12 Digital Marketing Tools You Should Be Using

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of digital marketing tools out there. If you’re trying to market your business and see results, it can be overwhelming to know which tools are worth it and which ones are not.  

At Socialike, we’ve been around the block when it comes to digital marketing tools. We know which tools are worth the investment and which ones are worth skipping. We know that even with the best tools, you need the right person behind the wheel driving your marketing strategy to see results.

But, if you are going to invest in some digital marketing tools, which ones should you go for? Some tools are foundational, and seem like a no brainer, whiles others are more specialized and may require a bit more knowledge to get them humming like you need.  

To get you started on selecting the right tools, we’ve outlined 12 digital marketing tools you should be using in 2021 to help you take your marketing to the next level.  

HubSpot

Price: Free to US$3,200/month depending on your plan 

What it is: CRM with sales, marketing, customer service and CMS features 

A must have in our eyes, HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing and sales software that helps with attracting, engaging, and delighting your customers at every step of their journey. 

With a free CRM and a wide variety of tools, you can use HubSpot to host web and landing pages, create blogs and email sequences, and manage interactions with your leads and customers—all while analyzing the success of the campaign and tracking user behavior.  

Benefits:

• An all-in-one solution: An all-in-one solution, HubSpot gives you the ability to provide a seamless customer experience. Everything from your website, SEO, emails, and CRM is all connected so you’re able to tailor everything to your customer.  
• Data-Driven: Measure the performance of all your marketing campaigns in one place with built-in analytics, reports, and dashboards. You can even customize your reports or create dashboards to share across your company. 
• Great support: HubSpot’s customer service team is so easy to chat to they’ve even won awards for it. If you’re looking to upskill, there’s even a knowledge base and certifications to help get you up to speed.  

If you’re wanting to see if HubSpot is right for you, give us a message, Socialike is a certified HubSpot partner, so we can easily steer you in the right direction if you’re wanting to give it a go.  

SEMRush 

Price: Starts at US$119.95/month 

What it is: Search Engine Optimization 

Keen to make sure you’re easy to find? If you’re wanting to appear early on in search engine results, SEMRush is a great tool to use. It’s an all-in-one suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights, including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), social media, and content marketing campaigns.  

Benefits: 

• Understand and monitor your organic reach: SEMRush’s organic reports will tell you who also wants to rank high on search results when certain words or phrases are searched. You can dig into what words your competitors rank for and how their rankings have changed recently.  
• Unlock your content marketing potential with the Keyword Magic Tool: This tool is the backbone of a good keyword strategy. Giving you further insight into words your competitors are using and what words you can easily rank for. Once you know that, including them in both your website and content to help boost your searchability is easy.  
• Traffic Analysis: Who is visiting your website and where are they coming from? With the traffic analytics tool, SEMrush shows how many site visits you had for a specified time period.  
  

BuzzSumo 

Price: Free to US$299/month depending on your plan  
What it is: Content and audience insights 

Want to get the most out of your content? BuzzSumo is a cloud-based platform that helps you discover the best engagement, content, and outreach opportunities across social and search, across four areas: Content Discovery, Content Research, Media Monitoring, and Influencer Research. 

Benefits: 

• Content Discovery: Built for brainstorming, get thousands of content ideas right at your fingertips. See what stories are trending before they go viral and dig deep into top-performing content from a specific category.  
• Content Research: BuzzSumo is great at making sure your content is set for success. Compare trends, identify top formats and search by domain to see your competitor's top content. 
• Media Monitoring: Monitor your competitors, brand mentions, and industry updates to make sure that you’re always in the know – there are even alerts to make sure you catch important events. 
• Influencer Research: Don’t be fooled by lots of likes! Identify authors and creators with engaged audiences and genuine authority on Instagram, Twitter, and the web, so you’re able to get the most out of your influencer strategy and investment.  
  

ASANA 

Price: Free to US$30.49/month depending on your plan 

What it is: Project Management 

Your one stop project management tool, Asana can help replace the slew of emails, spreadsheets, and sticky notes on your desk. Use Asana to create a comprehensive list of tasks, share details on actions that are required, and set deadlines for the whole project. 

Benefits:

• Get everyone on the same page: Because everyone has tasks assigned to them in Asana, your team can work in one common direction. In fact, 81% of customers say Asana helps them communicate about work more easily.  
• Make people accountable: Asana makes it very clear who’s doing what and when which also creates accountability. The clear ability to assign work to people and set deadlines means that 80% of customers say Asana increases accountability on their team. 
• Reduce email and in-person meetings: As there’s a clear list of tasks and the ability to see where everyone is in a project, Asana is perfect for saying goodbye to email. In fact, for us at Socialike, it has nearly cut it out altogether.  

Canva 

Price: Free to US$12.95/month for teams or custom enterprise pricing 

What it is: Content creation 

Need a graphic designer but don’t want the high price tag? Do it yourself with Canva. Canva is a free graphic design platform that's easy to use and great for making invitations, business cards, Instagram posts, and more. 

Benefits:

• 50,000+ templates to choose from: You name it, they’ll have a template for it. Canva is home to thousands of free, professionally designed templates that you can edit for your own use. Create infographics, Instagram posts, and even Zoom backgrounds, and anything else you need for your marketing.  
• An extensive suite of features helps your photos pop: One of the reasons that we love Canva is that it’s super easy to use. You don’t need a design degree to figure out how to add a textured background to give your photo more dimension, insert text to create your own meme, create a photo grid, blur your photo, and more.
•  Canva offers free video tutorials: Not only is Canva easy to use, but it helps you get the most out of the tool with a bunch of free video tutorials.   
  
  

Convertflow 

Price: Free to US$230/month depending on your plan 

What it is: Lead capture and conversion 

If you need to boost the conversion rate on your website, look no further than ConvertFlow. You don’t need any coding skills to effectively create, personalize, and launch landing pages, forms, surveys, quizzes, sticky bars, and popups from one simple platform. 

Benefits: 

• 100+ templates: Not sure where to start with your landing pages, forms, or popups? Get the inspiration you need to get started with the wide variety of templates that ConvertFlow has on offer.  
• Integrate with your stack: ConvertFlow has 1,500 possible integrations, meaning it will easily fit into your marketing stack. Sync form submissions, personalize your contact segments, automate workflows, send lead alerts, and much more.
• No-code visual builder: You’re a marketer, not a coder. That’s why ConvertFlow keeps things visual with their no-code visual builder make for marketers.   

Sign up to ConvertFlow to get started converting!  

Hero Post 

Price: From US$38/month you may also be able to score one of their lifetime package deals for US$197 – worth it in our opinion.   

What it is: Social Media scheduling and management 

You’ve got lots of social media accounts, but you need just one tool to help you manage when you post make a post all of them. Hero Post is the best tool for you to take control of your social media. Manage posts, engage with your chosen audience, track and analyze performance.

Benefits:

• Simple Dashboard Access:  If you’ve got multiple social media accounts, see their performance on a single page in a simple, accessible layout. 
• Add Unlimited Social Accounts: Many other similar platforms only let you add a handful of accounts. HeroPost’s Pro Unlimited Package will allow you to add an unlimited amount for a crazy low price.  
• Posting and Scheduling: Take control of your social media strategy with unlimited scheduling. You can schedule weeks and months ahead, which is perfect if you’ve been on a content-creating spree.

Conversion.ai 

Price: Starts at US$29 per month 

What it is: Content creation and copywriting   

Writing marketing copy can be time-consuming and hard. You need to get the right tone, use the correct keywords and make it sound natural at the same time as staying on topic. Conversion.ai uses learning algorithms to understand what works in online marketing so you can get better results from your campaigns without wasting time trying out different strategies yourself! 

Benefits:  

• Wave goodbye to writer's block, no matter what you’re writing: Conversion.ai will help you write the perfect message for every situation. With its powerful word choice suggestions and sentence structure options which are tailored to a range of audience types including bloggers, small business owners, or traditional marketers looking to establish credibility with their customers. (In fact, it wrote this paragraph for us!)  
• There’s a bunch of templates to choose from: Conversion.ai is so much more than a caption writing bot. From product descriptions to your marketing strategy and much more. There are 20+ writing skills that it has been taught by expert copywriters and examples proven to convert. 
• The writer knows how to convert: Always stressed you’re writing copy that’s not going to convert? Conversion.ai has been taught to boost your sales with better copy. Keywords, tone, and message are all things it takes into account to make sure your copy helps your bottom line.   

Sign up to Conversion.AI today and enjoy 10,000 bonus credits  

Opteo 

Price: Starts at US$97/month 

What it is: Online advertising and Google PPC optimization  

Description: A complete AdWords management toolkit, Opteo aims to make Google Ads management easier and more effective. Opteo continuously monitors AdWords accounts for statistically significant patterns. When something important comes up, Opteo suggests an improvement backed up by real data. Opteo also includes a set of tools to help you manage accounts, monitor performance, browse segments, track budgets, and get alerts when important changes happen. 

Benefits: 

Task Automation: Opteo analyzes the performance of your AdWords campaigns and defines the tasks needed for better efficiency and budget control - it organizes tasks in an easy-to-view dashboard.  
Improvement Suggestions: Opteo’s sophisticated algorithm monitors data in real-time and suggests improvements via notifications, improvements can be analyzed by the user, and instant decisions can be made. 
One-Click Changes: Opteo’s user-friendly interface and notification system allow users to make instant real-time changes that affect the relevance and effectiveness of campaigns with just one click.  

Databox 

Price: Free plans to US$289/month depending on your plan 

What it is: Data reporting and analytics 

Description: Having multiple digital marketing tools often means you often have to look in different places to see all your performance data. If you want to pull all your KPIs into one place, Databox is a great tool to do so. You can view all your performance data in one place and even mix and match metrics from different sources in one Databoard so you’re able to get cumulative, actionable insights to improve your marketing.  

Benefits: 

• Set measurable goals and track your progress: Google, HubSpot, Instagram, Facebook, and Shopify are just a select few of the 70+ integrations that Databox has on offer. Set goals for specific metrics for each of your integrations and track them all on one screen, so everyone can focus on what matters the most.  
• Get performance alerts & recommendations when they matter most: The handy Alerts function means you can get notified when performance is off or needs to be adjusted. We love the Alerts function as it means you can better understand how what your team is doing impacts the data you’re seeing. You can also see a stream of your team's achievements and receive recommendations for improving your performance using the Insights function.

• Easily calculate important business KPIs: Always wanted to combine two data sources together? You can with Data Calculations.  No coding or spreadsheets involved, create new metrics, conversion rates, ROI, and much more.  

Hotjar  

Price: Free to US$989/month depending on your plan 

What it is: Website Optimization 

Where are the hot spots on your website? Most “website optimization” tools will tell you how many people are coming to your website, but few will show you what they’re actually doing there. Hotjar shows you how people are behaving on your website and allows you to collect feedback from visitors.  

Benefits: 

• See your website through your customer's eyes: Heatmapsvisually represent where users click, move, and scroll on your site. With this context, you'll learn how users really behave. Recordings are live playbacks of users on your site. Watch full recordings of each visit, including the clicks, mouse movements, U-turns, and rage clicks. Identify issues on the fly and spot solutions in seconds. 
• Understand what your visitors are thinking: Surveys bring voice-of-customer to your decision-making. Gathering evidence for a new product or feature? Use a targeted Survey to validate your ideas and better understand your users. 

See what your website visitors have been up to with a 30-day free trial. 

Klayvio 

Price: Plans start at Free and tier up depending on the size of your database   

What it is: eCommerce marketing platform 

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform focused on email and designed for eCommerce. Klaviyo allows users to send out targeted email campaigns based on metrics such as purchasing and viewing history and how customers have interacted with past emails. 

Benefits:

• Great integration with Shopify: Klaviyo helps Shopify stores drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook, and Instagram marketing. Customers who switch from Mailchimp to Kalyvio see an average increase of 46% in total store revenue. 
• Easy to use:  Klaviyo ranks a 4.4 out of 5-star rating for the usability of their program. With the numerous advanced features, it gets a seal of approval for usability as the customer’s experience strengthens its appeal.
• Uses data science for top-notch insights: Ever wanted to know exactly who will buy when, so you can reach them at the most opportune time? Klayvio's data science engine unlocks just that and much more. 

Want better emails now? Sign up for Klaviyo.  

Selecting the right digital marketing tools can be the make or break for executing a well-thought-out marketing strategy. Although there’s a bunch of tools out there, if you’re not using them correctly, or missing a few key ones you’re likely wasting time, effort and energy better put into other aspects of perfecting your marketing.  
That’s why your best tool yet might be the right marketing partner. Having someone who knows how to select the right tools for you and implement them for you can be the best decision that you make to improve your marketing.  

Got a question about which tools might work best for you? Get in touch with us! We take our marketing tools seriously and can chat about which are right for you.