Digital Marketing Tools

I have been a digital marketing for 2+ years now and one thing that has always fascinated me is the wide range of tools available for digital marketers. It’s literally lot for one lifetime lol.

Personally, I have always felt excited about trying new tools. I spend some time every week looking out for new tools that can increase my productivity or ease my work. This curiosity enabled me to try nearly most of the popular free tools available. If not all, I did get my hands on just a few popular paid tools because I didn’t wanna go bankrupt in an attempt to try something I can’t afford lol.

Here’s what I realised.
There’s literally a tool for everything. That’s exactly the problem.

You have all these tools providing you kinda the same functions with either a price tag or for free. So, it’s pretty hard to choose which one to go for & that’s what this post is about.

I will walk you through some of my favourite tools that have saved me time & energy over the years.
Tools that are worth checking out.
This list will keep getting updates as I uncover more exciting & useful tools.

Why you need Digital Marketing Tools

• Save Time

  It’s pretty obvious that tools can help you save a lot of time. Having to spend a lot of time trying to manually extract every bit of information to an excel sheet can be such a pain in the butt. Instead, knowing a tool to carry out the task of extracting the desired data & presenting it in excel or spreadsheets can save your butt.

• Ease Work

  Don’t even bother reading if you’re a hard worker. If you’re a smart worker then you would be glad to know that God is showering his blessings of heaven unto the smart workers with the creation of new tools to ease our sufferings from pretending to work hard.

• Dive Deeper

  Tools can help you look beyond the surface data. This can help you make better decisions backed with data. It will also help you dive deeper & explore the unexplored.

• Ain’t Rookie

  Tools can help you portray yourself as a professional and not sound like an amateur. You can give your everyday tasks a more productive approach and make your life look a lot professional.

Tools for Digital Marketers

Now that you know why you need em. Let’s look at what you need.
These tools I hereby share are gonna make your life awesome. If they don’t then you are just too boring.

• Trello

  

  Trello is a web-based collaboration tool for tasks & project management. It allows users to create & manage digital boards to visually track a user journey for a task or a project.

  Trello provides a very simple & straight-forward interface to manage boards. Each board contains a set of lists used to create workflows. These lists will have tasks or ideas created in cards. These cards will contain labels, checklists, reminders, attachments & more. The cards can be moved around the lists to visually track & manage progress. There is no limit on the number of lists or cards created in a board.

  I use Trello to plan the activities or tasks to be carried out for the month. We track the progress, obstacles & dependencies of each activity using the cards on boards. I also personally use Trello to plan my budget & track my expenditure.

  How can you use Trello? Depends on how productive & creative you are.
  – To organize & plan your day or work.
  – Track your work progress.
  – Organize your reading list & recipes.
  – Content calendar.
  – Manage your money and personal budget.
  – Planning & Executing events, trips or vacations.
  – Recording milestones.
  – To-do lists.
  – Collaborating with friends & colleagues.
  – Track overtime achievements.

  You can check out Trello tips & tricks on their official help page – How to use Trello like a pro.

• Buffer

  

  Buffer is my go-to social media management tool.

  I try reading articles every day to stay updated & to learn new things. Whenever I come across a good article I share it with my social media communities and groups (Especially our Facebook Group).

  Join Our Facebook Group
  We are trying to build a small community of digital marketers, growth hackers and WordPress developers to get them the latest updates on their niche and provide a platform to share & endorse their ideas.
  Join the Group

  This is good practice as it will create an on-going purpose to learn & not only grow yourself but also help others to grow along with you. Hope, you consider sharing because sharing is caring.

  Let’s get back to Buffer now lol.

  The best thing about Buffer is the way they have planned the pricing. They have both a free version & a paid version. The free version of the tool has all the features an Individual needs & the paid plans consist of the features a company needs. The free plan allows you to manage 3 social media accounts & schedule 10 posts per social media account. The paid plan allows you to manage up to 150 social media accounts & schedule up to 2000 posts per social media account.

  It also comes with a chrome extension on both plans that just makes things a lot easier. It can be also integrated with various other platforms like Ritetag, Backly & others. It’s better I stop it here. It’s just too awesome that I can keep going on & on.

• Evernote

  

  Evernote is my go-to notes, to-do lists & bookmarks management tool.

  Like I told you, I read a lot of articles. Because of which I come across a lot of great reads that I would love to save for future reference. Initially, I used chrome bookmarks feature to do this but after a certain point, it just got too messy. That’s when I started using Evernote & I have been in love with it ever since. Now I can not only save a huge list of articles but also sort & manage them based on tags & notebooks. It just made my life a lot more productive & easier. It also helped me free up a lot of my bookmark space on chrome.

  Evernote just like Buffer comes with a free & a paid plan. If you don’t read very often & if you ain’t that productive then a free plan is all that you need. But, If you read articles pretty often & if you save a lot of articles, notes, to-do lists, documents & others then you will have to upgrade to the paid plan. The only benefit I found on upgrading to a paid plan is the unlimited storage space. The free plan does have enough storage space to save a webpage with a lot of images. It just runs out of space & you will have to wait until your monthly allowance resets.

  Evernote also provides a chrome plugin called Web Clipper that helps you to quickly save anything on the web to your Evernote account. It’s so simple yet so awesome.

  Creative ways to use Evernote?
  – Note-taking.
  – To-do lists.
  – Expense tracker.
  – Reminder.
  – Task manager.
  – Bullet journal.
  – Recipe collection.
  – RSS reader.
  – Bookmarks manager.
  – Manage receipts and bills.
  – Business card stack.
  – Personal lists.
  – Capture ideas.
  – Record passwords.
  – Vacation organization.
  – Store reports, documents, pictures, videos & audio.
  – Time management system.

  lol. Looks like I can just keep going on.
  Remember guys, It will be hard to manage & get around these tools in the beginning but once you make it a habit, things will get a lot easier & productive.

• Funnelytics

  

  Funnelytics is a pretty impressive funnel mapping & funnel customization tool for digital marketers. You can literally convert your funnel ideas into visual representations or maps. This will help you to track your overall activities and direct them to the end goal.

  Funnelytics makes use of a drag & drop layout that makes building funnels a lot simpler & easier. You can also bring your funnel ideas to life using their 6 funnel templates & self-explaining icons. You can also share & export your funnel templates with your teammates or create impressive reports for your clients.

  Their paid plan allows you to track goals & conversions on every funnel. It will also show you a live user journey through those funnels. This will help you to figure out the changes needed to increase your overall conversions & goal competition. You can also view the funnels of various successful companies & hack those funnels.

  We at Softscotch were carrying out multiple activities every day but none of them was tracked & none of them was directed to the end goal. But, with the help of Funnelytics, we were able to view the whole map of activities carried out for Softscotch and direct each one of those activities to the end goal.

  Pretty good eh!

• MailChimp

  

  MailChimp is one my favourite tool in the Digital Marketing tools list because there is literally no tool out there that can manage email marketing more efficiently. I believe this because of the number of features it has grown over the years & also the number of tools it can integrate with.

  One thing I love the most about MailChimp is the inbuilt email builder. It is one of the best free email template builders out there. It consists of nearly all the paid functions provided by services like BeePro for free.

  I have personally tried a lot of other services like Sendrid, Moosend & couple more but I always ended up back to MailChimp. It’s not that they are bad, it’s because of the impression MailChimp creates on you that it makes all other services look less competent. The free version of the tool allows you to manage an email list of 2000 contacts & send up to 12000 emails per month. You can always upgrade to a monthly paid plan to increase your sends or email list contacts.

  Try it! If you haven’t yet.

• AppSumo

  

  AppSumo is not a Digital Marketing tool but instead, it is a service provided by the same people who created Sumo marketing tools. Just in case you’re wondering, they have nothing to do with Buzzsumo. It’s a different company.

  Appsumo is a deals site for Digital marketers & Entrepreneurs. It’s not an ordinary deals site with coupons & discounts. They rather partner with companies to offer digital products or services to their users at an astonishing discount rate of 90%.

  I know that’s crazy! but AppSumo was created with one idea in mind – “The tools you need to grow your business shouldn’t put you out of business.”

  They have covered a wide range of products & services over the years like video editing services, project management systems, SEO tools, social media management tools and a ton more. But, these offers don’t last forever. They get sold out pretty soon. So, you better make your decision quick.

• MDDHosting

  

  MDDHosting just like AppSumo it is not a Digital Marketing tool but instead, it is the best hosting service I have ever come across. Their support team is fab, their technical team is fab, their whole service itself has been a great experience. BTW, Softscotch is hosted on MDDhosting.

  Awesome & Affordable Hosting
  After months of search & wasting money on costly hostings, I came across the best hosting provider ever – MDDHosting. Why they are the best? – StorPool Powered Cloud, 1000% Uptime Guarantee, 30 Day Money Back Guarantee, 24x7x365 Technical Support, Daily Offsite Backups, Free Website Transfer, and more.
  Build Your Dream

  MDDhosting has been around for a long time but not much people are aware of it. As I have seen, they don’t promote themselves as other hosting services do. They don’t have many reviews on them by other bloggers but people who have tried their service have always said good about em.

  Check their ratings here.

  I personally love their support team. Usually, the support team from other hosting services take an hour to reply to your support tickets but the support team in MDDhosting manages to reply to your queries in minutes. They have also helped me to understand issues & resolve issues outside their service. It’s like, they try helping you genuinely instead of considering it as a duty to towards their customers.

  They recently had an outage that wiped every website hosted under them but they were able to recover every website within 4days with constant hourly updates on the process of recovery. They also promised to take the necessary measures to avoid such events & to make the recovery process a lot faster. Like having it all recovered in an hour. So, I feel they are a lot more dedicated & genuine compared to other hosting services.

  The pricing of their plans is also comparatively low. Love em!

• Buzzsprout

  

  One of the most outgrowing channels to connect you to your audience in 2018 & beyond is Podcasts.

  The most appealing thing about a podcast for a creator is the ease of creating one. Unlike videos, you don’t have to spend hours editing the video & rendering it. Podcasts only require you to make minimal edits to the audio and publish it. Though it doesn’t have an impact on your audience like a video does. It surely does get you way more connected to your audience than blogging does.

  But the problem with a podcast is finding a good platform to host it. I spent some time researching & reviewing various platforms & finally had to choose between Libsyn & Buzzsprout. I ended up choosing Buzzsprout because it hosts podcasts based on duration & not on size. It also integrates pretty well with WordPress.

  It is a pretty good platform with reasonable pricing and decent customization options. Currently, I’m not hosting my podcast under them because I don’t record much nowadays & I wanted to save money by going for the free plan of Soundcloud.

• Pretty links

  

  Pretty links is a must-have Digital marketing tool for Digital marketers.

  It’s like a swiss knife when it comes to managing links. It will allow you to shrink, cloak, track, organize, share and test all of your links. Unlike other link shrinking services, pretty links allow creating short links with your own domain.

  It also supports tracking every activity related to the links created under it. It shows every hit on the URL and a detailed report on the user location, OS, & host.

  The reason why many love this tool is that of its ability to cloak the links with your own domain. It works very well with affiliate links. Affiliate links usually contain certain tracking details & it’s pretty easy to identify one. This actually puts your credibility at risk as your audience might consider you persuading them to take a particular action for your own benefit. Not that you should hide the fact it is an affiliate link but by cloaking you have a better chance of someone clicking on it.

  Pretty links also make link management a lot easy. You can also change the redirect URL and Pretty link URL anytime. Such functions are pretty hard to ignore. So, don’t miss this one.

• Collect Chat

  

  Have you guys seen the little chat thingy on Softscotch homepage? That’s Collect Chat.

  Collect Chat is an automated chatbot that collects data by live interaction with the user instead of the user having to fill a boring form. They have a pretty simple dashboard with a drag & drop builder that lets you create a simple chatbot in few minutes. It also comes with templates to ask relevant questions to your visitors and all the interactions are stored in the dashboard for solving business pain points & to make better business decisions.

  The free plan allows you to record up to 30 responses with a data storage for 30days. You will have to upgrade to a paid plan for recording more responses, unlimited storage, integrations & lot more other functions.

  Cool stuff. Why not try it on your site?

• Softscotch Calculate & Compare

  

  One thing I always wanted to know was if I was working the right way or heading in the right direction. The one way to know this is to wait until the end & see if you get screwed or not. The other way is to compare your metrics with someone who has succeeded in the path you have taken or compare it with the industry standards.

  That’s what Softscotch tools are all about. It lets you calculate & compare your data with industry standards or benchmarks. It also lets you know to an extent on how well you are performing compared to the others in your industry. Let’s look at some of the tools we cover.

  1. Calculate Advertising Formulas.
     You can calculate CTR (click through rate), CPM (cost per mile), CPC (cost per click), CR (conversion rate), CPA (cost per acquisition). You can also compare your AdWords search & display campaign CTR with the industry standards or benchmarks.
  2. Calculate ROI.
     You can calculate the return on investment in percentage & for every dollar spent on the campaigns.
  3. Calculate & Compare Email Benchmarks.
     You can calculate your email campaign metrics like open rate & click through rate and compare it with industry standards or benchmarks.
  4. Compare Website Benchmarks.
     You can compare your website size, website load time & website HTTP requests with industry standards.
  5. Calculate Social Media Benchmarks.
     You can calculate Facebook engagement rate & Twitter engagement rate & check how well you are performing. You can also calculate Facebook campaign CTR, CPC, CR, CPA and compare it with industry standards.
  6. Calculate Customer Lifetime Value.
     This is a pretty hard metric to calculate but we managed to set it up. It will allow you to calculate the average order value, purchase frequency, customer value, customer lifespan & bring it all together to calculate the customer lifetime value.

Conclusion

That’s it for now people! I will come soon with more awesome tools.
If you guys have any such favourite tools in mind then please do share it in comments.
Always share what you learn or know because that’s the only way you gonna grow.

Sanju Joseph

He’s a 23yr old pursuing a career in Digital Marketing, WordPress Development, and Graphic Designing. Trying to create a mark for himself in a Dynamic World. Frustrated by blood-sucking guru’s & specialists, he’s on a quest to educate beginners by creating small communities. He likes to spend his free time creating a purpose to make things more productive, playing games, reading articles & stuff that you wouldn’t care to know.