Marketers wear a lot of hats. Depending on the agency, digital marketers can be working on social media, emails, SEO, community building, public relations, or a combination of all in a single work day. To get all of our jobs done, we need the most efficient marketing tools around. If you searched “best marketing tools” on Google right now, there’s no doubt you’ll feel at least a little overwhelmed by the vast array of resources. Founder and CEO Kollin Lephart has got you covered, narrowing down all of those listicles and singling out the best of the best, both paid and free.
Here are our favorites for…
Email Marketing Tools
Mailchimp
This one-stop shop for email marketing currently has over 20 million users. It’s perfect for beginners with it’s super user-friendly interface. There’s a lot of features like automations and creating opt-in pages, and the data reports are easy to read. It’s also free for users with <2,000 subscribers.
Moosend
Moosend offers a free-forever plan, which rocks for small or new businesses, and the paid plan is super affordable. The UI is pleasing and easy to grasp, and they offer unique features like subject line optimization and real-time analytics.
Saving Time with Automations
Zapier
You can connect Zapier to a bunch of apps like Mailchimp and Slack. Their automated workflows are called Zaps, and there are over 350+ automations to help you spend less time on busywork and more time on cultivating your strategy and community.
Social Media Planning
Planoly
Planoly allows you to schedule out auto-posts with captions, hashtags, and profile tags, and also gives you an overview of the look of your feed.
Plann
Plann exists in the same vein as Planoly, but it doesn’t have an auto-post feature. What it does have is a really cool Strategy feature where you can schedule out the certain types or “themes” of posts in accordance to their purpose on your feed, like testimonials or behind-the-scenes. You can just drag and drop your content into the corresponding boxes. They also show you extremely in depth insights like which color palettes perform the best.
Later
Later allows you to schedule auto-posts for your social sets (groups of accounts). The free plan offers this for one social set. You can access more analytics with the paid plans, but they have the basics.
Designing Graphics
Canva
Canva makes designing easy, and there are so many templates to choose from. The most basic of beginners can pick up on Canva’s UI in no time.
SEO Research
Moz
Moz can be considered the all-in-one suite for any SEO affairs. Pretty pricey, but it has a free trial option. There are tons of features in the paid packages. Track keywords, keep tabs of how you’re ranking in comparison to your competitors, and crawl sites to report on what you can improve.
Yoast SEO
This WordPress plugin is super accessible for beginners. The comprehensive audits get the job done if you’re looking to evaluate the SEO scores of your web pages and make improvements.
Public Relations
HARO
Help A Reporter Out lets you share your expertise via quotes with reporters looking to cover your niche. Super helpful to gain more backlinks to your company and get a little PR buzz.
Customer Relationship Management
HubSpot
Nurturing your leads and analyzing your metrics is made super easy with Hubspot. The user-friendly interface makes the sale automation/contact insight/email marketing/lead tracking/you-name-it process accessible for the whole time with it’s real time updates.
Photo Editing
Adobe Lightroom
Lightroom helps you edit your photo content to make it as prim and proper as possible. You can download Lightroom presets to help present your content cohesively and maintain a consistent aesthetic.
Adobe Photoshop
If you ever need to correct, manipulate, design, or basically optimize an image for your socials, Photoshop is the tool to use. It’s tricky but possible to learn your way around it, and once you do, it really changes the game.
Management Tools
You know ‘em, you love ‘em. Our favorite managerial tools are:
Google Drive
Excel
Google Docs
Zoom
Google Meet
It was hard to chip away at the hundreds of pages of possible marketing tools to use when we first began. That’s why we created this list for you! Try out these tools in your 2021 marketing. Better yet, book a consultation with us and we’ll help you identify where we can make improvements in your strategy and which can be most helpful to you.
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