List of Top Digital Marketing Tools — Must Use

The internet is filled with an overwhelming number of free Digital Marketing tools for businesses and individuals looking to get hands-on with Digital Marketing best practices and techniques. With so many tools, there comes a tradeoff in time, quality, and personal data.

While most of the available tools are powerful enough, the free ones generally seek a lot of useful information before getting started. Eventually, these tools end up spamming your email inbox with over-aggressive sales emails.

To save your time and data, we’ve compiled a tried and tested list of the best Digital Marketing tools you’ll require across any holistic Digital Marketing strategy. These tools are easy to organise and require minimal technical skills to get going.

P.S.: The features listed correspond to the free versions of each product. For paid features, we encourage you to check out their websites and pricing plans!

Let’s dive in!

1. Mailchimp for Seamless Automated Email Marketing

Email Marketing is one of the more essential elements of any successful Digital Marketing strategy. It is known to provide the highest ROI among other efforts — simply because you can easily collect email IDs and directly reach out to your customers. However, Third-party this simplicity comes with a twist — you don’t want to spam your audience. You want to have processes in place that help you attain the fine balance between too many and not enough. For that, automated Email Marketing tools are available at your disposal. Mailchimp is one such tool that, along with being intuitive and powerful, is cost-effective, too.

Think of MailChimp as a tool to holistically manage your email marketing campaigns. Their free plan works up to 2,000 list subscribers and 12,000 emails a month. The free plan includes features like:

• Media storage functionality
• Ready-to-use email templates
• Simplified contact and list management
• Sign-up forms
• Autoresponders
• Drip Campaigns and A/B testing
• Subscriber data based on engagement rates
• Third-party and social media app integrations

2. Answer the Public for Rich Blog Topic Research

Constant blog creation and publishing is important and equally tricky. You need to be blogging, but you can’t be writing about things irrelevant to your audience. There’s a need to understand what topics attract people you’re interested in. Then, you also need to know about the relevant keywords related to different topics, so that the website can rank organically — which is an important traffic source.

Answer the Public is one such tool that gives you a perspective into your customer’s search intentions. Using the tool, you can discover relevant topics based on different parameters, like language, keywords, customer segmentation, and more.

In functioning, it is essentially similar to a search engine — just type in a keyword, and you’ll be offered a list of topics based on that keyword. So, on searching for “office chairs”, you’re likely to find the topics based on real search queries and trending questions commonly searched in relation to the keyword.

There — you have a list of potential topics that you can write on. Give it a spin, make it your own, and write it for your audience to read!

3. Trello for Unhindered Project Management and Collaboration

The strong communication channel is of utmost importance for any Digital Marketing initiative to succeed. Without communication, there’ll be no way to set expectations, assign deliverables, mention milestones, and get an idea of the entire team’s workload. Earlier, in the pre-digital era, email was the preferred medium for these internal communications. However, these platforms are extremely limited, and we have automated tools at our disposal today.

Trello is one such tool to smoothen your communication channel for simplified project management. With an interface that allows you to easily assign work, make “cards” with checklists and other things, Trello is easy to set up and get started.

Like other platforms on the market, Trello, too, has a paid version with more features, but the free version is good enough and offers sufficient features, including:

• Easy organisation of project tasks, milestones and deadlines
• Customisable task categorisation or status tags and labels
• Checklists and progress charts
• Calendar features, for deadlines and meetings
• Easy file upload features
• Security (SSL) features
• Email and desktop notifications

For most startups, Trello is a simple and powerful way to organise and plan digital marketing projects.

4. HubSpot CRM for Enhanced Customer Relationship Management

CRM tools are getting increasingly popular and important. From tracking the sales process to storing all the relevant data, being able to send custom notifications to managing organisational information — HubSpot helps you build stronger relationships with your customers by doing all the heavy lifting.

With HubSpot’s free CRM tool, you get the following features:

• Task boards
• Deal boards
• Drag and drop features
• Customer and potential database
• Email lists and connections
• Premade templates
• Tracking and scheduling functionalities
• Customisable views
• Intuitive dashboard

Using HubSpot, you can also import and export contacts into your custom databases and minimise the time spent on keeping the list manually updated.

5. Moz Local for Improved Local Search Listing Management

Search Listing Management tools are essential for bringing all your hard page of various engines’ front page engines. Moz is one such free Digital Marketing tool for businesses looking to boost their search listings.

Moz offers all the critical highlights and insights about how your organisation and business is getting received across the internet. With a comprehensive dashboard, you get to see all the listings of your website, check if the listing is correct, and monitor if there are any duplicate listings.

With a free version of Moz Local, you get the following features:

• Competitor analysis
• Website crawling feature
• Organic rank tracking
• Recommendations for on and off-page SEO
• Keyword value and competitiveness
• A comprehensive report of all the inbound and outbound links to your website

The functionalities covered in the free version are enough for beginners as well as advanced SEO professionals.

6. Smylelytics for Holistic Website Performance Monitoring

Gauging your website traffic is a daunting task. The smooth functioning of a website involves dynamic warriors layers, and you need to identify key performance indicators to monitor and improve your website’s performance.

Smylelytics is extremely user-friendly and sends you a bi-montlhy report of your website’s insights — thereby simplifying the entire monitoring process. Using visual aids and pictorial representations, the tool makes the data more understandable and insights easily digestible.

Smylelytics includes the following features:

• Translation of Google Analytics data for simpler understanding of KPIs like page visits, pages per session, bounce rate, new visits, goal conversion rate, and time on site.
• Easy-to-understand visuals depicting website performance and different indicators.
• Engaging email reports, twice a month.
• Free themes for email personalisation.

All you need to get started is your website’s URL, the Google Analytics email address (you’ll need an active GA account!), and an email address for the reports to go to.

7. Hootsuite for Automated Social Media Marketing

If you’re present on various social media platforms (which you should be), you need massive coordination to successfully manage all platforms. It takes a lot of brainstorming to come up with posts relevant to the platform, then there’s the burden of posting it on time, and tracking the progress of the post. All of this is excluding the engagement efforts with your fans and followers.

Hootsuite is a tool that helps you get rid of the above-mentioned woes. It integrates with most social platforms, and gives you a dashboard to manage postings, tracking, and other things to different platforms from one dashboard. It also provides an intuitive walkthrough tour for you to understand the workings and layout, so you can get started without any hindrances.

Hootsuite’s free service includes the following functionalities:

• Immediately publish posts
• Advance scheduling of posts
• React to the post, or comment, all from the dashboard
• Basic analytics
• Monitor all of your feeds

8. G-Suite for Smooth Collaborative Work and File Sharing / Storage

G-suite is a cloud-based tool from Google that presents a very minimal and effective approach to file sharing and collaborative work. G-Suite comes with all the productivity tools you need to collaborate, without needing the access to MS Office (which is the more popular counterpart). However, G-Suite is totally compatible with the MS-Suite, and is similar in nature, except simpler.

G-Suite includes the following features:

• G-Drive for file storage
• G-Docs for word processing
• G-Sheets for spreadsheet management
• G-Slides for presentations
• G-Calendar for tracking dates
• G-Forms for creating forms and analysing data
• Gmail for emailing purposes

G-Suite comes with revision tracking and automatically save features. The process of inviting collaborators to any file or folder is extremely simple, and there’s complete transparency in terms of who is holding access to or making changes to any file or folder.

To access these products, you need a browser and internet connection. Files created and edited through the G-Suite are saved in Google Drive, which offers 15 gigabytes of free storage (upgradable for an extra fee).

9. WhiteSpark Reviews Generator for Gathering Feedback, Improving Services

Online reviews are important for knowing the precise feedback of your audience. They can greatly enhance or inhibit your online success. If you’re looking for a way to make it easy for your customers to leave reviews, the WhiteSpark Reviews Generator is the perfect free tool for you!.

The Reviews Handout Generator tool helps you generate simple PDFs for you to print and share with your customers, with the details on how they can reach out to you and leave you a simple Google review from any mobile or desktop device.

10. Grammarly for Proofreading and Plagiarism Detection

Proofreading is of supreme importance for any text that goes out from you — whether it is social media content or a full-fledged whitepaper. Grammatical errors can put off the readers and drastically impact the credibility of your words. Manually proofreading copies is a good idea, but it’s prone to be vulnerable to errors. To simplify that, Grammarly is a free tool that you can use!

With an online dashboard pretty much resembling Google Docs, Grammarly provides an extremely minimal interface. Clicking on the “new document” option will open a window where you can proofread your text. Just copy the text and paste it, and Grammarly will immediately start checking your spelling and grammar. You can also save documents within the tool if you’re going to need them for the future.

This free tool includes:

• Grammar check
• Spell check
• Plagiarism check (with a limitation)
• Explanations about errors
• Suggestions for fixes

Wrapping it Up

Knowing the right set of tools to use for your Digital Marketing endeavours is a good first step. We hope this article helped you find the right tools for your trade. If we missed your favourite tool, let us know in the comment below!