If you are a digital marketer looking to boost your marketing strategies and ROI, you will want to know about certain tools that can make things easier. With digital marketing tools, you will be able to execute proper strategies in the right manner. These tools are designed to keep things organized, allowing you to make necessary customizations whenever needed.
After facing the challenges in 2022, we have to focus on creating better and more innovative strategies in 2023. In this post, we share the ten most influential and creative digital marketing tools you should experiment with and try if you want to outshine your marketing campaigns in 2022.
9 Digital Marketing Tools You Can Use to Outshine Your Competitors
1. Google Analytics
What we see a lot in new clients who explore digital marketing for the first time is that they don’t know where to start when it comes to utilizing their data. With endless ways for customers to interact with your brand in the modern era — everywhere from in-store to tablets to smart watches — it can become a challenge to piece together a complete picture of your audience. Yet that full understanding of your audience is key to make the right marketing moves. That’s where Google Analytics comes in. As a digital marketing agency, three of our most used functions are:
Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is measured as the number of visitors that come to your site and only view one page before they leave again without completing an action. Bounce rates can gauge if your website is visually appealing, has good content and good user experience, and is easy to navigate if visitors are looking for certain info. While all businesses should take advantage of small adjustments to lower bounce rate, if your bounce rate is significantly above 40%, it’s time to audit your site and figure out what is driving visitors away. Sometimes simple common sense will give you the answer, or maybe you need user testing to identify the issue.
Conversion Rate: This is very straightforward. It reflects the number of visitors who perform a specific action on a page that converts into a lead for you. Why is this important? If you have an action you want users to perform (buy something, book something, download an item, or fill out a form), the conversion rate tells you how effective each of your pages is in leading users to complete that action.
One of our clients, for example, works with a complex eight-step booking system on their website. We’ve implemented Google Analytics and can now tell exactly how often potential bookings don’t get completed and in which step of the process users drop off. That’s crucial information and helps us optimize the process to see higher conversion rates and to craft the best customer experience possible.
Plus, especially with consumers shopping more online, the effectiveness of your website is a vital KPI for e-commerce businesses.
Channels: Where are your visitors coming from? Is it organic search traffic? Referral? Paid? This helps businesses gauge your marketing efforts. For example, if you are running radio ads, you may see a spike in direct traffic because you mention your website at the end of the ad. If you’re investing in SEO, you will see movement — hopefully an increase — in your organic search traffic. If you’re running a Facebook contest, you’d hope to see more visits from social. The breakdown in channels basically helps businesses see which marketing efforts are driving the most eyeballs to their site. By engaging other metrics like bounce rate and conversion rate, you will find out if your website is what users want to see.
2. MailChimp
Constant Contact used to be the go-to service for newsletters until MailChimp came along. MailChimp makes crafting newsletters fun — our designers love it. It’s a fantastic email marketing tool that lets you create, send, and track HTML email campaigns with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop user interface.
From an SEO perspective, we love that it has powerful reporting features and comes with integrations that give its functionality that extra bit of oomph: WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Magento, Salesforce, ZenDesk, Shopify, WooCommerce, Mandrill, Eventbrite, Unbounce, Squarespace, Drupal, Slack, and Google Analytics — just to mention a few. One click and the recipient can share your content on Twitter, helping you increase your exposure!
In terms of understanding your audience and giving them what they want, Mailchimp’s A/B testing feature is gold. It allows you to design two entirely different emails — or just two different subject lines — and send option A to one-half of your subscribers and option B to another while tracking opening rates for both. That way, you collect valuable information about what speaks to your audience and learn how to craft amazing content that drives up your opening rates in the future and ultimately helps increase your page conversions. Since email is still the driving force behind e-commerce purchases this November, you’ll want to definitely up your game to make every email count.
That way, you collect valuable information about what speaks to your audience and learn how to craft amazing content that drives up your opening rates in the future and ultimately helps increase your page conversions. Since email is still the driving force behind e-commerce purchases this November, you’ll want to definitely up your game to make every email count.
3. Canva
Canva for Work has been a great tool for our SEO, editorial, and social teams. We’ve created a template that can easily be used by anyone on the team and is aligned with our brand standards. When working with clients, it is important that the designs used for their social shares are in line with their visual standards and not ours. Thanks to Canva’s template feature, we can create those templates for any of our clients and have a stunning post or blog image done in no time — with no design training required. It saves a lot of time and the flexibility you have within the tool makes it fun to work with.
4. Mention
Mention is a media monitoring and tracking tool that helps you monitor virtually all mentions of your brand online. Mention helps you get the most out of your online promotional efforts by allowing you to track and stay informed of every instance of your brand name online (including web and all major social media). Mention also allows you to stay informed on relevant topical discussions in your industry through keyword tracking, which offers the opportunity for your brand to enter the online discussion in real-time and build brand awareness within relevant audiences.
When you set up Mention, you will create alerts for words and topics you would like to track. These alerts will include your brand name and could also include relevant keywords you would like to track in your industry. The great thing about Mention is that they offer in-depth search refinement functions so you can exclude irrelevant instances of your keywords and you are only notified of the most relevant mentions. Mention will send you daily emails with your results for quick and convenient tracking. Average mentions per day and which sources you are receiving those mentions from also conveniently gets tracked, therefore visualizing your increase or decrease.
5. Trello
If you are looking for a content management tool that will help you brainstorm and strategize content for your digital marketing campaign, you can opt for Trello. It is one of the most popular content management tools used by hundreds and thousands of digital marketers worldwide to create, schedule, and organise content online.
The platform keeps the whole team together, making communication a lot easier and manageable. You can assign multiple members from your team to a single card so that they can work on a project together. This way, you will know who’s in charge of designing, writing, editing, posting, and adding call-to-action offers to a post.
The features of Trello:
- Allows you to create cards and incorporate notes on the card topic while creating deadlines and assigning topics to specific teams.
- Facilitates remote working where your teams can access their tasks and projects from anywhere. Also Read: How to increase productivity while working from home?
You can use Trello for organizing your digital marketing campaigns and ensure that you never miss out on anything that your team is doing.
6. Slack
Digital marketers use Slack every single day. With Slack, you can discuss client work, new articles, new projects, new support tickets, share useful content and send messages.
If you have a distinct team of digital marketers, you will need a powerful medium to make effective communication with them. This is where Slack comes into play.
The features of Slack:
- Makes it easier to communicate with team members over the web in real-time.
- Let you follow everything related to the projects, teams and channels.
- Let you do message and video conferencing too.
- Assist the teams in collaborating from anywhere
While it seems like a messaging app, it does a lot more than that. Slack can potentially tighten up your organizational efficiency. It is not a collaboration or a project management tool. It serves as a messaging platform with a rich collection of options and settings. It lets you have group conversations that are searchable and public, including private conversations. You can change the color scheme of the interface and create different groups.
7. Yoast SEO
You probably have heard of Yoast SEO. It is one of the most talked-about and used WordPress plugins that help digital marketers to optimize their websites to perform better in search results.
Yoast SEO helps with the details where WordPress cannot do much: for submitting sitemaps, managing keywords, creating content, and using webmaster tools, among other aspects.
The features of Yoast SEO:
The tool comes with a plethora of features that helps in optimizing your website.
- Incorporates built-in content analysis, description management, meta keywords, rich snippets, social features, XML sitemaps, as well as features to manage duplicate content.
- Allows you to write better content for your digital marketing campaigns. The plugin provides you access to the Yoast SEO meta box to add meta description and meta title for your content. Moreover, you don’t have to install a third-party plugin for XML sitemaps.
- It automatically produces XML sitemaps for websites and submits them to search engines.
The best part, you can protect your RSS feed from plagiarism and content scrapers. This protects you from other websites copying your content and publishing it as theirs.
8. Ahrefs
Ahrefs offer a suite of search engine optimization tools, making it easier for you to optimize your website based on your marketing requirements. It is primarily used for checking backlinks, and with its massive data index, the tool is definitely one of the most sought after digital marketing tools in the market.
The features of Ahrefs:
- Let you optimize your website.
- Let you find the right websites for your content and strategically choose content topics.
- Helps in analyzing the competitors
- It is a comprehensive SaaS tool that offers snippets of testimonials, data index, and a free trial as well.
- Let you manage your projects.
- Let you track your ranking progress.
9. SEMRUSH
SEMRUSH is an all-in-one marketing toolkit that helps grow the online visibility of the business with SEO, content marketing, market research, advertising, social media management and search engine reputation management.
The features of SEMRUSH:
- Helps in boosting organic traffic with the SEO tools and workflow
- Assist in creating the content which ranks
- Unveils competitors’ strategies and tactics
- Helps you discover the ways of reaching more prospects with less spending
- Supports in building social media strategies.
As per their official website, 7 million marketing professionals like to use SEMRUSH as their digital marketing tool. The tool has won many awards as the best SEO software. The tool is very easy to use where you just have to search out your keyword strategies, apply them and start tracking them. The tool is free for trial, but the user has to opt for paid plans after seven days.
Conclusion
In conclusion, as digital marketing is an area that is continuously changing, organizations must keep up with the newest techniques and patterns. It’s important to remember that different tools will work better for different businesses, depending on their specific goals and target audience. The key is to experiment and find the right combination of tools that work best for you. In addition, it’s also important to stay informed about new trends and developments in the digital marketing world, so that you can adapt and take advantage of new opportunities as they arise.
