Digital marketing makes the lives of businesses easier by helping them reach their prospective customers easier and in a clever manner than earlier. Thankfully, with a plethora of tools available at our disposal, you can expedite the entire process in a way that can completely change your results. The right technology stack can do the trick.
10 Digital Marketing Tools to Possess in 2020
The right digital marketing tools can power up your strategies. Still confused as to which is the right tool? No worries. Let us clear your dilemma. After conducting a thorough research, we have listed out the 10 must-have digital marketing tools to look up in 2020. Take a look:
#1 Ahrefs
It is a backlink authority checker that provides helpful information about backlinks and SEO. Ahrefs also offers features like ranking monitoring and keyword tools. It shows you how search engines see your site thus helping you to understand your site in a better fashion so you can make all the necessary changes.
Ahrefs dashboard helps you keep track of all your data. It will show new links, URL ranking, referring domains, and errors. Its tools are what make it special. Here are the tools and a short explanation of what it does:
Site Explorer: It tells you about the backlinks you have and compares them with your competitor’s. The tool will also tell you how to compete against other competing businesses so that you can be on the same level as them.
Content Explorer: It shows you the popularity of topics that have been already published somewhere. With the help of this tool, you can improve the quality of your content marketing campaign. With a database of more than 2 billion articles, no matter which topic you are looking for, you will always get a bunch of topics. It shows you the popularity of topics based on SEO factors like social shares, the number of sites that are linked to it, organic traffic, etc.
Keyword Explorer: It will give you traffic estimation for each keyword along with the frequency with which these keywords are searched. Not only does it generate keywords for the country that you are in, but it will also offer you keywords from more than 100 countries.
Rank Tracker: It monitors your rank for both mobile and desktop and lets you stay on top of it by sending regular updates about it. The tool will tell you how many visits you get from a particular link, and so on.
#2 HubSpot
It is an inbound marketing and automation software that allows businesses to manage their inbound marketing activities. Getting inbound traffic is a goal for most companies because having different sources of leads is important. HubSpot’s tool takes care of all the aspects of marketing making it easy for businesses to take care of its inbound marketing efforts.
HubSpot is an all-in-one platform that offers all the tools that a marketer would require, starting from a CMS, CRM, email marketing tool, scheduling tool, SEO tool, chat tool, analytics tool, etc. If you are serious about data-driven marketing, then HubSpot is the right tool for you as its analytics tool is quite powerful too.
With an easy-to-use platform, HubSpot has built a community that is a great place to learn if you are looking to solve your queries with the help of other entrepreneurs. One more reason HubSpot is so popular is that it has all the integrations that a tool like this could offer.
One of the best things about using HubSpot is that it offers a ready-to-market funnel. All you need to do is create content and place them in different stages of the funnel, which personalizes and distributes the content. With content prepared for each stage of the customer journey, you will be able to target the right customers without having to spend on a lot of paid ads. You can nurture the customers with the content, and lets you take a look at the marketing impact that has been made based on your campaigns.
#3 Google Analytics
Easily one of the most popular tools in the entire list, Google Analytic or GA helps measure your analytics ROI. To put it simply, it will track any search made on your website, so that you can understand your customers better. It will tell you about the people who visit your website, where they are coming from, the pages that are most popular on your website, what can be done to improve the speed of your website, and so on.
It is an underrated tool because there are businesses that still don’t work with Google Analytics. Even its free version is a landmine of knowledge and can be extremely helpful for your business. You can measure the results of each and every individual campaign in real-time, compare it with the previous records that are also made available on the platform.
Using Google, you can find the campaigns that bring you the most number of visitors, understand what people are searching for on your site, get an idea of the pages that people click on the most, find out the most popular content on your website, identify the pages that don’t perform well. Each of these metrics can be extremely helpful when you draft a marketing strategy for your business.
Some of the features of Google Analytics are as follows: Traffic reporting, Keyword referrals, conversion tracking, custom dashboards, and third-party referrals.
#4 Slack
It was the fastest-growing business app in the world by raking up ridiculous numbers. Today, it has more than 10 million users every day. Slack is an instant messaging platform that is also a project management tool that makes it so easy to take care of office work without having a messy laptop and a confused team.
Businesses can manage their entire marketing campaigns just with the help of Slack. It can also be integrated with many popular marketing platforms like MailChimp. Using Slack, you can take care of your editorial calendar, content marketing strategy, finances, invoices, analytics, etc.
Some of the other popular integrations that Slack has made available are HubSpot, HootSuite, Marketo, and Zapier. If you are good at using Slack, you can manage all of your work, starting from emails, marketing platforms, data platforms, etc., that can be handled from here.
#5 Canva Business
Canva is easily one of the most popular tools in the market for designing social media graphics, posters, presentations, documents, and other visual content. The best thing about Canva is that someone with zero design skills can create stunning visuals using it. For social media graphics, getting the images in the right dimension can be a big task and also confusing, but in Canva, the images format themselves.
It is popular so much because of how easy it is to use even for the novice. The number of templates and free resources that are available is staggering. The number of types of content for which they offer templates keeps growing too. Canva’s drag and drop functionality coupled with its superior search feature makes it easy to discover images and add the ones you like.
#6 Mailchimp
It is an all-in-one email marketing solution that lets you create and manage email lists, create automated campaigns, newsletters, drip campaigns, etc. It allows you to control your email marketing campaigns through all the angles. It is easy to design campaigns with Mailchimp even if you don’t have any HTML or coding knowledge.
Using its WYSIWYG builder and its huge selection of prebuilt templates and customization abilities, you can create powerful email marketing campaigns. One of its biggest advantages is that it allows you to automate your email marketing campaigns. Automation helps you personalize your brand’s campaigns and helps you bring you closer to the customers.
Mailchimp offers integration with a variety of applications such as PayPal, Facebook, WordPress, etc. You can even send customized email campaigns to a specific set of customers by segmenting them based on various characteristics. It provides an inbox tool that lets you see how your emails look in over 40 different email clients.
The software tracks the location of an email subscriber which helps you further in your segmentation. The ability to target certain geographical areas can increase the potency of your campaigns.
After email campaigns, you can check how it fared on Mailchimp. The Report section in its dashboard will give you more information. Going through the entire dashboard will tell you what is working for you and what is not. It would help you figure out why a certain link is getting more attraction than the others. It will tell you which are the most popular links, how many people opened your email, how many clicked on the link, and many more.
#7 BuzzSumo
This tool has the ability to entirely alter your content marketing process by giving you information on popular topics in the niche. To know what your target audience wants to read about, you should know what is popular. Going through each social media site to find out what your competitors are posting might take up a lot of time and is practically impossible.
With BuzzSumo, you can input search criteria, analyze the content that is already there, and find out what are the most successful content pieces in your niche, which will help sharpen your focus and direction.
It tells you the topics that are getting the most attention and where are these topics getting the attention. BuzzSumo also tells you about the influencers in your niche. It will tell you whose social media posts gain the most attention, who holds the most trust among their audience and what you need to follow, and who should be on your side.
The software also allows you to set up keyword alerts so that you know every time an article gets published about the topic or if there is a discussion about it in the public domain. Knowing what your competitor is doing can put you miles ahead of them if you can outwit them at their own game. It tells you the strategies that are working for them and what are the strategies that don’t work.
BuzzSumo even lets you set content KPIs to monitor which will help you measure and improve the performance of your content marketing campaigns. Track and analyze metrics such as shares, views, comments, downloads, leads, etc. At each stage of the content development process, BuzzSumo is a terrific asset right from generating content topics, ideas, showing you the best platforms to get published on, identifying the key influencers in your niche, and even the best possible time to post content online.
#8 Buffer
Buffer allows you to manage your social media accounts by helping you to schedule your posts and analyze them for your team. It lets you post your content more than once which means that you will be reaching a different audience every time. How do you fancy reaching out to businesses that are in different time zones? Buffer helps with that too. Want to reach new followers? Post your old content again for your new followers who will be seeing it for the first time.
It lets you A/B test your content for social networks so that you can decide the best copy and work on it.
It has three different types of features:
Buffer Publish: It allows you to schedule social media posts on different platforms.
Buffer Reply: This one is the Buffer’s social media monitoring and engagement tool. They are designed for organizations that want to know the conversations that are happening about their brand online. By following them, brands will also be able to help them with replies and get closer to the customer and come across as an empathetic company.
Buffer Analyze: In this feature, it lets you analyze how your social media posts are performing. You can get all your social media-related data in this feature.
The tool lets you post the same image with a different caption to various social media websites. It allows you to be visible as much as possible to your customers who are available on different channels. You do not have to manually communicate with each social media site.
Everyone believes that social media is easy and anyone can do it, but managing it can be time-consuming and requires a lot of resources. Your day-to-day operations should involve time for social media, otherwise, it will fall like a pack of cards. Social media is not a weekly thing where you post sporadically expecting results to happen. Thankfully, Buffer allows you to make things easy for social media.
#9 Trello
One of the best project management tools in the market, Trello allows you to create brilliant visual Kanban boards. These visual boards are shareable with others and can carry a lot of detail into each card. By mimicking physical interactions, it makes it possible for people to create systems for organizations according to their likes and dislikes. It is also popularly used as a tool for creating to-do lists and organizing work. Sometimes, even life.
Did you know that Trello is also used to track time? For businesses that get paid by the hour, it is one of the best ways to increase personal and professional productivity.
Trello can be used to manage your entire business conveniently. Think about it as a place where you store all your ideas, checklists, project information, updates, etc. You don’t have to share anything that you want to do. Choose to specifically share work-related information with your colleagues while you can have your personal to-do list kept aside.
Reducing clutter can be considered as one of its biggest benefits. It comes up with a bunch of preloaded templates that can make all the difference to your business. Here’s what you can do with Trello if you are a business:
- Create cards for each department and add your colleagues.
- Assign project owners to each card so that they are held responsible for updating whatever is happening in their department.
- If there are additional resources that they need to study, then use external links where you can direct them to Slack or a different Trello card.
- Keep track of the projects.
#10 SurveySparrow
Getting to hear direct feedback from your customers with the least effort possible is an advantage that businesses didn’t have a few years ago. They had to carry huge stacks of questionnaires, pass it to the customers in-person, ask them their answers, then sit through the answers for hours, and analyze them. With online surveys, none of this happens. It saves countless man-hours.
SurveySparrow is an online survey tool that lets you send surveys to your customers or prospects and analyze it for you to make business decisions. Thanks to its ease of use even for the respondent, there is a high response rate, unlike traditional survey collection methods. Collecting feedback from your customers isn’t an expensive affair anymore as you can easily do it without spending anything extra on resources.
Creating a survey is as simple as adding questions to SurveySparrow and sending it to your email list. Since there is no hurry and it is simple to answer a few questions through a highly intuitive form, customers are prone to respond to them. SurveySparrow has an integrated web system that gets all your survey-related work done from a single point.
No matter how big a list you have, 100,000 or more than 10 million, as long as your email client allows it, you can easily send it to as many people as you want with the help of SurveySparrow. It lets you offer anonymity for your respondents, gets you quick results in real-time, and can be made accessible for anyone using any type of channel. SurveySparrow makes it tremendously simple to make surveys.
Conclusion
The above ten digital marketing tools are a must-have for your marketing team. Learn how to use these effectively, all of these tools have been used by hundreds of thousands of companies which is a testament of how good they are. There are more tools that you can use for your business.
You need to identify the other digital marketing tools based on your business objectives. Just because a tool is available under your budget and is useful for most businesses doesn’t mean that they are useful to you too. Only choose ones that are specifically for your business.
What are some of the digital marketing tools that you have used for your business which you swear by? Or is there any feature that you want to be added for a particular tool. We would love to know. Please pass your responses in the comments section.
If you are looking for an online survey tool to collect feedback regularly from customers, then do check out SurveySparrow. Its highly intuitive interface makes survey creation and responding to it seem like a breeze. With its automation capabilities and highly capable analytics dashboard, you can power up your customer experience by working on the feedback from the survey.
