As a marketer, it can be challenging to keep up with the constantly evolving world of digital platforms, services and strategies. Fortunately, with a mix of the right digital marketing tools and partnerships, you can create effective and engaging campaigns that reach your target audience and drive results. Let’s dive into some of the top digital resources for marketers!
Content Management Systems
A Content Management System, or CMS, is a software application or set of related programs that allows individuals or organizations to create, manage, and publish digital content, such as articles, images, videos, and other multimedia files, on a website or other online platform.
The main purpose of a CMS is to provide an intuitive and user-friendly interface that allows non-technical users to manage content without requiring advanced technical skills or knowledge of programming languages.
WordPress
As one of the most popular content management systems, WordPress allows you to easily build, edit, and manage your website or blog. With its straightforward interface, you can customize your website without needing to know how to code. WordPress is highly flexible and can be used to create any type of website, from simple blogs to complex e-commerce sites. It is also highly scalable, allowing users to add new content and features as their website grows.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a robust and complete CRM platform that includes a range of software and resources designed to help businesses streamline their operations and establish a strong online presence. An important aspect of HubSpot’s platform is its Marketing Hub. This segment allows businesses to integrate their paid advertising campaigns, social media, email marketing, and other marketing channels. This integration allows businesses to create cohesive marketing campaigns that are consistent across all channels.
But wait there’s more! HubSpot’s Sales Hub and CRM are designed to work hand-in-hand with the Marketing Hub. The Sales Hub offers a range of tools to help sales teams manage their leads, track their activities, and close more deals. The CRM allows businesses to manage their entire customer relationship, from prospect to customer to advocate.
By integrating these factors above, businesses can create a seamless customer journey that is consistent across all channels. Overall, HubSpot provides businesses of all sizes and industries with a complete solution for managing their customer interactions and driving growth. Its integrated approach to CRM allows businesses to connect all aspects of their operations and deliver a more personalized and impactful marketing strategy.
Squarespace
Squarespace is a website builder that offers sleek and modern templates to help create a visually appealing website. It also has an easy-to-use interface that allows you to smoothly tailor your website. This platform has become a popular choice for creatives, small businesses, and professionals looking to establish an online presence.
Analytics
Data and analytics play a critical role in modern marketing by providing important insights into customer behavior and preferences. Getting a glimpse into a user’s online behavior helps marketers make informed decisions rather than assumptions or guesswork.
By leveraging analytics, marketers can develop personalized web experiences, optimize campaigns and deliver better results.
Google Analytics
Of course you’ve probably heard of or used Google Analytics, a free tool that helps you track website traffic (number of visitors, page views, etc.) and user behavior. But wait, Google has introduced a new sheriff in town when it comes to their improved analytics platform. Google Analytics 4 or GA4 is the latest version of Google’s web analytics platform. Unlike the previous version, Universal Analytics (UA), which tracked pageviews and sessions, GA4 tracks individual user interactions such as clicks, form submissions, video plays, and other custom events. This provides a more granular and adaptable way to analyze user behavior and engagement.
All in all with GA4, marketers can enjoy increased flexibility and gain deeper understanding to more effectively leverage their data. And the best part? All of this can be achieved while maintaining a strong focus on user privacy and data protection.
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Analytics provides usable information by going beyond canned reports. It allows you to blend and analyze data from every digital touchpoint in the customer journey. This versatile tool offers in-depth analysis, customizable reporting, and predictive intelligence, providing you with a robust foundation to create exceptional customer experiences. With Adobe Analytics, you gain the necessary intellect to optimize your marketing campaigns and enhance your customer engagement across all channels.
Looker Studio
Looker Studio is a self-service business intelligence tool that empowers smarter business decisions. It connects to over 800 data sources and allows you to create and share engaging reports and data visualizations in just a few clicks. With Looker Studio, you can transform your data into impactful business metrics and dimensions to enhance your team’s key business measures through shared automated dashboards. The tool features an intuitive web interface, customizable report templates, data connectors, Looker Studio API, and report embedding, making it easy to access, use, and share your data.
Design and Branding
Your brand is embodied through a variety of creative elements like your logo, color palette, fonts and images, as well as your organization’s mission, vision and tone of voice. Not only does your brand make a visual impression on your audience, it lets them know what your company is about.
Whether you have a full design team or you’re a marketing department of one, there are several tools available to help you build a strong brand identity and design language to resonate with your target audience.
Canva
Canva is a popular graphic design tool that allows you to create beautiful designs and graphics for a wide range of visual content such as campaigns, posters, presentations, flyers, and more. The best part about this platform is that it offers a variety of templates and design elements, making it easy to create professional-looking designs even if you’re not a designer.
Adobe
Adobe offers a range of creative design tools including Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. These tools are ideal for creating custom graphics and designs for your marketing needs. Adobe’s software applications are well-known for their advanced features and powerful capabilities, but they also require a significant learning curve and investment to become proficient in their use.
Vimeo
Vimeo unlocks the power to produce, collaborate, and share video content in a synchronized way. This video-sharing platform is widely used by designers and marketers to establish and deliver high-quality video content. Vimeo offers a range of customizable video players that can be embedded directly into a blog or website. These players can be branded with custom logos, colors, and other design elements, making them an excellent tool for maintaining brand consistency across different platforms.
Importantly, Vimeo is a community-driven platform, with a vast network of creative professionals and businesses that use the platform to showcase their work. This makes it an excellent resource for discovering new trends and best practices in video design and branding.
Social Media Management
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management platform that provides a suite of tools for managing social media accounts, scheduling posts, analyzing performance, and engaging with followers across multiple social media channels.
One of the standout features of Sprout Social is its ability to help agencies manage multiple social media accounts. This is particularly useful for marketing agencies that manage social media for several clients. With Sprout Social, agencies can easily switch between different client accounts, schedule posts, and monitor engagement across all of their social media channels from one centralized location.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another popular and cost efficient social media management tool that enables businesses to manage and monitor their social media accounts and performance from one centralized dashboard. The platform provides tools for scheduling and publishing social media content, as well as personalized recommendations on the best time to post based on your specific goals.
This platform offers a range of pricing plans to suit different business needs. Hootsuite’s pricing plans tend to be more affordable, making it a better choice for smaller businesses with limited budgets. Start-ups can make an informed and cost-effective decision, especially in a rapidly growing team with limited financial resources.
HubSpot
Making their second appearance, HubSpot offers a comprehensive social media management tool as part of their Marketing Hub. With this platform, businesses can easily schedule and publish social media posts across various platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more.
One of the key features of HubSpot’s management tool is the ability to bulk upload posts. This means that businesses can create and upload multiple posts at once, which can save time and effort. HubSpot also uses lead generation tools to create landing pages and forms that are specifically designed to capture leads from social media traffic. Overall, this social application supplies businesses with a range of features to manage their social media presence, engage with their audience, and generate leads.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization or SEO involves a wide range of techniques, including keyword research and optimization. It is highly valuable to marketers as it plays a pivotal role in helping businesses increase their online visibility, attract more qualified traffic to their websites, and ultimately drive revenue.
SEMrush
SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps you optimize your website for search engines. It offers keyword research, site audit, and backlink analysis tools to help you improve your website’s search engine rankings. SEMrush is considered a leader in the SEO space due to its comprehensive feature set, accuracy, reliability, user-friendly interface, customer support, and innovation .
As the SEO space is constantly changing, SEMrush stays ahead of the game by continually innovating and adapting to the ever-changing SEO landscape. They regularly update their toolset with new features and capabilities, ensuring that users stay ahead of the competition. SEMrush’s data is widely considered to be accurate and reliable. Their crawlers collect a vast amount of data, which is then processed by their advanced algorithms to provide meaningful insights into website performance and ranking factors.
SpyFu
SpyFu is a competitive intelligence tool that helps you take the guesswork out of SEO by tracking your competitors’ SEO strategies. It provides details into your competitors’ top keywords, ad campaigns, and backlinks, helping you identify new opportunities for your campaigns. Spyfu also instantly gives you access to backlink strategies, ranking history, top pages, and keyword tracking.
Ultimately, Spyfu users can search for any domain and view every place it has appeared on Google, including organic ranks, Google Ads keywords, and ad variations dating back 16 years. Additionally, the tool provides lead generation methods through social media, email, phone, and address that are not found elsewhere.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a digital marketing tool that every SEO specialist should have in their toolbox. This versatile SEO Spider Tool can crawl websites efficiently and provide real-time analysis, making it an invaluable resource for making informed SEO decisions.
One of the most significant benefits of the SEO Spider Tool is its ability to find broken links and server errors instantly. It enables you to export errors and source URLs in bulk for easy fixing, or you can send them to a developer. The tool also allows you to analyze page titles and metadata during a crawl and identify those that are too long, short, missing, or duplicated across your site.
Audience Building
Audience building refers to the process of attracting and engaging a specific group of people who are interested in your products or services. This group of people is known as your audience, and they are the people who are most likely to become customers or clients. By implementing successful audience building strategies, brands can create a sense of community and loyalty.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a valuable digital marketing tool that can help businesses build their audience and grow their sales pipeline. With advanced search filters, lead recommendations, and real-time insights, businesses can identify and connect with decision-makers who are more likely to be interested in their products or services. This tool provides access to a wide range of advanced search filters and lead recommendations, making it easier for businesses to identify and target their ideal audience.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo Targeted Audience platform provides top-of-the-line options for targeting, including firmographics, intent, and online behaviors. It’s like having access to a map of a crowded stadium, where you can locate the exact rows and seats where your potential customers are sitting. ZoomInfo also complies with privacy regulations and ensures that your data strategy remains relevant in the long run, without needing frequent updates that can cause inefficiencies. Overall their audience applications are versatile and cater to both B2B and B2C use cases. You can build audiences based on behavioral device usage or corporate and contact information, depending on your needs.
Sparktoro
Sparktoro provides deeper understanding into consumer behavior and preferences by analyzing data from social media platforms, blogs, and other online sources. Their interface allows users to search for specific topics or keywords and identify the online communities that are most active and engaged in those areas. With this tool businesses can understand what their target audience is interested in, where they spend their time online, and what types of content they engage with.
Lead generation tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, ZoomInfo, and Hunter.io help you find new leads for your business. These tools allow you to search for potential customers based on industry, location, job title, and more.
How to Save Time and Money on Digital Marketing Tools
Partnering with a marketing agency can save you time and cost by leveraging their licenses and expertise with these particular platforms. Additionally, they can help you create effective campaigns that drive results. “By utilizing a diverse range of digital marketing tools, Envision Health has been able to craft and execute highly effective digital strategies and campaigns for our clients. We’re able to efficiently deliver exceptional results while staying ahead in the ever-evolving landscape of online marketing,” says Envision Health Digital Marketing Director Zeke Holiman.
So if you’re looking to take your marketing efforts to the next level, consider partnering with a reputable marketing agency like Envision Health to help you achieve your goals.