
WordPress is open source software designed as a blogging platform, and it doesn’t offer a huge variety of tools to content marketers out of the box. However, its functionality is extendable by installing plugins.
For example, we use social sharing plugins, related posts plugins, and ad serving plugins to deliver deeper engagement and content offers to our audience.
There are thousands of free and premium plugins available for marketers to manage everything from SEO to sales funnel creation and landing page optimization. As WordPress is such a popular platform, it’s also compatible with most other content marketing software, so it will integrate smoothly with any other marketing tools you choose to use.
We’ve covered a list of the top competitive intelligence tools before but to me, SEMrush should be on everyone’s list. We use it to track our search rankings and organic search traffic over time.
We also use it to demonstrate the results we achieve with our weekly blog content service to our customers!
SEMRush provides a dashboard snapshot of a particular URL, and all your competitors including the top-performing keywords and information about which sites link to the URL. The Keyword Difficulty rankings help you decide which keywords can deliver the best ROI for your advertising dollar. And there is a content discovery tool that we are starting to use when building our client’s annual content calendars as well.