Top Digital Marketing Tools You Need
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If you work in digital marketing you know that trends and tools are constantly changing. We’ve put together a list of the top digital marketing tools you’ll likely need (or be aware of).
Paid Ads
Google Ads is a product of Google (go figure), the largest search engine out there. Google Ads allow you to reach new customers and re-engage with past customers. Google Ads offers advertising across a variety of platforms.
Google Search Network is an intent driven platform where users are actively searching for something. With the Google Search Network you utilize relevant keywords about your product or service to get in front of potential customers.
Google Display Network is often used for retargeting website visitors using still images or motion graphics.
Google Discovery Ads utilizes intent signals to personalize ad experiences and show ads to highly interested people. This includes a mixture of visuals, text and logos to generate the ads.
YouTube Video Ads capture your audience's attention while they’re streaming content on YouTube. With Google’s targeting options, you can target your videos to play on relevant channels/topics to your business or retarget those who have visited your site.
Google App Campaigns is used to encourage app installs. Ads are placed within the Google Search and Display Networks, as well as within Google Play and on YouTube.
Google Ads is PPC meaning you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Facebook Ads continue to be the go-to for social media advertising. Facebook owns a large amount of user data which allows advertisers to pick from a variety of audience targeting options such as demographics, geographics, interests and life events.
2022 will continue to see videos with the most engagement for ads. Mobile also continues to be the number one place people are viewing these ads. With that noted, it’s important to ensure your ad content, whether it’s video or image, is optimized for a mobile experience. That includes making sure your video ads can be viewed with sound off and still produce the same message.
TikTok has gained a lot of popularity over the last couple of years with over 1.5 billion users worldwide. While it does cater to a younger audience, with roughly 50% of users being under the age of 34, it is a great place to get your message out in front of millions of people.
Take a look at some of the best TikTok ads of 2021 and learn how you can start engaging with your audience.
Analytics
Owned by Google, Google Analytics is one of the most popular and powerful website analytics tools out there. Its robust features give you great insights into your website visitors such as their demographics, geographics, how they find your site and how they interact with it.
As you should already know, Google has introduced Google Analytics 4 or GA4. GA4 focuses on user engagement with your website and automatically includes insights such as button clicks, scrolls, downloads and more. While still in beta mode, now is the time to start familiarizing yourself with GA4.
Similarweb is a competitive digital marketing intelligence tool that gives you a 360-degree view of your industry and provides a performance overview of your website compared to your competitors.
Hotjar helps you understand how visitors interact with your website by creating heatgraphs and recordings to show your visitors behaviour while on your website.
Automation
Hubspot Marketing Hub is one of three “hubs” Hubspot offers. It is a full funnel marketing automation tool that includes a CRM system, email marketing, automation, social media management, landing pages and more.
Marketo is a marketing automation service owned by Adobe. It allows you to easily build and automate marketing campaigns. It doesn’t include a CRM system.
Pardot is Salesforce’s B2B marketing automation solution. It is a sales driven marketing solution that allows companies to use automation to engage potential customers and close more deals.
Mailchimp is not only an email marketing service, it also allows you to run Facebook ad campaigns, automate email follow-ups and monitor your campaigns.
Unlike other email marketing services, Sendinblue charges by the number of emails sent, not the number of contacts you have. It also has website chat functionality, SMS marketing, automated email follow-ups, landing pages and campaign management.
Constant Contact is an email marketing tool that caters to small businesses. It has built-in social media integration with basic email automation.
Social Media Management
Hootsuite helps you manage your social media platform engagements all through one dashboard. It also allows you to schedule your posts in advance and supports the leading social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest.
Buffer is also an all-in-one platform for your social media management with the ability to schedule your posts. Buffer offers an additional feature which allows you to build Landing Pages for campaigns in minutes.
Sprout Social is similar to Hootsuite in that you can manage all of your social media platforms through one dashboard. What differentiates it is that it also has customer relationship management (CRM) features.
Later has been on the rise as a social media management tool. Not only does it allow you to schedule posts and track user engagements, it allows you to easily find user generated content to add to your social feeds. Later even includes a linkin.bio to help drive your followers to your website.
Design
Canva is a free design tool that allows you to quickly create graphics for social media. You can upload your own logos and images or scroll through their library. Paid subscriptions are available to access their Pro content library.
Formerly known as Crello, includes thousands of templates to use for social media content design. It also allows you to create animated graphics.
The Adobe Creative Cloud has over 20+ design programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and more. These programs are for more experienced users and offer plans for individual products or for bundles of products.
SEO
Semrush is a single platform that covers SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing. It helps you with keyword research and how you rank compared to competitors.
MOZ provides your websites ranking data on Google, Bing and Yahoo searches and helps you keep your website at the top of the page for relevant search results.
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool that includes auditing of your website, site explorer to analyze competitors, keyword explorer, content explorer and rank tracker to keep track of your ranking progress.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that helps improve your onsite SEO. The free version allows you to crawl 500 URLs, or they offer a paid version.
Search Console is a free tool that helps track your website performance as well as which organic keywords are bringing visitors to your site.
Project Management
Trello is a free and paid project management system providing a digital board to display, organize and prioritize tasks between team members.
Asana is a web and mobile project management app designed to help teams keep track and manage their work with team members.
Basecamp is a project management tool (desktop and mobile) used to keep track of tasks, deadlines, files and discussions between team members.
Written by Cheryl Goeres
Stay Updated On Digital Marketing Tools
Keep yourself up-to-date on the top digital marketing tools with Jelly Academy’s Digital Marketing Bootcamp. It covers Google Ads, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, SEO, Social Media, Public Relations and a variety of other digital marketing tools.
