What do you think about the best & reliable tools for digital marketing? Which are those?

Since the last decade, digital marketing has evolved leaps and bounds and has become a core entity of businesses of all sizes. The digital world is enormous, complicated, and unstable. It is growing every other day, and hence it becomes a compulsion for the organizations to implement it. There are multiple digital marketing tools, software, and applications available in the market. These tools are user friendly and easy to operate and provides efficient results to the company.

As we have already discussed, Digital Marketing is a vast field, and it is divided into several parts. We must first have an idea about which type of marketing we are selecting and then decide to choose the relevant tools.

Some of the most prominent digital marketing techniques and its relevant tools are mentioned below:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Marketing is inevitable to every online business, whether it is a new venture or a great idea. SEO is a digital marketing technique that can help establish the credibility of the brand, reach the right and broader audience,  generate the traffic and brand awareness among the consumers. While all these might be a complicated set of activities, there are excellent SEO tools that streamline this process:

Some of the best digital marketing SEO tools are as follows:

• MOZ
• KeywordTool
• Google Page Speed Insights
• Browseo
• Google Analytics
• QuickSprout
• Bing Webmaster
• Botify
• Bright Local
• Clusteric

2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Today, with the growing competition, organizations are seeking innovative measures to sustain in the market. This leads every business to focus on Search Engine Marketing as a part of the digital marketing strategy. SEM is a paid marketing of the ads that appear on the SERP’s. There are various SEM tools available in the market that make this job easy and viable for users. These tools help in enhancing productivity with automation and increasing relevance to the consumers.

• SEMRush
• Buzzsumo
• Google Ads
• Bing Ads
• KeywordCompetitor
• iSpionage
• Google Marketing Platform
• Marin Software
• WordStream Advisor
• Acquisio

3. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social Media Marketing is an effective digital marketing strategy. Unlike paid advertising, the brands and business can grow their brand awareness and reach using social media activities with zero monetary investment by using SMM tools. The social media platform is transforming the consumer’s and business owner’s outlook towards advertising. Hence, social media presence is inevitable for an online business.

Some of the best digital marketing tools used by most social media marketers are described below:

• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social
• MeetEdgar
• Socedo
• Oktopost
• Buffer
• Facebook Power Editor
• Bitly
• SocialMention
• TweetDeck

4. Content Marketing Management (CMM)

Content is the way to reach your audience and develop the trust of the brand in the market. Every digital marketing channel must be updated with content according to the audience's requirements and platform. Content marketing helps in various processes such as idea generation, designing and drafting the content, and publishing the content in multiple channels. The content marketing teams also monitor and manage the content, depending on the effectiveness of the content. A robust content marketing campaign requires various skills such as writing skills, social media skills, video-production skills, and many more. Some of the most shared content marketing tools are explained below:

• Buffer
• Trendspottr
• Contently
• Landscape by Sprout Social
• Google AdWords
• Evernote
• Kred
• Trello
• ClickFunnels
• Tweriod

5. E-Mail Marketing

Email is a reliable and relevant source of social media today. It is one of the most versatile and consistent means of targeting the audience and monetizing the same. The brands can communicate with their target customers and promote their products and services with the help of email marketing. Some of the most common email marketing tools are as follows:

• MailChimp
• Active Campaign
• ConvertKit
• HubSpot
• MailGenius
• Litmus
• Reach Mail
• Target Hero
• Drip
• Mad Mimi

6. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the latest advancement in technology. Every repetitive and ordinary task of marketing can be automated with robust marketing tools. Marketing automation reduces the time taken to complete the task, minimizes the human error, and manages the marketing complexity. Moreover, marketing automation manages, monitors, and optimizes marketing efforts. Some of the best marketing automation tools are mentioned below:

• Marketo
• Hubspot
• Eloqua
• Omnisend
• Pardot
• ActiveCampaign
• Leadfeeder
• Act-On
• LeadSquared
• Wiser

7. Growth Hacking Tools

Growth hacking is the process of carrying out rapid experiments in different marketing trials and product development. This procedure is done with a unified objective to achieve fast-paced success and sustain in the industry. Growth hacking tools cater to various purposes, such as feedback and market insight tools, traffic growth tools, user experience tools, and more. Some of the most efficient growth hacking tools are listed below:

• Colibri
• Unbounce
• OptimizePress
• Qualaroo
• Zapier
• CrystalKnows
• GrowthBar
• Hotjar
• Airtable
• PushCrew

All the tools mentioned above are the best and reliable sources for carrying out a digital marketing campaign.

Digital marketing trends are constantly evolving. The right choice can help you grow your business, the wrong one can be a problem. It is an extremely vast subject that involves a lot of strategies and data along with a long analytical procedure. Researching and experimenting with so many tools can be a lengthy process.

The growth of India's digital advertising industry is at 33.5%. Stats show that the worth of digital marketing industry will exceed to INR 225 billion marks by 2020.

Digital advertising is likely to grow at an average rate of 14% annually. 

Social media management is a big task and one definitely needs to have tools which can do a great job in every aspect. 

Listing some of the best and reliable tools for digital marketing :- 

1. Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is a must have tool for digital marketing. Google Analytics provides a full detailed report about the visitors coming to your site. In addition, it lets you know which marketing technique on your site is more effective in terms of potential customers, conversions, downloads, sales etc. 

Pricing 

Google offers two versions of Google Analytics. The standard version of Google Analytics (GA) is free, and the premium version Google Analytics 360 (GA360) is the paid version, costing you about $150,000 dollars a year. Luckily, free version of Google Analytics usually provides enough insight to successfully guide their marketing efforts in terms of small and medium scale businesses.

2. Canva 

According to various statistics, consumers retain 80% of what they see and 20% of what they read. Hence, it is a proven fact. To retain in the marketing industry , you have to get your hands on graphics and create high quality images using customizable filters, manipulating texts, multi-coloured designs for Facebook, Instagram, blog banners etc. This is definitely an amazing app for people who do not want to use sophisticated design programs such as Photoshop or InDesign. 

Pricing 

Canva Pro has two pricing options: Annual Billing for $9.95/user/month which is billed annually as a payment of $ 119.40 /user/year, or, Monthly Billing for $ 12.95/user/month. 

3. Hubspot 

Hubspot is an all-in-one marketing software which includes CRM, a marketing Hub, a sales Hub, a CMS Hub, and a Service Hub. Hubspot is probably the best sales and service software that can help your growing business in minutes. It can be used for email marketing, social networks, blogging, and creating landing pages. With Hubspot CRM, you can organize, track, and build better customer relationships. You can also have a check on important key performance indicators (KPIs). 

Pricing 

There are four pricing options with different plans :- 

Hubspot CRM is completely free. Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub are available via four plans, with varying features and add-ons such as Free, Starter ($50/month), Professional ($400–$800) and Enterprise ($1200– $3200). Discount of 25 % on growth suit bundles.

4. Buffer 

It is one of the best and the oldest marketing tools. This tool is an exception when it comes to an early planning of publications, analysis of work results, and management of various social network accounts. More than 80,000 companies use Buffer and are operating their social networks efficiently and effectively. Buffer helps to quickly post and schedule posts across multiple platforms. Not only that, it also helps gather incredible data and insights on various posts in a streamlined way. This allows it to determine ROI and track engagement practices. 

Pricing 

Buffer pricing starts at $15.00 per month. It offers a free trial as well and has reasonable pricing policy for other small, medium and big businesses. 

5. SEMrush 

SEMrush is one of the well known advanced advertising instruments, giving advertisers an extraordinary chance to investigate. It is a one-stop SEO tool that offers a complete SEO workflow. It helps in keyword research and collects information regarding latest trends, competition level in the market, analysing competitor growth levels and also analysis backlinks, if any. It generates a list of keywords for predefined phases while uploading content. 

Pricing 

SEMrush gives three packages for monthly subscriptions Pro for $99.95, Guru for $199.95 and Business starting at $399.95. You can pay annually as well. These are some of the best and reliable tools to strategize and plan marketing trends. You can easily choose the best ones which suits your business and help grow it altogether.

At present time, digital marketing is booming creating a need for tools that help marketers improve their performance. Following marketing tools are crucial to streamline basic digital marketing workflow.

Hubspot Marketing

With HubSpot, numerous tools are freely available. For lead capture, you can set up online forms, popup forms, and live chat software. Then you can send campaigns for email marketing, pipe all your data into the free CRM, and analyze the behavior of site visitors.

HubSpot is an all-in-one tool, from handling your content and social media to monitoring emails and communicating with your leads, but it fits well with other point solutions, etc.

Google AdWords

One of the most prevalent choices for promoting your company on the pages of Google's search engine results is Google AdWords. Payment is based on the framework of a pay-per-click or pay-per-call.

It even holds tools for keyword research to help you drive more visitors to your website. Supposing, you are a shoe selling company and you are trying to organically rank for keywords like shoes for the gym. Organically, if you are not ranking in the top 10 you have very negligible chances to drive traffic but through bidding on keywords you can appear on top of websites and capture a large number of visitors.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics will show you who comes to your website, from where, and on which sections they spend much of their time. In addition, to learn more about customer interaction, you can set goals to track conversions, create an improved e-commerce setup, and track events. Google Analytics skills are required for any Digital Marketer. 

Ahrefs

This is a perfect tool for conducting competitive analysis. It gives you a complete insight into what keywords they are ranking for, their backlinks and more. With the content gap tool, you can even find the weak areas in your content. There are even tools to tell you which pages are getting higher traffic. Overall, it is a complete SEO tool. 

Mailchimp

MailChimp is a platform for email marketing and social marketing designed for campaign automation and instrumentation. It has integration and drip campaigning capabilities allowing you to engage with the audience more effectively. Setting triggered responses for user actions ensures no interactions are ever missed.

Asana

Asana is a shared workflow management framework designed to streamline projects and priorities between teams with a visual focus.

This helps you to record assignments, outline timelines and delegate and prioritize tasks, schedule updates and more.

Hootsuite

It is an enterprise social media management tool that stores your fed content in a cloud. It lets you schedule social media posts well in advance for different accounts based on the package you choose. 

To conclude, there are various tools on the web that are designed to tackle different digital marketing needs. The choice depends on the scope of your work.

Marketing is simply the act of trying to sell goods and services. The evolution of technology has made this concept more complex- combining strategy with the resources we have available to us.

Here’s a timeline of marketing and how we have evolved from trade to tech.

What is Chatbot marketing?

It’s a type of marketing that uses chatbots to promote products and services. They are also used as a way to engage with potential clients to get a sale.

The concept of chatbot marketing has actually been in the works from around 1950. When Alan Turing wrote his paper on Artificial Intelligence,Computing Machinery and Intelligence, he gave us the opportunity to explore the various use cases of chatbots. But it still felt like we were exploring un-chartered waters.

Until the birth of Joseph Weizenbaum’s E.L.I.Z.A. in1966- that was when the interest in chatbot marketing started to peak. E.L.I.Z.A. showed us how seamless communicating with machines can be.

We are now opening up to exploring the effectiveness of chatbots for sales and marketing.

How to do chatbot marketing

To use it for marketing, brands will create a chatbot using a chatbot platform, and connect it with their website, or messaging applications like Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.

Lead generation

When you go to a store, what’s the first thing that ruins your shopping experience? A worker coming up to you and insisting you need help.

When you watch a video, what’s the first thing that ruins your experience? A pop-up ad.

These are all examples of disruptive sales tactics. Such disruptions may end up ruining your experience and might make you never want to engage with the brand again.

So how is a chatbot any different?

A chatbot might gently ping you, but that doesn’t takeaway from your browsing experience. The tiny ping and chat window are just there in case you need any help.

And when you do need help, you yourself will open the window voluntarily and interact with the bot. And with the power of conversational marketing and questionnaires, you can gather information on these leads to determine whether they’re a quality lead or not. Read more here

Digital marketing is a vast field. It includes so many techniques and tools to maximize the online presence of a business. It is divided into many segments and you can use different techniques and tools for these segments. 

SEO is the main technique of digital marketing which is used to rank your web page higher on SERPs. You can use SEO tools Penguin techniquesTool, Wordtracker Scout, Lipperhey, Bing Webmaster Tools, etc. 

PPC or Pay-per-click is used to maximize a brad's visibility. You can use PPC tools for Search advertising, Display advertising, Social media advertising, Remarketing, Sequential remarketing, etc. 

SMM: Social media marketing includes using different social platforms to promote your brand. You can use different Marketing automation tools to get maximum benefits through SMM.