Article by:
Lyndsey Hall (https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/)
Digital marketing is an exciting and fast-moving industry, and digital marketers know that there are many tools, platforms, and apps out there to help take your digital efforts to the next level. They can save you time, but discovering and testing the various options can be daunting and confusing, especially in an ever-changing industry with many emerging trends.
We’ve gathered some old favorites as well as some tools to watch and consider adding to your digital marketing toolkit in 2022.
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- Social Media Marketing Tools
- Influencer Marketing Tools
- Email Marketing/Marketing Automation Tools
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tools
- Paid Search & Social Tools
- Data & Analytics Tools
- Digital Strategy Tools
- Marketing Management Tools
- UX and Design Tools
- Video Marketing Tools
- Content Management Tools
- Social Selling Tools
1. Social Media Marketing Tools
There are many tools and apps that support social media marketing, from content discovery, management, and scheduling. With social media marketing now essential for every brand and business, developing a social media strategy that drives brand awareness and ROI is integral to success.
SkedSocial is an all-in-one Instagram tool that allows you to schedule posts, visualize, and plan your feed while publishing to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Snapchat. A key feature of SkedSocial is the ability to automatically schedule Instagram Stories and Carousels. Everyone managing social media accounts knows the hassle of logging in on evenings and weekends to post stories; SkedSocial looks after this for you, and automatically too – so you need no notifications or reminders!
While SkedSocial is ideal for Instagram-first digital marketers, another content management platform making moves in 2022 is Falcon.io. The social media scheduling and management tool recently joined forces with Brandwatch to launch a social listening tool using digital consumer intelligence, so the offering within the platform is developing all the time.
This Twitter hashtag tracking tool allows you to find the best hashtags to reach your audience and deliver custom suggestions. It also allows marketers to monitor the performance of branded hashtags and identify Twitter influencers.
Not just a social scheduling tool, MeetEdgar allows you to share and recycle previous posts by automatically pulling posts from your content library to keep your social fresh every day. The result is a library of evergreen updates, so your social is always on. The various plan options are designed for freelancers and small businesses who can benefit from automated recurring tasks.
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that allows you to manage content for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube from an integrated dashboard. Social media marketers can schedule content, monitor keywords, and brand mentions, and generate highly visual reports from the centralized platform.
The BuzzSumo platform helps you discover what content is popular by topic. It’s the perfect tool for content marketers. It allows you to discover new keywords and find trending topics. As you search for trending topics and keywords, you can also gather shareable content ideas that will be of value to your audience. It also allows you to quickly find influencers to follow and connect with within your field.
2. Influencer Marketing Tools
Influencer marketing is exploding as it becomes increasingly accessible for every business or organization, and many tools specifically help with sourcing and reaching out to influencers.
Strawberry Socials & Melody Socials
These tag-team tools allow you to search for creators and influencers on Instagram and TikTok, respectively, with some great features. The ability to search based on multiple criteria, including hashtags and location, makes sourcing micro to macro-influencers faster and more powerful. And it’s handy when looking within specific areas or niches. The system works by filtering a list of potential influencers, which you can then sort through to select those that seem like a good fit. Then you can download the information in a detailed spreadsheet that includes their handles, bios, follower counts, and contact information.
This influencer and blogger outreach software streamlines influencer marketing and lead generation process with automated outreach, perfect for sourcing influencers on Instagram and YouTube. The system filters through millions of influencers to help you find the one that will capture your audience’s attention. The software also allows you to track conversation histories, email opens, clicks, and replies.
Upfluence is an influencer search and management tool that offers influencer marketing, affiliation management, and performance-tracking functions. Upfluence also offers a free Chrome plugin that allows you to analyze an influencer’s profile straight from your browser and is compatible with Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest. The plugin will let the marketers see how well an influencer’s posts have been performing on any given platform over the past 60 days.
3. Email Marketing/Marketing Automation Tools
Many platforms and tools can help with planning and executing email marketing campaigns. Dive deeper into this topic with our practical guide to the top email marketing automation tools.
Campaign Monitor is a web app that allows you to capture data to an online mailing list, manage it, and send HTML e-newsletters. Other features include automated email journeys and a Link Review tool that automatically searches your emails and flags any broken or outdated hyperlinks for your attention.
The classic all-in-one marketing, automation, and email marketing platform, MailChimp allows you to manage your mailing lists, create custom email templates, and nurture and automate your entire marketing campaigns.
HubSpot is a high-profile tool focused on inbound marketing and building a solid content marketing strategy. This is a great tool to help with everything from content curation to optimization and social scheduling and email automation systems.
GetResponse is an automation platform that facilitates automated responses, audience segmentation, personalization and reporting, and analytics. You can also use the platform to create landing pages and responsive forms, and automated emails based on various subscriber behaviors.
4. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tools
SEO is crucial for making your website more visible with many emerging trends. Here’s everything you need to know about the crucial elements of SEO & why it is important.
SEMrush is used for keyword research and online ranking data, including metrics such as search volume and cost per click. The platform also collects information about online keywords gathered from Google and Bing search engines. Specializing in keyword research, competitor analysis, and Google Ad campaign optimization, the platform allows you to improve online visibility and discover marketing insights.
Screaming Frog is an advanced SEO site audit tool that can crawl both small and extensive websites. This tool helps you improve onsite SEO by extracting data for review and checking for common SEO issues.
Ahrefs is a web crawler site that can highlight weak areas of your website, interrogate backlinks, discover keyword rankings, and measure SEO health. You can also use Ahrefs to conduct keyword research for Google, YouTube, and Amazon and find content that’s performed well (in terms of social shares and/or links) on a given topic.
Moz is an SEO and data management software that helps businesses increase traffic, ranking, and visibility of sites in search results. Moz offers full-service SEO solutions, from site crawling to keyword recommendations.
5. Paid Search & Social Tools
Managing paid advertising across search engines and social media requires a lot of upkeep if you want to maintain robust campaigns communicating many messages.
Google Ads Editor is a free tool for managing Google Ads campaigns, allowing you to make changes to your Google Ads campaigns offline and then upload the changes to the platform. This tool is handy for Google Ads accounts with multiple drives and long lists of keywords or ads, allowing you to use bulk editing to make numerous changes quickly.
When managing Microsoft ads, the Bing Ads Editor allows you to research new keywords and bids and make edits, using a desktop application to streamline PPC campaign management. The tool enables advertisers to build out campaigns and make bulk changes to campaigns before pushing them live.
The AdZooma platform supports digital marketers with online advertising, providing intuitive advertising tools to manage and optimize Google, Facebook, and Microsoft Ads all in one place, allowing you to manage multiple accounts without switching platforms. Manual, regular tasks can also be automated through the platform with rule-based automation.
WordStream is a PPC advertising tool that offers campaign management services and marketing software that helps businesses save time managing high-performance PPC campaigns. Their website also provides practical, free tools and learning resources related to digital advertising.
AdEspresso is an advertising tool that focuses on Facebook Ads, with functionality to quickly create multiple versions of a single campaign, manage split testing, and gain valuable audience insights.
A digital ads automation tool, Revealbot works to scale and automate ad strategies for Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Google Ads, and Snapchat Ads with advanced, customizable automation rules. This allows marketers to create dozens of ad variations at scale, auto-manage them, and get cross-platform reports. You can also automatically boost your best posts on Facebook and create social media ads in bulk with multiple variations with automated A/B and multivariate testing.
6. Data & Analytics Tools
Data and Analytics is an area undergoing tremendous change, with first-party data now more crucial than ever.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, allowing you to identify trends and patterns in how visitors engage with your website. Available features enable data collection, analysis, monitoring, visualization, reporting, and integration with other applications. In 2022, the interface known as Universal Analytics is being replaced by Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
Kissmetrics is a person-based analytics platform that tracks individual visitors to your website. It also allows you to understand the whole user journey of every customer and tie every action on your site to a person, even when they are using multiple devices and browsers. This allows digital marketers to increase conversion rates and identify roadblocks on the user journey.
Whatagraph allows you to track the performance of all your channels in a single marketing analytics tool. The platform tracks website and social analytics data combined and automatically creates visual, engaging reports that can be easily shared.
DataBoards is a full-service analysis and development service that turns raw data from different software, spreadsheets, and databases into valuable insights that allow marketers to make better, informed, faster decisions.
Google Data Studio is a free tool that enables marketers to create reporting dashboards that provide a marketing performance overview. With an intuitive drag-and-drop set of tools, users can create professional reports using a selection of templates.
7. Digital Strategy Tools
A good digital marketing strategy lies at the heart of any successful organization, and some tools can help with collaborative strategic planning and insights.
Miro is an online whiteboard tool that allows collaborative creation, project planning, and visualization. It comes with tons of handy templates for presentations, visualization, and illustration. The tool benefits digital marketing teams in marketing strategy development, campaign design, mapping, and launch planning, bringing team members together to plan, brainstorm, and co-create.
This platform helps with competitor benchmarking, allowing you to quickly analyze competitors’ best social media content and predict the success of your future campaigns. You can see and search your competitors’ best-performing posts and use the insights to plan your future content through the platform.
8. Marketing Management Tools
Managing digital marketing campaigns requires collaboration, project management, research, patience, and tools that facilitate communication, collaboration, and task assignment can help with this.
Teamwork is a project management software that can help digital marketing teams to improve collaboration, execute marketing strategies, and increase team efficiency. Within the platform, you can plan, manage, and track all your marketing tasks in one place. Working from a centralized project management software is ideal for marketing teams who need to collaborate to execute campaigns to a deadline, with complete project visualization for the whole team.
Asana is a work management platform designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work. Through Asana, teams can see a project’s progress, track individual tasks, and visualize their progress on projects.
Trello is a web-based list-making application helping teams ideate, plan, and collaboratively manage work. The platform’s structure encourages users to organize tasks into columns based on status, such as To Do, In Progress, and Done.
Communication is vital in business, and Slack is leading the way in changing the game for collaboration. It’s the leading messaging platform for communication via channels (group chats) and direct messages (person-to-person chat).
9. UX and Design Tools
This section encompasses the creation of graphic content and tools to help understand how users interact with your website.
Canva is a user-friendly graphic design platform that can be used to create social media graphics, presentations, posters, documents, and other visual content. The app includes a wide range of free templates for users to use and adapt and a library of graphic elements and photography content.
Hotjar is a powerful heat-mapping and behavior analytics tool that reveals the online behavior of your website users, helping you to monitor and improve your site’s user experience and performance.
Create engaging infographics and reports with this intuitive visualization tool, with a collection of designed templates and the facility to add your brand colors, fonts, and logo. Use this tool to quickly convert data into infographics that can be published, embedded, or shared.
Clarity is a free user behavior analytics tool that helps you understand how users interact with your website through session replays and heat maps. The focus here is on the user experience to help marketers gain insights into how users interact with their site.
Optimize allows you to run website experiments to test variants of web pages and see how they perform against a specified objective. By continually trying different combinations of the website content, marketers can increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor experience and satisfaction.
10. Video Marketing Tools
Videos are a powerful promotional tool. With the explosion in self-shot videos across social media, tools that allow marketers to make videos without hiring a professional are increasingly essential.
This video creation software allows you to combine your photos, video clips, and music to make quality videos. The easy-to-use templates and drag and drop features make it easy to create videos and customize colors, fonts, and transitions. You can add a licensed song from the Animoto music library to add a finishing touch.
CapCut is a free mobile video editor app that gives you access to advanced editing features that complement the visual language and editing features of TikTok. The app is user-friendly and includes many outstanding features for creating social videos.
11. Content Management Tools
No matter what kind of digital marketing you engage in, you’ll need to engage in excellent content marketing. There are tools available to help create, store, and source content across social and digital.
MishGuru is a marketing platform designed for Instagram Stories and Snapchat, allowing you to plan, manage, and schedule story content and track and measure engagement and viewership. Mish Guru collects and curates user-generated story content.
Oroson is an online proofing software that is an excellent tool for client-facing marketing teams. The platform allows you to create entire dashboards for individual projects, upload files to be reviewed, and get feedback through precise notes and pin-points. The platform works for various content types, from graphics to videos to pdfs, so you can share marketing materials with clients and coworkers to get specific, visual feedback. Getting feedback on content can often be a complicated process over email, so what’s great about Oroson for digital marketers is the ability to centralize input in one place and cut out the back-and-forth.
CrowdRiff is a platform dedicated to user-generated content, allowing you to quickly source, store and share user-generated visuals. While their focus is on the travel and tourism industry, this tool could easily be used by many other industries with user-generated content built into their strategy. The platform works by using intelligent image discovery tools to source images and then allowing you to quickly deploy comments to ask for rights approval. Once the rights are given, the photos are stored within the platform, so you can quickly build up a content library of up-to-date user images.
12. Social Selling Tools
Social media channels can play a central role in feeding the sales pipeline with qualified leads, and these tools make for powerful additions to your social selling strategy.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator lets you quickly find leads and offers contact recommendations, and allows you to see who’s visited your profile.
Vidyard is a video tool built for virtual selling, making it easy to record and send videos that add a personal touch at all stages of the sales cycle. You can also use the screen record function to create engaging presentation videos and track analytics like who has watched your video and for how long.
Loom is another video communications tool that allows you to connect with people without scheduling multiple face-to-face calls. With Loom, you can screen record and capture video, which can be shared with a link via any messaging channel, making it great for online sales.