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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
