Behind every successful digital marketer are the tools to back it up :). In this article, we’ll introduce you to 22 digital tools that help marketers manage, analyze and improve the results of their digital campaigns.
You’ll discover tools that cover different aspects of digital marketing, such as data analytics, SEO, B2B, creative creation, campaign management, UX and more.
You’ll find the first 11 here, and the rest digital tools in part 2.
Here they are:
- Google Analytics 4
- LiveChat
- Mailchimp
- Ahrefs
- Clarity
- Leadfeeder
- Canva
- HypeAuditor
- Bit.ly
- Ads Manager
- UTM Builder
1. Google Analytics 4
Google Analytics 4 is the latest version of Google’s data analytics platform, Google Analytics. Although it has been criticized by a number of experts for having cut features compared to the previous version, the platform is constantly updated and offers a lot of new reports and features that we could not use before, such as:
- A whole new way of analyzing your website traffic (event based vs. session based);
- analysis of the users of the applications and the website simultaneously;
- Server-side tagging setup via Google tag manager for more and more reliable data;
- anonymization settings;
- advance settings of funnels and segments and much more.
Furthermore, each new update will be happening specifically for GA4, while universal analytics remains a little bit in the past.
We recommend that you start reporting results from both GA4 and GA3 platforms in parallel.
2. LiveChat
About 73% of users rank real-time chat as the most convenient way to connect directly with companies. This and other statistics can be found here. That’s why it’s important to make the connection between your company and its users as easy, fast and intuitive as possible. This is the reason why we offer LiveChat as our choice for a chat platform among hundreds of other offers. Key benefits:
- Extremely fast integration without technical knowledge (in about 1 – 2 minutes with GTM on the site);
- a simple and intuitive interface that you or your support team colleagues can start working with literally immediately;
- Possible integration with many other digital tools;
- and perhaps most importantly for digital experts – integration with Analytics and GTM, which allows you to analyze user interactions with businesses and optimize campaigns for leads.
When is the best time to start using LiveChat? – Today.
Alternative – Zendesk Chat
3. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is the most popular email marketing platform in the world and there is a reason why it has been around for 20 years. The free version of the platform gives a lot of opportunities to small businesses that can’t yet allocate a large budget for email marketing, to build audiences, segment them, create simple automations and email campaigns. The paid packages of the platform offer more sophisticated Customer Journeys building, A/B testing capability, Customer support live chat, adding more audiences and new ready-made templates that you can use for your campaigns. With each of the paid plans, you get deeper audience research and more insights like demographics, age, and those based on user behavior from campaigns like “most frequent openers” or “most orderers.” The platform offers many more options, which you can explore in the link we’ve added in the header ☝ Before you embark on your email marketing adventure, we encourage you to read our article on the differences between b2b and b2c email marketing and check if you have built a proper email marketing strategy.
Advantages and disadvantages: the biggest advantage of Mailchimp is its free plan, which includes many of the platform’s features. One of the big cons of the platform is the difficult integration with other platforms.
Alternative: Active Campaign
4. Ahrefs
The battle of the SEO tool titans is still being fought between SEMRush and Ahrefs. Generally, you won’t go wrong whichever of the two tools you choose. We’ll give you a few reasons for Ahrefs. In this tool you can add a project to monitor from an SEO perspective. You can see how search engines see your site (and if they see it at all), you’ll also get lots of tips on how to improve your site’s performance, and a list of all the links that aren’t performing well on a given item. You can see which pages are returning errors, which are too slow, etc. Ahrefs also gives you a lot of options to monitor your pages (or your competitors) and their performance on keywords in SERPs (Search Engine Result Page). You can do keyword research and build a semantic core on which to build a working content strategy. You can find relevant links for link building as well as ideas for new content topics. These are just a few of the features of this comprehensive tool that we use and recommend you to test.
Advantages and disadvantages: the advantages of Ahrefs are many, but one of the biggest is its LinkBuilding features. It makes it really easy to find relevant sites to request links from. Perhaps the biggest drawback of the tool is the price. Sure, it’s not high for what you get, but small, fledgling businesses can’t always budget for a tool like this.
Alternative: SEMRush, Ubersuggest
5. Clarity
Clarity is one of Microsoft’s newest tools that enters into direct rivalry with another favorite tool of ours – Hotjar. Both tools record real videos of user sessions, allowing you to identify a potential problem on the site that is preventing the user from purchasing a product or taking another important action. You can also create so-called “heatmaps”, which give you a visual idea of which sections, buttons and elements are most used by users and which are not. This can prioritize important content to be more visible, and remove or relocate content that is not being used. An extremely important tool for improving UX and identifying problems, thanks to which you will be able to increase the percentage of users on the site who take the important actions for the company – sales, inquiries, etc.
The advantage of Clarity over Hotjar is the unlimited number of sessions it can record and save in the account, while with Hotjar they are only 300 (you need to buy the paid version) .
Alternative: Hotjar
6. Leadfeeder
Leadfeeder is our offer for B2B companies. Through it, you can receive information about other companies that visit your website and are interested in the product or services your company sells. From there on, once you have that information, the sales team will do the rest ;).
Easy integration and the option of a free account that provides all the necessary features. It supports direct integration with all known CRM systems used by businesses, as well as with a large number of analytical tools.
Alternative: Albacross
7. Canva
Here’s a suggestion that’s suitable for small and medium businesses, as well as anyone who doesn’t have graphic design skills or the resources for a design team. Canva is a visual content creation tool that has a huge library and hundreds of templates that make it easy, fast, and affordable to create a variety of post types.
The tool works either through a web browser or in the iOS and Android apps and allows you to create Facebook posts or Instagram stories, flyers, posters and invitations, presentation templates, videos, collages, infographics and more. Once you choose your content type, Canva offers designs in the right size that you can use directly, modify entirely or according to your brand’s needs and requirements.
There’s a free version that gives you more than 250,000 templates, more than 100 design types, hundreds of thousands of photos and graphics, collaboration, and 5 GB of cloud storage. The paid plans, Canva Pro and Canva Enterprise, have a wider variety of templates, templating and tools that allow you to customize designs to your brand.
Advantages and disadvantages: the biggest advantage of Canva is the free plan, which gives very good options for small and medium business owners. The downside is that the platform doesn’t allow for more difficult adjustments and edits and only works online.
Alternative: Adobe Photoshop.
8. HypeAuditor
HypeAuditor is an influencer marketing analytics tool that puts a special focus on the authenticity of their followers. Their database currently includes over 20 million accounts across multiple platforms. The paid version of the service offers a search engine for social media influencer profiles based on common metrics, audience details and profile engagement.
And while it’s not the ideal tool for our market to discover influencer accounts, it does offer good opportunities to analyze key metrics of opinion leaders you’ve already discovered and are wondering if they’re a good fit for your brand and campaign. You can use the tool to access data that is not visible in the Instagram interface. Such metrics are demographics, follower authenticity and engagement rate, which are some of the key data our team considers when partnering with influencers. However, when using such tools we advise you to always check the data to make sure it is correct.
Alternative: Buzzstream
9. Bit.ly
We also introduce you to an indispensable assistant in creating content for all social networks, which our Content & Creative team uses all the time. We’re sure that even if digital marketing isn’t your passion, you can’t help but come across Bit.ly.
The tool’s free service allows link shortening with the Bit.ly domain, while the premium service has customization options. Apart from the purely aesthetic use of the tool, it also brings many analytical benefits because it enables us to track individual connections and get related analytics on the dashboard. It even measures link performance by several metrics: number of clicks, dates, top referrer and specific location, which you can see in the attached screenshot above.
Alternative: https://tinyurl.com/app
10. Ads Manager
Ads Manager is a Facebook tool that allows you to create and structure ad campaigns, as well as track their progress and results. The platform is the preferred place from which to activate your ads. The other option that is available, but not recommended, is the Boost Post button to each post on the page. The reason we don’t recommend this sponsorship option is that the options for optimizing and setting up your campaign are limited.
Advantages and disadvantages? – The platform has many process optimization capabilities, a real-time performance overview and a set of tips to improve results on ad campaigns. As a minus we can define that the interface changes frequently, sometimes this leads to errors and slow loading elements. Some metrics are disappearing, replaced by other, less significant ones. But despite these drawbacks, we can define the platform as a very useful and integral part of a Facebook advertising professional’s work.
11. UTM Builder
Using the UTM Builder, you can easily and consistently build the parameter that automatically “hooks” to the URL you specify. This code allows you to track your advertising results at the site level – giving you data to easily analyze which format led to more conversions or which audience spent the longest time on your site. Here it is a matter of imagination what and how much you include as parameters to be able to read more data. In other words, an utm is a group of keywords that “tell” more about your ad campaign.
What is the biggest advantage of UTM Builder? – The biggest advantage of the tool is that it gives you a template for setting the parameters and with a few easy steps you have a ready “new” link that you can directly copy and paste to your ad. And last but not least – it’s free 🙂