31 Essential Digital Marketing Tools

Article Overview 12min read

Top digital marketers are able to leverage tools that allow them to work smarter, collaborate better and join the dots. With ambitious goals this year, you'll need all the time-saving tools out there. These are our top picks for digital marketing tools that'll support your success.

Buckle up marketers, because if you thought the digital landscape was fast now, wait until 2019 unfolds! The digital world and the consumers within it are changing at lightning speed.

You need to be seen before the competition, get in front of consumers at the right time on the right device, convert them with incredible offers, and deliver a seamless, engaging user journey.

There’s SO MUCH to do.

Just typing it is exhausting.

Don't panic - this is where technology has your back.

These digital marketing tools will help you build and optimise digital marketing campaigns and save you a heap of time.

In other words, they’ll make your life a whole lot easier. (You’re welcome)

Here are 31 digital marketing tools you should add to your arsenal this year:

LastPass

LastPass is a premium, indispensable password manager, which helps businesses take control of identity management. You never have to worry about keeping track of your passwords, as the tool provides simple control and unified visibility across all cloud and mobile apps.

With the ability to create shared folders for a specific team, secure passwords and notes, the tool is the epitome of convenience! From single sign-on (SSO) to adaptive multi factor authentication (MFA), LastPass can help secure your online presence, revolutionising the way passwords are being managed.

Overall with work and play and everything in between, who has the time to remember passwords? LastPass takes the stress out of juggling platforms - a no brainer for businesses!

Ahrefs

Ahrefs addresses all of your core SEO needs and more. It sidesteps the stress of monitoring your industry niche and competitors. It’s managing solution features an organic search report which simplifies your competitors search traffic.

AHREFS

At this time, when search is so important, keeping up with your competitors is essential to outranking them. This tool has a lot of awesome features which include backlink research, content research and web monitoring.

Plus, you can see newly discovered keywords each month and traffic estimations for all pages ranking in the top 10.

What makes Ahrefs invaluable is it’s intuitive design, convenience and usability.

Remove.bg

Remove.bg is our #1 free go-to tool when it comes to automatically remove backgrounds from photos. It’s immensely improved how we create engaging campaigns.

Their commitment to design and innovation, makes them a must-have for marketers, developers, eCommerce agencies and graphic designers alike.

remove.bg

Granular enough to create and share well-designed images, Remove.bg is a solid design tool to speed up your workflow. It also includes a number of other features and capabilities.

Plus it integrates seamlessly with adobe photoshop, making it one of the most sought-after graphic design tools on the market.

Buffer

Buffer is trusted by SEO and marketing professionals as a robust and highly effective tools for social media management, powered by industry-leading data. Buffer helps plan and coordinate your social media marketing campaigns, making it easily accessible for crafting remarkable content.

Ultimately, the tool helps to create a publishing schedule for your social accounts. For example, the custom scheduling features enables precise targeting for individual posts.

But, perhaps one of our favourite features is the re-buffer option, which allows re-sharing of posts in one simple click.

With the ability to collaborate on content with your team and check and compare your most important metrics, Buffer is definitely one of the most social media tools out in the market.

Tools such as this have helped eradicate the days when brand building was a tiresome task.

Canva

With every digital marketer’s ever-growing toolbox, it’s no surprise that we’ve tried our fair share of design platforms. Sometimes graphic design can be quite complex these days. However, Canva makes design simple.

Canva is robust in solving endless design requirements, saving time, efforts and money for small and medium businesses alike.

canva

The platform also makes it easy to collaborate on designs with an open to edit and comment feature. It stands above the rest with its drag-and-drop format, providing much-needed simplicity, taking friction out of the design process.

With both simple and sophisticated design abilities and a huge variety of layouts to choose from, it’s simplicity and richness is what sets the tool apart from others on the market.

Plus there is a free option too!

Feedly

Feedly is a news aggregator application for both web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android - the news powerhouse to a variety of online sources.

It compiles news feeds which are customisable, meaning you can read the latest news and updates from all your favourite websites, blogs, online newspapers, and digital publications.

With Feedly, you have everything you need - under one roof - to get the latest content without having to visit multiple websites.

Plus, you can link the tool to Google Alerts, meaning you can get alerts and notifications pertaining to content that features keywords your interested in.

feedly

For a curated news experience, all you have to do is add and organise your feed based on the name of a site of a topic of interest.

No longer will you have to wrangle for the best sources of news.

The best part? It’s completely free.

Sanity Check

Do you want to make smarter SEO decisions? Get faster results? Drive a ton of traffic to your website? Sanity check is an awesome platform which can help automate your page SEO and speed tests.

Offering a suite of SEO tools, the platform can help guide better business decision making, enabling faster results.

sanity check

With Sanity check, all the tools are under one roof which means you can find, structure, and qualify valuable data with is hidden in Google Search Console.

Use that data to drive high-performing keyword tracking, quality testing, and identify click-through rate improvement opportunities.

Sanity check provides an unhindered behind-the-scenes view of SEO insights you need from Google Search Console.

SEMrush

Don’t even think about doing paid search or SEO without SEMrush. It’s packed with built-in digital marketing tools designed to help you track and improve search rankings.

Want to see what it's really capable of? Check out the competitor tracking. You can look at your competitor’s backlinks, monitor their fluctuations in ranking and conduct a full competitive analysis.

Another brilliant function is the SEMrush integration with Google Docs, letting you can optimise content in the platform you use to create it.

semrush-screenshot

Yoast

Creating content in WordPress? This plugin will single handedly change your life.

What does it do?

Yoast checks the effectiveness of your SEO in real-time. In other words, it tracks as you write.

Using Yoast, you can make sure you’re maximising keywords, using internal and external links, and improving readability of your content.

It also incorporates features to help you optimise your content for better search results, including a snippet generator, image titles, meta descriptions and more.

There’s a reason Yoast one of the most-downloaded plugins on WordPress.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is an SEO spider tool. Give it a website, a list of sites or specific web pages, and it will crawl through to give you a complete analysis of their performance.

screaming-frog-uk-screenshot

This is a swift way of finding out if your website has any broken links, bad redirects, broken pages, duplicate content and other errors that need fixing.

Watch the video to see how it works.

Hemingway App

One of our absolute favourite digital marketing tools for content, the Hemingway App helps you create high quality writing to engage readers.

Just copy and paste your content into the app. It then ranks your content’s readability on a grade scale. The higher the number, the harder the content is to read.

heminway-app-screenshot

Use the stats to whip your content into shape.

Grammarly

Step aside spell checker – Grammarly takes proofreading to a whole new level.

Just upload your documents to see any grammatical, spelling and stylistic errors in your writing. It also provides suggestions for fixing mistakes.

grammarly-screenshot

The free version does an excellent job of catching critical errors, but if you want to take it a step further, go for the upgrade. Then, you can use the tool to check plagiarism of your content too.

Buzzsumo

We love Buzzsumo. After all, what’s not to love about a tool that allows you to analyse the best performing content?

It’s as easy as typing in the topic (e.g. “content marketing”) and checking out the data.

buzzsumo-screenshot

The Question Analyzer tool is worth using to uncover the most popular questions related to a specific keyword that people are asking on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, Quora and also other discussion forums.

Pixlr

If there’s one thing digital marketers can never get enough of, it's high-quality imagery. But how do you make sure you have a never-ending supply of awesome images?

Pixlr has it covered.

pixlr-screenshot

The no-nonsense image editing tool lets you upload images and make changes, like a simpler version of Photoshop.

Go for the Pro version and get access to templates, graphics, stock images and premium fonts for creating online ads and social media covers. You can also edit photos within other apps, like Dropbox.

Imagine the money you’ll save on graphic design!

Unsplash

If you need some cracking images to use on your blog posts and social media, Unsplash won’t disappoint. All images submitted and published on Unsplash fall under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which means you can use the image for any personal or commercial use without a fee.

unsplash-screenshot

You don’t have to credit Unsplash or the photographer, though they encourage you to anyway.

Google Analytics

No list of digital marketing tools would be complete without analytics tools such as the iconic Google Analytics. It is an essential tool to measure and optimise the performance of your marketing plan.

Use it to see your site traffic details, geolocation of visitors, most popular pages, bounce rates, which devices visitors are using, where traffic comes from, and so much more.

It’s completely free to use. Or you can go enterprise level with Google Analytics 360.

Are you just discovering the real power of Google Analytics? This HubSpot article is a great place to start.

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Bannersnack

Design display ads in every shape or format using Bannersnack. And we mean every format – you can create HTML5 animations, add videos, links, or embed your own code.

The best thing about this digital marketing tool is that it’s pretty intuitive to use. Start from scratch or choose a template, then make your ad unique with animations, interactive elements, and irresistible calls to action.

Hootsuite

Imagine if you could see all your social network feeds in one spot and post to them all, from one place.

That’s what Hootsuite is for.

It acts as a central dashboard for all your social media. You can post content across multiple marketing channels at once, track what’s been shared, and schedule posts.

Hootsuite has come a long way since its launch. Now you can also use it to boost the reach of social content with its employee advocacy tool, Amplify. Delve into the conversations that matter using Hootsuite Insights. And create, manage and optimise Facebook and Instagram Ads using Hootsuite Ads.

Hotjar

Wondering how your visitors are travelling around your website? Hotjar provides a real-time visual record of what your visitors are doing on-site.

Watch a heatmap and video recordings of a visitor’s journey to see where they are clicking, and where they aren’t.

Then, use this to optimise your website for better conversions.

HTML Tidy

Editing HTML is hard, we know. But HTML Tidy helps by automatically fixing mistakes and bring your attention to things you need to work on.

Another great thing about HTML Tidy is that it can help you identify where you need to pay more attention to make pages more accessible to people with disabilities.

Did we mention it’s also free?

Zapier

Zapier lets you automate everything.

Consider it the ultimate digital marketing tool for connecting your apps and automating your workflow.

Zapier can move information between 750 web apps automatically – in fact, it plays nicely with most of the tools on this list.

Simply build integrations to start automating your workflows.

Say you want to build an email newsletter and add your ecommerce customers to it. You can integrate your ecommerce platform with MailChimp. So, whenever a new customer buys your products, Zapier will keep your list up to date by adding new customers to the list.

Not sure where to start? The Zapier team has a list of suggestions about how you can use the tool to streamline your social media management.

HubSpot

HubSpot is probably the best-known marketing automation system. It offers a stack of sales, marketing and customer service tools with a completely free CRM at the core.

Create brilliant lead generation campaigns, create a content strategy, get real-time SEO suggestions, convert traffic using incredible landing pages – the list goes on.

What we love about HubSpot is that it doesn’t discriminate against business size. Get started on HubSpot for free, then upgrade as you grow.

Pocket

Pocket is one of those tools that seems so simple, it's hard to believe someone didn't invent it earlier.

This tool lets you save articles, videos, web pages, or literally anything with a URL, in one place that you can access from any device.

When you want to revisit the content, you can read or listen without distraction, even offline.

This is great for anyone involved in the content planning and creation process – especially if you struggle to remember where you read about that incredible idea!

Biteable

If you’re struggling to create enough video content for your digital campaigns, Biteable has the answer.

Biteable is self-proclaimed as the “world’s simplest video maker that gives you professional quality”.

Discover thousands of video clips and images that can be quickly and easily included in professionally designed templates. There’s a Template Selection wizard to help you choose based on whether you want to Share, Promote, Present, or Update.

Need to create an explainer video? Check out the simple animation and Claymation sequences.

Choose a free plan if you only need to create five projects per month and publish to YouTube and Facebook. Or go for the paid plan for unlimited videos, 85,000 stock footage clips, and no watermark.

Asana

We reckon Asana is hands down one of the best project management and collaboration tools out there.

Whether you’re managing SEO projects or content campaigns, Asana makes it easy to keep things moving and ensure everyone is on the same page.

You can create lists, set reminders, manage due dates, assign tasks to projects and team members, and communicate with team members via comments.

Asana also integrates with other tools, like Google Drive and Dropbox, making document sharing fluid and effortless.

By the way, we’re not the only ones who love it – Asana is used by the likes of NASA, Airbnb, Deloitte, and Red Bull too.

Choose from the Lite (free), Premium and Enterprise plans available.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights

When it comes to building a search engine optimised site and improving conversion rates, speed is a critical factor for websites. The faster your website loads, the lower the bounce rate and the better chance you have of ranking high on Google.

So how fast is your site?

Run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights to find out the score for your mobile and desktop site.

If you get 100%, your site is fast.

If not, you have some work to do.

Luckily, this free tool helps you diagnose what is causing your website to run slower than it should, whether that’s images or poorly written code.

Here’s what how the Red Bull Australia site scored:

Hunter

Hunter helps you find and verify professional email addresses so that you can get in touch with the right people.

How does it work?

Start by plugging in a domain, and it will find the emails for people attached to that company. It also tells you the structure of emails for a company (e.g. firstname @huffingtonpost.com), so if Hunter can't find the individual, you should be able to figure it out.

Headline Analyser

Here’s the thing about headlines: they need to be incredibly powerful. A massive 80% of people never make it past the headline of a piece of content.

CoSchedule’s Headline Analyser is a content marketing tool that helps you create headlines worthy of any front page.

Type in your headline to find out a score out of 100. This score considers many factors, including grammar, structure, and the use of powerful or emotive words. It will also show you how the headline will look in Google’s search results.

Take the learnings and use them to create headlines that people won’t be able to resist.

Wistia

If you’re looking to convert viewers through video, Wistia is the digital marketing tool for you.

The video platform lets you host, customise and share videos across the web. It has a heap of amazing features, including video analytics, heat mapping and a video site map. You can also and find out which videos perform the best with its A/B testing feature.

We reckon the best function is the ability to include a custom call-to-action at the end of each video, making it easy to drive viewers to specific landing pages for conversion.

The free plan allows up to three videos (with Wistia branding) while paid plans start from $137 per month.

Udemy

The best digital marketers never stop learning. But how do you find time to upskill on the latest digital marketing tactics?

Meet Udemy.

This online learning site offers 80,000 online courses covering a massive range of topics. There’s a whole library of marketing courses, covering web development, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, content marketing, retargeting and more.

Simply log in, choose your course and start learning whenever it suits you.

The best part? Because the courses are incredibly low course, you can keep building your skills without putting a huge dent in your professional development budget.

JotForm

Want to collect data from your customers easily? JotForm is the way to go. JotForm enables you to build dynamic online forms with a variety of handy features, and it's as simple as dragging and dropping. You can receive registrations, CVs, feedback or even payments directly through the forms you've created. Your submissions are neatly stored and emailed to you so you can track them easily. They also have a mobile forms app that allows you to do everything you can on the website, but the best part about it is that you can collect data even without an internet connection.

Over To You

One thing that separates the top digital marketers from the rest is their ability to leverage tools that allow them to work smarter, collaborate better and join the dots.

But a digital marketing tool kit is a personal thing. What works for you might not work for others. What you find frustrating, others will love.

The key is to find tools that support your digital marketing efforts and make your working life easier. Don't be afraid to add new tools to your arsenal – one thing that almost all tools have in common is they offer a free trial period. So, nothing is stopping you from trying them out before you commit.

These tools aren’t the only thing you need to smash your goals in 2019. You’ll also need a rock-solid digital marketing strategy, tailored to your customers and engineered to convert.

You need a Digital Marketing Game Plan.

We can help. Get our latest and free eBook to access proven insights, templates, techniques and examples on how to propel revenue shifting results with digital marketing.

It’s all yours, right here, for free.

Click below to download now!

About the author

Andrew Raso

Andrew is the CEO of OMG and one of the founding members. He has a long illustrious career in the SEO and SEM industry and has written for many prestigious websites, including entrepreneur.com, jeffbullas.com, searchenginejournal.com, kissmetrics.com and contentmarketinginstitute.com. He was also featured on Sky News Business and awarded the 30under30 award by Anthill.