Petra Mainer — October 4, 2017 Technological transformations in the modern world have moved much of human activity to the virtual space. Our work, study, leisure, and even private areas such as friendships and intimate communication are inextricably linked to “being online.”
So if your company does not exist online, it almost doesn’t exist at all. In fact, you almost don’t need physical premises anymore. Good performance online can bring incredible success, without the need for an actual store.
But growing your online presence is no easy thing. To make your products or services top notch, you need to be familiar with numerous digital marketing tools and operate them successfully. Luckily, we’re here to help.
If you’re a beginner, this post gives you a list of recommended tools to start with. We’ll start with just 15, but there is an incredible range and variety of helpful products our there.
These 15 tools help you do the following:
- Analyze keywords
- Measure your search rankings
- Get content ideas
- Build links
- Remove links
- Achieve technical SEO success
We’ve broken these up into three crucial stages of growing your business: research and planning, implementing marketing strategy, and analytics. Let’s take a look now.
Research and planning
1. Google Trends
Google Trends shows you the latest trends in any area you’re interested in. Just type the chosen keyword (product, industry name, or something else) in the search panel. You’ll immediately know how much online buzz there is about your topic. If this is yor brand name or a competitor, the information is incredibly valuable.
How this helps
It’s important to know which products or services are popular and trending to come up with better ideas for your own. With Google Trends, you’ll be able to verify whether your business idea is outdated, and if there are a lot of similar offers which may obstruct your success.
2. Ahrefs
The competitive environment is the most important concern when you launch a business. Ahrefs’ set of tools provides you with an opportunity to get to know the competitors in your field. You’ll also learn the source of competitors’ traffic, information about their ranking keywords, backlinks, content features, and a lot of other useful data.
How this helps you
To grow your business, you need to learn from your competitors. For this, you to know their weaknesses and strengths, and beat them within your area of business. Using these data, you’ll have a perfect reference point for your own digital marketing approach.
3. Keywords Explorer by Ahrefs
It’s hard to overestimate how much this tool will help you in creating your marketing strategy. Keywords Explorer’s Database proposes more than 3 billion keywords, updated on a monthly basis. It’s also supported in more than 100 countries.
A few of its standout features:
- Keyword difficulty score: tells you how easy it will be to rank for each keyword
- “Clicks” metric: shows the data about actual clicks for keywords
- Advanced metrics: includes an analysis of return rate, paid clicks, and clicks per search
How this helps you
Keywords play a core role in the promotion process since help searchers find the content they’re looking for. Thus, knowing what keywords users seek more often, you’ll be able to incorporate them widely into your content and make your content easier to find.
4. Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook is the biggest social network in the world. It’s also the most effective tool for targeting your advertising campaign to the right market. Audience Insights gives you demographic data, interests, habits, the devices people are using, and even the household income (for some countries) of these Facebook users.
How this helps you
There’s a saying: “who owns information, owns the world.” When you know your customers’ interests, you can offer them the products and services they really need. Plus, knowing the events which your target audience attend can inspire you to include these activities in your own marketing plan.
5. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo lets you analyze the most shared content on any topic. It allows you to find content in a specific niche by theme, author, or domain. It also makes it easier to monitor your competitors’ social activity.
How this helps you
When you know your target audience, this tool helps you to create the perfect content for them, based on other strong content available. This in turn leads to high engagement, and lets you see the users’ reactions to this content on social networks.
Building a marketing strategy
6. CoSchedule headline analyzer
The names of your products or services, campaign slogan, and content titles – all these are designed to attract customers. This tool helps you to create more persuasive headlines which attract readers and cause them to click for more information.
How this helps you
The tool has great tips to help you to create bright and notable headlines. The more effective your headlines, the more visitors of your resources you will get. The more online visitors, the more more likely that people will buy.
7. WebpageFX’s readability tool
Your best content will be ineffective if it doesn’t suit your target audience. This tool helps you adapt your texts to the required level of your readers. Just enter your URL in the search block, and you will get the guide for refining your content.
How this helps you
It makes your text readable and understandable for your target buyers. This is important, since nobody will delve into things which are complicated and ambiguous. Make your content more readable, and more people will actually read it.
8. PushCrew
The ultimate goal of your company’s online presence is to grow the audience. PushCrew is designed for exactly this purpose. It lets you send push notifications to your customers, even when they’re not currently on your website. This is a great way to inform people about your new offers.
How this helps you
With so much online noise, every company risks getting lost in the endless flow of information. Push notifications make it easier to remind customers about new products. And with a consistent strategy, this tool gives you the opportunity to transform your “casual” visitors into loyalists.
9. Facebook advertising
We’ve already mentioned the potential of this social network. This tool gives you both an easy and a complex approach to creating Facebook ads. Even at the basic level, it can help you increase audience awareness of your brand, and begin conversations with your prospects.
How this helps you
Facebook advertising helps you create an advertising strategy on the biggest social network, which allows you to reach a large, targeted audience.
10. Eclincher
At a time of extreme social activity, it’s important to maximize the opportunities that social media gives your business. Eclincher helps you automate your social media marketing. It automatically publishes content on all channels, and schedules posts to provide better performance and reception. Moreover, it replies to every reaction on your post on social media.
How this helps you
To implement and control marketing campaigns in a few directions at once is an overwhelming and unrealistic task for most people. Eclincher allows simultaneous promotions possible all over social, and provides easy interaction with the audience.
Analyzing your results
11. Crazy Egg
This application shows you information about your website’s visitors and their interactions with each page.
How this helps you
Using Crazy Egg, you get an opportunity to adjust your online resources to the visitors’ needs, improve navigation, and increase conversion rates.
12. SERPs Rank Checker
Just input your website (or any keyword), and you’ll see where your resource ranks for a particular period.
How this helps you
The tool evaluates your website’s keyword ranks in Google. The higher the rank, the easier it is for people to find you, and the more effective your marketing will be. Thus, by means of SERP, you can measure the efficiency of your positioning and change your strategy if the rank is low.
13. Google Analytics
Google analytics lets you track huge traffics flows, alongside surfacing keywords which visitors use to land on your website.
How this helps you
The availability and visibility of your website are the primary ground for top performance. Google Analytics helps you achieve this by optimizing your web resources.
14. Open Site Explorer
Open Site Explorer gives an opportunity to make a comprehensive link analysis. It lets you research backlinks, discovers opportunities for link-building, and uncover potentially damaging links.
How this helps you
You know that links are important for promotion. The more “good” links, the better marketing campaign is. But how one can distinguish a good click from spam? Open Site Explorer helps you do this.
15. Facebook Analytics for apps
This might be Facebook’s most powerful analytics tool. Nowhere else you can find such rich demographical data and across-channel analysis. Plus it provides numerous tools for analyzing your performance based on retention and revenue.
How this helps you
Facebook has valuable information about people’s actvities, location, and purchase habits., Its analytics give data about social tendencies that can be very valuable for your marketing strategy.
That’s the list
That was just a short list of valuable digital marketing tools. We hope you’ll find here the answers you need to build your business, and help grow it to the highest level possible.
We want to help you achieve the best digital and social media marketing possible.
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