Essential digital marketing tools

Why a guide to digital marketing tools?

As marketers today, we’re fortunate to have a huge number of free and low-cost tools to give us insight about our customers, competitors, and markets. These online services, now often referred to collectively as marketing technology (martech), also help us compete by enabling our businesses to communicate with our audiences with automated, relevant real-time communications integrated across desktop and mobile and digital plus traditional marketing
channels.

Success in acquiring new customers through digital marketing goes to the businesses who are most successful in exploiting the main inbound marketing channels to get visibility and leads. These channels include search, social media, and email marketing, all fuelled by content marketing. Although using these channels is really competitive, many free, and paid tools are available to improve the targeting, review, and overall effectiveness of online campaigns. The challenge is that there are so many tools in different categories that it can be difficult to know which are available and which offer the best features.

Where do you start when deciding on the best types of services to use? There’s a challenge with the sheer number of tools which vary enormously in cost and quality. New challenger tools can sometimes do a better job than the established tools. Larger businesses and brands will require ‘enterprise’ services with a full-feature set which can be used across teams and smaller businesses will be looking for simpler, lower-cost or free services.

This guide recommends the best types of tools and the most popular alternatives in each category based on our experience and talking to other marketers.

How is this guide structured?

To highlight the range of great services available, this guide and the infographic on the next page recommend the categories of tools you should consider and highlight the most popular, most capable tools. Rather than simply categorizing tools, we have also grouped them across the Smart Insights RACE Planning system for managing digital marketing so you can review where you could make better use of the tools across the customer lifecycle.

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