Marketing tools play a crucial role in helping businesses plan, execute, and measure their marketing strategies effectively. Whether you’re a small startup or a large corporation, here are essential marketing tools that can benefit your business and help you pick up some quick wins online.
Side note: Most of these articles online are sponsored, meaning the authors get a kickback for recommending certain software. Since we’re not sell-outs, we’ll never do that. These are the tools we use in-house, and with great success!
1. Website Analytics:
This is the number one tool on the list and its a must-have for any website. Google Analytics provides invaluable insights into website traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates. It’s a must-have for understanding how your online marketing efforts are performing from how many “hits” your website gets, right down to the granular such as being able to see what “path” most people take when they purchase a product.
This information is key because in a world of data, you should never make changes to a website off a “hunch”. The reason amazon became such an e-commerce powerhouse was that they made data-led decisions first.
Second on this list is Hotjar, although its limited in its free version it gives a “heatmap” report of your website, you can see every customers experience, where they click, where they dont and most importantly if they are having any issues navigating your website. This tool is for people who have a website already and want to make improvements but they’re not sure where to go.
2. Social Media Management Tools:
“There’s two kinds of people, those who hate social media and those that don’t use it”. – Luke Blacow
At the start, no one likes posting to their business pages. Every social media manager has a different philosophy about how to go viral. From posting twice a day to making sure it’s at 8:47am on Tuesday’s it’s a mental drain no one appreciates. Luckily, there are some tools to help keep the social effort to a minimum so you can focus on the more important things.
Later takes our top spot for the social tools, its free-to-use version is great, and it is intuitive to set up. It allows you to schedule social media posts months in advance across all your social channels. From Tiktok to Linkedin and everything in between. There are many tools you can that do a similar job. Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout all do a good job, Later is the cheapest but the others have arguably better analytic tools, so if you need help knowing what content is going to best connect with your audience, you may prefer Hootsuite
Side note; Ai tools are on the rise and we get asked about this a lot. We believe that for the creation of graphics that there are many uses, but unfortunately Ai writing captions comes across as cookie cutter. Next time you’re on socials looking at businesses, see how many use the words “Delve”, “Embark”, “Deep Dive” or an overuse of emojis, chances are it’s an AI caption. Unfortunately, this isn’t something you can’t unnotice, so sorry about that!
3. Email Marketing Software:
Email marketing is an amazingly consistent way of maintaining business/outreach for minimal cost and not enough businesses use it correctly. The average person gets around 121 emails a day so we can see why people are sick of them. But when done correctly it can be more effective than socials. 29% of our clients make more from email campaigns than they do from socials.
Brevo is our number one choice for email marketing, starting cheap with almost infinite scaling potential it’s not only a great way for businesses to start email marketing but a good way for those with an already existing structure a seamless way to transition and collect better analytics.
You may have seen others like Mailchimp, which, in our opinion, are expensive and can push you to get bundles you don’t necessarily need or want. They do come with very simple set ups but we don’t believe it justifies the price difference.
Shameless self promotion; It can be tricky to set email systems up at the start, we’re here to help and we’ve got a great track record! If you’re looking to improve your email systems get in touch.
4) SEO Tools:
The tool everyone should have for their Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the Google Search Console. This tool tells you what phrases your website is showing up for on google, what position on the page (on average) you are and how many clicks/impressions you receive. This is a great way to see what phrases are getting more impressions and where you should target your SEO efforts.
Side note: Google defines an impression is your search result showing up for at least 1 second on a users screen.
Tools like SEMrush, Moz, or Ahrefs assist in keyword research, on-page optimization, and tracking your website’s search engine rankings to improve your SEO strategy but they should only be used when you have a “foundation” built for your SEO. We’re going to explore SEO foundations in a later article but if you cant wait that long you can speak to us directly
5) Graphic Design Tools
Unfortunately there’s no great budget tools for social design, for very simple edits tools like Canva can be great but if you want something that looks like our social posts then you’re going to need Adobe Illustrator.
Illustrator is one of the best programs for all things design. With literally billions of templates for everything from web design to social posts to business cards you can create everything you need for your business. One of the beauties of Illustrator is being able to export into any file type so regardless of your project or how picky your printers are you have the right tool for the job.
There’s another more common Adobe tool most people have heard of called Photoshop. Whilst it surpasses illustrator for editing real images (and also logo creation but that’s a surprisingly heated debate amongst us tech nerds so we’ll gently close that can of worms), Illustrator has a stronger AI tool to help new users.
Side Note: The Adobe packages can be quite expensive be careful of “free” versions that do the exact same, if you can’t afford the price definitely dont look for “illustrator nulled version” online as they are pirated copies and you’d never be able to hand over your hard-earned money!