10 Must Have Marketing Tools in 2018
by Kristin Crabb •
Why Are Marketing Tools Important?
In today’s digital world, there seems to be an endless number of marketing tools available to help with all aspects of online marketing. Modern digital marketers need to be able to take advantage of the best of these tools to stay on top of current trends and ever-changing client needs. Marketing experts are expected to manage a wide range of online campaigns while monitoring numbers, staying on top of ROI, and keeping up with the latest developments.
Using the right digital marketing tools not only saves time, but it makes online marketing campaigns more affordable and effective.
Depending on your digital marketing background, you may already have some favorites or experience in working with some of the more common online marketing tools. But in case it’s been a while since you took a look at all the options out there, we’d like to share some of our favorite tools of the trade. This is our list of must-have digital marketing tools for 2018.
Best Marketing Tools For SEO
With more than a billion websites live today, it’s hard to stand out from the competition. To be successful, you need to have a good idea, great content, and a powerful strategy for search engine optimization. Effective SEO will enable you to increase website traffic, get out information about your company and offerings to potential customers, and ultimately increase sales. Here are two of the top digital marketing tools for SEO.
Related: 6 Mobile SEO Tools to Help You Optimize Your Site
SEMrush
This wonderful all-in-one digital marketing tool is incredibly helpful. SEMrush lets you to easily create optimal online content while also getting a clear understanding of what your competitors are doing. This powerful tool enables you to follow the keywords your competitors are using, find trending content, and discover effective industry experts who know how to work the system to their benefit. With SEMrush, you can track your SEO ranking, brainstorm ideas for creating more website traffic, conduct a technical SEO audit, research the best keywords for ads and marketing campaigns, and identify new, trending keywords to incorporating into your online SEO strategy.
Moz
Content marketers who need an influential SEO tool love Moz. It offers exclusive features like MozBar, which lets you quickly look at the keywords for any website, see new content they are creating, authenticate authorship, measure the efficiency of your own content, and check on-page SEO metrics – all in one user-friendly platform. You can also use Moz to check your business listing and research keywords with the exclusive Moz Keyword Explorer. And their brand-new Link Explorer is ideal for link analysis, link building, and competitive research to find backlinks and identify any potentially damaging links.
Related: How to Optimize a Blog Post for SEO
Best Marketing Tools For Content
Most online marketers today rely on powerful content marketing as a major part of their business strategy. But how do you decide what content to use and where? Luckily, there are effective tools out there to make your job easier.
ClickFunnels
Almost any company today relies on a sales funnel to analyze their Internet presence and online marketing process. Your sales funnel follows the journey that website visitors take as they move towards becoming qualified leads. Qualified leads turn into sales, and the funnels your customers pass through during this process can be analyzed to increase your company’s bottom line. You can use ClickFunnels to create sales, membership, auto-webinar, and hangout funnels, for email integrations, and even for A/B testing. It offers a lot of options that make it a helpful tool for creating and analyzing the effectiveness of your online content.
This fabulous tool lets you use a simple drag-and-drop platform to create a conversion-focused sales funnel focused on your particular offerings in just minutes. The included templates for content make this process even easier, providing an easy way to create and modify online pages to fit your specific products and services. And these templates actually work, because they have been designed based on what has already been successful for other similar companies.
Unbounce
In digital marketing, a landing page is a standalone page on your site that is created to receive traffic from a particular marketing campaign. Landing pages are intended to get visitors to take a specific action such as filling out a form, making a purchase, registering for an account, or downloading information. Unbounce offers users a simple drag and drop editor and dynamic text replacement to easily create custom landing pages to match the particular messaging of any campaign.
This simple tool lets you build these pages quickly, with full creative control and no time-consuming back-end process. As an added bonus, their process helps you build better landing pages for a more positive user experience – which boosts your AdWords Quality Score, lowering your cost-per-click and getting you better placement for your ads. You can even test the effectiveness of your current landing pages to get immediate recommendations to improve your conversion rates.
Related: Essential Tools You Need for Each Stage of Content Marketing
BrightEdge
Most marketers know that the secret to high performing content is that it recognizes consumer’s needs and addresses those needs with specific, targeted information.
This customer-focused process for creating content means marketers have to choose the best, most high-demand topics, or search terms, and optimize their content to make it as visible as possible for the targeted market through search engine results pages, or SERPs.
BrightEdge Smart Content blends the best of search engine optimization with artificial intelligence and content marketing to create high-performing content. This content is self-adjusting, leading to better content discovery and higher visitor engagement. BrightEdge offers a single integrated solution for search intent discovery, optimized content creation, and performance measurement.
Best Marketing Tools For Social Media
Today, almost every brand has at least one online media presence, and most companies have several. Social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are the new places where business is conducted, consumer bases are created, products are advertised, and sales are made. This creates a lot of pressure for businesses to foster a strong, consistent, frequent media presence. Luckily, there are many marketing tools designed to enhance these social platforms and make social media marketing more intuitive – and more lucrative.
GAIN
With GAIN, you can easily manage multiple online accounts as it automates collaboration and approval workflow, notifying the right people, following your timeline, gathering client feedback, and moving the content approval process forward. With a low price that covers an unlimited number of social accounts, posts, and brands, you get unlimited approval rounds and unlimited storage for files, images, and videos. You can create new social accounts, plan and schedule content, solicit collaboration and approval, and edit your content through one easy-to-use app. With an Enterprise version also available, you’ll be impressed by how much this tool can simplify your social media management.
AdParlor
Looking to leverage Facebook ads for your business? AdParlor is a full-service Facebook advertising solution. It offers digital media buying along with creative and audit services for companies of all sizes. You can increase your ROI for your ad spend by letting their experts handle all facets of your marketing campaign, from strategy and creation to reporting and optimization. A proven partner of the world’s most important media platforms, AdParlor specializes in the complex world of media buying with a unique approach to creative management that results in hundreds of thousands of static images and videos to best support your marketing strategy.
Best Marketing Tools For Email
Email has become a huge part of everyday life. Most people receive hundreds of emails every day – whether for work, from friends and family, or from brands and companies they’ve done business with. Emails are a great way of getting a message to your target audience. In fact, email marketing is so effective that it remains one of the most popular marketing channels out there. Luckily, there are a number of helpful tools available help you with all phases of your email marketing campaigns.
Related: Email Marketing Best Practices You Need to Deploy ASAP
Mailchimp
Perhaps the most popular email marketing automation platform out there, MailChimp is easy to use and offers a host of advanced features including tracking opt-in sources and the ability to build and run Facebook and Instagram ads. MailChimp has hundreds of templates and features drag and drop blocks. With it, you can track subscribing behaviors with UTM codes and create fully automated email sequences for your sales funnels. It can also be used to track leads and paying customers, re-engage stale subscribers, personalize content with merge tags, and conduct A/B testing.
Campaign Monitor
Another very popular email marketing tool, Campaign Monitor offers a simple to use, drag and drop email builder and segmenting tool so you can create various campaigns with different contacts. Using their email templates, you can customize all of your emails to fit your specific brand and message. The tool also offers you A/B testing to try out different email designs, subject lines, and even sender details in order to make your campaigns as effective as possible.
Best Marketing Tools For Creative Design
In today’s online world, having a visually appealing website is important. The task of graphic and web designers is to create sites that offer both attractive images and effective content.
Eye-catching visuals work hand-in-hand with fascinating content to convince users to stay on a website.
If you’re a newbie to graphic designing, these essential tools can help you add a professional look and feel to your site.
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop offers a host of automatic options that can add life to your images, making them look professional even if you are a novice. You can combine multiple images, crop images, remove unwanted elements, correct perspective, edit color, and much more. Video editing is smooth, and it even provides a clone stamp tool so that you can copy one area of an image to another, and a channel mixer to repair color. Photoshop works on both Windows and Mac systems, features sharing to sites including Facebook, Revel, Twitter, and Tumblr – and is considered to be one of the best graphic design software programs for beginners.
Illustrator
If you want to create your own logos, icons, sketches, typography, or complicated artwork for videos or mobile apps, then Illustrator is the perfect tool. It lets you generate seamless artwork by drawing pixel-perfect shapes. Designing is fast and easy, and it comes with a number of plugins to help it make web pages shine. Two of its best features are the touch-type and free transform tools. An ideal graphic design software for intermediate users, it can also be used on both Windows and Mac computers via Creative Cloud.
Digital marketing today involves managing a variety of fields including SEO, content, social media, graphic design, and email. Using these online tools can make juggling all of these various marketing channels both easier – and far more effective.
