While the increasingly digital world has required marketers to cover even more bases and a growing number of touchpoints, there are, fortunately, a wide range of tools available and web accessibility resources to make the task much more effective and hassle-free. This article touches on the different areas of digital marketing and few effective tools for your marketing and advertising campaigns.
Digital Marketing Stats
- An Oberlo report found that effective email marketing can boast an ROI of as high as $32 for $1 spent.
- Segmented email campaigns have an open rate that is 14.3% higher than non-segmented campaigns.
- 72% of marketers worldwide said relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic.
- Brands spend 25-43% of their marketing budgets on content. However, only 23% of CMOs feel they’re producing the right information for the right audience, and delivering it at the right time and correct format.
- Marketers who use automation tools said time is the biggest barrier to advanced marketing. Conversely, those who don’t automate say that budget is their biggest barrier.
- Businesses rely on the best webinar platforms for online marketing.
With that said, here are some of the tools you should consider for your suite:
Email Marketing Tools
Despite the plethora of communication channels, email remains one of the more effective marketing platforms around. And with some 5.6 billion active email accounts, it’s a cost-effective channel to connect with new prospects, engage existing customers, nurture leads, build relationships, and improve conversion rates.
Mailchimp is one of the go-to choices when it comes to email marketing with features like email automation, data segmentation, a collection of ready-made email template designs (which you can manually edit the code of), and content personalization. Additionally, it has advanced features like landing page A/B testing, lead capture forms, and integration with customer data platforms.
There are a number of other tools you can use like SendinBlue and ActiveCampaign, but whichever route you choose to take, just make sure you understand what you want to achieve from email marketing automation – be it lead generation via drip campaigns, or increasing sales – and pick a platform that best suits your needs.
Audience Research Tools
As the world has gone increasingly digital, it’s become easier to understand audiences if you just know where to look. It used to be that you had to employ tools like Nielsen, AAAA, and Mintel to gain consumer insights, but that’s no longer the case in 2020.
For example, Reddit, which is referred to as the “front page of the internet,” is not only free to browse – it has over 330 million monthly active users from some 208 countries.
You can find communities of people having conversations about all sorts of things on Reddit, simply by using the subreddit search tool. So when you understand what people are actually talking about, you gain valuable data that you can use for a number of things like creating content that audiences can relate to and even building a business website that appeals to them.
Similarly, Quora is a great platform to see what questions people are actually asking. This allows you to not only provide answers with your content, you can even use the language your audience is actually using, making it all the more relatable.
Marketing Automation Tools
Another great thing about today’s marketing tools is that they don’t only make the gathering of data for your campaigns easier, they also do the same for executing it – in some cases, even doing so through automation. Using the email tools mentioned earlier, for example, you can send targeted messages to your subscribers based on how they interact with your business. So, say, they abandoned their carts on your website, these tools can send them an automated email reminding them of what they left out.
Meanwhile, inbound marketing tools like HubSpot are even more comprehensive in what it can do, which include helping businesses attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. They do so with a host of tools like hosting web and landing pages, creating blogs and email sequences, managing interactions with your leads and customers, while also analyzing the success of campaigns and tracking user behavior.
Essentially, with these types of inbound marketing tools, you can act on every part of the buyer’s journey. Check out the example below from Simple Strat:
Content Development Tools
If you still haven’t’ dived into why “content is king” has become a marketing cliche, basically, it’s centered around cultivating trust and building relationships – something all businesses want. Essentially, if you’re able to provide high-quality content that helps your target audience solve their problems, they’ll eventually see you as a credible source of information. If you do that enough, they’ll keep coming back to your platforms whenever they need something they think only you can provide. Fortunately, there are a number of tools available to help you get started with this.
For example, CoSchedule has a free headline analyzer that scores your overall headline quality and rate its ability to result in social shares, increased traffic and SEO value. This is great for email subject lines and social post captions, among other types of content. And if you’re stumped on what type of content to create, Buzzsumo helps you find out what content is popular on any website. You can also find out what’s popular in specific topics.
There’s loads of online resources for nearly every need you have. Again, you just need to determine what you want to accomplish.
SEO Tools
Speaking of the importance of quality content, it’s also spilled over to SEO – a sphere that no longer relies merely on keyword stuffing. Below are some of the best ones in the market, applicable even to SEO for small businesses:
SEMRush
This tool can perform a full analysis of your website from search engine optimization and search engine marketing, content marketing, backlinks, search engine results page ranking, and social media. Additionally, it works seamlessly with Google Docs, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console. This allows you to fine tune relevant keywords and create relevant content that resonates with audiences.
Ahrefs
While this tool does a lot of what SEMRush can, experts agree that it tends to be better at analyzing backlinks. As well, due to its larger database of backlinks, its keyword data likewise tends to be a bit more accurate.
Serpstat
Again, this tool pretty much offers a similar umbrella of features as the two above. But its combination of rank distribution, historical data for rankings, and backlink analysis is its draw for some experts.
Sitebulb
If you’re an agency handling a number of clients, Sitebulb would be a wise choice. Among its functions are listing internal pages and their status codes, meta information, duplicate content issues, internal and external links, and header information. Additionally, the tool also provides information about the anchor text, content readability, top linked pages, as well as a crawl map with linked pages. And what’s even better than all that is that it presents it in an easily digestible visual format.
Majestic
Majestic claims to have the world’s largest link index database, which once included close to 487 billion unique URLs crawled from a four-month period in 2018 alone. With the tool, users can explore URLs in more detail, determine backlinks, and gauge search scores.
So if you need help in analyzing backlinks and figuring out which websites to approach for link acquisition, Majestic may be the tool for you.
VPN Tools
With everything entailed in conceptualizing, planning, and executing a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, one thing can be easily overlooked – security. Fortunately, Virtual Private Networks make the task of securing your resources that much easier. But what is VPN and its meaning?
VPNs are essentially software that secures all of your traffic from end-to-end using military-grade encryption. Apart from the obvious benefit of having better security, there are a number of other benefits to using VPNs. These include:
- Better linkbuilding – Because VPNs replaces your actual IP address with another one, you can visit websites that restrict people from creating multiple links anonymously, creating as many links as you want to.
- Better competitive analysis – Similarly, being able to perform competitor research in the virtual shadows provides a significant advantage.
- Better SEO – You can work around Google’s ultra-personalized search results by changing your virtual location to see results from different locations across the world. MangoMatter Media can assist you in creating and hosting elegant websites to attract more clients.
Here are some our recommended VPN Providers:
- Express VPN
- CyberGhost
- NordVPN
- Surfshark
- ProtonVPN
Final Words
As you saw, with all the top communication channels, and consumer behavior, digital marketing may be a tedious exercise. But with the amount of tools available, there’s always a way to make things just a tad bit easier to execute. Just remember to have a clear grasp of what you want to accomplish and how you want to go about it.
Salman is a prolific environmental writer, and has authored more than 500 articles in reputed journals, magazines and websites. He is proactively engaged in creating mass awareness on renewable energy, waste management, sustainability and conservation all over the world.
Salman can be reached on salman@cleantechloops.com
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Great list Salman. I’d suggest adding Pulno as an SEO tool for less experienced users.
Much thanks for your advice.