12 Can’t-Miss Digital Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business

It’s nearly impossible for a company to be successful without employing a variety of digital marketing tools.

You’ve got your Google Analytics set up. You’ve got your Google Search Console going. But there’s way more to do and digital marketing is expensive. Digital Marketing agencies are expensive.

So, as a small business with a small budget, what tool collection can you employ yourself without eating all your precious time away?

Well, for a start, you can check out this list of digital marketing tools and make sure you manage your website properly.

Email Marketing Tools

When it comes to marketing efforts that usually provide the most bang for your buck, email is second to none. Your email marketing strategy should be one of your main priorities.

The conversion rate on email marketing outpaces that of any other type of marketing you might implement for your business. As a result, building your email list and sending out relevant content and deals to your subscribers can have an incredible impact on your business.

But email marketing can be hard to keep up with and sending out emails on a regular basis can be a real challenge. Fortunately, there are a great many email marketing software tools to help automate your email marketing campaigns.

Two of the best digital email marketing tools also happen to be one of the most feature-rich free email marketing tools you can find.

Sendinblue

It’s hard to beat free, and while Sendinblue has a variety of pricing options, their free plan gives you access to an impressive suite of automation tools for list-building and email deliverability that’s hard to find anywhere else.

They have an easy to use drag & drop email builder that doesn’t have a steep learning curve so you can be pushing out those marketing emails in a flash.

Sendinblue is one the few email platforms that actually allows you to use their services for sending transactional emails in addition to marketing campaigns. This means you can even use them as your website’s primary email sending servers for the ultimate in email deliverability and ensuring your messages don’t end up in the spam folder.

In addition to email, Sendinblue offers CRM, SMS marketing, and chat support for your customers.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the original email marketing platform providers and among marketers, they’re a household name.

MailChimp has a robust free plan and a very nice e-commerce integration tool that allows you to remind customers of abandoned carts and build your email list.

MailChimp’s paid plans come with an impressive set of automation tools which can help you save a bunch of time in your marketing efforts. They also have a responsive support team with 24/7 email and chat support.

SEO Tools

What would any marketing tools list be without the ones that help you be found on Google or other search engines? SEO or Search Engine Optimization tools are the bread and butter of marketing when done well because search traffic is basically free!

Most SEO tools have their own proprietary means of capturing data, so while many folks use more than one tool, a small business might be able to get away with just using one of them. Here are a few to try.

ahrefs

My favorite SEO tool is ahrefs. Not only do they have an impressive set of free tools, their data is some of the most robust in the industry.

In addition to being able to audit your website for issues that may affect your SEO, ahrefs also gives you backlink counts, tells you which keywords your site ranks for, and has one of the industry’s most trusted domain ranking scores.

Semrush

It’s difficult to talk SEO without stumbling on to Semrush. They’ve been around for over a decade and their tool is an industry standard.

Semrush provides much of the same information as ahrefs, but it’s important to note that they use a different database of information so you can get addtiona information utilizing them even if you already use ahrefs.

One of the most powerful features offered by Semrush is the ability to do competitor analysis. By seeing the organic traffic that your competitors are getting and where they got their backlinks from, you can create a roadmap to improving your own position.

Rank Math

Rank Math is an SEO plugin for WordPress and they’re a relatively new kid on the block compared to other tools… but boy do they pack a ton of features into their plugin.

Rank Math can add your Google Analytics code to your website and integrate with Google Search Console to make sure your pages and posts get indexed. It provides tons of prompts to help guide you to create SEO-friendly content every search engine will love.

Rank Math has a rich feature set for free but really takes it to the next level with their paid version. The paid version includes AI analysis to help find keywords to add to your content and they ability to track performance over time right within your WordPress admin dashboard.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Social media is a cornerstone of digital marketing success. And while your small businesses may not have the budget for a full-fledged social media management agency, that doesn’t mean you have to leave social media behind.

Social media can be a major tool in your arsenal, driving potential customers to your landing pages and content.

You can start small by regularly sharing your content on social media. But it takes time and energy to constantly post on social media. If you run a website build on WordPress, you can use various social media posting plugins to automate the process.

Two of the best marketing automation tools for posting across various social networks are Social Networks Auto-Poster by NextScripts and FS Poster. They’re both worth a try, but FS Poster is the only one that allows access for multiple team members and it doesn’t have a free or lite version so you’ll have to think about the expense.

When it comes to other social media marketing tools, consider checking out the following ones.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is the top tier of social media management tools and toolsets. Their platform is second to none and includes and impressive set of analytics, CRM, and post scheduling tools.

On top of it, Sprout Social is one of the only platforms that offers an Employee Advocacy product which helps enable your employees and cowokers to become brand ambassadors for your business. Marketing via employee advocacy is one of the most powerful ways to grow into a trusted market.

Hootsuite

Another big player in the Social Media Marketing realm, Hootsuite will help you put your social media activities on autopilot.

With a post scheduling tool for your social media campaigns and plans for multiple team members, you can make sure your content hits your social accounts at the perfect time. Hootsuite also provides a way to access all your social account messages in a single convenient inbox, saving you time and effort.

Hootsuite rounds out their package with a robust set of analytics and monitors so you know exactly what’s going on. And while they don’t offer a free plan, they have a tiered pricing so you can get a plan that fits your budget.

Lead Capture Tools

Let’s face it, getting leads is the primary reason for having most websites. Your goal is to get your visitors to buy something or sign up for something. So how do you know if your efforts are working? These tools might be the most important set of digital marketing tools you can implement for your business.

Luckily there are some great lead capture tools that can help you get leads and make sure you get the information from those leads that you need in order to do business and make a sale.

Optimizely

With a variety of products to offer, Optimizely touts itself as a “Digital Experience Platform”. One of their most powerful tools is the ability to run landing page experiments including A/B tests to analyze what works best for your audience.

Optimizely’s platform is one of the best lead enrichment tools you can find and will help ensure that not only do you get more conversions, but those conversions are high quality and contain all the information you need to follow up and make those leads a part of your business.

Convert Pro

Convert Pro is a WordPress plugin by one of the world’s top developers, Brainstormforce. The plugin allows you to create pop-ups, forms, and even entire landing pages, making it one of the best conversion optimization tools you can buy.

Convert Pro also integrates well with Google Analytics so you can keep track right in your WordPress dashboard of your conversion rates and makes tweaks to your landing pages appropriately.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange is an analytics tool that gives you an unparalleled view into how visitors interact with your website.

Rather than just capturing basic traffic stats like entries, exits, and time on page like other analytics tools, Lucky Orange literally tells you where people click on your website with heatmaps and even full session recordings you can watch.

There’s no better way to find out what is and isn’t working. Perhaps there’s an element on your landing page that’s distracting and pullin your visitor’s attention – with Lucky Orange you’ll be able to fix it!

Graphic Creation Tools

Graphics might not be the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks of digital marketing tools, but having good quality graphics and images on your website is critical for that polished & professional appearance.

Canva

While it gained popularity primarily for it’s Pinterest templates, allowing users to quickly create interesting pins and grow their social following, Canva’s design tool can be used for all kinds of graphics perfect for your digital marketing campaigns.

Canva has free tools with lots of features and paid tools with even more templates and stock images. With Canva’s graphic creation tool, you can quickly create logos, flyers, banners, posters, business cards, and just about any other graphic you might need for your business.

GIMP

For the do-it-yourself folks, it’s hard to beat a full-fledged image editor. GIMP is a free open source software that allows you to do just about anything you could do in PhotoShop. While the learning curve can be steep, if your business relies heavily on graphics, it should be a stable of your software collection.

GIMP allows you to to make your content pop with unique graphics and images and it has all the same features you’d expect from an expensive editor program. You can download it right now at gimp.org.

Final Thoughts

Focusing on digital marketing is an absolute requirement for modern businesses. Whether you’re selling products online, services, or simply a content marketer, building traffic and buzz about what you do rides on the back of your digital marketing plan.

There are thousands of digital marketing tools out there to be discovered and I hope this list gives you a bit-sized chunk to start with.