Marketing tools to best connect with your audience

Best tools for digital marketing

When it comes to digital marketing, there are plenty of awesome tools available to help with analytics, conversion optimization, social media marketing, search marketing, and much more. Here are a few of the essential marketing tools you need to include in your arsenal.

Keeping up to date with trends

Google Trends is a vital tool for every marketer. It allows you to explore search interests by time, location and popularity. If you need to know what people in Argentina searched for online yesterday, Google Trends can tell you. If you need to know what was popular in Spain in 2008, Google Trends can help you there too. Another idea is to scan industry websites and journals to keep up to date with trends. Subreddits for your industry, in particular, are an excellent source of new information about what’s happening and for examples of best practice.

Knowing what competitors are doing

You can’t keep up with everything and everyone, all the time. That’s why Google Alerts is incredibly helpful for marketers. You can easily set up alerts for people within your own company, competitors, and industry news. Other options for keeping up include Social Mention which scours user-generated content on social media platforms, or Talkwater Alerts which allows you to monitor specific companies, brands, and topics.

Understanding search behavior

Organic web search drives the majority of visits to your company website. That’s why marketing tools like Google Analytics are essential for every marketer. This will help you understand what your audience is looking for and what type of content they’d like. Other options to help you understand users’ search behavior include Searchmetrics and Keyword Eye. These tools allow you to see which keywords particular sites rank for, giving you an understanding on how customers are finding your and your competitors’ websites.

Automating social media updates

It can be incredibly time-consuming to update your social media profiles consistently. Some platforms need to be updated several times a day, which could lead to you needing to be updating your social media all day, every day. And, let’s face it, you’ve got other work to do. That’s why it’s important to automate and schedule your social media posts. Pick one day at the beginning of the week to schedule your posts. Then you’ll only need to take the time to check in and reply to comments. Examples of marketing tools that'll do this type of work for you include Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, and IFTTT.

Also, consider the benefits of SMS marketing in your strategy. Read our blog post about how to you can use SMS marketing to increase conversions. Whether you’re in banking, insurance, healthcare and even ecommerce, every industry can benefit from including SMS as a marketing tool in their arsenal.