Digital Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Digital marketing tools help your content and campaign with actionable metrics, insights that you can use to measure the performance of your marketing activities against your budget, against competition, at the same see how decipher how you are relatively fairing in your market.

Digital marketing tools make the world of online marketing go round!

These are 25 Digital Marketing tools for:

1. Social Media Monitoring -Hootsuite, HubSpot
2. Bookmarking and Content Curation -Scoop.it, Flipboard, StumbleUpon, Digg, Diigo
3. Competitor Research -Ahrefs, Moz, Similarweb
4. Rank Tracking -Serplab, Serpstat
5. Keyword Research -Kwfinder, Longtailpro, Mangools
6. Email Marketing -GMass, Hook Line Dynamic, Bee, Sendloop
7. Blog Promotion -Drumup, Quora
8. Audience Engagement -Chatbot
9. Visual Content Creation -Canva, Design Wizard
10. Link Building -Linkarati

Whether you are a pro Digital Marketer, business owner, or a newbie in online marketing, there is a new Digital Marketing tool for you to learn on this list.

Here we go!

Digital Marketing Tools for Social Media Monitoring

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a funktastic social media management platform for scheduling, curating content, measuring the impact of your social media activities on your brand, and monitoring conversations that matter to you.

For scheduling social media posts with Hootsuite across multiple channels (and then vanish into thin air), I am guilty as charged!

But Hootsuite, as Digital Marketing tool,  is far more than merely scheduling social media posts.

With Hootsuite, you are blessed with a simple dashboard that shows you what is happening across your social media pages from different channels on the go.

With full package, you can use Hootsuite to get your team members to work on the same dashboard, create contests to grow followers and integrate other apps that will make you perform better.

HubSpot

Hubspot Social Media Monitoring Tool is good for tracking mentions about your brand. It is a Digital Marketing tool that lets you follow lists of selected contacts on Twitter. You could as well engage with their posts alongside your team members. 

[bctt tweet=”@Hubspot Social Media Monitoring Tool is good for tracking mentions about your brand.” username=”obadeyemi”]

Monitoring your social media activities helps you create content and social media posts around conversations already happening among the selected contacts that you are following. This makes interacting with your posts more organic as they contribute to what is on ground.

To do this, you will need to create stream(s).

What is Stream?

Stream is the search that HubSpot uses to monitor conversations on Twitter and display them in your Social Monitoring tool. In addition to creating your own stream, you can view streams of your timeline, mentions, retweets, and sent messages.

Be it about scheduling posts or adding user accounts, Hootsuite has been of immense help to me. I’d even recommend Hubspot as it helps in publish and monitor content and activities of our social accounts besides throwing light upon the channels that are actually affecting our sales volume. – Jonny Pean (SEO Analyst and Finance enthusiast at The Finance Wand).

Digital Marketing Tools for Bookmarking (Content Curation)

Scoop.it

Scoop.it turns everyone to a publisher. So, they say!

As its name sounds, it allows you to scoop sweet content from various sources. You pool these content together to create an online magazine kindof. Thereafter, you have only one click to serve your followers across social media and blog (WordPress) with your scoop.it magazine.

Is scoop.it like every other content curation platforms?

Hell no!

You can create your own scoop, you can steal from other users’ scoops and you can scoop from web pages outside of scoop.it.

[bctt tweet=”You can create your own scoop, you can steal from other users’ scoops and you can scoop from web pages outside of scoop.it.” username=”obadeyemi”]

Scoop.it also allows you to export your curated content in PDF format so, you can publish on WordPress or use it for other purposes.

Flipboard

You want to organize stories about a particular topic/idea from across the world? Get on Flipboard.

With Flipboard, you identify an area of interest you are passionate about, then you read, collect and share stories about it.

Flipboard boasts of having content from respected publishers and notable thought leaders. So, you are not collecting wannabe pieces of content for the sake of curating content.

There are stories from Vogue, CNN, Rob Walker, SF fashion Bloggers on Flipboard. All you need do is to flip the stories.

Flipboard is a special Digital Marketing tool because it has Bookmarklet and Chrome Extension for bookmarking an interesting story you come across on the web without getting out of your current browser.

Get the Flip It Chrome Extension here. Henceforth, to flip the story to your board, click the Flip It button on Toolbar. Flipping stories is that simple!

Stumbleupon

StumbleUpon surfs the web, discover content you may find interesting and recommend it to you. It is a web content discovery engine and that makes it a beloved Digital Marketing tool.

Beyond the well-laid out dashboard, StumbleUpon automates combination of machine learning with human opinions to select content based on a user’s personal preference.

It allows users to rate websites. This lets it update personal profile of the user to be able to know more what type of content works for the user.

StumbleUpon has both interest filter and content filter. Interest filter allows user to select content based on interest or topics while content filter determines format of the content- like image, video or audio.

Content recommended by StumbleUpon to users are determined by preferences identified by the user, web pages that the user thumbs up or down, user demographic information among other features.

Digg

Digg is a news aggregator with curated content on science, politics and viral stories that can be shared to Facebook and Twitter.

Digg used to be a social news website which allowed users to dig or bury content. You dig what is good, you bury what is bad.

[bctt tweet=”Digg used to be a social news website which allowed users to dig or bury content.” username=”obadeyemi”]

You get it?

Digg is called homepage of the Internet because it is a Digital Marketing tool that features great articles, videos, quality content that are part of trending conversations.

If you really want to curate the most talked about stories in your field today, go Digg it!

You can as well subscribe to Digg Editions so that these hot stories are delivered to your mailbox.

Diigo

Sometimes content ideas for (social media or blog) seem not to be flowing well.

Well, to tell you the truth, shortage in supply of content ideas happens to everyone no matter how creative you are, though, at different levels.

Diigo is here for your content ideas when you need a Digital Marketing tool to research content ideas. It is as exciting as bank alert. (lol)

Why?

You get to use a powerful online research tool and roll with endowed knowledge-sharing community that will help you solve your ‘what to write’ problem without sweating.

Diigo takes pride in helping you with browsing, reading, researching, annotating, storing, organizing, remembering, collaborating, sharing pieces of information online that you will end up putting together to make your piece of content.

It basically streamlines your content planning, researching and publishing workflow.

These are what you can do with Diigo:

1. discover interesting information as you surf the web
2. build your own online library of these pieces of information
3. keep tabs of all these scattered information by linking to them
4. organize your information to your taste
5. share information on social media by highlighting or annotating
6. work better with your team members in your content production process

Digital Marketing Tools for Competitor Research

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is that undercover Digital Marketing tool with which you find out why your competitors are ranking for what they are ranking for.

[bctt tweet=”Ahrefs is that undercover Digital Marketing tool with which you find out why your competitors are ranking for what they are ranking for.” username=”obadeyemi”]

Much as you don’t want to be blinded by the rat-race where you pursue your competitors for everything they do, you don’t want to turn a blind eye to what is going down in your market.

For in-depth competition research, Ahrefs has your back. Always!

What are Ahrefs Tools and Features?

1. Ahrefs Competitor Organic Search Report
2. Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
3. Ahrefs Backlinks Analysis
4. Ahrefs Content Explorer
5. Ahrefs Rank Tracker
6. Ahrefs Alert

Ahrefs Competitor Organic Search Report: it provides you with analysis of competitors in terms of volume, sources, and the keywords giving them the traffic that is turn giving you ‘sleepless afternoon’.

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer: it gives you ‘plenty’ keyword suggestions with difficulty score, annual search volume, CPC, Clicks, and more.

Ahrefs Backlinks Analysis: it gives you backlinks data as you request it from its World’s largest index of live backlinks. Ahrefs actually crawl billions of web pages everyday and updates it backlinks index every 15 minutes.

Ahrefs Content Explorer: it helps you research content that is already doing well for any topic idea you want to write about. With this you have an idea of how to produce a piece of content that rocks regarding the chosen topic idea.

Ahrefs Rank Tracker: it tracks keyword rank on desktop, mobile and based on location. It also allows automated keyword ranking to keyword performance monitoring feel cool.

Ahrefs Alert: it sets you up for email notifications for back links gained or lost by you or your competitors mentions on the web for certain keywords relating to you or your competitors monitors your niche to keep you abreast of new opportunities/campaign ideas.

Moz

Moz is actually my darling SEO tool. Maybe because I like Rand Fishkin’s swag or because I look forward to building my SEO consultancy from a couple of clients to a giant online marketing company that Moz is right now.

What makes Moz toolbox full of SEO and other marketing solutions?

1. Moz Keyword Explorer
2. Moz Site Crawler
3. Moz Open Site Explorer
4. Moz Rank Tracker
5. Moz SEO Toolbar

Moz Keyword Explorer: it helps you discover and prioritize best keywords to target using  metrics such as total volume, average monthly volume, level of difficulty, keyword opportunity score, priority.

Moz Site Crawler: it helps you with SEO site audit, crawl alerts and website diagnostics. From all of these, you are able to identify issues that your SEO performance and how to improve, crawl your website periodically to any crawling issues early enough to quickly fix them, check for indexing issues such as duplicate content, broken links and more. 

Moz Open Site Explorer helps you analyze a website to discover:

1. inbound links
2. top pages
3. linking domains
4. anchor texts
5. Spam analysis
6. broken links

You can as well use Moz Open Site Explorer to compare your back links metrics with that of selected competitors for better insights to help you with link building campaign.

Moz Rank Tracker: it helps you track keywords and pages in order to save you time, improve ranking in SERP. Lots of technical jargon are associated with keyword ranking but take this home and you will very alright.

Moz Pro’s powerful rank tracking software tool retrieves search engine rankings for pages and keywords, and stores them for easy comparison later. Moz.

Moz SEO Toolbar: it is Moz toolbox that puts custom searches, page overlay, authority score, Links and other On-page highlighter in your Google Chrome browser.

Download Mozbar right way.

Similarweb

Similarweb is your market intelligence accomplice for analyzing websites, industries and apps.

Similarweb Web Analytics: this gives you insight into Web Traffic and Engagement, SEO and PPC keywords, Audience Interests, Traffic/Referral Sources, and Popular Pages.

I guess Similarweb is mostly called that name because it lets you benchmark your website against competitors, in order for you to know what you are getting right or need to double up on. (My personal bias thou.)

Similarweb SEO and PPC Keywords: this gives you keywords from both organic and paid search channels. These keywords include those that you who find in Google or Google Keyword Planner and trendy keywords you can use to create content for ongoing high-traffic conversations.

Similarweb Audience Interests: this helps you find new target audience, prospects you can target with re-marketing, affiliates and publishers that have the kind of audience you are targeting.

Similarweb Traffic Sources: this reveals to you the mediums that bring traffic to your competitors which you can leverage on to boost your referral traffic.

Similarweb Poplar Pages: this gives you insights into top performing pages on your competitor’s website. This is a real magic wand if you know how to wield it.

With Similarweb Popular Pages, you can leverage on knowing your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses to create better performing campaigns.

Digital Marketing Tools for Rank Tracking

Serplab

Serplab is a Digital Marketing tool for checking Search Engine Ranking Position quickly, accurately and FREE.

SERPLAB provides you with free google ranking checking. You can use it to find your websites or competitor’s google search ranking position in real time for selected keywords.

To know the state of health of your website and to keep up with competition within your market, it is very important to regularly check your website and competitors’ websites.

How to Check Google SERP Ranking with serplab?

1. Choose country/location you target with your website
2. Type in your URL
3. Input selected keywords you want to know Google SERp ranking about (10 keywords max)
4. Click ‘Check SERP Now’
5. Within 3minutes, you will get top 10 rankings for the selected keywords.

You can also automate Google SERP tracking for your website using serplab by registering.

Serpstat

Serpstat is Digital Marketing tool you can bank on to growth hack your business into SEO, PPC and Content Marketing success.

It is all-in-one SEO tool for Backlinks Analysis, Rank Tracking, Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis.  

Why use Serpstat for Rank Tracking?

Serpstat has in depth algorithm that analyzes Search Engine Result Pages and saves data about top-100 domains for selected keywords.

It shows exactly how selected keywords are doing in Google search in any selected city, country or language.

Serpstat tracks unlimited number of keywords daily, provides fresh data and helps you effectively monitor competitors.

You could share your Serpstat account with other team members for the sake of reporting without incurring additional cost.

These are 7 Ways  to Become Serpstat Power User. 

Digital Marketing Tools for Keyword Research

Kwfinder

So, all the keywords (short tail) that you can ever rank for have been taken. What will you?

Kwfinder is the place of refuge. Run, run to it now!

KWFinder is a keyword research and analysis tool which gives you tons of long tail keywords that have low SEO difficulty.

While Google Keyword Planner plays the search volume prank on you with range, KWFinder gives you exact search volume data for selected keyword.

Serpchecker panel gives you SEO difficulty for selected keywords, with which you have an idea of what keyword is worth dying for. Trying to rank for a keyword without considering its SEO difficulty is suicidal, hope you know.

Learn How to Use KWFinder for Long Tail Keyword Research

Longtailpro

Long Tail Pro allows generate hundreds (thousands possibly) of Long tail keywords  based on a base keyword or multiple base keywords at once. And, this is done in a matter of minutes.

The whole essence of searching for long tail keywords is to find keywords with moderate search volume that are not involved in neck-breaking competition. Selecting the right keywords to rank for determines how much traffic you get.

Long Tail Pro was developed by an experienced Internet marketer who got frustrated after 5 years in online marketing and having tried various keyword research tools with no major success. If keyword research has proved to be a major problem to you, you are not alone.

Grab Longtailpro subscription. You sure can get at least 800 longtail keyword suggestions based off Google keyword tool.

Mangools

Mangools is a Digital Marketing tool that combines keyword research, SERP analysis, rank tracking under on one platform. It offers you synergy, simplicity, user-friendly design.

Mangools houses KWFinder, SERPChecker and SERPWatcher for better control of your rank tracking, keyword research and SERP analysis.

SERPWatcher is the newest in this toolset. It take four basic inputs to start rank tracking for keyword positions on SERP -domain, location, keyword(s) and platform to track.

I use a list of bookmarking sites, so that each article gets a bunch of backlinks right away (scoop.it, flipboard, stumbleupon, digg, diigo). For competitor research my one-stop-shop is ahrefs. I could double check in similarweb too. This research includes both content and keywords.

For keywords I also use ahrefs and double check in kwfinder. And for the rank tracking I use my fav tool –  https://www.serplab.co.uk , which is free for 150 keywords and costs a few coins for each additional 500 keywords. Top tool. – Anton (Owner of Anton Gorlin Photography).

READ ALSO: Keyword Research Tools for Small Business in Nigeria

Digital Marketing Tools for Email Marketing

Gmass

GMass is a Digital Marketing tool that is added to Gmail to let you send bulk email, merge campaigns and setup auto follow-ups. It can also be connected to Google Sheets.

GMass, like every other email marketing tool, allows you to personalize and schedule email campaign as well as track open and click rates.

What make GMass unique?

GMass allows you to set up and automate email sequence that follows up on your first email outreach until you get response.

GMass is the real email marketing MVP!  

Hook Line Dynamic

Hook Line Dynamic is a Digital Marketing tool that helps you craft effective headline (or title)

for email campaign, blog posts, or social media campaign.

Email that is opened is like a gun with no bullet. Thus, you need to craft attention-grabbing email headline that is catchy enough to drive open rate and be candid enough not to disappoint readers when they read through.

It use tone of your message -excitement, emotion, empowerment- to create catchy headlines which have worked wonders ever since it was launched.

How does Hook Line Dynamic work?

Hook Line Dynamic is based on a unique, proprietary formula that takes into consideration research on the feelings words evoke, expressiveness, readability, virality, and much more.

The research behind it it based on thousands of people’s responses. The team behind the tool and methodology continues to research, survey and gather additional data. – Michelle Shaeffer.

Bee

Bee is a Digital Marketing tool for designing elegant, responsive email messages. If you ever used off-the-shelf email template and you liked it, this will blow your mind as it helps you build beautiful emails easily and quickly.

Whether you are a digital marketer working for yourself or for clients, email marketing specialist, or an app developer, Bee has a drag-n-drop email building platform that designs mobile-friendly messages in no time; in no time at all!

Bee is embedded in many user-friendly messaging platforms as email editor. You  can embed it in your app or platform as email builder.

Sendloop

Sendloop turns you to one-man-army email marketing team with its sleek email automation tool and email delivery gateway.

For businesses that send daily transnational emails, Sendloop makes it easy to send the right email to the right audience at the right time without you having to work like round the clock.

Sendloop Marketing Automation can be integrated into to a platform within few minutes.

You can also easily add Google Analytics code to track performance.

eCommerce business needs Sendloop because it helps trigger the right follow-up email messages and send to users who have abandoned their shopping cart among other ‘unfinished businesses’ online transactional activities.

With Sendloop, Saas businesses looking for how to bring back users that have been inactive for some time,  or those who have not been able to successfully use a feature they have shown interest in can follow-up  with them.

READ ALSO: Email Marketing: How I Built Email List of Over 7,000 Subscribers

Digital Marketing Tools for Blog Promotion

Drumup

Drumup is a Digital Marketing tool that doubles as content marketing and social media management tool.  I find that really cool!

Drumup ranks content and queues them for sharing via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn accounts. It lets you edit/delete posts, add recommended hashtags and @mentions, add an image/emoji or GIF, set custom/auto time and date for posting, schedule to all/multiple accounts and set the post on a repeat schedule.

Repeat post feature on Drumup seems to be what I like most about it. I used sometime ago and the way it brought back one of my most amazing piece of content felt so sweet.

Drumup logon can be done with your social media accounts. That is another one-up.

Quora

Should I start explaining how Quora is a superstar Digital Marketing tool you need to master how to use? I don’t think so.

I just want to remind you of something you should never forget about Quora, preferably after publishing some awesome piece of content. This is it.

Quora is a place to gain and share knowledge. It’s a platform to ask questions and connect with people who contribute unique insights and quality answers. –Quora

So, if your content answers a particular question or will help someone to solve a problem. Attend a Quora party and serve your content those who are hungry for answers over there.

You get?

Digital Marketing Tools for Audience Engagement

Chatbot

Chatbot Don’t take up space on your blog with a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. Let your chatbot answer your questions for you. Thanks to the genius of Bottr.me, you can have a chatbot greet your website visitors and answer frequently asked questions. Imagine the time you’ll save! Enter the age of machine learning.

Your chatbot learns quickly how to greet guests and respond as you would. Go ahead and try it! Ask my chatbot a question! – Janice Wald (the author of AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL BLOG, Mostlyblogging). 

Digital Marketing Tools for Visual Content Creation

Canva

Canva is an amazingly free graphic-design tool website that is easy to use to make creatives or visual content by both professional graphics designer and laymen.  

Canva has user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, provides access to over a million photographs, graphics, and fonts you can use to create and export images.

Canva lets you create designs for Web content or print in formats such as blog title image, presentations, infographics, flyers, posters, invitations, Instagram post, postcard, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter cover photos.

I love the beautiful layouts, free stock images, icons and shapes personally. So, I declare, without fear or bias that, Canva has everything required to create amazing designs!

Design Wizard

Design Wizard is a simple free graphic design tool for creating stunning visual content within seconds.

With thousands of design templates plus well over 1 million stock images, Design Wizard has taken the time and hardwork out of creating visual content.

What I consider fantastic about Design Wizard is the fact that it allows FREE integration of Buffer and Hubspot. You can store your images for free, upload your preferred photos, logos and fonts for various projects.

‘Yeah, yeah, Canva, Canva, Canva – I dislike Canva, it might seem sacrilegious, but there it is. Up to now I have used a combination of a 1990s image editor, Xara Designer Pro X9 (like photoshop but simpler) and search to find the ever-changing image size required by each network.

I was introduced recently to Design Wizard (https://www.designwizard.com/) and I found the interface intuitive to use and the whole thing easier to get along with than Canva. One more advantage DW has is that you can use and save custom palettes, even on the free version, meaning you can brand your images more easily.

I spoke to the marketing manager and she assures me that all photos are taken in-house because that way the company **knows** they are safe to use and that there are model release forms.’ –Philip Turner (Owner of Philtrate)  

Digital Marketing Tools for –Link Building

Linkarati

Linkarati is the Internet’s most detailed link building resource center.  Yes, I said so!

Linkarati is the online community of SEO, SEM and inbound marketers where they discuss just one thing -link building.

Maybe you are a beginner SEO, search marketer or business owner but you want to be in charge of building links to or optimize your website, visit the link building fraternity on Linkarati.

There are blogs, videos, SEO courses and webinars on the Internet but Linkarati is where the link building gurus lay it bare for everyone who cares to learn and do what they learn.

I visited Linkarati recently and this is what I brought for you:
Building High DA Back links with Visual Content: 8 Methods.

Wondering how to grow your business with these digital marketing tools? You may need to tap some Internet marketing strategy as suggested in Best Internet Marketing Strategies for any business.