All digital marketing tools have been designed with a single purpose in mind – that to make yours, the digital marketer’s, life easier.
However, with the sea of tools out there, it’s pretty easy to get lost in the storm and lose sight of the tools that can actually make a difference and help you accomplish the bevy of tasks that are always on your agenda.
What can make things even worse is the fact that tools you’ve been using for years might not prove to be useful anymore on account of being outdated.
Add to that your busy schedule, means you have no time whatsoever to figure out which digital marketing tools should be a part of your kitty in 2019.
Well, fret not my dear friend for I have a handy list of the most useful digital marketing tools of 2019 ready for you. Make these tools a part of your arsenal and you will have a smooth sailing run for the year and after. I can promise you that!
For your convenience, I’ve divided the list into specific categories so you know the purpose each tool serves-
Email Marketing Tools
Email marketing is still one of the most effective and crucial ways of generating leads. Despite the clouds of doubt over its future, it’s still used extensively by businesses all over the world. You can use the tools given below to create powerful email marketing campaigns-
1. MailChimp
An obvious one on the list, MailChimp should be you go-to tool for whenever you wish to create mass email marketing campaigns.
This social advertising and email marketing tool can automate your campaigns and even show you the traffic you’ve managed to attract via your campaigns. Moreover, with MailChimp, you get the option to integrate with other SaaS companies as well.
If you plan on starting an email drip campaign, you won’t find a better tool than MailChimp. All in all, you can’t go wrong with this tool if you want to connect with your audience.
2. BuzzStream
Spending time on routine emails is only a waste of time. BuzzStream can automate the process for you, making your life as a marketer so much easier than before.
One of the key highlights of BuzzStream is that it helps you find influencers for your campaigns so you can communicate with them in easier and more effective manner.
This email outreach tool offers the facility of collecting site data, which includes contact details. The contact data collected is then added to your personal database as well as email templates. With BuzzStream, you can collect data from social media channels as well. So that’s a total win win!
What’s more, you don’t have to get another email service to keep tabs on your mail. BuzzStream stores all the information you could possibly need on your user account.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tools
A properly planned and implemented SEO strategy can take your brand to new heights – both in terms of sales and fame. Hence, keeping your site search engine optimised at all times is a must. And you need tools like these for that-
3. Ahrefs
You’ve probably only heard nice things about Ahrefs and the reason for that is it’s actually worthy of all the praise it gets!
Ahrefs is one of the most comprehensive SEO tools out there. Their keyword bank is HUGE! literally of monstrous proportions. You get a database of around 150 million keywords to skyrocket your traffic and this is just for the US. They have a large bank of keywords for 150 other countries as well.
You can use Ahrefs to conduct competitive analysis to see what your rivals are up to. Ahref has an in-built tool as well, called Content Gap, which can be used to identify the weaknesses of your content so you can work on them.
Feature-packed to the brim, Ahrefs is a great SEO tool to have at your disposal.
4. Google PageSpeed Insights
So you’ve got a tool for keyword analysis. Well, that’s like a glass half full. You need another tool to make your glass full, and that is Google PageSpeed Insights.
The download time of your website plays a crucial role in determining the time a visitor will spend on your site. If any single page site takes more than 3 seconds to load, the chances of the user leaving increase dramatically.
Google PageSpeed Insights can help you know the download time of your site. You can analyse the speed of individual pages as well. The tool allows you to analyse the speed of both desktop and mobile versions of your site, which is always a bonus.
The highlight of the tool is that it offers you actionable measures you can take to improve the download time of your site and its individual pages.
Advertising Tools
What’s one of the most effective ways to let people know about your brand? Ads! Digital display ads are the new way to make your presence felt among your target consumer base. So as a digital marketer, it is your duty to ensure ad campaigns are done right. These tools can help you-
5. Google AdWords
Well-known and well-loved, Google AdWords is your safest bet, irrespective of whether you’re starting out or are a pro digital marketer.
AdWords’ simple and convenient interface coupled with the wide variety of features make it the most effective ad campaigns tool you’ll ever use.
If you use it right, your site will be featured right on top of the search results page under the section titled “sponsored links”, making for a great promotion for your brand. It’ll show up on Google’s partner sites as well.
A major advantage of AdWords is its flexibility. You get the option to set a specific budget for a limited time; change the ad content or the keywords in it; and restrict your ad to a particular time slot or geographical area.
Since AdWords is integrated with Google’s Keyword Planner, you get the benefit of choosing the best keywords for your ad as well so they are always featured right on top of the results page!
6. Adroll
Making your audience visit your website is the purpose of ads – a purpose that can be easily achieved with the help of social media re-marketing tool, Adroll.
What Adroll does is redirect visitors on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms to your website. This is a very useful tool when it comes to re-engaging your customers.
You can use Adroll to place highly personalised ads based on your audience’s purchase history and target them to buy something they may have missed out on previously.
The tool can track 300+ signals as well categorise visitors and shoppers with the help of its algorithms, leading to a huge jump in sales for your business. This makes Adroll the perfect tool for e-commerce sites.
Social Media Marketing Tools
Social media being one of your primary focus areas as a digital marketer, you will have to have tools that can help you reach a wider audience in a more effective manner. Here are a couple of advanced tools to get you started-
7. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a simple yet powerful social media management tool. You can use Hootsuite to store all your content on cloud, which your team can then access 24×7 to post on different social media platforms. That’s what makes it so popular!
Hootsuite comes loaded with additional features as well. Of the most useful of these (and my personal favorite) is the ability to track the performance of the content you post on different social media channels.
This tool can also help you track your ROI and conversions along with the conversations your audience has on relevant topics or your brand. It’s like getting you everything you possibly need under one roof!
8. Buffer
Buffer gives you the facility to automate social media posts for all your accounts on a single platform. Which means you don’t have to go through the hassle of logging into ten different accounts or even remembering their passwords for that matter!
Another useful feature of Buffer is analytics. Via this feature, you can track the performance of your social media posts (just like in Hootsuite) and see if they’re doing well. The type of the content that’s doing well is the kind that obviously ticks.
Buffer is one of the easiest to use social media marketing tools. It takes only a couple of minutes to set it up and get started. Plus, there are advanced options too if that’s what you’re looking for.
Web Analytics and Report Tools
Analytics forms the core of digital marketing. No matter the size and budget of your campaign, you can’t keep it afloat if you don’t have proper analytics backing it up. But to have to get the right analytics reports, you need the right analytics tools-
9. Google Analytics
Google Analytics needs no introduction! It is the gold standard for analytics in the industry and rightfully so. As a digital marketer, you should have basic knowledge of Google Analytics as this is the tool that you will have to use extensively to know how your marketing campaigns are performing.
The core feature of Google Analytics is traffic tracking. This tool allows you to know who is visiting your website, where are they from, how long they spend on your website and which page they spend their maximum time on.
That’s not all though. You can track conversions and events, set up new goals and even get multi-channel sequence reports if that’s what you desire.
10. Facebook Analytics
Since a huge chunk of your social media posts will be on Facebook, it only makes sense to use Facebook’s own analytics tool – Facebook Analytics.
One of the most powerful and useful tools out there, Facebook Analytics comes packed with plenty of features.
With this robust tool, you can analyse user interactions via sales funnels for Facebook ads and advanced goal paths.
What makes Facebook Analytics a smart analytics tool is the fact that it comes integrated with AI or artificial intelligence. This technology allows the tool to present key insights to you such as the number of conversions that occur through your content.
You also get a custom dashboard and omni-channel support as cherry on top.
Other Important Marketing Tools
Apart from the tools mentioned above, quite a few other tools should be a part of your digital marketing tools collection. Each of these serves a different purpose and is highly useful. Check them out below-
Currently, Slack enjoys immense popularity as a business communication tool. With a focused approach to information-based communication, it’s pretty difficult to get distracted and not get the answers you want when communicating with your team. Slack also gives you the opportunity to network and meet with other digital marketers so you can share your know-how and wisdom.
11. Tool for voice search – SEMrush
Voice search is an emerging trend in marketing – one with a lot of potential. SEMrush is the tool that can help you harness that potential and use it to your advantage. You get a full list of voice search keywords along with their search volumes and difficulty level so you can optimize your website content accordingly.
12. Tool for sentiment analysis – Brand24
A social listening tool, brand 24 works by gathering every single public mention of your entered keyword. It analyzes the data collected and segregates them into comments with positive, negative or neutral sentiments. All of this data is presented to you on a neat dashboard so you can view the analysis easily.
13. Tool for chatbot – MobileMonkey
A highly intuitive customer service and marketing chatbot tool for Facebook Messenger, MobileMonkey can help you land new leads and promote your content. It can also increase your sales and the number of sign-ups you get on your site. Moreover, setting up and using MobileMonkey is very easy.
14. Tool for images – Unsplash
Stock photos will always be in mind. And in 2019, the best tool to use for stock photos is Unsplash. Unsplash has a large library of free, high quality photos you can use for blogs, ads, newsletters or even website content. You don’t even have to sign up to use free images!
15. Tool for personalization – Evergage
If you want a tool that can effectively manage customer data for you, Evergage is the way to go. This handy personalization tool can help you accomplish plenty of other tasks as well. Via the tool, you can know more about your audience and discover the intent behind them visiting either the desktop or the mobile version of your website. You can even respond to consumer questions in real-time among other things.