The 50 best online marketing tools and software for every business and budget
Dee Overfield - 20 November 2020
We’ve all heard the phrase; a workman is only as good as his tools. But how do you know if you’re investing in the best online marketing tools that are going to support your business to grow, keep your team working efficiently and provide you with the best insights to strategise effectively?
One way to know for sure is by looking through our list of the 50 best online digital marketing tools. We’ve done the hard work for you, pulling together our favourite resources that help us to do our job as marketeers effectively. And, we’ve categorised it by marketing activity too, for simple and easy viewing:
- Client Communication and Business Development
- Design and Visual Content Creation
- Ecommerce
- Google’s Tools
- Keyword Research
- Marketing and Reporting Platforms
- PPC
- PR and Content Writing
- Social Media
- Time-Saving Tools
The best client communications and business development tools
Tool: Proposify
What it is: A platform enabling you to create proposals for clients
Price: $19 per user – Proposify offers a free trial
Biggest benefit: Custom template-based proposals for ease of use. All stored in one place that you can segment into proposals that you have won, lost, etc. Notifies you when your client has opened the proposal and shows you how much time they have spent on each page.
Tool: Zoom
What it is: A Video communication platform
Price: Basic Plan is free. For unlimited meeting times with multiple people, prices range from £120-£160/ year
Biggest benefit: Safe and secure platform to host virtual meetings/conferences, as well as webinars.
Tool: LinkedIn Sales Navigator
What it is: Sales / prospecting tool
Price: £££
Biggest benefit: Focused prospecting and lead targeting.
Tool: Loom
What it is: A tool for creating video explanations to run alongside content
Price: Free for 5-minute recordings. Business accounts start from $8 / month, with a full Enterprise package available via discussion
Biggest benefit: An easy way to record and share presentations and walk clients through documents.
The best design and visual content creation tools
Tool: Canva
What it is: Design application with easy templates and graphics, particularly for social
Price: Free for basic use. Access to all designs and images requires Canva Pro (free 30-day trial)
Biggest benefit: Easy and simple tool for anyone to create quick graphics and designs which look professional (without needing the help of a photoshop expert).
Tool: Colorpick Eyedropper
What it is: A handy chrome extension that allows you to identify colour values from webpages
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: Great for personalising online documents to suit a brand.
Tool: Photopea
What it is: Online photo editor for editing images, adding effects, resizing/optimising images
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: Easy to use and free alternative to Photoshop.
Tool: Unsplash
What it is: Website for free stock imagery
Price: Free, with further images available for a price per item
Biggest benefit: Huge variety of stock images available to use freely within your content.
Tool: Pexels
What it is: Website for free stock imagery
Price: Free, with further images available for a price per item
Biggest benefit: Huge variety of stock images available to be used freely within your content.
Tool: Pixabay
What it is: Website for free stock imagery
Price: Free, with further images available for a price per item
Biggest benefit: Huge variety of stock images available to be used freely within your content.
Tool: Splice
What it is: Online video content creator
Price: Free and premium packages, with full access available for $7.99 / month
Biggest benefit: A quick way to create and edit video content when on the move.
The best e-commerce tools
Tool: WooCommerce
What it is: E-commerce solution. Excellent plugin for WordPress
Price: Hosting can be as little as $3.95 per month and as high as $5,000, dependent on your store
Biggest benefit: Can instantly turn a basic website template into an online store
Tool: HotJar
What it is: Behaviour analytics tool and website heat mapping
Price: Free, but with premium plans too, starting from $99/month
Biggest benefit: It’s a great tool for seeing how visitors are navigating on your website and a great way to collect data on your customers.
Google’s best digital marketing tools
Tool: Google Analytics
What it is: Digital analytics software
Price: Free
Biggest Benefit: Allows you to analyse in-depth detail about the visitors on your website. It provides valuable insights that can help you to shape the success strategy of your business.
Tool: Google Ads Scripts
What it is: This tool is located with Google ads and allows you to automate, report, make changes to any google account, through the use of JavaScript scripts.
Price: Free unless you need to connect to an external API
Biggest benefit: Saves time, allows even a small client to get ahead of their competition by allowing them to run accounts more efficiently.
Tool: Google Data Studio
What is it: A reporting tool which allows you to create really visual reports by connecting real-time data sources. Share your insights and report the most important info back to your team in a really digestible way
Price: Free
Biggest Benefit: Allows you to tell a story with your data. Connect different sources, create visual charts and let the data speak for itself.
Tool: Google Lighthouse
What it is: A plugin that audits your page and produces suggestions on improvements to make to your page based on performance, accessibility and developer best practices, as well as SEO too.
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: This tool offers a quick oversight and quick fixes in a simple click of a button!
Tool: Google Search Console
What it is: It helps measure a site’s search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: Great for finding SEO opportunities and is easy to use.
Tool: Google Tag Assistant
What it is: Google tag checker tool
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: Can be added as a Chrome extension to easily see all tags that are working correctly.
Tool: Google Trends
What it is: A Google site that shows trends. Allows you to segment by time and location and compare results
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: A great tool to see when you are likely to see an uplift or downtrend throughout the year, great for forecasting without a full year’s data.
The best keyword research tools
Tool: Answer the Public
What it is: Keyword research tool
Price: Free for limited features. Pro features start from $99 / month
Biggest benefit: Research trends and key words to support H2 development.
Tool: Keyword Everywhere
What it is: A plugin that transforms your search results to show you data like search volume around certain keywords, as well as CPC
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: This tool is always working so will help to identify new keywords/quick data for research.
Tool: KWFinder
What it is: Keyword research tool. Helps to find trending keywords with exact search volumes based on historical search trends, also calculates keyword difficulty
Price: Free 10 day trial, Basic $29,90 a month, Premium $39.90 a month, Agency $79.90 a month
Biggest benefit: Great tool for finding long-tail keywords and questions to support blog title research.
The best digital marketing platforms
Tool: HubSpot
What it is: In-bound marketing and sales platform
Price: Package dependent
Biggest benefit: An all-in-one, full-stack inbound marketing platform that includes; a CRM, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and Service Hub.
The best PPC tools
Tool: GOA
What it is: A platform that finds actionable data insights and highlights any paid search account issues. An automated audit platform, but on steroids for Google ads.
Price: Dependant on account size or number of accounts
Biggest benefit: it’s a great tool to save you time finding issues with your account and also show you where there is potential to grow the account.
Tool: Optmyzr
What it is: A completely automated account management system for Google ads accounts
Price: $499 per month pro or $799 per month pro+
Biggest benefit: Helps to automate nearly all aspects of your accounts, giving you more time for strategy rather than activation.
Tool: Wordstream
What it is: A paid search focussed marketing tool, supporting businesses to grow by streamlining their Google Ads, Facebook and Bing Ads accounts into one platform
Price: Prices start from $49/month depending on usage levels
Biggest benefit: The opportunity to white label reports for clients.
The best PR and content writing tools
Tool: Gorkana
What it is: PR database
Price: Package dependent – enquire for demo and models
Biggest benefit: Find all the journalists you could possibly ever want to speak to in one place.
Tool: Grammarly
What it is: Digital writing assistance tool
Price: Free for basic use, with premium plans available for wider access from $25/member/month
Biggest benefit: Can be added as a Chrome extension, used for emails, in Google docs and social media so you can be confident your content is mistake-free.
The best SEO tools
Tool: gInfinity
What it is: A plugin that creates infinite scroll on Google results
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: This tool allows you to navigate through the SERPs without jumping to a new page.
Tool: Meta SEO Inspector
What it is: A plugin that allows you to quickly access the metadata and other website data on a website – no more “Page Source” in a different tab
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: It’s a great way to quickly access aspects of your website, including meta-information, open graph information, alt tags and structured data.
Tool: Schema Markup Generator
What it is: A tool for generating structured data
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: An easy, simple tool for creating schema code.
Tool: Screaming Frog
What it is: This is a powerful tool that crawls websites to identify errors and analyse results. Find broken links, analyse page data, create XML site maps and so much more.
Price: Free, but if you want to crawl a bigger website with more than 500 URLs, you will need to move to the paid version
Biggest Benefit: This tool does so much! It’s an invaluable part of the toolkit for anyone working in digital marketing. Create spreadsheets of all your URLs to get a visual reproduction of all the pages of your site.
Tool: SEO Minion
What it is: Described as the ‘Alfred to your Batman’ SEO tool.
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: Great way to analyse on-page SEO, preview search listing results, check redirects & broken links and also check Hreflang tags.
Tool: Whitespark
What it is: Boost your rankings and drive business to your website through local SEO. Designed for bricks and mortar establishments and those who meet their clients face to face. There are a range of tools, from tracking local rankings and checking reviews, to producing a list of local citations of your competitors
Price: Some features of free, but more detailed reports and the managed services incur a fee. This is a pay as you go service, and not a subscription-based model, meaning that you only pay for what you need.
Biggest Benefit: The Google review link generator provides your own Google review link that you can pass to customers when requesting them to do a review for your business
The best social media marketing tools
Tool: Facebook
What it is: The most used social media platform for all ages and demographics, Facebook gives brands the opportunity to speak directly to customers, sharing curated content and advertising their services to their target audience
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: Facebook offers a really in-depth level of advertising opportunities, enabling you to create engagement and lead generation campaigns to really targeted audiences.
Tool: Facebook Pixel
What it is: A tracking tool to understand how people are engaging with your website to be used alongside Facebook advertising and remarketing
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: Enables you to create really targeted ad campaigns based on who has interacted with your brand and in what way, within a set period of time.
Tool: Hootsuite
What it is: Social Media Management platform
Price: Free and premium accounts, including team, business and enterprise (ranging from $25 to $520). 30-day free trial available.
Biggest benefit: Great way to upload and schedule social media posts across multiple platforms. You can also access analytics and view your posts on a calendar.
Tool: Instagram
What it is: A social media platform with a focus on video and visual assets, giving brands the opportunity to talk to customers and interact with them on a daily basis
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: Instagram is addictive and interactive for users, providing the perfect platform to keep followers engaging with content. Instagram Shopping has also added an ecommerce element, supporting brands to make sales through the platform, rather than simply using it as an engagement tactic.
Tool: LinkedIn
What it is: A B2B social media platform for sharing company and professional information, as well as job search related content
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: The ability to connect with professionals across multiple sectors and build relationships to support your own professional career and business’ development.
Tool: Pinterest
What it is: A social media platform driven by visual content, with opportunities for sharing expert knowledge and articles
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: The ability to appeal to a variety of users, through sharing your own brand’s products, as well as bringing together supportive and helpful third-party curated content to inspire.
Tool: Preview
What it is: Instagram feed planner
Price: Free for basic use for one Instagram account
Biggest benefit: Great way to plan posts and develop an aesthetic Instagram feed. You can also schedule posts and access Instagram analytics and discover trending hashtags if you upgrade your account.
Tool: Sprout Social
What it is: Social Media scheduling and analytics tool
Price: Package dependent ($99-$250)
Biggest benefit: Can be used to create really visual reports for clients to highlight their social media engagement levels.
Tool: Twitter
What it is: A social media platform offering the chance to share thoughts in under 280 characters
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: The opportunity for content to go viral in minutes due to the fast paced and all the ball nature of the platform.
Tool: YouTube
What it is: Video platform
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: An easy way to embed video content onto websites.
The best time-saving marketing tools
Tool: Built with Technology Lookup
What is it: A fantastic tool that goes behind the scenes of a website to show you what platform it’s been built on. Allows you to answer the question ‘Is it WordPress?’ without asking the client
Price: Free to check out one website, but there are paid options to support with lead generation and sales intelligence
Biggest Benefit: Great when you’re on a call with a client or a potential client – it allows you to see what technology the website is using and what plugins have been installed. Certainly impresses a client and demonstrates expertise!
Tool: Linkclump
What it is: A plugin that allows you to grab titles and URLs from a webpage and paste them into an excel doc
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: Saves time trying to get hundreds of links from a webpage manually.
Tool: Scraper
What it is: Data mining extension for facilitating online research when you need to get data into spreadsheet form quickly.
Price: Free
Biggest benefit: Saves time trying to retrieve data and visuals off a web page. Comes with a Google Sheet integration for ease of data exportation.
Tool: Search Analytics for Sheets Add-on
What it is: This add-on for Google Sheets pulls query, page and click data straight into a spreadsheet. Connect it to Google Search Console and it syncs with your verified websites.
Price: Free
Biggest Benefit: Filter your data easily and simply.
Tool: XMind
What it is: Mind map, brainstorming software
Price: Free download. Paid plan at $59.99/year
Biggest Benefit: Easy to use mind map tool to showcase visual brainstorms and ideas.
Still not sure which tools you should be using or how to use them? Luckily, we’re experts in all of the above, and many more for that matter. Get in touch with the team for support across a wide range of digital marketing activities and we’ll work with you to ensure you’ve got the best tools and tactics in place to reach your goals.
