Why are digital marketing tools crucial for today’s businesses?

We live in the information era, a digital world in which everything is easily accessible via computers and computer networks. Both the hardware and software aspects of the automation industry have been on the rise, and the marketing techniques keep evolving. You need to upgrade whether you like it or not, but for marketing through sound planning and potential strategy, these tools come in handy.

Digital marketing tools will boost your business growth, allowing you to outperform your competitors and get a larger market share in the industry.

I have highlighted the 17 best digital marketing tools that every marketer should have in their tool kit.

Free keyword research tools

So what are keywords ?

Keywords are search phrases that a website owner or SEO expert uses to optimize a website in order to rank at the top of Google’s results for certain keywords. Below are some free keyword research tools.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a powerful tool when it comes to link building, keyword research, and competitive analysis. Ahrefs helps you find relevant keyword ideas and evaluate how difficult it would be to rank for them. It ranks your website relative to other sites to compare the size and quality of its backlink profile.

Features

Ahrefs helps you find the strongest backline opportunities in your niche.

Ahrefs has the most accurate data in the industry. It discovers popular content on a variety of topics and finds ideas for your own content. The database has around 8 billion keywords and 421 billion indexed pages.

Keywords everywhere

Keywords everywhere is a Chrome extension and a Firefox add-on that provides users with the search volume of keywords and also related long-tail keywords. As a result, the new sites will be able to rank for low-competition keywords.

Features

The Keywords everywhere tool shows the total searches performed for a specific keyword and the SEO difficulty of such keywords.

It displays the cost per click that advertisers are paying for a single click for keywords in Google Ads.

Best tools for lead generation

Lead generation encompasses activities relating to the discovery and nurturing of potential customers. Companies use a number of sales and marketing strategies to create leads, but it’s critical to have well-defined processes in place in either case. Below are some of best tools for lead generation

Snov.io

 Snov.io is an all-in-one outreach automation and customer relationship management tool. It helps you find convertible leads, validate contact details, and check the status of your leads. Snov.io makes it simple to integrate with a variety of third-party platforms.

Features

Snov.io allows marketers to create personalized drip email marketing campaigns using a drag-and-drop interface to connect with prospects.

It provides a Google Chrome plugin that allows marketing teams to swap between Gmail accounts and receive push alerts when emails are clicked.

GetProspect

GetProspect is an email extraction tool that marketers use to gather contact information. which includes job titles, business email addresses, LinkedIn profile URLs, organization names, and other information.

Features

GetProspect is one of the most effective email generation solutions available on the market. It gives more than 90% of accurate contact details of prospects.

Through Zapier, GetProspect allows you to integrate with third-party platforms, such as Twitter, Google Sheets, LinkedIn, Salesforce, MailChimp, Pipedrive, Hunter, Facebook Lead Ads, ActiveCampaign, Slack, NeverBounce, HubSpot CRM, and others.

Free email marketing tools

Convertkit

ConvertKit is a cloud-based solution that helps with lead generation and email marketing automation, which is used almost exclusively by bloggers, online course instructors, youtubers , and businesses that create content.

Features

The application is intended to enable users to grow their email list and automate the drip email marketing process through custom opt-in forms.

Convertit offers free landing page templates with a visual editor to customize according to the requirements of the user.

Converkit is free up to 1,000 subscribers. Users can send separate incentive emails too.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a marketing automation application that lets users send and analyze emails, campaigns, click-through rates, custom reports, and subscriber management. It is free for up to 2,000 contacts and can send up to 12,000 emails per month.

Features

On Mailchimp, you can create unlimited landing pages, forms, and browse 100+ pre-designed custom templates.

Mailchimp lets you code your own emails and personalize them according to your audience.

Best grammar checking tools

Grammarly

Grammarly is a cloud-based grammar editor that helps you write better content, email, social media posts, and academic papers. It is based on Ai technology that helps users write mistake-free and improve content tone, readability, writing style, and word choice. It is quick, simple, and very accurate.

Features

The AI automatically detects errors and suggests improvements to provide refined phrasing that increases the client’s engagement.

The English grammar checker will automatically start reviewing your content, but it is not as detailed as a human proofreader, but it does the job.

Hemingway

Hemingway Editor is a proofreading tool that highlights adverbs, passive voice, and uninteresting and difficult phrases to assist users in improving their writing style.

Marketers can use the tool to determine the grade level of material using an automatic readability index.

Features

Businesses can use Hemingway Editor to highlight complex text in different colours, delete unnecessary words, and break sentences into two pieces to increase the readability of the content.

The editor provides an estimated reading time for your content so that you can reduce the reading time by cutting superfluous phrases.

The best free search engine optimization tools

SEMrush

SEMrush is a multi-tool program; it is one of the most effective search engine marketing tools on the market. Semrush will conduct an audit of your website in order to identify any issues on your website and help you optimise them.

Features

Semrush is one of the most popular keyword research tools; it will assist you in finding long-tail keywords in order to drive organic search traffic.

SEMrush’s competitive research tool will analyze your competitor’s strategy and tap into their marketing strategies to gain insights about traffic, backline research, and other features like SEO tool kit, advertising toolkit, content marketing toolkit, social media toolkit, etc.

Note: it is a paid tool, and they offer a 7-day free trial to new users.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides statistics of website traffic, understands user interaction, and generates custom reports for your website. It gives insights into traffic sources and user behavior and helps to improve Search Engine Optimization and Content Marketing.

Features

While advertising online, Google Analytics tracks the metrics of all the advertising sources and helps you discover the best working advertisement platforms to avoid spending on sites that don’t provide ROI.

With Google Analytics’ “Intelligence Events’ you can receive automatic and custom alerts when significant statistical changes in website traffic occur.

Analytics tools

Hubspot

HubSpot is a cloud-based customer relationship management tool that can help you unify business sales and marketing teams, encourage sales assistance, increase ROI, and improve your inbound marketing approach to produce more quality leads.

Features

The Hubspot CRM tool helps you track emails and see whether the link has been clicked, also assists you with keeping track of all email correspondence and the prospect’s position in the sales funnel.

HubSpot Marketing Hub serves as a content management system, allowing customers to refine their website content, enhance it for search, and make mobile friendly adjustments.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a behavior analytics tool that shows the visual representation of how users interact and engage on your site. Hotjar creates heatmaps of a user’s actions and clicks and provides recordings of their sessions.

Features

The heatmap feature allows you to see where the users are clicking and how far down a page they’ve scrolled.

Hotjar feedback poll: Allow users to explain why they have or have not taken a specific action.

Digital Marketing Tools for Designing, Presentation, and Stock Images

Canva

Canva is a free graphic design tool, so you don’t need to spend on expensive tools to create professional designs, but it also comes with a premium version. Canva offers a wide variety of formats, templates, posters, etc. Digital art and design are now sweeping the world, and it is becoming hard for marketers to master the art of design. This is where Canva comes in handy with built-in templates, posters, and banners.

Features

Canva is a user-friendly tool for each project, including presentations, social media videos, posters, flyers, invites, and more. Users may pick from hundreds of design layouts.

Canva offersstock images, icons, and fonts to create appealing and engaging content, and you have full ownership of all your canva creations

Visme

Visme is a web-based visual content creator that helps users translate data into engaging content with graphics, infographics, charts, reports, and other forms of presentations. Visme is used by a wide range of professions worldwide, including marketers, instructors, executives, and communicators.

Features

It lets users transform dull facts into visually attractive representations, including a wide selection of fonts, free pictures, and icons to let them customise the content.

Visme allows users to record audio while giving presentations and add animations to slides to make them more professional and engaging.

Unsplash

Unsplash is a website that provides royalty-free or stock photos and has over 1.3 million photographs that have been posted to the platform, with over 65,000 new images being added every month.

Features

Unsplash photographs are free to use and can be used for most commercial, personal, and editorial projects.

Using Unsplash to share photographs may provide a freelancing business or personal project a lot of attention.

Free custom domain email address tool

Zoho

Zoho Mail is a safe and reliable email service for businesses. With a custom email ID using Zoho, with a custom email address that uses your domain name, you can increase the exposure and legitimacy of your business. They offer a free forever plan for up to five users (5GB per user).

Features

With Zoho, you can create and manage multiple domains from a single account, also it lets you share specific emails or entire folders with members of your organization.

Zoho Mail has an integrated calendar for managing all of your events in one place.

Bitly

Bitly is a link management tool that helps businesses shorten long and complicated URLs to as little as 14 characters. Bitly supports businesses with the creation and distribution of branded links for blogs, landing sites, webpages, social media, and more.

Features

Bitly lets you create QR codes of bitly links and track them.

With bitly, you can customize the link as per your domain and take control of your content.

Conclusion

Digital marketing tools can be a significant asset for any business.

Finally, these are some crucial digital marketing tools for marketers and start-up business owners that I recommend. To succeed in online marketing, it is essential to understand and implement various channels of marketing such as search engine optimization, social media marketing, drip email marketing, keyword research, lead generation, and more.

Above all, you can be a master of one, but having a broad knowledge of the tools will save time and increase the efficiency of your business.

You can select the finest of the lot that you believe will assist you in creating your ideal marketing plan. Keep examining your content, looking for areas to improve, and experiment with different tools and strategies.

Before you use these tools understand the principles of marketing