25 Top Digital Marketing Tools to Simplify Your Life in 2021

Digital marketing is about taking advantage of smart and innovative tools that were created to help give your business an edge when it comes to finding leads. The more you know about how many creative digital marketing tools there are out there just waiting to be utilized, the better off you’re going to be.

But make no mistake about it: don’t assume that successful digital marketing is all about new devices, apps and websites. Digital marketing is still about one thing above all else: your customers.

If you focus on the customer and understand what they want to see and learn from you, there are marketing tools that will enhance your efforts and help you expand your audience and maintain a base of loyal customers.

So here are 25 digital marketing tools that have been proven to help the marketers who start using them.

1. Sprout Social

If you’re using social media accounts to reach your audience, there’s one popular site called Sprout Social that offers social media management, advocacy and analytics software for businesses.

This site lets you communicate more effectively with customers on social channels, employing social media management tools that provide you with faster communication tools by allowing you to monitor, respond, and collaborate more quickly.

For example, Sprout Social will collect social mentions from different networks, putting them in one place, and making it easier for you to manage your responses when your account has been mentioned or when you receive follower comments. It also allows you to schedule your content across platforms and add analytics.

The Sprout Social plans include a 30-day free trial period.

Pros: It offers a free trial.

Cons: Reports can be lacking in depth.

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics — I can not say enough about the importance of using Google Analytics. Numbers are the marketer’s dream. We use numbers to help us make a determination. So what sort of determinations does Google Analytics help with? Site traffic, landing pages, locations from where users use your site. These are all key factors in determining the health of your site and marketing strategy.

Where are people coming from? Is it Organic traffic from Google? Social traffic?

You can learn a lot about your site, as well as your audience. This is a vital tool to analyze how your website is performing, and not surprisingly, it’s among the most popular analytics platforms available today. There’s always some digital marketing training you can take before hiring an agency.

Pros: If you want a better understanding of your users and what works (and doesn’t work) on your website, this is not only a great tool but impressively, a free one. Google Analytics is a freemium service, and money is charged for proprietary features and functions.

Cons: There’s a lot here so it can be overwhelming. Google offers a free course to help teach you how to use it. Check it out here.

3. SEMRush

Any business that posts blogs on their website wants to be sure that their blogs don’t just sit out there in cyberspace, but that people actually find them. SEMRush can help you get those results.

When it comes to SEO, you really need an all-in-one marketing tool to be able to not only do your keyword research but also help you track how your site is doing: whether that’s by tracking keyword positions, site analytics, or backlinks; SEMRush really is an all-in-one platform for SEO and your website’s visibility and analytics.

You can also use SEMRush to review organic search rankings for your keywords and see what competitors have done.

SEMRush has a monthly fee.

Pros: It really has a lot to offer.

Cons: It can take some time to learn the program

4. BuzzStream

Buzzstream is an effective tool for finding influencers and potential prospects. While browsing the web you can add new bloggers, websites, and social profiles to your database. You can conduct outreach that will look and feel personal.

BuzzStream is a great way of keeping track of your conversations because this service automatically saves your emails and tweets. You can set reminders so you can follow-up on each discussion, that way you won’t lose track of that conversation. This is the ideal way to prioritize your most important contacts.

This is a highly effective platform for doing research as well. Buzzstream offers different pricing plans for users.

Pros: You can try it for free. You can use the prospecting tool to find potential prospects. It’s great and easy-to-use.

Cons: Only searches for contact information which can be limiting.

5. ActiveCollab

ActiveCollab is a great, task management tool to help you organize your client work or your work in general. It’s a good platform to use to be able to make sure everyone is on the same page or same task.

You can comment right in the platform, and assign tasks for anyone on a given project. When it comes to marketing, tasks, and organization is a must. With team collaboration and time tracking, you can make sure everyone is on the same page.

Pros: This allows collaboration which is perfect for any working environment.

Cons: Even though it’s easy to use, the search functionality is really poor and unable to find the task you are looking for most times.

6. Facebook Business Manager & Facebook Insights

Facebook business manager is the perfect way to maximize the use of your Facebook business profile. You can run campaigns, check analytics, and truly utilize all that Facebook offers, whether it’s checking on an ad or previously boosted post or creating an ad from scratch; this tool is something you can really use in your social media arsenal.

With Facebook Insights, you can successfully track user interactions. Anyone who is an admin on your page can use this tool to see how followers are responding to your Facebook Page, then track the number of active users you have. This is an ideal way to better understand how your page is performing.

Facebook Insights lets you determine the best time of day to post or the best day of the week, and what kind of content has been the most popular.

Pros: Facebook Business Manager is free with a business account.

Cons: The interface is not intuitive; so it can be easy to get lost.

7. Hotjar

“Connect the Dots with One Powerful Solution” is the theme for Hotjar, which allows marketers to gain insights into how users are behaving on your website.

That includes heatmapping – heatmaps are a great way to understand what users want and care about, and what they do while they’re on your site – and recordings of user interactions with your site.

Through those recordings, you can observe the moments in the browsing process when users get frustrated and abandon their search and leave.

It also shows you the content that they spend the most time with. Hotjar also allows you to pose questions to users and get direct answers about how they’re interacting with your site.

Hotjar offers pricing plans for businesses of all sizes.

Pros: Hotjar gives you insights into how your site can be optimized in the future.

Cons: It’s a large site that can affect your load time.

8. LinkedIn Programmatic Ads

If you’re doing paid advertising, a good option is Programmatic advertising. It’s the use of software to automate your media purchase, so your ads get displayed automatically, based on data.

Programmatic media buying solutions let you cut down on the amount of time you spend searching for the right networks to advertise on. A good tool for this is LinkedIn Programmatic Ads, which can process a lot of data from your audience.

LinkedIn allows you to promote your company updates to targeted audiences on desktop, mobile, and tablet. This is a way to deliver your content directly to the most viewed professional news feeds. It’s also a way to deliver personalized messages that drive more conversions than email.

Pros: Your ads can easily be relevant to the people you’re targeting.

Cons: It can take some time to learn how to use.

9. AdRoll

Display Retargeting Tools are increasingly popular today, particularly retargeting ads that follow web users from one site to the next. Retargeting is an increasingly popular tool for drawing customers back to your site to make a purchase.

A good site to use for this is AdRoll, which provides you with access to more than 500 ad exchanges, including most of the major social media networks.

Pros: Marketers who have used AdRoll in the past have reported as much as a 265 percent lift in sales.

Cons: With AdRoll, you pay for ad space, and AdRoll retains a small percentage for serving your ad. Your total spend is the cost of buying ad space to deliver your ads.

10. Wyng

Organic Social Media Tools are popular, and for good reason. Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly active users, Twitter has 320 million and Instagram more than 700 million.

Not surprisingly, marketers are looking for an edge to cut through all that online traffic, and as a result, social media management tools have become common ways to improve engagement.

One useful engagement marketing tool is Wyng, which helps transform the way brands can engage and convert mobile and social consumers.

Wyng has different pricing plans.

Pros: They have a built-in analytics dashboard that monitors how each campaign is performing, and they help boost engagement through hashtag campaigns, contests, referral programs and more.

Cons: Wyng has different pricing plans. However, it can be pricey. 

11. Google Search Console 

Google, Google, Google — they are THE search engine! What’s great is that they know it, and offer the tools you need to improve your site and get ranking on search. If you succeed; they succeed.

If you don’t utilize the tools that they offer, you are doing yourself a disservice. Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a great platform. You can utilize reports in order to help you measure your website’s performance and traffic.

With Search Console, you can add a sitemap which can help your site get crawled by Google Bots, as well as tell Google to recrawl a site or pages that you just reoptimized.

As Google says, this will “make your site shine in Google Search results.”

Pros: It’s free. 

Cons: It can be a bit confusing (particularly with the semi-new update) but it’s worth it once you get the hang of it.

12. Google Ads

To continue the long list of marketing tools that are made by Google, you have Google Ads (previously Google AdWords). Google Ads is a great way to promote your site, services, or page. With Google Ads, you can promote your brand and company, finding relevant users and increasing conversion rate. 

Pros: You can get a pretty good click-through rate if you do it right, reaching your intended audience.

Cons: Navigation and cost (for ads) can be quite wonky and pricey.

13. Optmyzr

Optmyzr is another great tool. This tool can help you maximize your Google Ads — or optimize them.

With this tool, you can pull a quality score. The higher the quality score, the lower the cost per click, which is, after all, what it’s all about.  The program states that it is fast and can help you better optimize your reports in no time, but that may not necessarily be the case. 

Pros: It has a quality score, which can make PPC management so much easier.

Cons: The location bidding tool could be a little more user-friendly.

14. Moz

Moz has so many options for SEO and website monitoring. You can monitor your site, check keywords, do keyword research, or check your site’s domain authority with this digital marketing tool.

The Moz Bar — which is an extension you can use on Google Chrome — is a great, easy-to-use tool that will tell you the optimization of your page. If you just optimized a page, use this tool to check to see how well you did out of a score of 1 to 100 (percentage). 

Pros: There are free tools, like the Moz Bar, which, as I already said, can help you check your domain authority and on-page optimization. I suggest downloading the Moz Bar extension.

Cons: The paid version, which can help you track your client campaigns, can get pricey pretty fast.

15. Ahrefs

Need to check on some keywords? Want to see the backlinks of a competitor? Want to know your website’s backlinks? Then look no further than Ahrefs. With Ahrefs, you get competitive analysis, keyword research, backlink research, content research, as well as rank tracking and website monitoring.

Easy to use and a great keyword research tool, there’s no reason why Ahrefs isn’t for you and there’s no reason why you aren’t using Ahrefs to help expand your digital marketing efforts. 

Pros: With a seven-day trial for $7, you can see just what Ahrefs can do and if it’s a good fit for you.

Cons: Like SEMRush, it will take some time to learn how to use efficiently.

16. Google Keyword Planner 

Google’s Keyword Planner is a great tool to find the keywords that you need to start ranking for. Google Keyword Planner can be used to help you find competitive bids for your campaigns — future and present. You can use the keywords for your SEO efforts, and of course, for PPC, too.

This tool, straight from the tech giant itself, will help with your marketing efforts if you know how to use it correctly, which can be quite tricky after the semi-new update. 

Pros: Find the keywords direct from their source — Google.

Cons: With the new update, the Keyword Planner can take time to learn.

17. Grammarly 

As a content writer, I can not stress enough the importance of Grammarly. For the most part, it’s a free (there’s a paid version) application that will edit your content.

You can write in the program, paste content in it or utilize Grammarly’s extension to help you edit your content. The application breaks down grammatical and spelling issues.

It is the perfect resource to help you create professional writing and professionally edited writing. 

Pros: It’s great and free!

Cons: It has no idea how to properly use the singular “is” and the plural “are” in a sentence – confusing the subject of your sentence frequently.  

18. Canva

Do you need to design a logo but don’t have the time or money? Do you need to build a quick social media graphic for a promotion but can’t figure out Adobe?

Then look no further than Canva, a free platform that can help you create custom images for social media and other campaigns. From business cards, to book covers, you can use Canva templates to create stellar images.

Pros: It’s free. How can you beat that? 

Cons: You want to break free of the templates. They can start looking too similar to other content out there.

19. FunnelDash

Funnel Dash is a lead magnet generate. With Funnel Dash, you can convert leads into clients, utilizing tools such as their Facebook Messenger growth tool.

With FunnelDash, you can easily attract new clients. With integrated software as well as training (to help you learn the ins and outs of the program) you can create amazing Facebook Messenger funnels.

Pros: They offer a free trial.

Cons: It can be complicated to get started, but they offer a demo, workshops and training.

20. Buffer 

Do you need a social media management system to help you organize your campaigns?

Buffer is an all-in-one platform designed with the user in mind. You can link Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+, etc. and schedule out posts.

It can be hard to manage so many different accounts, which is why Buffer is so helpful. You can have everything in one place.

Pros: It’s free for up to one profile.

Cons: The scheduling software can be very wonky. You want to doublecheck and make sure you set it up correctly and check back to make sure issues like posting at the wrong time doesn’t happen.

21. Dropbox 

Share documents, photos, infographics — whatever you want to share, with this platform. This platform offers cloud storage from business to the individual.

You can easily share documents with this cloud sharing service with your business or clients; and since the documents are safely encrypted, you don’t have to be concerned about data being stolen.

Pros: 1st 2 gigs are free.

Cons: Customer support can only be contacted via email.

22. Trello

Marketing requires organization. Like ActiveCollab before it, Trello is all about project management and organization. You can use it for organizing tasks, managing projects and much more.

What’s great about Trello is you can build each “board” from the ground up.

Pros: It’s free!

Cons: Limited email marketing integration. 

23. Unbounce

Unbounce is a leader in landing pages. When it comes to building landing pages here at Chatter Buzz, this is our preference.

With Unbounce, you can create high-converting landing pages, popups and more. Unbounce is easy-to-use and can help you start converting traffic, and launch more campaigns.

Pros: Offers a free trial.

Cons: Can take some time to learn.

24. BrightLocal

BrightLocal is a great way for you to find leads, discover local citations for SEO, and help you maintain your local SEO.

You can develop in-depth reports that can help you assess how well your campaigns are going.

Pros: You can get a free 14-day trial.

Cons: It can take some time to set up and get used to.

25. Shopify

If you’re selling products, then you need an e-commerce website. It’s that simple. If you don’t have one, then you should get one. Where do you start? Well, why not Shopify?

There’s a reason why Shopify is so popular with e-commerce businesses. Shopify is a powerful all-in-one interface that can help you build and maintain your website, easy as can be.

Pros: Built-in SEO for marketing.

Cons: Can take some time to learn how the site is organized and the jargon they use can be confusing.

Conclusion: Digital Marketing Tools Will Help Your Marketing Efforts

These are just a few of the digital marketing tools at your disposal for boosting your marketing efforts. How successfully these tools can be used depends on how much time and money you put into it.

And, until someone invents one tool designed to solve every one of your problems by pushing one button, it’s a smart idea to start experimenting with some of these online platforms and see which ones work best for your brand. You can pick and choose the best of the bunch that you think will help you build your perfect marketing campaign.