20 Top Tools To Boost Your Online Marketing
The right marketing tools are essential for businesses aiming to make their mark online. While the number of options may seem overwhelming, the following list focuses on 20 great tools with proven potential to help elevate your strategy.
These are not just aids but transformative solutions built to conquer the unique opportunities and challenges businesses face online. Equipped with these tools, you can gain critical insight into your customers, streamline campaigns at scale, and craft compelling digital experiences that drive real business growth. Whether you’re looking to sharpen your social media edge, fine-tune conversions, or understand your audience better, you’ll find a tool here to help move your digital presence to the next level.
Our goal is not just to compile a list but to equip you with actionable solutions to thrive amidst the dynamism of the modern digital marketplace. You’ll find tools tailored for goals ranging from market research to customer retention – what remains consistent is their immense potential to provide that coveted competitive advantage for your business. Read on with an open mind, and prepare to build a future-forward digital marketing strategy.
20 Great Marketing Tools for Your Business
To help you get started, here are 20 great marketing tools to give your business a boost:
1. Google Analytics
Understanding your digital footprint is the first step to growth. Google Analytics equips you with an x-ray of your online presence – from visitor demographics to acquisition channels and everything in between.
This free powerhouse integrates seamlessly with your website, capturing data across every visit and interaction. Equipped with shareable dashboards and intuitive reporting, Google Analytics surfaces pivotal insights on website traffic, audience geography, marketing ROI, conversions, and more.
Whether you’re looking to fine-tune web content, paid ads, or email campaigns, Google Analytics has the data you need to strategize and optimize every facet of your digital presence. Uncover meaningful analytics to inform your next move, and watch your online business take strides towards your goals.
2. Intuit Mailchimp
Email marketing remains an unparalleled channel for engaging existing customers. Intuit Mailchimp makes creating targeted campaigns that feel like personalised 1:1 messages simple.
With Mailchimp, designing professional templates, segmenting subscribers, personalising content, and tracking engagement metrics are intuitive even for first-time users. The platform goes beyond basic email functionality as well – automates multi-email journeys, tailors messages with behaviour-based triggers, and integrates with e-commerce platforms.
Whether you’re looking to improve email open rates, prevent subscriber churn, or drive repeat purchases, Mailchimp levels up your email strategy. Robust analytics and clear reports help you optimize every facet of your communications over time. And the free plan means you can build subscriber relationships right from your first campaign.
Put the power of email marketing to work for your online business with a platform purpose-built to turn subscribers into loyal brand advocates.
3. Hootsuite
Expanding your social media reach is pivotal, but coordinating a multi-channel presence can be complex without the right systems. Hootsuite brings order to social media marketing – enabling you to schedule content across platforms, engage audiences, and demonstrate ROI through custom reports.
At its core, Hootsuite offers an intuitive dashboard to manage and post to all major networks from one place. But the platform goes further to help businesses consolidate social media efforts across teams. Streamline workstreams with collaborative features, use social listening tools to monitor brand mentions, or leverage a library of training resources.
Whether you’re looking to drive brand awareness, monitor trends, or make data-backed decisions, Hootsuite provides the analytics and infrastructure. With the ability to showcase your social media value through reports, you can justify continued investment in winning more customers through social.
Streamline your social media marketing and unlock greater growth with a tailored SMMS solution.
4. SEMrush
Gaining an online competitive advantage begins with understanding the digital landscape – from keywords to strategies across every channel. SEMrush arms you with actionable data intelligence for all of your digital initiatives in one robust toolkit.
At its core, SEMrush turbocharges tasks ranging from SEO to paid content. Finetune on-page elements, craft targeted content, optimise Google Ads, track backlinks and more, leveraging hard keyword search data. But the platform offers valuable visibility across the wider competitive space as well – benchmark rivals, monitor rankings globally, analyse advertising approaches and beyond.
Whether you need to diagnose website issues, spot content gaps, expand opportunities, or track wider industry shifts – SEMrush puts the power of data behind every decision. Unearth digital insights that cut through assumptions with a 360-degree view of your market.
Sharpen your online competitive advantage with an indispensable Swiss army knife for the modern digital marketer.
5. Buffer
A social media presence is pivotal, but consistent posting is challenging without the right systems. Buffer makes it simple to plan, schedule, and analyze social media efforts across every major platform.
At its core, Buffer offers an intuitive calendar dashboard to visually map out and auto-schedule social media content queues. But the platform goes further to help resource-strapped teams maintain consistency. Leverage features like post recommendations, reusable content buffers, engagement analytics, and more to work smarter.
Whether you’re looking to streamline workflows, spot posting gaps, or tightly manage brand voice across networks, Buffer has you covered. The free plan even extends core scheduling functionality to solopreneurs and small teams just starting out.
Maintain social media momentum without the hassle or overspending. Streamline consistency with a platform purpose-built for organized, effective social queues.
6. Canva
Making a visual impact online and offline demands eye-catching assets – from social posts to ads, flyers and beyond. Yet designing attractive visual content has traditionally required costly designers.
Canva smashes through this barrier with an astonishingly simple drag-and-drop interface built for non-designers. The platform combines professionally designed templates across every asset format with intuitive customization tools and a stock media library.
Whether you need to create social media posts, digital ads, product images, or even full presentations, Canva enables anyone to produce quality visuals that reinforce brand consistency in minutes. And the functionality spans both online and offline use cases.
Skimping on visual appeal to cut costs is no longer an excuse. Empower your team to effortlessly generate on-brand, effective visual content with a tool expressly built for the design-challenged.
7. BuzzSumo
Viral content isn’t created in a vacuum – it’s fine-tuned to resonate with target audiences. Yet, determining what drives engagement is guesswork without the right signals.
BuzzSumo was built to provide precisely that data layer for smarter content marketing. The platform analyzes competitors, influences, trends and more – spotlighting engagement signals across every major network.
Armed with actionable intelligence, you can consistently create high-performing content tuned to your audience’s interests. Outperform competitors by leveraging the same signals that drove their viral success stories. Determine relevant influencers to amplify owned content. Or uncover resonating topics and discussion questions you may have overlooked.
Stop guessing what engages your customers and let data-driven insights optimize your content marketing strategy. Move the needle with an ear to the digital ground.
8. Ahrefs
Ranking high on Google requires winning the search engine optimization game. Yet excelling at SEO means perfecting the imperceptible – from technical site issues to backlink profiles.
Ahrefs makes dominating search engine results pages achievable with its heavyweight SEO toolkit. At its core, Ahrefs exposes what matters most – sinking sites and propelling rivals alike. Track keyword rankings across geographies, reverse-engineer competitors’ successful backlink building, discover new link prospect targets and diagnose site problems hindering organic performance – all with actionable insights.
Whether your current SEO is sinking or stagnant, Ahrefs gives you the controls to course-correct and soar up the SERPs. Uncover the site-level wins and misses that Google notices behind the scenes across on-page and off-page factors. Then, step up your SEO game where it matters most.
Cut through SEO complexity with the sharpest site audit and competitive analysis toolbox on the web.
9. HubSpot CRM
Understanding your customers is the bedrock of growth. Yet many solutions treat CRMs as contact databases rather than intelligence hubs. HubSpot CRM infuses your system with insights to drive real relationships.
At its core, the CRM gives you a flexible, centralized hub for managing contacts, deals and tasks. But the platform transforms customer visibility with integrated analytics spanning interactions, timeframes, companies, and more. Further empower your team with connected workflows across email, landing pages, meetings and calls.
Whether you’re looking to reveal customer churn risks, tailor messaging, or close more deals, HubSpot CRM provides the insight layer for action. A forever-free version means core functionality scales with your business from the start.
Stop managing contacts in a reporting vacuum. Graduate to a CRM that fosters the relationships your business needs to grow.
10. Google Ads
Reaching audiences actively searching for your products or services delivers unmatched ROI – but only with the right targeting. Google Ads enables you to strategically display text, display and video ads aligned to audience intent signals across Google’s unrivalled network.
At its core, Google Ads helps you optimize every facet of your campaigns to drive qualified traffic that converts. The platform spans formats from text to display and video, while its intuitive workflow lets you target customer segments, define goals, track performance, and showcase marketing impact through actionable analytics.
Whether you need to boost traffic to a new landing page, promote seasonal offers to existing contacts, or amplify awareness, Google Ads gives you the controls to start seeing results fast. And you only pay when potential customers engage.
Stop guessing what marketing channels work. Let Google Ads put a budget towards strategies with demonstrated impact toward your goals.
The Next 10 Essential Marketing Tools
The platforms above may provide an exceptional starting point for getting your feet wet online. However, over time, even robust solutions like SEMrush or Hootsuite have evolved into just another utility in your stack. The marketing fog thickens once more.
Yet for brands ready to advance to the next level, an entire ecosystem of cutting-edge tools lies in wait behind the cloud – ready to expose gaps and lift performance even higher.
These lesser-known platforms tackle particular friction points holding your strategy back in ways broader solutions cannot. Find search visibility bottlenecks that are invisible with Ahrefs manually. Visualize web journeys hiding conversion failure points via Hotjar. Let Survicate close feedback loops, saving disenchanted customers in the nick of time.
The solutions may sound alien now. However, product leaders once questioned the need for a “third party email platform” like Mailchimp or a social media “dashboard” like Hootsuite. Adopt the right blend of advanced functionality today, transforming digital marketing from cost centre to profit powerhouse.
Here are ten more cutting-edge yet intuitive platforms for graduating from marketing kindergarten…
11. Crazy Egg
Understanding how visitors interact with your website is pivotal to growth. Yet analytics only reveal part of the customer journey – critical moments happen on-page. Crazy Egg fills this visibility gap with heatmaps exposing exactly how customers navigate your site.
With click, scroll and engagement heatmaps, Crazy Egg enables you to visually diagnoise usability issues throttling conversions. Spot failing calls-to-action, layout misconfigurations directing visitors away from key pages, confusing journeys and more.
Lift the curtain on exactly how every customer experiences your site. Then armed with visual intelligence, eradicate friction points losing you conversions today. Create customer experiences that sell from the first visit.
Stop guessing why site visitors bounce. Visualize the moments of truth that make or break your on-site conversion funnel.
12. Pingdom
A sluggish site drives customers away, yet diagnosing performance issues under the hood can be complex. Pingdom makes boosting site speed achievable. The platform monitors real user journeys across geographic regions to expose exactly why your pages load slowly.
Beyond exposing root causes from CDNs to server configs, Pingdom provides actionable remediation guidance tailored to your stack. Follow step-by-step directions to optimize page elements dragging down site-wide performance.
Whether you need to resolve a site-stopping outage quickly or chip away at incremental speed gains over time, Pingdom gives you the tools. Engineering-led performance insights help you reconfigure servers, adjust resource allocation, or upgrade infrastructure elements as necessary.
Don’t let slow speeds silently undermine user experience and conversions. Resolve performance bottlenecks with surgical support to help your pages load at peak speed.
13. Hotjar
Customers vote with their clicks. Yet most analytics only reveal part of each journey, missing moments of friction. Hotjarbuilds on traditional web analytics, with visual tools exposing exactly why visitors convert or churn.
At its core sit heatmaps and session recordings demonstrating precise customer engagement with site elements. But expand visibility further with conversion funnel analysis spotlighting drop-off points and surveys unearthing experience blockers.
Armed with this intelligence, eradicate UX pain points one-by-one until site performance aligns seamlessly to user intent.
Cut through assumptions to see first-hand how customers navigate your digital presence end-to-end. Then make experiences shoppers can’t resist.
14. SEMrush Writing Assistant
Crafting error-free, compelling content at scale is pivotal for owned channels – yet editing takes scarce time. The SEMrush Writing Assistant tackles this friction directly by integrating grammar and style corrections seamlessly into existing workflows.
Unlike standalone editing tools, SEMrush enables you to perfect digital writing for maximum impact while you draft. Let AI assess reading level, highlight grammar errors, tighten verbose phrases and sharpen messaging tone with precision as you create. Then export consumable, on-brand content to your CMS or other systems with confidence.
Spend time strategizing what to communicate versus fixing typos. And ensure blog posts, product pages, emails and other owned properties make the impact you intend with every publish.
15. AnswerThePublic
Viral content directly addresses the questions on your audience’s mind. Yet uncovering the right topics to tackle involves guesswork without the right signals.
Answer The Public smashes through writer’s block by revealing the terms and questions customers already ask on Google and Bing. Leverage real auto-complete data to immediately access hundreds of relevant headline ideas and discussion topics perfectly tailored to your business.
Whether you need inspiration to address new products or trends, identify opportunities to support customers better or simply perfect top performing articles – Answer The Public gives you insights derived straight from the front lines. Access content ideas already resonating with searchers now.
16. Screaming Frog
Site issues silently undermine performance across search, site speed and beyond. Yet manual audits are tedious while most tools only assess surface-level problems.
Screaming Frog crawls every corner of your site exposing fatal flaws threatening organic growth. At its core, comprehensive technical SEO reports reveal fixes for duplicate content, broken links, metadata, accessibility problems and more. But configurable crawl rules and customisable dashboard views enable360-degree visibility based on your specific priorities whether page speed, security, redirects or mobile optimisation.
Armed with actionable issue roadmaps, systematically eliminate the known site health threats compromising conversions today. Then power towards higher SERP rankings and faster load times with the insights needed for site-wide optimisations.
Don’t let hidden technical issues silently sabotage performance. Comprehensively expose and resolve them now instead.
17. Optimizely
Guesswork wastes budget on website changes visitors don’t want. Optimizely lifts performance throughput with built-in A/B testing tailored to your KPIs.
At its core, visualize and trial variations of any site element — from layout to content, images, offers, and beyond. With custom metrics aligned to business objectives, measure engagement lift generated by each iteration. Then launch winning recipes proven to move the needle for conversions, retention or revenue itself.
Whether looking to perfect new signup flows or squeeze more revenue from existing resources, Optimizely gives you an optimization toolkit for continual lift. Explore questions, not assumptions. Then rapidly scale what customers validate to unlock growth.
Stop leaving site experience to chance. Launch and refine page changes that visitors verify will achieve your goals.
18. Zapier
Too many hours wasted on manual workflows throttles growth. Zapier tackles productivity bottlenecks, connecting apps you already use to automate repetitive tasks across teams.
At its core, Zapier’s intuitive no-code platform builds automated multi-step workflows between tools you rely on daily. But with 2000+ integrations spanning analytics, email, social media, storage solutions and everything in between – the possibilities are endless. Streamline lead capture forms, synchronize contributor onboarding, error-proof data backups and more.
Whether you need to coordinate multiple systems, take tasks off crowded plates or simply build scalable processes as you grow, Zapier can help. Reclaim hours lost doing the mundane manually. Then reallocate effort towards high-impact goals only humans can handle.
Stop tackling repetitive tasks across fragmented systems. Automate workflows to focus on skilled work only you can drive.
19. Survicate
Customer churn often hides in plain sight. Survicate reveals retention threats, with targeted surveys gathering actionable feedback across the entire customer lifecycle.
Unlike broad annual reviews, deploy branded questionnaires at each pivotal moment – from sign up to renewal. Gain visibility into specific pain points as they emerge, then course correct experiences before customers walk.
But Survicate’s solutions span beyond surveys alone. Send NPS relationship check-ins, leverage pop-up or email-based questionnaires, then export insights across teams. Identify detractors early, double down on loyal brand advocates instead.
Don’t let customer issues remain invisible until it’s too late. Gather actionable signals to guide tailored touchpoints that convert one-time buyers into lifelong brand champions.
20. Hotspot Shield
Opportunities hide in plain sight beyond regional borders. Hotspot Shield provides instant access to the unfiltered internet across geographic restrictions to assess digital experiences globally.
Unlike limited website testing tools, leverage full VPN connectivity to simulate local customer journeys end-to-end across devices. Gain visibility into how site performance, quality of local translations, localization misconfigurations and geo-restricted content shape engagement region to region.
Then armed with intelligence on precisely how visitors from target expansion markets navigate your online presence, tackle global growth systematically. Resolve international site speed bottlenecks, address missed cultural nuances in UX flows and amplify awareness with content tailored to local interests.
Stop dealing in assumptions on global digital experience. Validate them instead, through the lens of users anywhere growth potential exists.
Bringing It All Together: The Digital Marketing Toolkit of Tomorrow
With technology progressing at a dizzying pace, today’s marketing tools represent just a snapshot of what’s possible. Yet even the solutions explored above can deliver immense impact when tailored strategically to your business goals.
The key is to remain nimble – assessing and reevaluating needs continually as market landscapes shift. Are newest additions like Hotjar or CrazyEgg solving website experience limitations that may have cost you, customers, last year? Do platforms like SEMrush expose emerging searcher demand for conversational content your brand still overlooks?
Monitor, learn, and refine, but also lay the foundations for flexibility tomorrow. With robust platforms like Zapier, new systems can be integrated smoothly as innovations emerge while protecting previous workflow investments.
Most importantly, technology should complement strategy rather than compromise it. Choose solutions that help your brand deliver relevance, value and connection at every stage. Place the customer, not the novelty, at the centre of implementation decisions.
With a thoughtful approach, marketing technology can help ambitious brands drive connections today, turning one-time visitors into lifelong loyal advocates. Adopt solutions strategically to deepen relationships through innovations yet to materialise. Then, forge lasting bonds that hold relevance no matter what the next wave of disruption may bring.