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8 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business

With limited resources, it can be a challenge for many small businesses to hire a marketing team to plan, develop, and implement a campaign. Not only does it require a large investment, but you may also need to focus your hiring efforts or budget on other important matters.

With many entrepreneurs taking their business online, establishing a strong online presence is crucial. However, the process is no easy job. Luckily, there are different digital marketing tools that can help you grow your business and promote your products and services to your target audience.

What Are Digital Marketing Tools? 

Digital marketing tools are apps and software designed to help you strategize, collaborate, and execute your digital marketing campaign. Whether you are planning a marketing campaign, developing a social media asset, or monitoring results, digital marketing tools helps ensure that your efforts are more efficient and convenient. Also, effective use of these tools can help set up and guide your business to success. 

Essential Digital Marketing Tools

We have rounded a list of the most important digital marketing tools that serve as your marketing foundation that will help you manage customer relationships, acquire more qualified leads and uncover more marketing opportunities. 

  1. Google Trends

This tool is designed to show you the most current trends in specific locations. Type your chosen keyword in the search panel, and it will reveal how much online buzz there is about your topic. This information is extremely useful, especially if you are monitoring your brand name or a competitor. 

  1. Ahrefs

Launching a business in a competitive environment is a common concern for many entrepreneurs. Ahrefs has a set of tools designed to help users monitor their competitors. It also provides you with information about your competitors’ traffic details, ranking keywords, content features, backlinks, and other essential data. This information can help you know the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors and beat them within your niche market. 

  1. HubSpot

Hubspot comes with a set of marketing tools designed to help users keep their content and data in a single, accessible place. It enables you to manage all your blog and social media posts, focus on your SEO strategy, monitor your digital advertising effort, and more. Also, you can combine HubSpot’s tools with other sales software to help you create strong relationships with your clientele. 

  1. Google Analytics

As the gold standard for website analytics, Google Analytics can provide you with essential information about the people visiting your website, where they are coming from, and the pages they are spending most of their time. Using this information can help you track conversions, enhance your eCommerce setup, and monitor events.

  1. Buzzsumo

This content marketing tool helps you with your content planning and monitoring of content performance to boost your content marketing strategy. Use it to identify the most ideal influencers to partner with and analyze useful metrics to create meaningful relationships with your customers.

  1. Facebook Audience Insights

In addition to being the biggest social network, Facebook is the most effective tool used by many business owners to target their advertising campaigns. It provides users with important information, such as demographic data, habits, interests, devices used, and even household income of Facebook users. 

  1. Mailchimp

Email marketing is another effective approach to reaching and connecting with your target customers. Mailchimp is not only designed to create and send branded emails and newsletters monthly, but also enables you to build landing pages, design digital advertisements, and more!

  1. Hootsuite

Designed as a social media marketing tool, Hootsuite allows users to create, schedule, and track posts. It is also an effective collaboration tool, which enables you to view, manage, and respond to comments and messages from your target audience. Hootsuite also provides you with a comparison of content performance across different social media platforms to help you identify posts that relate the most to your potential customers.

Why User-First Approach Matters to SEO

When it comes to search engine optimization, many focus on Google algorithms, sitemaps, and backlinks and tend to forget their primary goal: providing users with helpful information. 

Years before, cramming keywords into your page and slapping on several meta tags can make your web page appear on the first top 10 search engine results pages (SERPs). However, Google recognized that these methods do not provide users with top-quality answers to search queries. As a result, it began to adapt its algorithms to improve the user experience. You can find the evidence in updates like Panda (February 2011), Core Web Vitals, and other regular core algorithm updates. 

You do not necessarily need to abandon keywords and the traditional SEO aspects completely. Google still takes the fundamental attributes of SEO into account. However, implementing a user-first approach plays a significant factor in organic search. 

Follow these 5 essential steps to make a user-friendly website and increase your ranking on the SERPs.

  • Learn Design Fundamentals

Having a clear understanding of the design fundamentals helps you improve user experience and make your website run smoothly and naturally. Be sure to work with a professional who understands the principles of design fundamentals and explains the psychology behind them. Knowing the reasons why can help you make better decisions that will have a desirable impact on your users. 

  • Addressing User Pain Points

Statistics is essential when working with an established website and dealing with various user problems. Google Analytics can help determine pain points that trigger users to leave your website. Setting up heat mapping and logging can also help address user pain points. Heat-mapping tools allow you to monitor how visitors interact with your website. 

Some solutions enable screen recording to keep track of how visitors navigate through web pages and identify the factors that prevent conversion. Obtaining this information can help you make better choices on how you can improve your pages and ensure a desirable user experience. Additionally, it allows you to see and re-evaluate the specific benefits that your visitors are looking for from your website.

  • Test Everything

After acquiring data, do not start making adjustments and improvements to your website. While the information you have gathered does not necessarily provide solutions, it can help identify potential pain points. 

If you detect a problem or need to perform a significant change in your page’s layout, put up an A/B test to ensure that the revision is beneficial to the users. A/B testing involves the distribution of traffic between 2 versions of a similar page. Check which page version performed better. It should help you enhance your objectives during a specific time and with a certain number of conversions. 

The data you acquired from your A/B testing efforts can help address and confirm or refute your theory about the pain points. This helps determine if you are on the right path toward a solution and make sure that the adjustments are helpful and do not injure your users.

  • Give the Users What They Desire

Balance is everything in SEO. If your goal is to only please the search engines, you will likely fail to connect with your target audience. If you focus all your efforts on designing your website from the user’s point of view, you can potentially overlook other valuable search engine elements. To hit the sweet spot, make sure to focus on both users and search engines. 

  • Continue to Learn

To be an expert in digital marketing, you should be ready to expand your knowledge and explore more about SEO. As Google continues to modify its search algorithm, you should continue to look for new strategies to attract more website visitors and boost your search engine rankings.