The 16 Best Digital Marketing Tools in 2020

I'm a big fan of finding the latest and greatest digital marketing tools.

While digital marketing tools will only help you execute a proper strategy (they won't do the work for you), the right technology stack can really help you zoom past the competition.

Some tools out there are foundational -- things like email marketing, web forms, analytics, and a CRM. However, other tools are more specialized, including keyword rank trackers, or design tools.

To take your marketing strategy to the next level, we've outlined the following 16 digital marketing tools every marketer should have in their tool belt.

Learn how to run more impactful, measurable marketing campaigns.

1. HubSpot Marketing

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

HubSpot has several tools to help you grow your business, no matter what stage you're at.

Starting out, there are several tools available for free. You can set up web forms, popup forms, and live chat software for lead capture. Then, you can send email marketing campaigns, pipe all of your data into the free CRM, and analyze site visitors' behavior.

When you expand into the paid tiers, things get really sophisticated with advanced marketing automation.

From managing your content and social media to tracking emails and connecting with your leads, HubSpot is an all-in-one solution -- although it works well with other point solutions you may use (Typeform, HotJar, etc.).

Ultimately, the tool allows you to:

• Grow your traffic, convert leads, and prove ROI for your inbound marketing campaigns.
• Shorten deal cycles and increase close rates with the provided sales tools.

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2. Ahrefs

Price: Tiered pricing, ranging from $99 to $399

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool to help you punch up your website traffic. They have data for around 150 million keywords in the U.S., and even more for 150 other countries.

Ahrefs is great for competitive analysis, allowing you to check out who is linking to your competitors, what their top pages are, and more. You can see where their content ranks and, using the Content Gap tool, identify key weaknesses for your content areas.

The Top Pages tool lets you see which pages get the most traffic, and you can see the amount of traffic going to competitors' sites.

Ahrefs is one of my favorite SEO tools. It constantly impresses me with features I use daily, and I learn about new features all the time. It's easily the most robust product in this space.

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3. Proof

Price: Tiered pricing based on the volume of your website traffic, starting at $24/month

Proof connects to your CRM or website and uses social proof to boost conversions on your site. They implement social proof messaging (i.e. "25 people are viewing this post right now"), reviews, and videos geared towards targeted customers once they visit your site.

The popular Live Visitor Count and Hot Streak notification features boost customers' perception of your brand, and lets prospects get a look at how other people respond to your product. Additionally, it's super easy to install -- you just copy and paste their pixels into your site.

You can identify your visitors and examine their journey throughout your site, which can help optimize your site design for higher conversions. It integrates with an impressive amount of other software systems and is optimized for mobile.

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4. Survey Anyplace

Price: Tiered pricing, starts free and goes to $42/month for enterprises

Survey Anyplace is able to reflect your branding on surveys and allows you to build your own, and they've improved upon the user experience. You can now formulate your own questions and include images as needed.

Their surveys are simple, well-designed, and compatible with mobile. Removing the friction from completing surveys increases their likelihood of completion.The better your survey, the more useful the insights gained can be.

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5. Yoast

Price: The Yoast plugin for WordPress is free, but the paid premium plans range based off the number of sites you need monitored

Yoast is a very popular plugin that works with both Gutenberg and the Classic editor in WordPress. Yoast is an excellent tool to help you optimize your content for search engines.

Yoast helps you choose cornerstone content, focus keywords to help you rank, individual content URLs, and internal links for an additional boost. The plugin also evaluates your page readability and gives it a Flesch Reading Ease score.

It's updated to reflect Google's algorithm every two weeks, so you can always stay up-to-date on your SEO.

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6. Slack

Price: Free for small or medium companies, custom pricing for enterprises

Slack is one of the favored communication services in business today.

It operates in channels designated for certain information, so business conversations don't get distracted or cut-off by tangents about where everyone wants to go for team lunch. It facilitates, de-silos, and focuses collaboration between employees and teams.

It's an excellent tool for networking and meeting others in the digital marketing space, and gives you the freedom to join or leave channels as needed.

Because it's such a popular communication channel, it has wide-ranging integrations with plenty of other tools. You can tack on a seemingly unlimited amount of integrations and Slack applications to make the tool even more powerful -- for instance, many teams will pipe in A/B test results, analytics notifications, new customer or transaction notifications, or even sales or customer support bots. While undeniably powerful, Slack is easy to start using immediately.

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7. Trello

Price: Paid plans range from free to $20.83 per month for enterprise

Trello is a content management tool that many organizations use for brainstorming and strategizing content -- in fact, we use Trello at HubSpot to know when our blog posts are scheduled for publication.

The reason Trello is so appealing is that it's free for small teams and businesses, and it provides a visual way to brainstorm and schedule content online -- even if your team is remote or global. Additionally, it's easy to assign multiple employees to a card, so you know who's in charge of writing, editing, or adding CTA offers to a post.

Users can create cards and include notes on the card topic, as well as create deadlines and assign topics to certain teams. Trello facilitates collaboration and provides clarity on projects in the pipeline.

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8. Canva Business

Price: Plans start free, $12.95/month for teams, or custom pricing for enterprises

Canva is a drag-and-drop design platform that allows users to create images using custom pictures, icons, shapes, and fonts from the Canva catalog. It offers an aesthetically-pleasing, simple way to design your own logos, presentations, images, or graphs based off your team's needs.

Additionally, Canva cuts out the need for an experienced designer and enables you to create the exact visual you have in mind using their vast image collection.

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9. Google AdWords

Price: AdWords run on a pay-per-click model

Google AdWords is one of the most popular options for advertising your business on Google's search engine results' pages. Payment is based on either a pay-per-click or pay-per-call structure.

Google AdWords hosts the Google Keyword Planner, where you can research which keywords you want to include in your ad and your other content. You can set budget caps on how much you want to spend. Ultimately, the tool helps you funnel more prospects to your website.

AdWords is an excellent way to display your products or services on Google's results pages for very specific queries. For instance, let's say someone searches for "best CrossFit gym in Austin". Sure, you could work on your SEO and hope to appear organically -- but you can also bid on the keyword and appear at the top of the page, enabling you to capture tons of high intent visitors.

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10. Google Analytics

Price: Free

Google Analytics is the gold standard for website analytics. Nowadays, it's hard to operate as a digital marketer if you don't have some level of Google Analytics expertise.

At its most basic level, Google Analytics can show you who is coming to your website, from where, and on which pages they're spending most of their time. Beyond that, you can set up goals to track conversions, build an enhanced ecommerce setup, and track events to learn more about user engagement.

Truthfully, barely a day goes by that I don't use Google Analytics. To learn more, check out The Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics in 2019.

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11. MailChimp

Price: Tiered pricing, plans start free and range up to $199

MailChimp is an email marketing and social advertising tool designed to automate and orchestrate campaigns.

You can track the traffic garnered from your campaigns -- additionally, MailChimp offers multiple integrations with other SaaS companies. The tool is especially powerful for email drip campaigns. Ultimately, it's a good option for engaging with your audience.

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12. Asana

Price: Tiered pricing, free to $19.99/month, with custom enterprise options

Asana is a collaborative workflow management system with a visual emphasis designed to streamline and de-silo information and goals between teams.

Asana allows you to do several things:

• Record and visualize projects to be completed
• Map out deadlines and prioritize tasks
• Assign tasks to certain team members
• Identify points of friction and bottlenecks
• Report on projects quickly and openly
• De-silo data between teams

The Portfolios function also lets you keep track of every project's status, ensuring that your team members have the support and motivation to get out their digital marketing initiatives on time.

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13. BuzzSumo

Price: Paid plans start at $79/month

BuzzSumo is a unique content research tool that identifies top influencers in your industry and helps you connect with them.

You can look up trending topics and define the scope of your search to generate both evergreen content, or trending content aimed at your desired audience.

From there, you can look at your content's analytics and social mentions, and then measure performance accordingly.

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14. MeetEdgar

Price: $49/month

MeetEdgar is an excellent social media management tool.

Using the browser extension, it can write posts and extract up to five important highlights from your posted content for you to easily share. You can sort your content into categories and decide when you want content shared from each category.

It allows you to schedule posts 24/7, and if your queue runs out, it will mine previous posts and re-share them -- which you can start and stop at any time. You can also use MeetEdgar to run A/B tests on your content to find the most optimal language and content for your posts.

MeetEdgar is integrated with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

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15. Buffer

Price: Starts free and goes up to $199/month

Buffer operates in much the same way as MeetEdgar for social media posting, but also offers analytics on posts, so it's worth checking out, as well. It has tiered pricing, and plans range from free to $199 per month.

Buffer is one of my favorite social media tools. Its simplicity is its value proposition. You can easily get started in a matter of minutes, but it's got plenty of features for the advanced user, as well.

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16. Hootsuite

Price: Starts at $29 per month, or custom enterprise pricing

Hootsuite is more of an enterprise social media management solution, but it's quite powerful and very popular. Hootsuite is able to store your approved content in a cloud that team members can access 24/7 for social media posting needs. It allows multiple posts to be scheduled at once with developed tags and keywords.

Using Hootsuite, you can track the performance of your social media content. Hootsuite can calculate ROI, conversions, and track public conversations about your brand or specific subject matter. Plans have tiered pricing, starting at $29 per month and ranging toward $599 per month for enterprise.

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There are plenty of different tools for you to tackle your marketing problems head-on -- you just need to decide where to focus first. Which tool works best with your company structure and ultimate goals?

If you want a free, comprehensive, all-in-one marketing service, check out HubSpot's free marketing tools.

Originally published May 29, 2019 7:00:00 AM, updated December 16 2019

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