Marketing is busy business. With the never ending stream of tasks coming your way and a day still being 24 hours long and all—well, its not always easy.
This is why we believe in making things as convenient for ourselves as possible. Luckily, there’s an abundance of tools, free and paid, designed to help marketers do just that.
Now I think it goes without saying that more so than anything on this list, your website and blog are your best marketing tools. Nevertheless, with them exempted, here are 5 tools all marketers should consider using (with alternatives):
1. Google Analytics
If you want to know what really works on your website, Google Analytics is the way to go. The product itself is excellent, and it’s free.
It allows you to easily track your website traffic, where visitors came from, and what they did and on which pages. It essentially gives you a wealth of data to figure out what works for your site and which aspects need to be changed.
Is there one particular page that sees a higher bounce rate than others? Is the majority of traffic coming your way from social media, from other websites, from organic search? Knowing your metrics allows you to measure them, and consequently tweak them adequately to bring things to where you want them.
Alternatives include Kissmetrics, Piwik.
2. MailChimp
Since having an automated marketing system is the best way to manage and promote all your content, automated this process is extremely significant for businesses looking to reach potential customers and keep existing relationships intact.
MailChimp is the most pervasive email marketing platform out there, with over 15 million active customers and responsible for sending about a billion emails a day. It is reliable, and as of recently, also Forever Free for subscriber lists of 2,000 recipients or less.
It’s also very user-friendly, and easy to use for non-technical folks. It offers flexibility, scheduling, segmented lists, a broad reporting tool that tells you how many times people interacted with your email and in what way (number of times opened, the most clicked links, best times to post, and more), and is easily integrated with a lot of other software.
Alternatives include Get Response, Emma.
3. Sprout Social
Speaking of automation, there is also a pressing need to stay connected to audiences via social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Social media can be a deceptively difficult task, and your work is never truly ‘finished’. To save time and maintain the freshness of your social media accounts, you could look into the many options available for automating social media.
We at Canadian Web Hosting use Sprout Social and recommend it immensely.
Sprout Social provides great analytical reports with specifics on all interactions on your posts. You can add multiple accounts, schedule posts, tracks hashtags, mentions, and keywords, etc.
Alternatives include Hootsuite, Buffer.
4. Canva
Great content needs great graphics, but we can’t all be Photoshop geniuses, can we?
Enter Canva.
Canva is a cloud-based graphic design tool which lets you make very impressive graphics for pretty much any purpose (pre-optimized for Twitter, Facebook, infographics, flyers, lots more).
Canva can be used by organizations large and small. As long as there is a need for decent graphics on a regular basis, Canva is a good resource to have. The great part about it is that quite a few of its features are free, and it’s so simple to use that anyone with an internet connection and a little creativity can create some really beautiful images.
And for those lacking slightly in the creativity department, Canva has a bunch of free templates you can choose from.
Alternatives include Piktochart, Pablo.
5. Moz
Formerly known as SEO Moz, Moz can help brands optimization their search engine marketing by providing insights from social, search, and link building activities.
Moz can help you optimize and measure your organic reach in terms of identifying opportunities as well as feedback on performance. Its keyword rankings tool lets you track individual keyword searches, and discover which keywords are bringing your site the most traffic.
Finally, it also gives you an understanding of external inbound links—where they are located and how much traffic they are bringing you. With this information, you can focus on the sources that generate the most traffic for you and focus on building more of those.
Alternatives include SEMRush, HubSpot.
What marketing tools do you include in your arsenal?
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