There’s no one size fits all digital marketing tool. They all focus on making marketing easier for your business, but in many different ways. It’s important that you find a tool that is designed for the specific marketing channels and tactics that you use.
The summaries below will help you quickly identify tools that have the features that will benefit your small business, startup, or nonprofit.
Key Takeaways
- There’s often some overlap, marketing tools can be divided into 3 main categories: social media marketing tools, email marketing tools, and content marketing tools.
- Marketing tools aim to make those annoying tasks easier, and almost always significantly reduce the amount of time needed to complete them.
- Content marketing covers a lot of different marketing activities between email and social media marketing including tools that help you analyze traffic and behavior on your website.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a set of essential software tools that help businesses grow through inbound marketing. It can help your small business get organized, capture qualified leads, identify which prospects are likely to buy, and increase sales.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a complete social media management tools. You can connect accounts from all the major social media platforms. Features include scheduling posts, content curation, analytics, and team management.
Sendible
Sendible was designed for agencies needing to manage multiple clients as a team from one dashboard. It lets you schedule posts, monitor results, and generate professional looking reports.
Social Oomph
Social Oomph is primarily designed to schedule posts on Twitter. However, it can also be used to schedule posts on other networks like Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
SocialPilot
SocialPilot is an all-in-one social media management tool on a budget. It’s built for social media marketers and agencies to manage their accounts. You can work as a team to schedule posts in bulk, curate content, and analyze the results.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is best known for its visual user interface. It’s easy to see engagement or tracking results at a glance through charts and tables. You can schedule posts and reply to them from within the tool.
Unbounce
Unbounce is a user-friendly landing page builder, allowing you to create high-conversion landing pages without a single line of code. The platform offers a drag-and-drop builder with ready-to-go templates. It recently launched the conversion intelligent platform, an AI-powered solution for effortlessly creating your highest-converting marketing campaigns. The Unbounce Conversion Intelligence™ Platform lets you quickly optimize campaigns that get more of your visitors to take action.
MarketerHire
MarketerHire bridges the gap between qualified freelancers offering digital services and the marketing needs of their clients. They use a rigorous freelancer screening process ensures to look for proven experts with passion and drive. Accordingly, hundreds of marketers apply to MarketerHire each month and only 5% is accepted.
They review each marketer’s professional experience, client feedback, and work samples to assess their level of expertise and knowledge of best practices. The final layer of screening is a video interview that assesses communication skills, critical thinking, and professionalism.
If all of these criteria are met, the freelancer joins the MarketerHire community who assigns test projects as a final step in the application process. Test projects provide real-world scenarios for candidates to demonstrate their competence, thoroughness, professionalism, and integrity over what is typically 1-3 weeks.
To ensure accountability, MarketerHires are expected to maintain a perfect track record while working with clients. They check in with clients every 2 weeks to ensure the quality service they provide – this can guarantee successful marketing campaigns for the growth of your business.
What is a Marketing Tool?
Many aspects of marketing are slow, repetitive, or inconvenient. These are necessary tasks that take several hours a week. If your business relies heavily on active marketing, you may even need to hire multiple employees or freelancers to help.
Marketing tools aim to make those annoying tasks easier, and almost always significantly reduce the amount of time needed to complete them.
Some do this through automation, while others let you do tasks manually but in bulk.
The Main Benefits of Marketing Tools
The benefit of a marketing tool will depend on its purpose. In general, however, expect to get most of the following benefits if using tools effectively:
- Saving time through automation.
- Less time spent on the boring parts of marketing, freeing up your time for the enjoyable parts.
- More convenient. For example, no more having to log in at a specific time just to post something.
- Better results through advanced analytics and optimization.
- More reliable, as it’s less likely that you forget to do a task when it’s planned and tracked in a tool.
The more time you currently spend on marketing, the more of a benefit you will get from using tools.
Types of Marketing Tools
While there’s often some overlap, marketing tools can be divided into 3 main categories:
- Social media marketing tools
- Email marketing tools
- Content marketing tools
Some tools cover marketing in one or more areas. Tools from one category can also be used together with tools from another.
Email Marketing Tools
Many tools are created with the purpose of making email marketing simpler or more effective.
Some are basic, letting you add users to an email list and send out basic emails to them.
Others are more advanced (and more expensive). They let you create highly targeted segments based on behavior, which can be used to improve conversion rates. They often have advanced features like split testing available.
Browse our email marketing tool reviews.
Content Marketing Tools
Content marketing covers a lot of different marketing activities. There’s a lot of overlap with email and social media marketing.
These include tools that help you analyze traffic and behavior on your website. Other tools focus on helping you distribute your content more effectively, usually at scale. SEO tools are also often included in the umbrella of content marketing tools.
If you find that you’re spending too much time on the same marketing tasks every week, there’s likely a tool or two that can save you time and effort. The tools mentioned on this page are some of the best that exist, if any of them are relevant to your marketing efforts, give them a try. Stick with them past the initial learning curve and you’ll typically get great results.
Related Reading and Resources
Online Marketing for Offline Businesses
10 Amazing ways to Generate Leads Through Email Marketing