Like any profession, a marketer is only as effective as their tools. If the available tools are insufficient and you find yourself looking for alternatives, then it’s time to pause, take a deep breath, and think about how to do things better.
It could be said that if you don’t use any marketing tools or platforms, you’re making your life harder. You probably spend a lot of time digging into data, trying to figure out what’s going on and how to turn marketing or sales data into something that can be used.
What Can Marketing Tools Help With?
There is an abundance of apps, tools, and platforms that marketers can access to make their lives easier. These expert tools span a breadth of specialisms, including but not limited to:
- Analytics
- Reporting
- SEO
- Behavioural analysis
- CRM (customer relationship management)
- Automation
- Email marketing
The choice of which tool is best or even right for you is overwhelming. So, to help you out in the process, we’ve listed some of the best marketing tools available across the range of marketing specialisms listed above.
The Best Website Analytics Tools Available
Access to data enables us to make decisions. It tells us what is working and the volumes associated. For example, web analytics tools tell us the channel(s) that drive the most traffic to our site, i.e. organic search, referral traffic or social media. They also tell us additional metrics, such as:
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Average time on page
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Average session duration
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Average pages per session
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New vs returning users
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Bounce rate (The percentage of visitors who do not click through to any other pages)
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Location of visitors
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that enables marketers to track, report on and understand website traffic. Google Analytics is arguably the most popular form of analytics tracking.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity provides marketers with the same type of analytics as Google Analytics – gain a deep understanding of where visitors are coming from, how long they’re spending on your website and what content is performing best.
The Best SEO tools Available
SEO is a minefield for most marketers, with very few understanding what it is, why it’s so important and how to do it effectively. Too many think that stuffing a webpage with keywords and phrases is sufficient. It is not. But there is some good news! There are enough marketing platforms, tools, and apps available to help you master SEO once and for all. Here is a couple…
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a set of web-based tools that enable SEOs and/or marketers to boost their website’s search presence. The tools available include:
- Site Explorer, which enables you to look at competitor analysis of both backlinks and keyword position rankings
- Keyword Explorer, which enables you to find market-leading keywords to drive relevant and valuable traffic to your site
- Site Audit, which helps you identify what is preventing your site from ranking on Google or Microsoft’s Bing
- Rank Tracker, which helps you see where your site performs within SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
- Content Explorer, which helps you to create content based on search intent, as well as find backlink opportunities
Ahrefs claims to provide everything you need to rank higher and get more traffic.
Moz.com
Moz is a website that breaks down SEO into really layman’s terms, helping marketers understand the basic concept of SEO. It is also home to a range of tools that marketers can use to drive forward their search engine optimisations by understanding domain and page authority and how to tackle on-page and technical SEO.
Moz calls itself the “proven, all-in-one SEO toolset,” which includes site audits, rank tracking across 170+ search engines, backlink analysis, and keyword research.
SEMrush
SEMrush is an SEO tool that supports marketers in conducting keyword research. From there, it helps them to track keyword positions and understand the SEO and keyword strategies that their competitors are using. It also enables marketers to understand their existing backlink volumes, as well as identify opportunities to drive new backlinks.
SERanking
SERanking is an emerging competitor in the SEO space, supporting marketers with a wide range of SEO functions:
- Position tracking
- Competitor analysis
- Website audits & on-page SEO checkers
- Keyword & competitor research
It claims to be “all-in-one SEO software made simple”.
The Best Website Behavioural Analysis Tools Available
Why is behavioural analysis important you may ask? Simply, it enables marketers to see how website visitors interact with their website.
When we build or rebuild a website, we make a lot of assumptions as to the website journey; how people will move between pages, how they will interact with landing pages, and so on. Behavioural analysis tools help marketing teams to know for sure if their assumptions and hypothesis’ are accurate.
HotJar
HotJar claims to be able to provide everything that marketers want to know about their website that analytics are unable to show.
HotJar’s solutions include:
- Page heatmapping
- Website recording playback, enabling marketers to see exactly how somebody has interacted with their website.
- Feedback forms & surveys
HotJar boasts of being used by over 1 million websites in over 180 countries.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is a free-to-use solution built by Microsoft, which enables marketers to understand how users interact with their websites. It enables marketers to replay website sessions and understand how users interact with their websites. It also provides heatmaps to show the most clicked/engaged sections of any website or landing page.
Mouseflow
Mouseflow provides marketers with the insights required to understand what is happening at every touchpoint of your users’ journey. It helps marketers find user/visitor pain points and identify website optimisation opportunities that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The Best CRM Tools Available
HubSpot
HubSpot is arguably one of the best sales & marketing engines out there. It enables marketing & sales to work together effortlessly to drive forward business growth.
As a CRM, HubSpot supports in the following ways:
- Contact & company management
- Robust contact engagement tracking; i.e., emails sent and received, phone calls made & received
- Detailed insights on contact website engagement
- Prospect tools, which enable you to see who has visited your website and which company from (where applicable and available)
HubSpot’s CRM is the foundation for its wider sales, marketing, service, CMS and operations solutions.
Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft Dynamics (Sometimes referred to as Dynamics 365, akin to Microsoft 365) enables sales and marketing teams to manage, track, and store information related to their existing and potential customers. Available in both cloud-based and on-premises solutions, Dynamics boasts a fully customisable solution.
In addition to Dynamics as a CRM, it has additional plugins and functionality that enable it to be layered up as a marketing engine, as well as a customer service, commerce, supply chain, HR and finance tool – a one-stop-shop for small to medium-sized businesses.
The Best Reporting Tools available
Looker Studio
Looker Studio (Previously known as Google Data Studio) allows marketers to display data from a wide range of sources in a quick, easy and visual way.
Through its integrations, marketers can combine almost all of their data sources into one central real-time dashboard.
Looker studio supports data from platforms such as:
- Website analytics
- Ad platforms (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Ads & Microsoft Ads)
- Video analytics
- Email marketing analytics
- CRM analytics
- Google Sheets
Whatagraph
Whatagraph is marketed at both agencies and in-house teams and provides a real-time automated reporting dashboard solution, which enables marketers to show data in a visual way. It’s integrations with multiple platforms offer an automated way to report on day-to-day or campaign metrics.
The Best Email Marketing Tools Available
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor helps marketers to “drive results with unforgettable marketing”.
It’s easy to use drag and drop builder has helped the platform to sustain a large number of users. It supports traditional ad-hoc, one-off campaign building, as well as email automation and transactional email sending.
MailChimp supports the segmentation of all email types utilising the data avilable in-platform or provided by an API.
For agencies, Campaign Monitor has an effective, easy to use interface that enables agency workers to switch between accounts seamlessly. It also enables margin and credit adding and for end-users to have some level of management with their own account.
MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the longest-standing enterprise email solutions, suitable for businesses of all shapes and sizes. It’s drag and drop functionality enables marketers to create simple and nice looking emails with ease.
Alongside its basic email building functionality, it offers the ability to execute sophisticated email automation and to trigger emails via API data. In addition, with MailChimp, marketing teams can spin up basic campaign landing pages in a quick and easy manner.
MailChimp claims to be able to help marketers “turn emails into revenue”, and boasts over 12 million registered users globally.
Omnisend
Omnisend is an integrated email marketing and web push notification tool, which works seamlessly with ecommerce solutions such as Shopify, BigCommerce and so on.
It enables marketers to send ad-hoc, one-off emails as well as trigger automated workflows based on consumer behaviours.
The Best Design Tools Available
Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe’s Creative Cloud solutions are some of the most popular tools. Built for designers rather than marketers, they enable creatives to create the most incredible designs.
Creative Cloud includes solutions such as:
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- InDesign
- Premiere Pro
Canva
Canva is an incredibly powerful design tool with both web-based and application-based solutions. It supports marketers with little to no design experience in creating beautiful and engaging assets.
Complete with brand kids, Canva makes executing branded assets easier than ever before.
Canva templates support website building, product mock-ups (i.e., mugs, posters and clothing), social media and so on. In addition to this, Canva also supports the creation of basic animated assets.
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