10 Great Marketing Tools to Boost Your Business Online
Running a business today means having an online presence. While building a beautiful website and creating social media accounts are great first steps, you need the right marketing tools to actually drive results.
The online landscape provides a wealth of platforms, software, and solutions to help your business connect with customers, promote your brand, and track your performance. With so many options, it can get overwhelming to identify the best tools for your needs.
To help you get started, here are 10 great marketing tools to give your business a boost:
1. Google Analytics
As the most widely used website analytics service, Google Analytics is an invaluable free tool to understand key metrics like visitors, acquisition channels, demographics, behaviour flow, conversions, and more.
Integrating Google Analytics will provide data-backed insights to optimise your web content, paid advertising, email marketing, and other initiatives. Customisable dashboards and intuitive reports make sharing analytics across your organisation easy.
2. Intuit Mailchimp
If you want to develop an email marketing strategy, Intuit Mailchimp makes creating and sending professional email campaigns simple while automating subscriber communication flows.
With Mailchimp, you can design email templates, segment your lists, personalise content, and track engagement. The platform also provides reports to help strengthen your email approach over time. The free tier lets you get started with basic features.
3. Hootsuite
Managing social media marketing can be complex, but Hootsuite’s platform helps streamline the process. As a social media management system, it enables you to schedule posts in advance, engage your audience, coordinate team collaboration, and track performance – all from one intuitive dashboard.
Hootsuite also provides social listening tools to monitor brand mentions and trends. With customisable reports and metrics, you can showcase the value of your social media efforts.
4. SEMrush
SEMrush is an invaluable all-in-one toolkit for digital marketing, providing solutions for SEO, content marketing, paid search, and competitive analysis.
With SEMrush, you can perform keyword research, optimise pages for search, generate content ideas, analyse backlinks, track rankings locally or globally, research competitors’ strategies, and much more. It’s a powerful platform to strengthen your overall online visibility.
5. Buffer
For maintaining a consistent social media presence, Buffer is a user-friendly scheduling tool that lets you plan and publish posts to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Buffer’s calendar view makes it easy to visualise your content queue and scheduling. Features like auto-scheduling, post suggestions, and engagement analytics help save time while optimising your impact. The free plan is great for individuals and small teams.
6. Canva
Creating visual assets like social media graphics, ads, flyers, or presentations is made incredibly simple with Canva’s drag-and-drop tool and professional template library.
Even non-designers can quickly produce high-quality visuals to promote online and offline campaigns. With plenty of customisation options and a large stock library, Canva enables you to consistently develop engaging visual content that strengthens your brand across channels.
7. BuzzSumo
Performing effective content marketing requires an understanding of what resonates with your audience. BuzzSumo provides invaluable data-driven insights for your content strategy.
Use it to analyse competitors’ top performing content, identify relevant influencers who can amplify your owned content, and leverage trending topics and questions for new article ideas. BuzzSumo will help create content that truly engages your target audience.
8. Ahrefs
In terms of boosting your SEO, Ahrefs is a robust tool for backlink analysis, tracking keyword rankings, finding link building opportunities, and auditing your site’s overall search presence.
With Ahrefs, you can research competitors’ backlinks and content strategies, discover relevant link building prospects, monitor your site’s keyword progress, and fix technical problems impacting SEO. Actionable insights to climb the search rankings.
9. HubSpot CRM
Managing your sales pipeline, understanding your customers, and retaining clients are crucial business priorities. HubSpot CRM provides a free, powerful system to organise your contacts, deals in progress, and tasks in one place.
Beyond the CRM fundamentals, the system seamlessly integrates with HubSpot’s email and landing page tools for a streamlined workflow. The platform flexibly scales as your business grows.
10. Google Ads
Google Ads should be a core component of your digital marketing, enabling you to run search, display, shopping, and video campaigns to reach interested audiences.
With Google Ads, you only pay when someone engages with your ad. The platform makes it easy to target your campaigns, optimise keywords and ads, track conversions, and analyse your ROI. More traffic directed specifically to your site can significantly impact growth.
Going Beyond the Basics for Deeper Insights
While platforms like the ones outlined above form a powerful starting toolkit, many more sophisticated solutions exist for gaining an edge. Here are 10 lesser-known but game-changing tools to take your website and digital marketing to the next level:
1. Crazy Egg
Are you struggling to understand how visitors truly interact with your web pages? Crazy Egg provides heatmap technology to visualise clicks, scroll depth, and other engagement. Identifying usability problems can dramatically lift conversion rates.
2. Pingdom
Nothing hurts conversion rates like slow page load speeds. Pingdom provides website monitoring and performance testing to help pinpoint and fix page speed issues that affect user experience and SEO. Vital for website optimisation.
3. Hotjar
Hotjar offers a suite of analytics to visually understand the customer journey, including heatmaps, visitor recordings, form & funnel analysis, and targeted surveys. The insights can strengthen your website, content, and overall online presence.
4. SEMrush Writing Assistant
The SEMrush Writing Assistant integrates directly into your workflow, providing an AI-powered grammar checker and readability enhancer for your digital content. Polishing your writing can boost engagement.
5. AnswerThePublic
Leverage actual search autocomplete data from Google and Bing to uncover questions and conversation topics relevant to your business. Invaluable for creating content that resonates with searchers.
6. Screaming Frog
This easy-to-use website crawler generates comprehensive SEO audit reports on issues like duplicate content, broken links, metadata, site speed, accessibility, and more. Fix what’s slowing you down.
7. Optimizely
Take the guesswork out of optimisation with A/B testing. Optimizely lets you trial landing page tweaks, content variations, custom offers, or new features to determine what maximizes your key metrics.
8. Zapier
Automate mundane tasks and connect your tools with 2000+ app integrations. Zapier can save you hours while error-proofing your processes.
9. Survicate
Actively gather customer feedback using Survicate’s suite of survey solutions. Get the insights you need to reduce churn and build loyalty.
10. Hotspot Shield
This VPN service lets you access the internet from different regions to understand location-based barriers and opportunities. Useful for assessing geo-restricted content.
Bringing It All Together
With myriad marketing technology solutions available today, it’s worth taking the time to research and evaluate different tools based on your specific business needs and goals.
The platforms outlined in this article can provide an exceptional starting point for optimising your online presence and engaging your audience. Don’t overlook the more advanced capabilities offered by lesser-known solutions to take it to the next level.
The key is identifying areas for improvement, choosing tools strategically, and integrating them into your workflows for efficiency. With the right marketing stack supporting your strategy, your website and campaigns will be primed for success.
Approach these solutions as long-term investments and assets. Take the time to monitor and learn from the data-driven insights. Refine your usage of each tool to amplify your efforts at every stage, from initial research to content creation to conversion rate optimisation.
By delivering value and relevance to your audience, the returns from boosting your marketing technology can be monumental. Implemented effectively, these tools represent immense potential in reaching, engaging, and converting your customers online.
