Many marketers who try to start a business online or increase sales without having the proper digital marketing tools often meet with dismal failure which, in most cases, leads to them giving up before they see their dream of a successful online business come to fruition.

The internet drives most people’s opinions as well as their decision-making, so it’s vital that you use the necessary internet marketing tools to leverage this power as best you can if you want to claim your slice of the pie when it comes to reaching potential customers.

These tools, whether free or paid, serve to help you in establishing a very strong presence online and they promote your business by using the most effective strategies for digital marketing available these days.

Without such tools, any online business owner would find it next to impossible to survive the competition (let alone to get an upper hand in the market).

Finding the Right Tools

Online marketing tools are everywhere these days and there is an incredible demand for effective tools among businesses of all sizes.

While the diversity is a good thing, the huge variety of options available on the market can also prove to be a little overwhelming for those who are just getting started in internet marketing.

In an effort to make things simpler for you, this article outlines some of the best digital marketing tools that you should be using in 2019 to effectively optimize your marketing efforts.

To make it easier, we’ve classified the tools into 6 categories according to what they are used for:

• Search Engine Optimization
• Research and Content Planning
• Social Media Marketing
• Digital Advertising
• Email Marketing
• Visual Design

In each category, there are various digital marketing tools that are considered by many successful marketers in the world as go-to solutions.

We’ve chosen them with regard to their usability, performance, as well as their cost-effectiveness.

Search Engine Optimization

1. Google Keyword Planner

This is a tool from Google Adwords which allows you to choose keywords for contextual advertising and promotion.

It instantly displays the search statistics for the keywords.

Additionally, the selection is done taking into consideration several factors which include language and region.

The tool also allows you to filter for negative keywords and stop words.

With Google Keyword Planner, you can see search statistics for phrases, the level of competition that each keyword has, and the average CPC for the keyword.

2. Moz

This analytical service collects information about the website’s search traffic.

It then selects keywords and offers recommendations for optimization. It lets you track website ranking and compare it to other sites from competitors. For experienced web developers, this tool offers a technical audit function which is extremely useful.

Being able to optimize search on maps is something that companies who sell products and services directly would obviously find beneficial.

3. SEMrush

This platform lets you conduct SEO analysis on your own site in addition to your competitors’ websites. It also gives you data on advertising activities, attendance, and the approximate budget of any third-party web resources.

It’s a particularly effective tool for monitoring your competitors’ back-links and rankings.

4. Screaming Frog

This is a crawler program designed for on-page SEO audit.

It effectively locates broken links and checks all meta tags. It offers free checking which makes this software more accessible to those who own small web resources.

Research and Content Planning

5. Google Trends

This is a simple and easy-to-use tool that is designed to help you analyze the seasonality and popularity of online search queries.

This tool helps you to solve tasks such as:

• How to find existing trends
• How to determine the popularity of a particular topic
• How to analyze seasonality of your market
• How to assess the effect of geographic data on specific search queries
• And so on…

In other words, Google Trends helps you to find out exactly what excites your customers currently, and whether or not they are likely to be interested in your product or service over time.

For the most part, your advertising success depends on how quickly you’re able to react to trends, and this tool will help you to always be a step ahead.

6. BuzzSumo

This tool helps you to search for online content based on search queries with regard to different factors such as likes, comments, and shares on social media.

With BuzzSumo, you can analyze content in any niche in the market. It has an advanced search engine that looks for the most relevant content by author, domain, or topic.

This service allows you to glean what themes your target audience relates to so that you can make the most appropriate decisions when crafting your own content.

It also helps you to obtain valuable information pertaining to responses on social networks.

7. Reddit

This site is called the Internet’s ‘front page’ for a reason. It’s one of the biggest online communities and it absorbs all the best and most popular content that is available on the web.

Basically, Reddit is an aggregator site that draws content from millions of users worldwide.

When those people share links to engaging and useful materials or when they publish content of their own, other users on the site evaluate the content that has been added and a discussion ensues in the comments section.

The content that is deemed to be great content gets higher rankings while the mediocre content goes to the bottom of the list.

This makes it an ideal tool to monitor what the hot topics are and to identify current trends for your particular content marketing campaign.

Social Media Marketing

8. HootSuite

This social media marketing system is powerful and convenient. It allows you to manage all of your corporate accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks.

With this tool, you can schedule many of your posts in advance and then publish them on all social media networks and be able to track your followers’ reactions on each social page that you run.

Also, this tool allows you to respond more effectively to comments, monitor what customers are saying about your products and company, and send your RSS feed to all your social profiles automatically.

9. Sprout Social

This is one of the most commonly used social media tools for helping businesses to boost their performance on social media networks.

Some of its more remarkable features include integrated analytics, Help-Desk, and CRM. Sprout Social allows you to monitor customers’ search by location or interest as well as to monitor your competitors’ activities.

The tool also has a contacts organizer, features for engagement garnering, advanced team tools, fully integrated publishing tools, and centralized reports.

10. Sprinklr

This tool allows you to plan your publications and analyze reports and statistics.

It enables you to monitor hot topics and trends as well as checking the ROI of social media marketing activities. This is a feature that is unique and definitely makes this tool stand out.

Sprinkler also supports all social media platforms which puts it among the most versatile tools for your social media marketing efforts.

Digital Advertising

11. Google AdWords

This contextual advertising service from Google has a conveniently simple interface.

It provides users with multiple tools to help them create effective digital ads. Adwords is great for businesses of all scales. This online marketing technology enables you to advertise on Google’s search results pages.

You can also run your ads on Google partner websites.

Adwords is very flexible and allows users the freedom to set their budget for a particular period of time, set geographical limitations, and to change the keywords or content of the ad if they want to do so.

Another great advantage of Google Adwords is that it works on a pay-per-click basis. This means that marketers only pay for customers who are actually interested in the products or services that they are advertising.

12. Facebook Ads

This is a great tool for digital marketing.

This social media network has a massive audience just waiting for marketers to tap into. And Facebook knows their location, gender, age, interests, and preferences.

With Facebook Ads, you can customize your campaign by defining criteria such as goals, budget, target audience, format, and so on.

You can create the ideal digital ad to best suit your potential customer.

This platform also offers you very accurate analytics tools so that you can check how effective your paid social media campaigns are and make any necessary adjustments on the go.

13. WordStream

This online marketing service is ideal for analyzing your ads on Facebook and Google Adwords to see how effective they are.

WordStream monitors contextual ads and offers recommendations on new keyword use, landing page alternatives, and bid management.

When you register and connect your Google account, you get some free basic recommendations to help you improve your ad campaigns on social media networks and search engines, and also to increase the visibility of your landing pages.

Email Marketing

14. MailChimp

This is one of the best email marketing services that allow you to send automated emails to customers.

With the help of MailChimp, you will be able to manage several mailing lists automatically as well as run email campaigns much more efficiently.

This service also provides you with valuable statistics about your email delivery rates, open rates, and also your click-through rates.

This means that you will have a much easier time analyzing how effective and profitable your email campaigns are.

It has a very simple and intuitive interface.

15. ActiveCampaign

This is a comprehensive marketing platform which has features such as email list management, tools for SMS advertising, and a CRM system that has automation functions.

This application can be integrated with third-party services such as Google analytics and internet browsers.

This is a wonderful system not just for bloggers, but also for businesses that deal with e-commerce, ad agencies or specialized corporate units such as sales, marketing, and customer support departments.

16. GetResponse

This is a favorite of many marketers thanks to its all-in-one solution for email marketing automation. This software has numerous settings for email marketing campaigns.

You can conduct webinars, build beautiful landing pages, and the platform also allows you to optimize interaction with customers. This helps to boost your business’s efficiency.

With GetResponse, you get a convenient email builder and testing platform that helps you achieve higher conversion rates. You can create landing pages from existing templates or from scratch.

They even offer a free trial as well as free video lessons on how to get email subscribers for newbies.

Visual Design

17. Canva

This software for graphic design has a simple drag-and-drop interface which makes it easy for anyone to use regardless of their skill level.

Unlike a lot of other graphic design tools on the market today, Canva doesn’t have a huge learning curve which makes it ideal for beginners to internet marketing.

It has hundreds of layouts that are ready-made but you can also easily create your own from scratch.

Canva’s stock library contains over a million photos, graphic images, and fonts.

With this platform, you can create beautiful and professional looking presentations, covers, ad posters, images for your social media accounts, leaflets, logos, banners, postcards, and invitations.

18. Animoto

This service is for creating videos and allows you to direct and edit the videos as well.

With this software, you can analyze photos and music to automatically create videos.

This kind of platform is particularly beneficial to social media marketers who need to create videos and slideshows for advertising.

It’s also of great use to business reps in the sales industry as a tool for making promotional video clips.

19. Lander

This designing tool lets you create unlimited landing pages.

You can manage visual elements in the platform’s editor which has a simple to use drag-and-drop interface. Lander is great for businesses of all sizes.

It has a wealth of training videos, customizable templates, and an extremely intuitive design editor.

Because users don’t need any particular skills in web design to master this software, it’s a firm favorite with individual entrepreneurs and startups.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the many tools available for online marketing.

Whether you choose the above-mentioned tools or consider other options, don’t forget that a tool is only as good as its user. So while achieving digital transformation is essential for most businesses, these tools are only here to optimize the processes.

And remember, most effective tools offer free trials or a free version of their software so you can test the tool before investing your hard earned cash, so make use of them.

Feel free to post your comment below.  An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!

PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published May 25th 2018