Every marketer and business owner knows they need plugins and software to stand a chance in the digital marketing game. However, with thousands of digital marketing tools and different apps, how can one know which will help you execute your digital strategy flawlessly?
To help you narrow your choices, here is a sample of some of the best digital marketing tools the market currently offers, with all their pros and cons, to help you create your essential toolkit for digital marketing dominance.
Table of Contents
- What Are Digital Marketing Tools?
- Best All-in-One Solution: Semrush
- Best SEO Tool: Ahrefs
- Best Social Media Marketing Tool: Hootsuite
- Best Designer Tool: Canva
- Best Digital Marketing Analytics Tool: Google Analytics
- Best Email Marketing Tool: Mailchimp
- Best Lead Generation Tool: Linktree
- Best Lead Capture Tool for Digital Marketing: Pointerpro
- Best Collaboration Tool: Slack
- Best Digital Marketing Tool for Time Management: Clockify
- Finding the Best Digital Marketing Tools
- FAQs
What Are Digital Marketing Tools?
Marketing tools are software, be it apps or tools, assisting in several aspects of your marketing initiatives. They can help engage your audience, attract leads, streamline sales, and retain existing customers, and more.
Put simply, the term refers to a wide range of software, covering everything from SEO, advertising, and social media marketing (SMM) to collaboration and analytics — as you’ll see shortly.
It’s also worth noting that a standalone digital marketing tool likely won’t cover all your bases — for a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, you’ll need a whole suite. Let’s see your options.
Best All-in-One Solution: Semrush
Semrush is an excellent addition to your digital marketing toolkit. SEO strategists and marketers love it, as it can efficiently identify those highly targeted and long-tail keywords that can significantly improve your conversions and traffic.
However, Semrush also offers much more than SEO, including tools for social media, advertising, content marketing, market research, and analytics. SEMrush also has built-in customer relationship management (CRM) reporting, making it a solid all-in-one solution.
This expansive toolkit would make perfect sense for those who are looking for a one-stop marketing toolbox with all the essentials that you’d need for tracking your most important marketing KPIs. Still, those who are just looking for excellent SEO features may find the other functionalities less relevant.
Price:
- Free
- Pro: $129.95/month
- Guru: $249.95/month
- Business: $499.95/month
Pros:
- Broadest feature set among the competition
- Seven-day money-back guarantee
- Unique add-ons like reputation management
Cons:
- Very limited free plan
- Expensive premium plans
- Some businesses may not need all the features
Best SEO Tool: Ahrefs
Regardless of the type of digital marketing you are undertaking, optimizing for search engines is a must. While Semrush boasts great SEO features, Ahrefs has been the go-to tool for many marketers and SEO specialists to reach better SERPs.
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool that will help you find the keywords you should target, evaluate keyword difficulty and volume, and has plenty of SEO analytics features. Ahrefs also allows you to monitor backlinks and offers a clean dashboard that makes the somewhat steep learning curve a lot less difficult to manage.
To get a better feel of how things work with the tool, you can sign up to use a free, limited-access version of the tool, allowing you to check out SEO health, backlink data, keywords, and search traffic, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg compared to the paid plan offerings.
Price:
- Free account
- Lite: $83/month/annual billing, $99/month/monthly billing
- Standard: $166/month/annual billing, $199/month/monthly billing
- Advanced: $333/month annual billing, $399/month/monthly billing
Pros:
- Awesome learning resources
- Lite plan great for small businesses
- Great for competitor analysis
Cons:
- Has a bit of a learning curve
- No free trial with paid plans
- No phone support
Best Social Media Marketing Tool: Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an excellent tool that helps marketers create social media content calendars, publish and schedule content, create account-based streams for better account management, and centralize all incoming social communications into one platform.
One significant advantage of Hootsuite is the “Inspiration” feature, which helps you generate ideas for content. Another AI-based feature is OwlyWriter, which can help you repurpose top-performing content and add a new twist to older ideas.
Lastly, there’s an analytics feature that offers automatic suggestions for optimal posting times, which takes out the guesswork of ideal social sharing.
Price:
- Free plan
- Professional: $99/month
- Team: $249/month
- Enterprise: inquire
Pros:
- Great for keeping social content fresh
- Easy-to-use interface
- Great customer support
Cons:
- Limited free plan
- Analytics can be complicated to set up
- Mobile app version has issues
Best Designer Tool: Canva
Canva is a template-rich and intuitive tool for creating professional visuals for your digital marketing campaign. It has a vast library of images and templates which enables you to create eye-catching graphics and videos in only a few minutes. The drag-and-drop interface makes using the tool easy, not requiring any preexisting design knowledge.
Canva lets you create animated videos, offers a massive option of photo filters, enables you to create custom images, and even comes with team collab features. As visual content helps you engage with your audience, conveys information quickly, boosts brand recognition, increases engagement and shares, and can improve user experience on websites, it’s imperative for digital marketing. Canva can help you achieve all this in an intuitive, easy-to-use package.
Pricing:
- Free version
- Pro plan: $12.95/month or $119.40/year
- Enterprise plan: starts at $30 per user/per month.
Pros:
- Massive template library
- Customizable brand kit
- Collab features
Cons:
- Storage limitations
- Concerns over file quality
Best Digital Marketing Analytics Tool: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that will help you make sense of the data that the websites you’re tracking offer. In short, data can help you better understand how customers interact with websites so you can better evaluate site-specific campaigns. You’ll also have insight into customer demographics and behaviors, allowing you to optimize your digital marketing strategy, improving conversions and boosting platform engagement.
Moreover, what’s excellent about Google Analytics is that all the data will be visually represented, making it even easier to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses. The console also features funnel analysis, which helps you view the entire buyer journey, from clicking on an ad to making a purchase.
Lastly, Google Analytics seamlessly integrates with other Google products or third-party partners, such as Search Ads, Data Studio, Google Ads, Survey 360, Google Search Console, and AdSense.
Pricing:
- Free
Pros:
- Free
- Great from small businesses to enterprises
- Customizable reporting
Cons:
- Steep learning curve
- Poor customer support
- Doesn't comply with EU data protection laws, but that may change in the future
Best Email Marketing Tool: Mailchimp
Mailchimp has been at the forefront of email marketing solutions for quite a while now. Their toolkit offers great email automation features and integrated campaign tools that can deliver content to all channels.
The tool also offers content creation templates, and the drag-and-drop interface enables marketers to create expert-looking emails with little effort. That’s not all, though — Mailchimp can also function as an all-in-one marketing toolbox with content creation, audience data analytics, automation, and more.
Pricing:
- Free basic plan
- Essentials: starts at $13/month
- Standard: starts at $20/month
- Premium: starts at $350
Pros:
- Great email template editor
- Integration with Google Analytics for better reporting
- Offers more than 500 add-ons and integrations
Cons:
- Can’t schedule emails with free plan
- Expensive premium plans
- Lost subscribers are charged for
Best Lead Generation Tool: Linktree
One of the most overlooked lead generation tools for a comprehensive omnichannel digital marketing strategy is Linktree. This simple yet convenient tool lets you create and alter bio links, allowing you to include more than one URL in your social bios, such as online stores, all your other social links, various media, events, and the like.
One massive downside to it is the fact that it’s allegedly banned on Facebook and Instagram. Fortunately, there are several alternatives you can use that come with the same features as Linktree; namely, Shor, Taplink, and Pally.
Of course, leaning only on Linktree and its similar competitors for lead generation would leave much to be desired, as their lead capture capabilities may be limited.
Pricing:
- Free
- Starter: $5/month
- Pro: $9/month
- Premium: $24/month
Pros:
- Easy to use
- Easily update links
- Inexpensive plans
Cons:
- Anecdotal problems with Instagram/Facebook
- Limited analytics
- Limited personalization
Best Lead Capture Tool for Digital Marketing: Pointerpro
Speaking of lead capture, Pointerpro is a comprehensive data-collecting tool that automatically creates personalized advice reports based on assessments. The tool will automatically create customized questionaries based on the provided info. The branded reports are professional, offering instant value to users.
In that regard, Pointerpro can be used both as a lead generation tool that can attract potential clients and customers and as a lead capture that can help gather more information about a potential customer, initiating further communication.
With Pointerpro, marketers can help businesses scale their expertise, offering valuable feedback efficiently. It can be a fine addition to your already running marketing stack, as it can be integrated via Integromat or Zapier. This means you can easily transport your leads through your CRM tools or email marketing software and start turning those leads into conversions.
Pricing:
- Professional plan: $69/month 2000 responses/month - $699 Annually
- Enterprise plan: On request, 5000+ responses/month
- ReportR plan: On request, 10000+ monthly responses
- DistributR plan: On request, 15000+ monthly responses
Pros:
- Great for building highly engaging surveys
- Easy to set up surveys
- User-friendly interface
Cons:
- A bit expensive for the features
- UI feels outdated
- No timer for assessments
Best Collaboration Tool: Slack
Slack is also a popular tool used by digital marketers, and it’s among the most popular interfaces for work-related communications, usually within a company. Slack can be a great collaboration tool for agencies with remote employees, enabling them to find all the relevant resources they ought to have access to.
Slack can be downloaded or used directly via browser, using private and public channels to easily share files or pin messages. It also integrates with Google Drive or Zoom, providing an even more seamless communication experience.
Also, it works well on almost every device and browser, and its Whiteboard feature enables you and your teammates to brainstorm ideas quickly. At the same time, the advanced search function allows you to find old convos and files easily.
Lastly, it offers workflow automation that enables the generation of automatic responses. For instance, other flows can also be set up to give new users helpful info to help them navigate channel-related specifics.
Pricing:
- Free
- Pro: $7.25 per user
- Business+: $12.50 per user
- Enterprise Grid: Custom Quote
Pros:
- Core features available for free
- Ease of use
- Workflow automation
Cons:
- Plans can be expensive
- Free plan can’t access historical data older than 90 days
- Important conversations may get buried above others
Best Digital Marketing Tool for Time Management: Clockify
Clockify is among the leading time management tools on the market. It’s an excellent option for digital marketing agencies who want to improve time management on projects, tasks, or even their entire scope of work. It comes with several features that are beyond mere time management.
The timekeeping features include calendars, clock-ins and outs, time tracking, and timesheets. The reporting features include reports, activity tracking, dashboards, project forecasting, and progress, while the management functionality covers expense management, invoicing time-off management, and scheduling.
The tool also comes with a forever-free version, ideal for small businesses with tighter budgets.
Pricing:
- Free version
- Basic: $3.99/ user/month
- Standard: $5.49/ user/ month
- Pro: $7.99/user/month
- Enterprise: $11.99/user/month
Pros:
- Feature-rich free version
- 7-day pro trial with no credit card info
- Automatic timer and idle features
Cons:
- Time entry errors need to be fixed manually
- Manual payroll export software
- Confusing Kiosk features
Finding the Best Digital Marketing Tools
While many tools boast comprehensive digital marketing capabilities, the reality is that you’ll likely need multiple solutions, and which among those are best for you depends on your needs. That said, the tools we’ve listed are all but essential, as they generate and amplify results as well as enhance productivity.
If you’re heavily relying on content as part of your digital marketing efforts, leveraging the right content management and SEO platforms will be crucial. On the other hand, if you’re having trouble generating and capturing leads, as well as tracking follow-ups and creating forms, you ought to look into tools that fit that bill.
FAQs
What are Digital Marketing Tools?
Digital marketing tools are software that help you with your marketing efforts online. They range from SEO tools, design tools, and email automation to reporting dashboards and lead generation software. Digital marketers usually agree that to get the most out of their marketing efforts, business owners should use a collection of these tools that complement and enhance each other.
Which Digital Marketing Tool is the Best?
Comprehensive options like SEMrush or Mailchimp are great all-in-one options, and Google Analytics can be a handy tool for better understanding site visitors.
That said, defining the best is almost impossible, as different businesses or website owners will use these tools for other purposes. For example, bloggers may not need such detailed lead generation reports, as they may rely on organic traffic to gain a more substantial online presence.
How Many Digital Marketing Tools Should I Have?
Focus on the tools that align with your marketing objectives, provide valuable insight, and expand your toolkit as your business needs grow.
Determining the exact number of tools you need, however, depends on several things, such as your marketing objectives, resources, and business size. Marketers usually advise covering the basics with social media management, content management, SEO, email marketing, and analytics tools. Starting with these can help you familiarize yourself with their basic features and the necessities of running sound digital marketing campaigns.
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