10 Essential Digital Marketing Platforms
Whether you’re interested in fine-tuning your content, SEO, PPC, social media, lead gen, data reporting, or any other facet of your digital marketing strategy, someone offers a tool for it. Our digital marketing toolkits are growing and constantly changing, adapting alongside market trends in the blink of an eye. The best platform or solution for each team is unique and takes a LOT of trial and error before finding what works. Here are some of our favorite paid and free tools to kick-start your digital marketing initiatives!
Free Tools
Canva
For teams looking to design their own content, Canva is your answer. It is a web-based design platform that includes tons of premade templates, images, and inspiration. This tool is perfect for a last-minute social media graphic, a professional infographic, and quickly resizing creatives for every channel.
Data Studio
Gone are the days of expensive reporting tools that never quite worked as intended, all thanks to Data Studio. This web-based tool easily integrates with web analytics, social profiles, paid advertising, and other tools, allowing you to create professional reports full of data visualizations.
Google Analytics
If you have a website, this is a must-have tool. Google Analytics provides a comprehensive look at your website users, page performance, and conversion goals. The data collected by this tool allows for immediate, actionable insights that can increase your digital performance and overall business goals.
Hotjar
Hotjar provides insight into on-site behavior using heatmaps. Through heatmaps, you can get an idea of how visitors to your website are reading through your pages, where they do and don’t click, and literally see what parts of your site need the most attention.
PageSpeed Insights
Page speed tools are built-in with many paid platforms. Still, Google’s online PageSpeed Insights allows developers, marketers, and anyone curious to understand how their website is performing. This tool provides higher-level optimizations and suggestions to boost load times, which is vital for SEO.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Crawling your site regularly for technical errors is easy with Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider. You can scan your entire website in a matter of minutes for broken links, metadata errors, and so much more. This tool allows you to catch errors before they can negatively impact the health of your website. Free until 500 pages.
Paid Tools
Ahrefs
Research is key to digital marketing success, and Ahrefs is blazing the trail for all things SEO. Their plans start at $99 per month and scale to fit additional needs. This tool includes comprehensive competitor analysis, content and keyword rankings, PPC analysis, backlink information, and so much more.
MeetEdgar
Social media automation tools are everywhere, but MeetEdgar is hard to beat. Starting at $49 per month, their platform gives you a lot of bang for your buck. It includes a browser extension for sharing quickly, post scheduling, A/B testing, content creation, and easily integrates across social platforms.
Moz
Moz is the go-to platform for many marketing professionals because of its entire suite of tools. Moz Pro is a total SEO solution that can scale to meet your needs, starting at only $99 per month. With this plan, you have access to keyword and link research, technical audits, SEO insights, and reporting. SEMrush is a similar platform with a comprehensive toolset and competitor intel, starting at $99 per month.
SparkToro
SparkToro is the audience research tool straight from digital marketer dreams. Paid plans start at $112 per month and provide better information than a typical customer survey. From a simple search, this platform sources data from social media, websites, and podcasts to deliver a complete audience profile.
Supermetrics
If you’re using Data Studio for reporting, Supermetrics for Google Data Studio is a must-have tool. You can access a 14-day free trial before paying for features that start at $39 per month. Supermetrics easily integrates your data across paid channels, social platforms, email, and analytics for creating accurate, insightful reports. The paid accounts come with access to pre-made Data Studio report templates.
Yext
Managing all of your online listings from one simple dashboard is what draws so many users to Yext. Pricing for their tools varies depending on the number of listings needed, the add-ons for industry verticals, and more. Yext partners with its customers to tailor a package for individual needs.