Not to be Debbie Downer, but the online world expects you to be E V E R Y W H E R E. That’s social, email, search engines, ads, and the list goes on. In fact, the digital world is practically limitless.
Fortunately, digital marketing tools can make this digital universe conquerable. Or, at least, a little less challenging. Thanks to the insights and automation they bring to the table. But here’s the catch – picking the best ones can be seriously overwhelming considering the variety that’s out there.
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To keep all that confusion at bay, I decided to compile a list of epic digital marketing tools that are super easy to use and budget-friendly too. 🙌
You’ll find there’s a marketing tool for each of the major branches of digital marketing like social media, email marketing, and so on.
So grab a cuppa and dig in:
Table of Contents
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing software for designing and sending marketing emails in bulk to subscribers. It also gives you access to important data such as the number of people who open your messages, those who click links you share with them, and so on.
What’s more, it enables you to easily segment your email list into different sections and send messages specific to those segments.
Price: Free till you’ve 2000 subscribers.
Visme
Visme is a DIY design tool that helps create different visuals such as infographics, presentations, GIFs, blog posters, eBook covers, and social media graphics among others. It offers a cost-effective and quick solution to your business’s design requirements without you having to go over design briefs with designers.
Besides, the vast library of templates offered makes it super easy for you to design. You can tweak the templates to align with your branding and save them for use later on.
Price: Free. Upgrade for more templates and multiple users’ account.
Buffer
Manually publishing all your updates on social can take a lot of time, which brings us to Buffer, a social media marketing software. You can create a different posting schedule for different social channels so your updates are timetabled to go out at the times when your audience is most likely to be active.
What’s more, you can also grab your post performance metrics via this tool and optimize your social content according to the post types that get the most engagement.
Price: Tiered pricing with free 14-day trial for all packages.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of those free digital marketing tools that you can’t miss. Although Google hasn’t offered an update in a while, the last estimate is that over 30-50 million websites use Google Analytics. Essentially, it’s a traffic monitoring platform by Google with an easy set up.
It provides insights into how people are finding and using your site. So you can figure out which keywords are driving traffic, which social campaigns are yielding fruit, and so on. Tweak your marketing strategy accordingly.
Price: Free
Google Ads (previously Google Adwords)
Google Ads is another free marketing tool for advertising your business on Google’s search results (SERPs). It comes with a Google Keyword Planner where you can search for keywords people use to find a business such as yours.
Let’s say you offer massage services in Houston. Your target audience is likely to use keywords like ‘best massage services in houston.’ Use this keyword in your ad and related content, then set up ads with a budget telling how much you want to spend on advertising.
Your ad will show up in Google’s paid results section (usually on top of the page) as people search for this phrase:
You’ll be charged when someone clicks on your ad. One thing to keep in mind here – since there are lots of people advertising for the same keywords, your ads show up based on two things:
- How much you’re willing to pay (technically known as bid) and
- The quality score of your ad (how relevant the ad and the page it links to are)
Price: Free
SimilarWeb
Nothing can help you beat your competition like market research. You know the practice of keeping an eye on your competitor traffic, where it’s coming from, how you compare to it, and so on. SimilarWeb is a marketing tool for just that.
It is a web analytics service used by big fish companies like Google and eBay, which gives you a scoop of your competitor’s site ranking, reach, and user engagement. You can also see where sites get their referral traffic from.
Price: Free with custom paid packages available.
TrustPulse
See that little box on the left of the page? This is what TrustPulse does. It shares who has recently bought from the site, providing what’s known as social proof or evidence that others trust the company and you can too.
The thing is, we tend to trust a business more if others are trusting it too. And your customers are no different. 70% of them take recommendations from those they don’t even know. Take that to your advantage and set up a live stream of social proof using TrustPulse.
Price: Choose between Basic, Plus, Pro, and Growth yearly packages.
LiveChat
LiveChat lets you chat with your site visitors using a chat pop up that shows up in a corner on your website. Like this one:
These chat boxes facilitate conversations by allowing you to answer questions your visitors may have. By instantly getting back to them, you improve your business’s customer service, and with it, the odds of a sale.
You can also engage with your potential buyers at checkout. This can help you upsell, cross-sell, and even reduce cart abandonment. Remember 6 out of 10 people say they prefer a tool such as live chat for getting answers to simple queries.
Price: Tiered pricing with Starter, Business, and other plans.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a website analytics marketing tool. It shows you heat maps, which are visual maps illustrating the behavior of your site visitors. Using a heat map, you can learn where your visitors pay attention on your webpages.
Here’s how it works – your heat map shows areas where your visitors focus on in red color. On the other hand, blue in the map shows unpopular areas or elements on your site.
Take the heat map for Hotjar’s home page as an example:
You can optimize your website and improve its user experience as you uncover areas where your audience focuses, areas where they scroll past, sections they click, and so on.
Price: Start off with the free Basic plan or upgrade after 2000 page views.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is one of the best digital marketing platforms that giants like The Telegraph trust.
It helps you create content that your audience would appreciate and engage with. There’s no point in creating content that your audience won’t enjoy, isn’t it?
With Buzzsumo, you can dig out what’s trending over the web and what’s getting the most engagement on social. Let’s say you type in ‘digital marketing tools’ in the search bar:
The engagement score shows you the topic is pretty popular on social. So it’s worth covering. Additionally, Buzzsumo helps you find influencers to collaborate with.
Price: Tiered pricing started from $99/mo.
SEMrush
Used by over 5 million users including eBay, SEMrush is a keyword research tool that helps you find the right keywords to target for your ads and SEO. When you enter a keyword in SEMrush, it’ll deliver a ‘Phrase match report,’ which gives you related long-tail keywords to target.
What makes this keyword research tool unique is it gives you keywords your competitors already rank for, helping you decide which keywords to try to rank for yourself.
Price: 7-day free trial for Pro plan at $99.95/mo.
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BirdEye
Ranked highly over at review platforms like G2.com, BirdEye is a reputation management software. It helps you gather reviews for your business by sending automated SMS or email requests to your customers.
You can automatically share positive reviews on your social channels and website to earn other’s trust (remember we talked about social proof earlier?).
As for negative reviews, BirdEye immediately alerts you so you can attend to them without delay. The more you help sort your negative reviewer’s concern, the better your chances of future conversions.
Price: Available upon request
And that’s a wrap to this list of digital marketing tools for your business. Which of these is your favorite online marketing tool?
Featured image source: Freepik
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