Marketing professionals have always relied on data to help them craft effective campaigns. In the past, though, they had to survey consumers to find out how people responded to certain messages. Gathering data took a long time, and you didn’t always get accurate results.
Thankfully, today’s marketers have software that helps them do everything from choosing the right keywords to deciding the perfect timing for a social media post.
With so many digital marketing tools available, though, people can get confused about their options.
The following list will explain 15 of the best digital marketing tools of 2020 and help you decide which ones you should use.
The Most Comprehensive Digital Marketing Tools
When you want a suite of tools that will let you take control of your digital marketing while saving a ton of time, turn to SEMRush or HubSpot. They have a lot of similarities, but there are enough differences that you should explore each one before making a decision.
SEMRush
You have to see the full list of SEMRush features to understand how much it can help in every aspect of your digital marketing campaigns.
Some standout options that will boost your website’s performance include tools that:
- Analyze backlinks.
- Generate long-tail keywords.
- Analyze your website traffic to discover new markets and learn what people are searching for.
- Assist your content creation so you always have engaging pages and posts.
- Track the performance of PPC campaigns.
- Audit your site to find mistakes that can hurt your optimization.
- Compare your website with those of your competitors.
This list barely scratches the surface of what SEMRush can do.
If you already feel overwhelmed, you should know that SEMRush has an academy that will teach you advanced SEO and how to use the suite’s tools. You can enroll in classes for free, but you can’t participate in all of the lessons until you signup for SEMRush.
HubSpot
HubSpot breaks its tools into three categories:
Each category has useful features (the Sales Hub, for example, lets you track and analyze emails), but let’s focus on Marketing Hub.
Marketing Hub has a long list of features that you can use for free. If you’re a freelancer or you manage marketing projects at a small business, then you should consider signing up for the free service. It doesn’t skimp on tools. To the contrary, you get access to:
- Traffic and conversion analytics.
- Ads on the most popular social media platforms.
- A content management system.
- Contact insights.
The paid version starts at $800, but you get plenty in return. In addition to the free tools, you benefit from:
- Landing page optimization.
- A huge list of SEO tools.
- Blog and content creation tools.
- An analytics dashboard that puts all of your reports in one place.
- Marketing automation that can save you hours of time.
Like SEMRush, HubSpot might sound intimidating. Also, like SEMRush, HubSpot offers free courses and certifications taught by industry experts. Start with a subject that matters a lot to you. As you learn, you can move on to more advanced topics that will make you a master digital marketer.
Digital Marketing Tools for Search Engine Optimization
Without search engine optimization (SEO), no one would find your website or blog posts. SEO has a lot of moving parts, so you may need more than one tool to improve your site’s ranking. Any steps that you take, though, will move your website closer to Google’s first page of results.
Not surprisingly, several of these tools come from Google.
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner will help you find the right keywords to use in your landing pages, blog posts, and social media posts. The information comes from Google, so you have to trust it.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics tracks your marketing performance so you can see which strategies work best for you. You can use the tool to look at short-term results or pull back to view years of data.
Google Ads (Formerly Adwords)
Google Ads makes money when people click on your links. That gives the company an incentive to help you choose the right keywords and influential statements. Unlike traditional advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
UberSuggest
If you work in marketing, then you know Neil Patel. He has branded himself as the world’s greatest authority on digital marketing and customer engagement.
UberSuggest is a free SEO tool owned by Patel. You can use it to analyze competitor websites, discover new content ideas, research backlinks, and get keyword suggestions.
It’s 100% free, so you might as well try it.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a cleverly named suite of SEO tools that offer:
- Competitive analysis.
- Keyword research.
- Backlink research
- Content research.
- Rank tracking.
- Web monitoring.
You’ll need to buy a subscription to use Ahrefs, but it has affordable rates under $200 a month.
Yoast
If you use WordPress, then consider using the Yoast plug-in to optimize your sites. It will make sure you:
- Don’t have any duplicate content.
- Publish highly readable content.
- Optimize your keyword density.
- Link to your internal pages.
Yoast also has a lot of features that operate in the background to tell Google what it needs to know about your site, generate sitemaps, and take care of other tasks that you probably don’t need to understand.
Digital Media Tools for Beautiful Designs
Canva
Your digital media campaigns need beautiful images and designs that make audiences stop for a second look.
Canva is one of your best options for editing photos, making graphs, and producing other visual content that will look great on everything from your landing pages to your social media posts.
Digital Media Tools for Email
Sumo
Email marketing isn’t dead. Without the right tool, though, it can take a ridiculous amount of time to manage contacts, write calls-to-action, track responses, and analyze conversions.
With Sumo, your email marketing tasks only take a few minutes. It handles practically everything, so you just sit back and watch your sales grow.
Digital Marketing Tools for Project Management
Trello
Some aspects of digital marketing only take a few minutes. A digital marketing project, however, can last for months.
Trello helps you schedule your campaign, create tasks, and track your team’s work. It has web-based and mobile apps that synch tasks with everyone on your team. With Trello, everyone knows their responsibilities and how they can meet the campaign’s goals.
Digital Marketing Tools for Understanding Customer Feedback
Customer feedback and reviews can have tremendous effects on how other people behave. How can you determine the quality of feedback, though, when its spread across dozens of websites?
That’s where R comes in.
R
R is a statistical analysis environment that a lot of industries use. It’s extremely flexible, so you can use it to analyze just about anything.
When it comes to understanding customer feedback, you can use R to assign value to certain words. For example, you can tell it to assign negative numbers to words like “hated,” “unhappy,” and “terrible.” You can give positive values to words like “helpful,” “awesome,” and “helpful.”
R will evaluate your customer comments and give you an overall numerical value for each one. If you get a high value, then you don’t need to worry about negative comments. If you get a low value, then you need to have a customer service agent reach out to the unhappy commenter immediately to resolve the issue.
Digital Marketing Tools for Social Media
About 3 billion people around the world will use social media in 2020. You can’t miss that opportunity to reach new customers and engage with existing customers.
These three digital marketing tools will help you make the most of your brand’s social media account.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media marketing suite that integrates with pretty much every social network you’ve ever heard of.
Hootsuite comes with a ton of tools that can make your interactions more effective. When you first start using it, though, you’ll get the most benefits from its:
- Scheduling tool that lets you release posts at optimal times.
- Content curation that makes sure your posts stay on brand.
- Analytics that give you insights into how well your projects and individual posts influence viewers.
- Monitoring tool that lets you find and filter conversations so you know what people say about your company online.
Tailwind
Tailwind focuses on social media scheduling, but it takes a deep dive into analytics to help your posts make the biggest impact.
You can benefit from Tailwind’s ability to:
- Suggest hashtags that will get your posts noticed.
- Analyze trends to tell you when your audience is most engaged.
- Discover content topics that people want to share.
MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar has most of the same features that you get from Hootesuite and Tailwind.
Why does it belong on this list? Because it does a remarkable job analyzing social media posts and automating your content process. In other words, it can write engaging social media posts for you. You’ll save hours by letting MeetEdgar create content, post it at the right times, and interact with your audience.
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