If you want to stand any chance of competing in the fierce world of marketing, you need to arm yourself with the right digital marketing tools to succeed.
Because let’s face it…
The life of a digital marketer is hard, isn’t it?
There’s just so much for you to do.
Oh, and social media? Don’t even get me started!
All the while you have to build a network, sell your products and still make time to have a life outside of it.
Man, it’s exhausting just writing about it, never mind living it.
In this article I’m about to give you 201 different digital marketing tools that have helped to make my life a heck of a lot easier and hopefully they will do the same for you too.
And, you’ll get an insight into the marketing tools I use to get awesome results.
So if you’re ready to level up your marketing game, while freeing up more time, then boy, you’re in for a treat…
What Will I Learn?
I decided to ask some of my favorite marketing experts what tools they use, but rarely get talked about.
So as well as all of the marketing tools I recommend in the sections above, you can also discover the best digital marketing tools according to 39 experts-
Nathalie Lussier – @NathLussier This is an interesting one, because I feel like most marketing tools are “on the outside” where everyone can see them being used.
But my favorite marketing tool and strategy is one we built for our business called AccessAlly because it allows you to market to your existing free website visitors and cross-sell different programs and products.
The premise is that people opt-in or sign up to join your membership area, and within that area they see all the other products you have to offer and can purchase right in there.
This has resulted in thousands of additional dollars in revenue for our small business since we implemented this tool.
Sean Malarkey – @seanmalarkey We recently made the switch from using a self hosted email solution (Interspire) + Infusionsoft to Active Campaign and are loving it.
It’s hands down one of the easiest to use email marketing tools ever created.
Jason Quey – @jdquey Every time you engage someone in email, it’s hard to know what works best for the person you are emailing.
Ever wondered if you should start with “Hi” “Dear” “Hey” or simply start with their name? Wonder if they would respond well to an emoticon or not? Should your email be brief or very detailed?
We humans are a beautifully diverse group of individuals. Crystal Knows takes out all the guesswork so you don’t need to worry how to respond.
Bryan Eisenburg – @TheGrok From the Website: All your apps in one place. Quit opening new browser tabs and logging into all your various apps for data.
With your Dasheroo dashboard, you can access your data from anywhere, on any device, at any time — in one place!
Brandon Schaefer My favorite least talked about marketing tool is called Edgar.
To put it simply, Edgar is a social media scheduling tool that recycles content on a regular basis so that it never goes to waste.
It’s really a big time saver, as well as a great way to keep legacy content out in front of your audience.
Rand Fishkin – @randfish I love Fresh Web Explorer because it gives me high quality, easy-to-read, comprehensive alerts about who’s linking to the sites I care about or mentioning the people/brand/product names I want to follow.
It’s what I wish Google Alerts would do (but for some reason, they just seem to get worse!).
Full disclosure – it’s a Moz tool, but I’d pay for it/use it even if I weren’t at Moz.
Dennis Yu – @dennisyu I live and breathe using this free browser plug-in. Because the web is being controlled increasingly by third party javascript trackers (most sites we see have over a dozen), it’s important to make sure they have the right tags in place.
This is not just for remarketing or analytics, but conversion optimization and communication widgets, too. Tags are the tools that drive all other marketing tools, but few marketers understand their power or importance.
This goes deeper than tag management (like the free Google Tag Manager that integrates with Google Analytics in a single click), which is nearly as important.
If you’re using social marketing tools, then you need to govern which ones live where and collect what data. Ghostery helps you easily troubleshoot this. Then you’d have other browser plug-ins like Facebook’s pixel helper and BuiltWith.
– @martinsherv Google+ of course! People don’t seem to understand you can leverage content into Google.com (and worldwide) through building a circle of just 100 people.
Through their engagement it signals to Search your content should be seen by more people, and that you/your content are authoritative.
It is through trust that your reputation spreads into the wider world. It is awesome for marketers. Really.
Search ‘Social SEO facts’ for case studies how 100 turned into 300,000+ people visiting one blog post.
Ann Handley – @AnnHandley Grammarly bills itself as an automated proofreader and “your personal grammar coach.”
It’s both a web app and plug-in for both Word and Outlook, and as such it is fairly robust.
A machine is doing the work, of course. But using Grammarly almost feels like you have a gentle but dogged copyeditor on your side, who is determined to improve your text’s readability.
Heidi Cohen – @HeidiCohen Call me old school but my favorite marketing tool is graph paper and my favorite pen (often a give away from the latest marketing conference!) I include large post-its as well.
I use paper to organize and visualize projects and content as well as tocapture those on-the-go thoughts and inspirations before they vanish into thin air. I find that outlining articles before I write them reduces content creation time.
I also print out my writing before publishing it (yes I’m conscious that this isn’t eco-friendly) but it makes a world of difference in the final result, especially when I’m on a tight deadline.
Cyrus Shephard – @cyrusshepard A few come to mind. Grepwords offers killer keyword data at volume, and the price is reasonable. Be sure to check out the GrepWords Chrome Extension for Ubersuggest.
Another favorite is SimilarWeb. Their competitive research intelligence blows similar services out of the water. They also have free browser extensions for both Firefox and Chrome worth checking out.
Peep Laja – @peeplajaHeap Analytics is an amazing tool that auto-records every interaction a user can take in your website or app.
It enables you to create custom funnels on the fly based on user behavior, and figure out which actions increase the likelihood of final conversion.
This helps you understand the value of various widgets and functionality on your site, and come up with better test hypotheses.
Ian Cleary – @iancleary – Inboundwriter is a relatively new tool which assesses topics you plan to write about on your blog.
It will rate the topic and indicate the chances of it getting ongoing organic traffic. It will also outline related keywords that you should consider including in the article.
Neil Patel – @neilpatel Ambassador.
It’s one of the best email marketing tools out there. Everyone talks about Hubspot, Marketo, MailChimp, and other solutions out there, but Infusionsoft has a lot of flexibility for experienced marketers.
By no means is the tool easy to use, the but results are much better.
A.J. Ghergich – @seo Right now a tool that many may not of heard of is Link Miner.
This is a really neat and free chrome extension that helps with broken link building.
I think you will really like it!
Marko Saric – @markosaric I love Locowise and have used it for some 3 years now in order to analyse and get actionable overview of social media profiles for brands I work with.
It does this very well with simple and easy to understand charts.
I enjoyed the product so much so I’ve been helping them over the last couple of months build new, free internet marketing tools to help even more marketers.
One new tool is Facebook Page Analyser where you can compare your own page to 5,000 other pages to identify what you’re doing well, what not so well and how you can improve.
Stats such as reach by post type, engagement rate by post type, percentage of pages using ads to boost posts etc. Simple, useful and free.
Brian Clark – @brianclark Microsoft Word.
Despite all the new a shiny technology, the simple act of creating the right content for your audience remains the fundamental thing.
Get it wrong, and all the marketing technology in the world won’t save you.
Greg Hickman – @gjhickmanI love Mobit because it brings SMS marketing and automation into the same tool allowing small businesses to run the same level of mobile loyalty programs as larger brands.
Adam Connell – @adamjayc I’m a big fan of Ninja Outreach due to how helpful it is for blogger outreach, right from researching influencers to helping you manage relationships.
Sure there are a lot of big players in this field and Ninja Outreach is very new, despite that it does a great job (and it’s affordable too).
Amanda DiSilvestro – @ADiSilvestro One tool that our company uses all the time is the Panguin Tool from Barracuda.
Particularly because we are an agency working with clients, we find that many clients have had a bad experience with another agency or have done something on their end that lead to a drop in rankings.
This tool will pull their Google Analytics and then match them up with visitor patterns as well as any algorithm updates that may have occurred. It saves us time diagnosing the problem so that we can quickly come up with a plan of attack to fix it.
Even if you’re not an agency, I would highly recommend this tool to see if there are any patterns you can uncover. Good luck!
Arnie Kuenn – @ArnieK My favorite app of late is Pocket, formerly known as Read It Later.
It can fuel the content you post to social media, help with research for content creation, and generally keep you organized. If you’re reading an article online—whether it’s in browser, email, or social media apps—you can save it to your Pocket for later reading or reference.
What’s great about this app is it saves your articles for offline reading on your phone, tablet, or computer, so you don’t even need an internet connection (which comes in very handy for some plane rides).
You can also tag articles for easy sorting later, and filter by video, image, or article.
In a world of tons of content coming at us from every direction, Pocket provides a little moment of organization and peace as you’re able to take back control of what you let into your day. Highly recommended for marketers or for personal use.
Peg Fitzpatrick – @PegFitzpatrick Post Planner is a fantastic tool that I don’t hear many people talking about so it still seems like a great secret.
It’s fantastic for getting content ideas for Facebook Page management. They’ve just expanded with a robust website and I love the calendar feature.
I don’t know what kind of magic they have in their algorithm but the content that I share from their viral photos does really well on my Facebook Pages.
Ashley Faulkes – @madlemmingz One of my favorite internet marketing tools and techniques for learning more about people you see in your Gmail inbox is Rapportive from LinkedIn.
If you don’t know Rapportive, it is a Google Chrome plugin that enables you to see all sorts of useful details about people when you open their email or compose one in Gmail.
It shows you things such as:
- Their photo
- Profile
- Social media links
- LinkedIn connections you have in common
- Where they are located
Sounds pretty boring, but when you think about the possibilities it is a powerful tool to have in your day to day arsenal. Some things I use it for include:
- Finding emails of people I need to contact for outreach (just try all the options and when Rapportive comes up, you have it! – yes there are other marketing tools, but this is inside gmail and easy most of the time)
- You can connect instantly with new contacts
- You can instantly learn more about someone who has cold emailed you about an interesting opportunity
And given how much you are emailing each day, and knowing that relationships and networking are some of the most important things you can and should be doing – this tool is an absolute must.
Gini Dietrich – @ginidietrich I’d have to say, right now, it’s Riff.
It’s an easy and fun way to crowdsource video. You create a quick snippet and your Facebook friends can add to it.
It’s kind of like the telephone game…it keeps going and going and going.
Jay Baer – @jaybaer RivalIQ – we use it every day at Convince & Convert to track engagement rate, and alert us to “breakout” social content – ours, our clients’, and their competitors.
Full-featured, easy-to-use, inexpensive. I like it so much, I invested in the company.
Sujan Patel – @sujanpatel My new favorite marketing tool is Satismeter. Satismeter is a lightweight platform that gathers feedback from customers using the NPS survey system.
It prompts users during use of your website and follows up with people who haven’t responded via email. It’s great for Ecommerce and SaaS businesses.
There are many NPS Survey tools out there but Satismeter is great because it’s lightweight, low-cost, and incredibly easy to integrate into your website or app.
I’ve seen a 50-60% response rate out of the box which is 2-3x higher than most other NPS surveys that use email to deliver NPS surveys.
John Rampton – @johnrampton From the Website: Searchmetrics delivers enterprise SEO and content marketing analysis, recommendations, forecasting and reporting for companies that want potential customers to find them faster.
It means prospects and customers spend less time searching and more time buying. We call it ‘search experience optimization’.
Jason Acidre – @jasonacidre Mix.
It’s a really great resource for getting new ideas/approaches for content creation (and even in promoting content, if you can just spend time to really understand how the popular content there succeeded in getting more traffic, shares, and links).
Ann Smarty – @seosmarty I use Suggest Tool before publishing any article.
It lets me find searchable and popular keyword phrases to use in the title and article body. You can dig for 2-, 3-, 4, 5-word phrases. It’s free, fast and requires no registration.
I use it to brainstorm article ideas to (just put your core term). The fact that it digs Google, Bing, Youtube and Amazon at the same time is amazing because you get to see keyword selections with different user intent side by side. Then select any you like and switch to step 2 to dig for longer (more specific) phrases.
Step 2 of the tool returning longer phrases is also useful because you can get some ideas for your article sections (subheadings).
Overall this is an absolutely awesome free tool for bloggers and writers.
Noah Kagan – @noahkagan Sumo is the ultimate marketers tool.
Instead of worrying about a bunch of internet marketing tools to drive more traffic this tool does it. Share, Emails and analytics.
The 3 core things every website needs to improve in 1 simple tool.
Annie Cushing – @AnnieCushingThe Supermetrics addon for Google Drive.
It provides an easy way to pull data from a number of internet marketing tools right into a Google Spreadsheet.
Some of their connectors include Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Facebook, YouTube, and SEMRush. It’s a must-have tool for every marketer in my opinion.
Robbie Richards – @RobbieRichMktg My favorite, but least talked about marketing tool is Thrive Leads. This WordPress plugin has helped double my blog’s email opt-in rate to over 9% and allowed me to collect 734 new email subscribers in the last 5 weeks.
Here are some of the benefits of the Thrive Leads plugin:
1. Beautifully designed pre-built opt-in templates.
2. Multiple different opt-in forms to choose from – ribbons, popups, sidebar widgets, post footer, slide ins, in-content, screen filler light boxes and multi-step opt-in forms. All of which can be setup and launched in minutes.
3. Powerful targeting feature allow you to target certain opt-in forms and offers to specific posts, pages and categories on your site. This is perfect for promoting content upgrades and segmenting your list.
4. You can A/B test form designs, different form types – a lightbox popup vs. a slide-in form or a widget vs. a ribbon – and triggers. For example, see if forms displayed on page load convert higher than exit intent forms.
5. There are a number of form triggers to choose from. Should you show a popup after 3 seconds, once the users scrolls 50% down the page or once the visitor is about to exit your site? Run an A/B test and find out. You can also have the tool automatically select a winner after a certain threshold is met.
6. Build opt-in forms and paste their shortcodes anywhere within your site without writing a single line of code.
7. Easy-to-use reporting dashboard to see number of conversions broken down form type and campaign source will give users a clear picture of what is, and is not working.
On top of all that, Thrive Leads is continually releasing new features and updates.
This tool is often overshadowed by far inferior products on the market. But, I think it’s only a matter of time before it breaks through and gets the attention it deserves. I use this plugin on all my personal websites and now client projects. Highly recommend you check out Thrive Leads.
Eddie Gear – @brokeblokeblogs, I’m somewhat of a Twittaholic and often need something more than the native Twitter Analytics. Its times likes these that I turn to Tweet Binder.
Tweet Binder is an analytics tool for twitter that allows you to see a specific set of metrics based on @handle, #hashtag or keywords or unique parameter.
Offers metrics such as most active, highest impact and influence for a certain duration. It comes in handy when you want to analyze Twitter Chats or keyword based activities on twitter.
Comes with a free and a paid option.
Scott Wyden Kivowitz – @scottwyden I’m a man of simplicity when it comes to my internet marketing tools.
I do use the popular Buffer and IFTTT type apps. But for ongoing engagement and monitoring of Twitter I use Tweetbot for both Mac and iOS.
It allows me to sync my read and unread tweets on multilple devices across multiple accounts. I can also open new windows with different accounts, searches and more. And what’s more – who doesn’t like free internet marketing tools?
Rich Page – @richpage Usability Hub – it’s fantastic for getting quick feedback on your website and any proposed changes/test ideas you are thinking of making.
Certainly helpful if you don’t have enough traffic for proper A/B testing. Not as in depth as what UserTesting.com offers, but cheap internet marketing tools often offer similar features – even has a free version.
Kim Garst – @kimgarst ViralTag is specifically designed to manage your visual content. Do you have images scattered across Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Dropbox and Picasa?
Not to worry, with the click of a button, ViralTag pulls content from all these outlets which makes sourcing images much easier!
You can organize content into categories or content buckets, and publish scheduled posts around specific types of visual content.
If you haven’t tried it, you can check it out for free.
Christian Karasiewicz – @ckroks One of my favorite but least talked about internet marketing tools is Workflow. For Mac users, it’s similar to Automator, a tool that helps you automate repetitive tasks except it runs on iOS devices (iPhone, iPad).
What’s neat about Workflow is that you can automate many tasks right from your mobile device – which if you’re a marketer, you’ll love! This way you’re not tied to your laptop.
Here are some ways I’m currently using Workflow:
- Crop, resize, and share photos across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
- Store quotes for blog posts and social media channels
- Clip articles I’m reading into Evernote
- Share my latest photos and notify a select group of recipients
- Convert photos and files with one-click
- Share my availability
Overall, this is a powerful, underutilized tool that can save you a lot of time – especially if you’re attending conferences and all you have with you is a tablet or smartphone.
I’m looking forward to seeing Workflow evolve. It has helped to make my iPhone an even more indispensable tool for many of my marketing efforts.
Jason Keath – @jasonkeath Yesware is one of those tools that I really hesitate telling people about. It is a marketers secret weapon. It is also one of those internet marketing tools that might not be with us for very long, like Rapportive or Timely. Both now gone.
Yesware allows you to track who opens your emails from Gmail and other email apps. It also allows you to schedule emails to send out from Gmail and lets you set automatic reminders based on sending those emails.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The real killer feature of Yesware is the ability to send simple mail-merge emails from inside of Gmail. There are limitations (less than 200 emails a day right now) and this should not be abused (which means it will be, just a matter of time), but if used carefully, this little tool can help you support tons of marketing efforts.
Selling a new product? Send personal gmail emails to your top 200 customers. Launching a new microsite and want your friends to help promote? Instead of BCCing a message to everyone, mailmerge an email to your 40 closest contacts and ask them to help tweet it out.
I would not recommend using this feature more than once every few months. With a little subtly, Yesware can save you a ton of time and help give a lift to your most important marketing pushes.
Do you know what is better than any of the digital marketing tools that you see in this list?
It’s not coffee or even any of the hottest digital marketing trends right now. It’s to develop your mindset for success. Because no matter how many marketing tools you have…
And the quickest way to develop a mindset for success, is to read the infamous book by Napoleon Hill called ‘Think & Grow Rich‘ which has sold over 70 million copies worldwide since it’s release in 1937.
Without that book – this blog wouldn’t exist & I would probably be slaving away in a soul sucking 9-5 job each & every day of my life.
I first read it in my early teens (and countless times since) which gave me the most powerful marketing tool on the planet – the mindset for success.
So if you don’t already possess that tool, the best thing you can do is to go and read it right now.
What are your favorite digital marketing tools? Let me know in the comments!
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Thank you So much For this Informative Writing. This is so helpful for everyone. Hope you will give us a more good blog like this.
Glad it was helpful. Cheers 🙂
thanks for sharing
No worries Jason
Hiii,A Good article to read. Its beneficial.
I hope so!
thanks for the list. Such a wonderful article.
No worries, there are so many useful tools out there!
By far one of the best lists I’ve seen in my marketing career. Thanks for the this! I’ve already shared with my team.
Great feedback, much appreciated Jamie
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Wow! What a list! Thanks for all the incredible tools. I’ll be going through each of them one by one.
I hope you find some useful ones to suit your needs!
It’s quite amazing how I keep stumbling on fresh information every day even with my expertise. This is indeed a great list! I should probably check out that Riff tool. It could actually help with my video sourcing, who knows? Thanks Matt.
Hey Thelma, no problem. I quite often come across tools I haven’t heard of before and enjoy trying them out!
Excellent one …
Thanks 🙂
Helpful site
*thumbs up*
great websites
Cheers!