Therefore, we’ve decided to come up with a list of tools that have proven to be the most valuable to us. It’s a comprehensive selection of marketing tools for small business and medium enterprises that will beautifully complement the marketing strategies and techniques within your startup.
1. Buzzsumo – Content Performance Research
Buzzsumo is super useful for delivering insight about the most shared content for any topic or domain across the web. Thanks to this data you can finally discover what generates the most user engagement and learn what trends you should be following when creating your content.
Buzzsumo is an app that reveals what and who is currently creating a social buzz, making it a great resource for jumpstarting your winning content strategy and ultimately hacking your growth.
This invaluable marketing tool also finds the right influencers in your field.
You can be the first to know who is behind the most popular content across the Web and whose authority shapes online trends with just a few clicks. Buzzsumo makes it so easy to filter out influencers according to the particular business chosen, enabling you to have a ready-made list of opinion leaders right on your desktop, instantly.
Influencer marketing is a powerful strategy that strongly boosts your reach through opinion leaders who have active communities and the super power to drive highly targeted traffic to your assets.
2. Brand 24 – Social Media Monitoring
With Brand 24 it will be love at first sight. Why? Because it’s beautifully efficient, easy to use, and affordable.
The tool searches the web for mentions regarding a chosen brand, product or competitor.
In this way, you’re up to date with notifications so you can track and engage people who are talking about topics that are relevant to you in real-time.
Brand24 can also help you find brand ambassadors, leads, and negative comments so you can turn a dissatisfied client into a brand advocate (or a happy client, at least! ).
By knowing who, where and how often others talk about your company, you can determine your marketing campaign’s effectiveness and know whether something needs to be tweaked or adapted for the current conditions. You can’t be everywhere on the web to be able to find instantly out if someone said something about you. Luckily, Brand24 is there to help.
3. Buffer – Social Media Scheduling
Buffer is an awesome time saver! It saves you hours… Hours that you will then be able to spend engaging with people who mention you or otherwise interacting.
All you have to do is set up your queue once a week for all the social channels that you use, and then just let yourself forget about it for the next seven days.
Buffer provides you with social media analytics that let you select and export the best performing updates and upload them once again to your queue via bulk (a tool provided by Buffer for importing even hundreds of updates to the buffer queue instantaneously).
Last but not least, Buffer has an additional feature called Pablo which creates beautiful visuals using any selected quotes or sentences related to your business that you spot on the internet.
This social media tool is also available for free.
4. SumoMe – Conversion Booster
With SumoMe, you can turn any page into your highest converting page. SumoMe is an outstanding toolset that strongly boosts conversion from your blog. How does this magic happen?
For instance, with a customized welcome mat. This is a full-screen call to action that shows up when visitors land on your site. And the best part is, you can choose whether you want a successful visitor (the one who already subscribed) to see it or not.
SumoMe lets you create any subscription popup or form designed according to your expectations and connects it to your email service provider. You will be able to control its behavior internally.
There are also easy and ubiquitous social share buttons that look great on mobile devices, and you can have total control over their appearance, too.
In addition, SumoMe tools include heat maps, a/b test tools, and content analytics. The latter presents you with detailed data about how users interact with your content and where they actually stop reading. So now you can obtain a clear visualization of your visitors’ habits and use that as a baseline to determine the ideal spots for CTAs and bonuses. WoW!
5. Customer.io – Simple Messaging Platform
This super tool has exactly what we, at Positionly, need. From automated messages, fully customizable email templates that look great, to rich user profiles and a dashboard that measures your success with opens, clicks, and conversions.
All this makes it a more efficient email marketing tool for our weekly newsletters and drip campaigns than we could have wished for.
6. Optimizely – Optimization Platform
Optimizely is a fantastic marketing tool that sets up and performs various experiments of your pages to establish what effect any change imagined can have on your audience’s behavior; all this without even touching the code.
You can resize the elements, change their placement and decide who to show your experiment to. Also, check what generates more engagement by goal tracking and measuring particular outcomes.
Optimizely is the simplest way to start with A/B or multivariate testing and learn how to provide the best user experience for your users.
7. Positionly – SEO Software
SEO is the absolute foundation of inbound marketing, and this is why you should definitely be using a reliable tool that is going to report keyword ranking changes on a daily basis.
Positionly will do that for you. With Positionly, you can track your rankings on the local or global market in major search engines, easily manage thousands of keywords and see how your websites are performing at a glance.
This SEO tool also provides you with precise data about your backlinks and their quality. Moreover, all your results will be compared to your competition.
With Positionly’s beautifully designed and clear dashboard you can easily understand the analysis, no matter what SEO level you represent.
This SEO software makes complex metrics simple and helps make correct, data-driven decisions about your online marketing.
8. Sniply – CTA to every link you share
When you promote someone’s content, you can still drive traffic to your assets.
Thanks to Sniply you can simply attach a preferred, eye-catching call to action to any page that you share with your social media followers and make people even more engaged with your website.
This neat tool generates unique links to share; anyone clicking on your content will see a page with your CTA inside.
Sniply allows you to also measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts by monitoring clicks and conversion rates through their snips.
9. Canva – Amazingly Simple Graphic Design Software
Canva literally empowers the world to design. Yes, any marketer can now become a design pro in 1 minute.
With Canva, you can start creating beautiful blog graphics, visuals, presentations, charts, facebook covers and infographics that will strongly improve the user experience of your blog pages and social media updates.
Enjoy the variety of inspiring layouts, a huge range of hand selected fonts, stunning backgrounds, simple photo editing tools and optimized sizes for any social media platforms.
Apparently, this is the easiest to use design program in the world – The Webbys
10. Pocket – Easily save articles for later.
How often do you notice an inspiring piece of content but don’t have time to read it right away?
It happens all the time to most of us.
Fortunately, once you save these articles on Pocket, they’re stored on all your devices, and you’ll be able to access them even without an internet connection for a later, more suitable reading time.
This great application is useful not only for marketers but for everybody who reads online articles.
However, marketers especially need to get in on the action because Pocket obviously boosts productivity and saves time when it comes to content research.
Pocket lets you effortlessly collect ideas for your future social media updates andinspirations for your content creation, even on the go. And you can get back to your list whenever you want.
11. IFTTT– If This Than That
We all want to work less but be more productive, and that’s why automation can be a great help.
That’s why IFTTT (the acronym from If This Than That) is one of our favorite marketing tools.
IFTTT integrates your apps and products with each other and triggers events, in other words, recipes.
For instance, you can automate the action of adding a picture to Facebook if you publish something on Instagram or the action of adding users who mention you on Twitter to a secret list.
There is a wide gallery of ready-made recipes on their website. Discover and try them out! You can also come up with your own recipes.
The philosophy here is to spare your precious time for the really important stuff and let the routine job be sorted out carefully by a smart tool.
12. Grammarly – Grammar Checker
Want to be sure that anything you write is mistake and typo-free? Then you really need this writing enhancement platform.
Grammarly is always on guard with your flawless social media updates and any copy you craft.
The tool is easy to use, instantly finds and corrects over 250 of grammatical mistakes and does a good job at detecting plagiarism. So, you can be sure that any guest articles you receive from freelancers are unique.
Grammarly also gives you ideas on how to enhance your writing with better, more accurate for the particular context words.
You can use it to check your social media updates and the emails that you write. It integrates seamlessly with browsers, MS Word, Outlook and perfectly syncs with all your web applications.
Its extra feature is a professional proofreader service made by experienced professionals with Masters and Ph.D. degrees in English.
13. Medium – Free Publishing Platform
If you want to start blogging, Medium is definitely the best to begin with. However, it’s more a social media platform than a marketing tool and it’s the perfect choice for anybody who wants to establish a new blog and is looking for the simplest (and cheapest) way to do so.
Medium is a platform created by a Twitter co-founder, and it has become a beautiful place of expression for its users, where they can freely share their ideas and small or big stories on any topic.
Medium’s design is just stunning, and the composing tools are super easy to use.
It is perfectly minimalistic, words are central, and the template is clear, simple and just pure white.
This makes for a clean canvas to convey whatever you want to tell to the world and keeps your readers focused on your words.
14. Google Search Console – Your Crawling Database
There is already a blog post on Positionly’s blog devoted entirely to Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) just because its value is priceless. On Google Search Console you have a full database dedicated to your website’s health. Yes, Google Search Console is the only place where you can communicate with Google about website’s browsing status, so you’ll receive a message if anything goes wrong.
Google Search Console detects crawling errors, broken pages, and search traffic data. This way you can get to know your best-performing pages in Google and what queries drive you the most traffic.
And this is only a small snippet of what you can do with this tool. Read this article to find out more about Google Search Console.
15. Google Analytics
I’m under the impression that we cannot come up with a complete list of must-have marketing tools without mentioning Google Analytics. Perhaps because Google Analytics supplies you with everything you need for tracking your website’s traffic.
This is a performance tool that needs no introduction: it’s a classic, and a crucial one at that.
Read more about Google Analytics: How to Master SEO with Google Analytics – Beginners Guide
16. Google Trends
With Google Trends, you can see the top and rising search terms based on Google Search and find out about trending topics in your area, real-time. This is one of the most useful and versatile tools available for SEO. It allows you to check how often different keywords or queries are used in Google over a specific period.
There are thousands of reasons why you should be using Google Trends. It is a powerful marketing strategy tool which changes the way you perceive data because it gives you a long term perspective.
For instance, by topic keyword modeling, thanks to Google Trends, you can compare the trends and popularity of various keywords (on the same topic).
17. Coschedule Headline Analyzer
Headlines can make or break your content success. This is why you need to learn how to make them awesome so you can use them to drive traffic, social shares, and click-through rates. Coschedule Headline Analyzer checks if your headlines are a well-balanced mixture of both common versus uncommon and emotional or power words. You can find the perfect length, too.
This free tool from Coschedule investigates the quality of your headlines by measuring their likelihood of success and gives you back an overall score.
Conclusion
More and more creative products and applications continually appear on the market to help marketers collect and analyze data, so the list of marketing tools at your disposal is lengthy. Make the best of them!
Thanks for giving me a read! Hope you liked my selection of tools. What other marketing tools would you add to this list? Feel free to let us know in the comments below.
