Using the best digital marketing tools can be a game changer for your business. But with so many options, how do you pick which services are worth your time and money? In this article, we list the best of the best to cover all of your in-house digital marketing needs:
We all know how important valuable content is for a business. Do you struggle with coming up with trending topics relevant to your business? Do you also wonder what types of content your competitors are producing or how to find key influencers? Enter BuzzSumo. It's the best tool we’ve found for discovering fresh, trending content across the entire Internet. Simply enter a combination of keywords and let BuzzSumo do the work. BuzzSumo is a powerful way to help business find new content ideas for all of your social media and website publishing needs. A basic account is free and there are fees associated with more features.
For marketing professionals and business owners, identifying excellent long-tail keyword search phrases to target can be a major challenge! Ubersuggest is a free tool that offers a simple method for finding the right keywords to target for your business, especially those difficult to find long-tail search terms. But Ubersuggest doesn't stop there. They also provide free tools for analyzing a domain (great for competitive analysis). You'll also find Ubersuggest's “Top SEO Pages Report” can easily find which of your competitor’s pages are ranking well for your targeted keyword terms. 100% brilliant and very necessary if you’re trying to get your business to organically rank with the search engines.
There are several email marketing service provides that provide free account levels with anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 emails per month and around 2,000 subscribers. Above that, with almost all email marketing platforms, you have to pay for the upgrade to handle more subscribers and emails. Where Benchmark stands apart from their competitors is in their email designer tool. With their WYSIWYG editor, digital marketers can create top-notch HTML email designs that look amazing. Benchmark also provides all the necessary reports you need to track the results of your campaigns. Benchmark's free plan includes up to 2,000 subscribers and 14,000 emails sent per month.
If you feel like you're constantly swamped with multiple time sucks when it comes to your digital marketing tasks, you need to give IFTTT a try. IFTTT stands for “if this then that”. What it does is allow you a way to automate your marketing campaigns using a chain reaction of events, which they refer to as “recipes”. Using IFTTT, you can setup rules for what you want to have done when an action has been triggered. It will take a little bit to learn and setup, but it is a very powerful tool for saving digital marketers time and money. IFTTT is a free service and there are a ton of recipes you can use to automate posts to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. Click here for more information on how to use IFTTT to automate your marketing tasks.
Professional graphic designers can be expensive and it's best to utilize them for when your business needs some heavy lifting in the design world. However, if you just need to edit an image or add some text or create a simple graphic for your social media channels, Canva is a great resource.
Canva is super simple to use and can save you time and money by giving you the ability to create fast, powerful graphics on the fly. Canva includes easy to use design templates that are available in specific dimensions for each social media platform.
They also provide access to royalty-free images and a huge selection of graphic tools. Canva has a free membership level and they also have an upgraded level for $12.95 per month per team member, which is good if you're collaborating on larger projects.
How valuable would it be to know what is working and what isn't working on your website? Crazy Egg does just that. It gives you details on what your visitors are doing once they reach your website. Crazy Egg is also a very powerful tool when it comes to your A/B testing. You can test different images, button colors, headlines and content to see which creates more engagement with your visitors.
Crazy Egg provides a heat map overlay of your website so you can see visually where people are clicking. They offer all of their membership levels with a free 30-day trial. After that, it will cost you a minimum of $24 per month, but if your website(s) generate a lot of traffic, it is well worth the investment.
Do you have trouble coming up with powerful headlines for your blog and social media posts? Then it's time to give CoSchedule a try. CoSchedule will help you create attention-grabbing headlines that get your visitors to click and keep reading, ultimately spending more time on your website.
Simply go to CoSchedule's website, then enter your headline and receive your score, along with helpful tips on improving your score. Spending a few minutes using this free tool can make a huge different in your click through rates and user engagement. Try and shoot for a score above 70, if you can.
The Hemingway App is a free tool for improving your content. It's a must for anyone publishing fresh posts on their website. Simply enter your content into their form and it will give you a critique with recommendations on how to improve the quality of your content. It will show you which sentences are too long, those that are difficult to read and areas where passive voice is being used.
Their “Simplifier Tool” is awesome and provides you a time saving way for finding simpler synonyms to use that will improve your readability score. This tool is 100% free and can make a huge difference in how well your visitors engage with your content. We recommend testing your next article before you publish and see what it can do for you.
Sprout Social is the best social media marketing tool we've used. They offer a free 30-day trial. The entry-level account is $99 per month, but if you are doing large social media campaigns, it's well worth the investment. Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media-marketing tool. It provides a way for marketing managers and business owners to better control and executes their social media marketing campaigns. Sprout Social features include full post scheduling capabilities, a detailed analytics platform, and even a social listening platform to better understand how your demographics use your platforms of choice.
Time is money. If you're a digital marketing professional or a business owner handling your own marketing campaigns, you definitely need the best tools at your disposal. Without the proper tools to get the job done right, you'll only experience sub-par results, wasting your time and money.
Remember that it doesn't have to cost you an arm and a leg to automate your marketing tasks. Automating just a few of your minor marketing tasks can make a huge difference in your timesavings, week-to-week and month-to-month. Too much to handle on your own? We work with tons of clients, nationwide, to manage all of their social media and content marketing needs
Email us at info@rmimpr.com or call 480-305-2017 for more information on our social media and digital marketing packages.