Running a business in the 21st century means facing a world of competition. Stand out from the crowd with these marketing tools.
Making a lasting mark in today’s modern business world necessitates a multi-faceted approach. While complex digital marketing plans help set you up for success, it’s crucial to know which marketing tools can help you put those plans into action — and capture the attention of the audience you want to reach.
What are marketing tools?
A marketing tool is any program or resource that helps implement marketing tactics to promote your small business. Email marketing is one example of a tactic, and email marketing tools help make it possible.
You can also use indirect tools to streamline the marketing process, like project management or customer relationship software. But before deciding which tools are right for your business, you need to understand the basic goals of marketing.
One goal is visibility — the more people discover your product or service, the higher your chances of increasing sales. Another goal is brand awareness, which you can achieve by sharing branded content that accurately expresses your brand’s values and offerings. This approach demonstrates what makes your business unique and why potential customers should choose you over competitors.
Most marketing tools focus on achieving your visibility and brand awareness goals. Search engine optimization (SEO), for example, is a marketing tactic aimed at helping websites rank higher in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) so the site gets on more people’s radars. SEO tools help businesses optimize site content for higher search rankings.
48 of the best marketing tools for businesses
Not every marketer needs every marketing tool. To make it easier to find the most useful tools for your unique strategies and campaigns, we’ve broken down a list of our favorites by the marketing tactics they’re most likely to help with.
SEO
Google sees more web traffic than any other search engine, so SEO strategies focus on ranking higher on Google SERPs. Since most people only click on the first few search results, the goal is to ensure your site shows up as high on the first page of results as possible. A great way to do this is by optimizing your website content so that when Google crawls and indexes it, it comes across as informational and relevant to the keyword you’re aiming to rank for.
SEO can be complex, but plenty of online platforms are available to help you optimize your content, including:
Social media marketing
Social media marketing tools help you create and schedule posts, track customer engagement metrics, and advertise your business. With 90% of consumers purchasing from brands they follow on social media, a solid presence — with active accounts and frequently updated content — on platforms your target audience uses will increase visibility and improve brand awareness.
These five tools are a great place to start:
Project management
Project management tools help track projects and timelines, store data like lead behavior metrics, and break down silos between sales and marketing teams.
For example, you might need to make an email campaign for a sales-focused event. You could create a task for this project in a project management tool and monitor progress as it gets handed over to different parts of the team, like copywriters and sales execs. That way, everyone’s aligned on the campaign’s progress, performance, and contributors.
Here are a few helpful tools for project management:
Customer relationship management
Lead organization is a crucial part of marketing. You want to target interested people with compelling content and pass them off to your sales team at the right time. Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you do just that.
CRM tools organize and track leads to strategically time content delivery and transition them to different phases of the buyer cycle. If a prospect clicks on a call-to-action (CTA) button on your site, for example, a CRM tracks this activity so you can follow up with the next move, like targeted advertising or an email with a discount code, to drive the sale.
Some CRMs double as project management tools, helping you organize content, store marketing and sales team documents, and comment in-doc to collaborate on projects.
These CRM tools help cultivate client relationships and manage campaigns:
Event marketing
Event marketing creates awareness about virtual and in-person events. This tactic might involve circulating physical promotional event materials, posting on socials to advertise an event, and sending emails after the event to gain attendee feedback.
These promotional tools are excellent for marketing events:
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Landing pages
Marketers create campaign-focused website landing pages to build brand awareness, generate leads, and track sales. Landing page tools offer templates optimized for engagement and track helpful metrics to show you which pages perform well (and which don’t).
Try these landing page creation tools:
Influencer marketing
Influencers are people with a large, engaged social media following. You can collaborate with these digital creators by asking them to feature your products or share your posts so you can leverage their following to gain visibility for your brand.
These tools help you find influencers who align with your brand and budget:
Marketing analytics
Data analytics help you analyze customer behavior and pivot marketing strategies if campaigns aren’t performing or trends change. These tools help you create segmented lead lists and marketing strategies based on a target audience’s behavior.
Some marketing analytics tools include:
Video marketing
Video marketing tools help prepare and post video content by allowing you to edit and enhance videos with effects, transitions, and soundtracks and providing hosting and distribution options. These tools also provide useful metrics, like the number of play-throughs or time stamps that show where people pause or exit the video. You can use these analytics to optimize your content to match user behavior and promote further engagement.
Some video marketing tool examples include:
Email marketing
Customers who provide their emails are leads because they’ve demonstrated a clear interest in the product or service. That makes email campaigns a fantastic, low-cost way to foster and nurture relationships with people who’ve expressed interest in your brand.
Before starting an email marketing campaign, you need a system for collecting and organizing customer email addresses. You may also want to pay for tools that measure things like open rates and button clicks to optimize future campaigns.
Some great options include:
Start with a great website
Web design and marketing go hand in hand, so we’ll add a 49th tool to this list — Webflow. With more than 1,500 templates ready to go, Webflow has the tools you need to design a website that supports your marketing efforts and pushes your business forward.
Visit Webflow University to learn how to design user-friendly webpages, enhance your content marketing with a content management system, add ecommerce functionality to your site, and more.
