What’s the key to growth-oriented success for today’s businesses?
Is it having an awesome product? Stellar service? Competitive pricing?
Sure, all those things are important—vital, even. But if we had to pick just one singular key, it’s marketing.
Or perhaps we should say, it’s marketing—along with the marketing tools your business uses to execute it.
Why is marketing the key? Because none of the other stuff matters much unless you get your company’s message out there effectively and to the right people. So we’re going to show you 15 of the best marketing tools you can add to your marketing tech stack—because the right marketing tools are the catalyst for sustained marketing success.
Note: These marketing tools were found during our online research while writing this article.
What are marketing tools?
A marketing tool is anything you use to make marketing happen. Pencils, papers, and printers are all marketing tools—and so are the countless systems and software solutions that power your digital marketing efforts.
We’re going to assume you’ve got the physical marketing tools (pencils and scissors and even computer hardware) taken care of already. But the world of marketing software tools is a wide one, and culling through all the available tools in every marketing category takes time.
So we’ve collected 15 of the best tools you can add to your marketing stack to get a better return on your marketing investments.
Link management and shortening
Any comprehensive digital marketing strategy needs a way to shorten and manage links. Doing so saves precious space on physical and graphic ads. Plus, you won’t max out your character count on social media with a lengthy, vague string of letters and numbers.
For this category, a single product solves all your link management and shortening needs: Bitly.
1. Bitly
Most businesses use links in all of their marketing content, so leads can just click or tap to visit their website or landing page. In this approach, the link is just a means to an end. There’s nothing special or strategic about the link itself.
We say there’s a better way.
Bitly is more than just a link shortener—it’s a way to easily create memorable shortened branded links and QR Codes. When you use Bitly to set up a vanity URL or vanity domain, these links correlate with your business and help reinforce your branding.
Bitly is among the most popular free marketing tools as well. Free plan users can create 10 custom short links (with custom back-halves) per month.
Bitly stands out as one of the best marketing tools thanks to its simple navigation and deep mobile linking features. The backend link management platform adds unprecedented power and flexibility to your short links. You can redirect, track, analyze, and organize your links and QR Codes as much as you need.
Last, Bitly offers a powerful Link-in-bio microsite your brand can use on social media platforms, giving you a mobile-friendly landing page that helps your audience get where you need them to go.
Key features
- URL shortener
- Custom domains and custom back-halves
- QR Code generator
- Link-in-bio creation tool
- Powerful analytics
- Link redirects
- Simple UI and navigation
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is a huge driver for many businesses. As many as 82% of consumers have purchased a product they saw for the first time on social media, and that number climbs to 85% among Gen Z.
Here are three of the top social media marketing tools your brand can start using right away.
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is designed to be a control center for your entire social presence. Compatible with all major social media platforms, businesses can organize their whole content calendar via a single dashboard. It also makes it easy to collaborate via its smart inbox and comes with a full suite of social media analytics tools.
3. Loomly
For smaller businesses, Loomly is the ideal platform for collaborating on content. From deadlines to workflows and built-in calendars, Loomly can do it all. It also tracks trending social media topics for more timely and relevant content creation. Loomly is incredibly affordable, which makes it ideal for small marketing agencies and one-man operations.
4. SocialPilot
Automation is all the rage, and with SocialPilot, you can add a layer of it to your social media marketing efforts. For collaborating with other businesses, SocialPilot allows you to automatically share their posts and links on your social media just by entering their URLs. You can also take advantage of integrated social media analytics and reply to messages on Facebook from the same platform. One of its coolest features is being able to download analytical reports in PDF form for formal presentation.
Email marketing
Email marketing is another highly effective marketing approach, one that can’t function at all without a set of dedicated tools, like these:
5. ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing, email automation, and CRM platform designed for sales teams at small to mid-sized businesses. It’s a growth-oriented platform that can automate your customer journeys, create powerful email marketing sequences, and even engage in sales automation and lead scoring.
ActiveCampaign is worth using for its email marketing automation features alone, and the numerous additional capabilities make the product even more powerful. Ecommerce integrations are all here as well, with support for WooCommerce, Shopify, Square, Stripe, BigCommerce, and Magento.
Key features
- Marketing automation
- Landing page creation
- Personalization
- Site tracking (with follow-up and retargeting)
- Transactional emails (SMTP and API)
6. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing platform that helps brands engage with their audiences. The platform includes an email-building tool, automated personalized journeys via the Customer Journey Builder, a segmentation tool for precise targeting, and more.
Mailchimp now boasts an AI-powered analytics module as well, so you’ll get a clearer and more in-depth understanding of how your email marketing is performing. You’ll also find a wealth of other email marketing tools, such as customizable templates, A/B testing, and intuitive design tools to help you crush your next email marketing campaign.
Key features
- Email marketing creation
- Social media marketing
- Audience management (targeting and segmentation)
- Marketing automation
- Reporting and analytics
SEO and content marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful method for attracting warm leads. Content marketing is one of its main components, allowing brands to create value-generating content for relatively little marketing spend.
It’s also an underused approach, as around 57% of small to medium businesses still lack a clear SEO strategy.
Whether you need affiliate marketing apps or more traditional e-commerce-focused SEO tools, we recommend you start with these two industry-leading products.
7. Semrush
Semrush is an SEO and search engine marketing (SEM) platform that delivers powerful tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, and optimization for various ad platforms. It’s a nearly indispensable tool for any business doing SEO, content marketing, competitor research, and search engine marketing (including PPC).
Semrush can help your brand discover the right keywords (both nationally and locally), analyze the backlink profile of any domain, and audit your site for technical SEO problems. The platform also includes a visual dashboard where you can track your search engine rankings placement (SERP) over time.
There’s much more to Semrush than just SEO, but we’ll keep the key features focused on the SEO piece of the pie.
Key features for SEO
- Keyword research
- On-page SEO
- Local SEO
- SERP rank tracking
- Competitor SEO analysis
8. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another SEO-focused software as a service (SaaS) platform that operates differently than Semrush. Many companies leverage both of these tools together, each for its own specific functions.
Ahrefs is all about building traffic and increasing SERP. It does this with a set of five tools, which double as the platform’s key features:
- Site Explorer helps you analyze how your competitors’ sites are performing.
- Site Audit helps you discover issues on your own site and optimize it to rank in search.
- Keywords Explorer helps you discover the keywords your customers are already searching for, so you can start building content around the most relevant keywords.
- Content Explorer helps you find strong content ideas and linking opportunities.
- Rank Tracker helps you see your progress in SERPs over time.
In addition to these key tools/features, Ahrefs includes a wealth of educational content, including the Beginner’s Guide to SEO and Ahrefs Academy.
Lead generation and enrichment
Every business needs leads to sell to. Lead generation and enrichment tools help you find, understand, nurture, and convert those leads into customers.
9. HubSpot
HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that can connect your marketing, sales, content management, and customer services all under one umbrella.
HubSpot is also notable because its core basic CRM is available free of charge. And as far as free CRMs go, HubSpot is hard to beat.
The Sales Hub portion of the suite is where the lead gen and enrichment features live. It provides a place to track your lead nurturing efforts, with helpful reminders when it’s time to do the next step. The platform helps you establish better trust and more stable sales relationships by connecting on a more meaningful level.
10. Unbounce
Unbounce is a platform for building landing pages that convert. It’s also a great tool for creating those sticky banners and pop-up messages you see when trying to close out a browser tab.
These are popular tools for a reason: they work. Just as a website visitor is about to give up, you pop a discount code front and center. For some visitors, that’s just the nudge they need to move from “I don’t really need that” to “paying customer.”
There’s also a laundry list of apps and integrations, and Unbounce has recently rolled out an AI writing assistant.
11. Clearbit
Reaching out to prospects relies on the quality of the information you have in front of you. Clearbit leverages more than 100 different sources, including Salesforce, to give you the latest information on your leads. Never rely on outdated or incorrect information again with a platform that refreshes its entire database once every 30 days. Now you can prospect with confidence without relying on any other marketing tools.
Conversion optimization
Getting visitors to land on your website is one thing. Getting them to stick around (and, hopefully, buy something) is another.
Conversion optimization tools help with the second (and third) parts of this equation, helping you keep visitors on-site and turn more of them into customers.
12. OptiMonk
Stop your customers from bouncing with targeted pop-ups on your landing pages. These personalized pop-ups emphasize showing the right message based on the behavior of the user. Standardized passive-aggressive pop-ups are ineffective and annoying. OptiMonk aims to make pop-ups an asset to your lead generation campaign. With personalization fast becoming a cornerstone of modern marketing, OptiMonk empowers you to make the transition seamlessly.
13. Hotjar
Understanding user behavior is a critical aspect of marketing. Hotjar is a type of behavior analytics software that allows you to gain insights into how users behave on your sites.
From visitor recordings to heatmaps, you can get a better idea of how your customers react when they hit your website. You can even add surveys to your website via Hotjar to get direct feedback about your user experience.
Content creation
SEO and content marketing efforts create one big, ongoing need: content. Of course, other aspects of your marketing strategy also demand content. Every social media post needs a graphic or video, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
These two content creation tools will help your brand improve both speed and output. And if you need more than these two recommendations, check out the 12 content creation tools all marketers need in their toolkits.
14. Canva
It might not be exactly right to call Canva “graphic design for the rest of us,” but it’s a pretty good start. It’s a graphic design platform for those of us who didn’t go to art school and don’t know where to start in PhotoShop or Illustrator. It gives users a relatively simple set of tools for creating graphics and even simple videos.
Canva makes it much easier to create elegant graphics that look good and don’t scream, “I don’t know what I’m doing!” In fact, the Canva platform is so easy to use, you might even find pro designers using it instead of their pro tools from time to time.
15. BuzzSumo
How much is a blog post worth if no one wants to read it?
Answer: Not much.
BuzzSumo is a content discovery and content research tool that helps brands find out what’s hot right now and what’s likely to resonate over the long term (trending/evergreen content ideas). Brands leverage BuzzSumo to keep their content creation timely, interesting, and relevant.
You can also use it as an influencer research tool to figure out which influencers truly make sense for your brand.
Revolutionize your marketing strategy with Bitly
The best marketing tools are the ones that get results. These 15 marketing tools all have proven track records of helping brands reach, convert, and retain audiences with their digital marketing efforts.
Bitly is one tool that integrates well with just about every other on this list. It’s the key to building trust online and to making your links shorter for bigger results. And those custom short links and QR Codes can be used in just about anything you create with the other tools discussed above.
Ready to get more clicks, better analytics, and more paying customers? Start using Bitly today!