Must-Have Marketing Tools for your Business
With businesses downsizing, budgets and departments being chopped, your Marketing in Chief is DIY and wearing all the hats. And your marketing budget is more important than ever.
Here's a collection of our favourite marketing tools, put together as a one-stop guide to the must-have marketing tools for your business in 2020.
Of course, the list of useful applications is endless and continuing to grow. Knowing how to automate and use tools that manage your workflows are key to your marketing success in this years' unpredictable environment.
No business can survive without a constant flow of new leads. But finding and nurturing those can be a huge cost of money and time. We’ve put together a list of tools that will help you optimise your marketing efforts into profitable conversions.
Some are free, some trial periods, and some are paid - but all are tools we use every day with our clients and in our regular marketing efforts and we wanted to share these with you to help get a leg up for your team.
This week, let's focus on these categories:
- Content Marketing
- SEO
- Social Media
- Growth Hacking
- CRM
- Automation.
SEO - Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website of organic results in search engines. There are some excellent free and paid tools that we use here at Click Creative every day.
If you want to learn more about SEO check out our article5 Things You Need to Know about SEO but if you are feeling more confident and ready dive in then these tools are great to learn and build on your knowledge.
Yoast
WordPress platform is used by over 40% of all websites across the world with hundreds of thousands of plugins available.
Yoast is the most widely used and the best in its class for website optimisation. It's one of the most important marketing tools for your business, that will help you instantly improve SEO for your website. Easily add titles, descriptions, meta descriptions, redirects and sitemap to all your posts and pages. You’ll need to do some keyword research and make sure you are using the correct terms on-page and content to match, but doing SEO correctly can increase your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) results in matching keywords with search intent.
We love it for:
- Increasing your organic web pages rankings.
- Very easy to install and use for on-page SEO.
- Get ideas/suggestions on how to improve your on-page content for readability.
- Both a Free & Premium version.
Google Analytics
Easily measure ROI and track your website traffic inside the Google brand platform. Understand your customers with robust custom reporting. Gain insight and learn where to make improvements over your website and customer journey and verify your site with a Gtag.
We love it for:
- Free reporting & dashboards.
- Campaign tracking (tracking parameters).
- Identify the best and worst-performing content pages.
- It’s 100% free.
- Connects with Google Ads and Console for additional reporting.
- For conversion tracking, traffic, behaviour, Audience analysis.
Google Search Console
Connect your Google Console up to Google Analytics and use it to view your website organic presence, how Google views your site, and how to optimise it. There is a steep learning curve but once you have mastered it there, the information you can glean is priceless.
We love it for:
- Your sitemap is easy for Google to read and index.
- Measuring and performance reporting (speed, errors).
- Broken links/removals/index coverage reports.
- Learn how many pages have been indexed and why.
- Website security and alerts.
SEM Rush
This is a crazy comprehensive SEO tool. There are hundreds of tools and reports overall from site health and performance to PPC competitors, site audits and report across all stats of your website. We use SEM Rush to add value to every client's reporting and recommendations made for SEO.
We love it for:
- Identifying competitors and keywords.
- Identify good/toxic backlinks.
- SEO site audit and site health for vital improvements.
- It’s pricey, but a non-negotiable for SEO, with a beginner business plan at $99 per month.
CONTENT MARKETING
Marketing is all about creating and distributing valuable and relevant content to attract, engage and delight your audience, drive more traffic, and improve conversions at every marketing touchpoint.
Improve your brand awareness, increase sales, build connections and brand ambassadors, engage prospects with videos, images, posts, long-form content articles, blogs.
Grammarly
Take your writing to the next level because Grammarly is more than just a grammar check. By adjusting goals you get an overall score by measuring correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery.
We love it for:
- Audience, formality, domain, tone and intent reading tools.
- Character count tool.
- Store online or integrate it with many SaaS publishing platforms like Google Docs.
- 90% of the features are free to use. Monthly Premium includes plagiarism check for punctuation and additional writing issues.
Canva
Design anything with brilliant posters, professional presentations, infographics, social post templates and video from the crazy amount of free templates and ideas. It’s your simple to use SaaS design editor, as big as your imagination and inspiration allows. Canva is best free visual designer on the web.
We love it for:
- Free for individuals - 8000+ templates, 100’s of design types.
- Pro Version is $13.99 include brand kit visual identity, 60,000 template and premium stock images, videos, graphics.
Buzzsumo
Find content that performs the best, generate ideas, create high-performing content, monitor content performance and identify potential influencers. Buzzsumo helps you create content to achieve your goals of rankings, connections and results.
We love it for:
- Develop a content strategy based on rankings and real data.
- Benchmarking performance.
- Identifying influencer for genuine connections and authority.
- Create feeds for any topic or domain and viral content.
- Topic explorer - Generate endless ideas in less time with just a keyword.
- Free trial (7 days) or $99 per month.
Growth Hacking
This kind of marketing is found mainly in your lean start-ups and it’s relevant to companies who need to employ effective, sometimes unconventional tactics to achieve rapid results and growth, often using smarter, low-cost alternatives to leverage strategic partnerships, SaaS platforms, and viral marketing.
Being more of a methodology than another more tangible marketing tool for your business, it's a whole blog article in itself which we'll cover another time!
Zapier
Zapier automates 2,000+ apps in millions of ways of saving you time. Integrate all your data and build workflows to same time and work smarter not harder.
We love it for:
- 2000+ APP integrations.
- Automate your marketing workflows.
- Free start programs, build flows and tasks.
- Starter program $29 with 20 Zaps (workflows), premium apps and webhooks.
Hotjar
Collect feedback from your visitors as they visit your website. Hotjar builds a great visual impression of where people are going and interacting with features can help you understand behaviour and traffic flow for improvements.
We love it for:
- Heatmaps of your webpages and what actions people are taking.
- Survey & polls to help you better understand your audience.
- Funnels - see where are your visitors dropping off.
- Recordings allow page interaction videos.
- Free for 3 pages - Premium version for $89 per month.
Mailchimp
Everyone knows these players. It’s the all-In-one integrated email marketing platform. With Mailchimp, you can develop your email marketing base, easily build effecting and engaging email templates - and even landing pages to convert your audience.
We love it for:
- Customisable email templates.
- Website integration forms.
- Multiple lists and tagging of email groups.
- Free for up to 2000 emails. The paid version includes unlimited numbers and customisable template imports and drip email automation.
Google Business
Free for one. $10 per month use for business hosted emails, Business tools like Sheets, Doc and Slides, and many other tools that all sit in the cloud. No more storing Gigabytes of files on your desktop, laptop and device. It’s all available on the fly with easy to use apps, with no memory hogs for your devices.
We love it for:
- Apps and integrations work with most SaaS platforms.
- Very reasonable pricing of $15 per month for all services and storage.
- Ubiquitous Google is continuously improving its services and tools.
- Available for every device in existence.
CRM & AUTOMATION
Hubspot
It’s a CRM with sales workflows, marketing automation and so much more in an all-in-one platform - with one of the most comprehensive learning & ebooks courses and certifications available. Paired with integrations, it is so much more than just a SaaS. Guaranteed to help your business grow because “good for the business” should also mean “good for the customer.” All of our customers are set up on a Free CRM & Marketing Tools version of Hubspot for them to see how much their business can grow in a short time.
We love it for:
- Use it to Attract, Engage, Delight holistic customer programs.
- Robust Freemium version with CRM and email marketing tools.
- Huge database of courses and certifications.
- Everything you need in one platform.
Hello Bar
Grow your subscription email list with this little free pop-up bar on your website. You can add them to specific pages, or as an exit pop-up to catch the traffic that might be leaving on your site for one last CTA.
We love it for:
- Free version includes 10 pop-ups per site and unlimited subscribers.
SOCIAL TOOLS
Hootsuite
Manage your email postings on major platforms with this very useful Social Media Management tool. Save time and easily plan your content posting schedule days and weeks ahead of time.
We love it for:
- Visual monthly/weekly calendar.
- Get unlimited posts, multiple users to control workflow (approvals).
- Use listening tools for mentions, hashtags and easily monitor your profiles and business.
- Easy to schedule automated reports with traffic, likes, mentions, and post engagement.
- Free 30-day trial, or $39 per month plans allow up to 10 social account profiles.
And of course, the list is endless and continuing to grow. Knowing how to automate and use marketing tools for your business that manage your sales and marketing workflows are key to your marketing success in this years' unpredictable environment.. Spend your time where it counts, creating great content, engagement and winning the hearts and minds of your audience.
Our challenge to you this month... pick a tool from our favourites above, give it a try and let us know your results. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
If you are looking for some marketing help, whether its strategy, content creation or campaigns, make sure you have a solid start. Click Creative is here to help with your marketing needs; we’d love to hear from you.
