The evolution of marketing in the digital marketplace has forever changed the way companies conduct business. With the opportunity to reach a much broader audience than ever, brands can better connect and engage with their consumers. To ensure that your digital strategy is performing well, there are eight essential digital marketing tools that you need to incorporate into your daily marketing tactics.
A great way to connect with your audience and get some valuable feedback is to send out surveys. Asking your customers about their experience with your brand, products or services is crucial to understanding your target audience’s preferences.
PointerPro is a third-party application that allows you to create easy interactive surveys. You can fully customize the assessments for your brand and generate PDF reports from each response. Each survey concludes with a personalized report, quote, or another next step for a streamlined nurture flow.
Surveys could also be a fun, engaging part of your marketing strategy. PointerPro is flexible enough that you can build personality tests, quizzes, digital slot machines, and many other interactive experiences. Use them as a lead-capture tool or to provide value to your prospects.
PointerPro offers mobile-friendly templates, PDF reports, branching logic, analytics, and other powerful features. The Essential plan starts at $49/month and allows up to 400 monthly responses. For $69/month, you gain advanced question logic, custom scoring, email integration, and more. Start with the free trial to get a sense of how it could help your business grow.
If you are running a small- to medium-sized company, you may find that communications are a lot easier with the help of Slack. This well-loved messaging tool is designed to reduce lengthy email chains and keep teams in closer touch. More importantly, Slack embraces a human-first philosophy that has helped transform workplaces across industries.
The best part about Slack is its ability to integrate your CRM and project management tools for simpler collaboration. You can also install a wide variety of third-party apps to share data, manage service requests, and develop code. This versatility can help your marketing team nurture leads and churn out new content with greater efficiency.
Pricing ranges from the Free plan, which allows basic messaging, audio and video calls, and 10 integrations, to the Business plan ($15/user/month), which offers more security features and unlimited integrations. Enterprise custom pricing is also available.
Your marketing team will thank you when you bring Trello into the workplace. As a visual project management platform, this application is especially useful for brainstorming, content mapping, and your overall marketing strategy. It’s easy to use yet packs some powerful features. This makes it an excellent tool for collaboration, even if your team members are scattered across the globe.
Trello is similar to a Kanban board, a classic project management tool. However, it’s incredibly versatile. Team members can interact with “Cards” on a “board.” These cards include tasks, files, reminders, notes, and links to your other marketing tools.
Trello offers many integrations, called “Power-Ups,” for everything from Google Drive to Slack. You can also run automations, such as marking a card as a different status when all tasks are completed.
The free plan is fairly robust, offering 10 boards per workspace with unlimited Power-Ups and 250 automations/month. If you need more boards or automations, advanced features, or guest users, you can upgrade to $5/user/month.
SEO is a critical part of digital marketing, but it’s much more than keyword lists and backlinks. Neil Patel, a renowned expert in all things SEO, knows this well, which is why his brand acquired Ubersuggest.
As the name implies, Ubersuggest generates keyword ideas to help your content rank highly in search engines. It also provides in-depth keyword analysis for both your site and competitor pages, as well as content suggestions and backlink reports.
You can see how your content is performing and get suggestions on which keywords to include. Or, reverse-engineer your competitors’ success by targeting the key phrases and content ideas that have gained them traffic. Ubersuggest is a must-have tool for any team that uses content marketing.
Pricing starts at $29/month for the Individual plan, which covers 1 website. Higher tiers range up to $99/month for businesses managing 15 or more sites. All plans include historical keyword data, competitor analysis, and daily SEO reports.
As social networks are crucial to many businesses’ marketing strategies, a professional management tool is a huge time-saver. Thankfully, SharpSpring combines powerful automation, scheduling, and social listening tools.
But after creating so much great content, why not get the most bang for your buck?
MeetEdgar helps your social marketing team save some precious time by automatically repurposing evergreen content. It can be a helpful complement to your active social campaigns, plugging in gaps and driving more engagement with the content you’ve already created.
MeetEdgar does not offer advanced CRM integration, trigger-based campaigns, lead scoring, or the other functions of an all-in-one tool such as SharpSpring. But it’s an easy way to repurpose your social content and keep your audience engaged.
If you have done any sort of marketing, then you have most likely already heard of Canva. As a free design platform, it’s currently one of the most recognizable marketing tools available. However, Canva for Teams offers powerful branding, collaboration, and social scheduling tools.
Canva’s basic features are already quite robust. You can drag-and-drop designs, edit videos, record your screen, instantly enhance photos, and perform many other creative tasks with a few clicks. Canva is quite intuitive and allows even non-designers to easily create stunning content.
Upgrading gets you access to a huge digital library of design templates and elements, plus premium assets, custom fonts, and more. The instant re-sizing feature is worth the price alone, making it simple to duplicate and edit designs for all platforms.
In Canva for Teams, you can also leave comments on drafts, assign revisions, then get approval and publish designs from within the platform. Canva lets you customize everyone’s access, generate collaboration projects, share your brand identity, and other coordinate your entire creative team.
Pricing varies depending on the number of users and whether you wish to pay monthly or yearly. For a team of 2-5 people, Canva for Teams costs $149.90/year.
Google Ads is one of the world’s most popular paid-media vendors, and with its versatility, that’s no surprise. Your options include search ads or YouTube video ads, or you can connect to a wide variety of publishers on the Google Display Network. Ads are pay-per-click or pay-per-call.
Google Ads is now part of the Google Marketing Platform, which includes Google Analytics for your website and other digital channels. You can see who is visiting your website, how they found it, and how long they spent browsing your pages. You will also have the ability to track conversion and see where the hotspots are throughout your website.
Google Marketing Platform also lets you conduct surveys, run A/B tests, optimize content, and otherwise align your campaigns across paid, earned, and organic channels.
The platform includes the Keyword Planner, a powerful SEO marketing tool. It can help to optimize your digital ads for maximum effectiveness as well as your organic search strategy. Your Google Ad will then be displayed on the search results page whenever a user inquires about your chosen keywords.
Best of all, most of these services are 100% free.
If there’s one thing that virtually all marketers use, it’s spreadsheets. But these can be frustrating or limiting, especially for content planning or giving context to your analytics.
That’s where Airtable comes in. It offers basic spreadsheet functionality plus tons of powerful features. You can build your own “base” with multiple tables and views, or choose from a variety of helpful templates. Then, enter your “records.” These seem like spreadsheet rows but expand into rich, fully customizable documents that integrate with your other tools.
Features include tasks, commenting, URLs, photo or video embeds, custom labels, field calculations, and much more. You can sort and filter your records in each view by any of these attributes. Airtable lets you see everything as a grid, Kanban board, calendar, or image galley. Paid plans offer Gantt charts and timeline views.
Thus, Airtable could serve as a content planner, timesheet, marketing campaign tracker, production sheet, product catalog, and virtually anything else you need. You can even create forms for customers, leads, or employees, and Airtable will automatically enter their responses into the associated base.
Airtable has a bit of a learning curve, but after that, many marketing teams find it to be an immensely helpful tool for planning, project management, brainstorming, and much more.
The free plan includes most of Airtable’s functionality, plus all pre-configured templates. For greater storage, more add-ons and views, access permissions, and other advanced features, you can upgrade. Tiers range from $10 to $20 per user per month.
Social media influencers and earned media spots help you build your brand reputation and discoverability. However, it can be challenging to figure out which influencers are legitimate and which have fake followers, or which guest publishers or thought leaders are actually worth your time.
BuzzSumo can help you identify the top influencers, podcast hosts, and journalists in your industry or niche. Then, connect with them, plan out high-value engagements, and monitor your brand’s presence in the digital realm.
The platform also helps you monitor social trends, find new content topics, and separate evergreen content from trending content. Its content index is quite extensive, giving you critical insights into what performs best for your target audience.
The free plan includes the Content Ideas Generator, influencer searches, and other key features. With one of BuzzSumo’s paid plans, which start at $99/month, you will gain the ability to monitor your content’s performance using analytics and social mentions as the two major measuring factors.
Whatever your digital marketing plan and tactics are, there are a host of tools that can make your life easier — from planning to scheduling to publishing. Choose the ones that drive results for your business — and make your team members’ lives easier!
To find out more about SharpSpring’s suite of digital marketing and automation features and learn how to integrate your other favorite tools with our platform, request a free demo today.
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