It doesn’t take insider insight to understand that digital marketing efforts are an increasingly important part of running a business. In fact, one forecast found digital advertising spending for 2022 reaching $248.72 billion—or 71.8 percent of all U.S. media spending.1 That’s a commanding majority of advertising spending, and that’s not even accounting for investments into digital marketing work that doesn’t come with an up-front price tag for placements.
The growth of digital marketing has also led to an explosion of tools and software that aim to make marketing professionals more productive and efficient with their time. If you’re new to the field, this variety of marketing-related tools is a double-edged sword. It’s great knowing that they exist and can make your life easier once mastered, but learning your way around all of these tools can feel daunting.
And if you compare two similar organizations’ tech tools, you’ll soon find that there are rarely perfect one-to-one matches between tools. The good news is that while the details of how these platforms and tools will vary, many will feature similar functionality. And if you’re just starting out in a digital marketing role, even some basic familiarity can be seen as an asset.
So which tools and platforms are worth getting familiar with? We break it down into six primary categories:
- Analytics
- Email/marketing automation
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools
- Social media
- Search engine marketing
- Design and creative
Digital marketing analytics tools:
One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is the ability to gather data and track the performance of your marketing efforts. When used properly, these tools can offer a wealth of insight.
Google® Analytics
One of the most popular analytics tools is Google Analytics. This platform can be used to measure critical statistics related to a website, including the number of sessions, “conversion” events, navigational paths and more. This is a powerful tool for understanding who gets to your website, how they get there and what they do once they arrive. Even better? There are tons of free how-to resources available online to help get you up to speed.
Ruler Analytics®
One challenge that comes from the wide variety of systems and databases used to monitor digital marketing performance is that they don’t always integrate with each other, and that can make a holistic view of a customer’s journey tough to get a clear picture of. Ruler aims to fix these issues by providing a tracking through line for all potential interaction points. This helps marketers understand how specific interactions (like web searches, calls or email opens) do or do not influence a customer’s buying decision.
Mixpanel®
As an analytics tool, Mixpanel can go a step further than free tools because it sets goals that become more tailored to your company as you plug in more and more information. This analytics tool is capable of integrating with many common marketing platforms—again, unlocking the potential for better visibility into a customer’s overall journey.
Email and marketing automation tools
You might not love being the recipient, but automated email (and text messaging) campaigns are a cornerstone of many digital marketing campaigns. These tools can help you get a better handle on building complex messaging campaigns and what’s most effective for this channel.
Mailchimp®
One of the most well-known email marketing tools out there, Mailchimp can be a one-stop shop for all your email marketing needs. They can help you analyze your prospect lists, design and create an email campaign, and even offers an intuitive email builder for beginners who haven’t designed email campaigns before.
HubSpot®
HubSpot’s customer relationship management (CRM) system is one of the most widely used options in the market. The platform enables email tracking, prospect tracking, meeting scheduling and live chat options, giving you additional avenues for building campaigns and nurturing prospective sales. It makes many of digital marketing’s “best of” lists because of its ease of use. The main difference between the free plan and paid plan is the number of users—the paid plan offers unlimited users while the free plan allows two different users. This is a great small business or startup digital marketing tool.
Omnisend®
Omnisend is an email and SMS marketing tool that claims to be used by over 70,000 e-commerce brands. Whether a business wants to send newsletters or targeted campaigns, Omnisend helps personalize who receives which messages, the method in which they receive it and the time based on customer’s online behavior. This platform is an excellent, easy-to-use tool that works well with many popular e-commerce platforms.
Sendinblue®
Sendinblue is another digital marketing tool for email and marketing automation efforts. The free plan includes email templates, SMS marketing, automation workflows, phone support and the ability to send up to 300 emails per day. This is a great starting email marketing tool that can be upgraded if your business grows.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools
In digital marketing, getting a prospect to visit your website or open an email message is half the battle. Holding their interest and reducing the “friction” on page that keeps them from making a purchase is also important. These tools can help with the adjustment, testing and implementation of CRO efforts.
Unbounce®
Unbounce is a dedicated platform for building effective landing pages—the sales-focused “money” pages of a website where most transactions take place. With features like AI copywriting assistants and AI-based traffic routing that determines which landing page variation a visitor is most likely to convert on, this platform can help provide a big lift in the value of marketing landing pages.
Hotjar®
One of the challenges of designing an effective website is that the end results can be very difficult to evaluate. What may look great in the eyes of the team building the site could also be a source of confusion for visitors. Hotjar is a helpful tool for gathering quantitative and trickier-to-capture qualitative insights about the performance of a page.
With heatmaps highlighting what areas of a page the visitors focus on most, recordings of live user sessions as they navigate your site and user survey tools, you’ll have an excellent toolkit for identifying areas of improvement.
UserTesting®
Another immensely useful CRO tool for gathering qualitative feedback, UserTesting allows you to pull insights from specified groups of testers who fit your website’s target audience. These testers are provided testing-related prompts (ex: “I want you to find this product page from our site navigation—document your steps and thinking”) to walk through during live recording sessions. These reviewable user testing sessions can be used to confirm assumptions and identify sometimes surprising points of friction.
Social media management tools
Social media represents an important avenue for digital marketers aiming to reach new audiences, and there’s no shortage of useful apps for digital marketers focused on this channel.
Hootsuite®
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that works across various social media networks as a one-stop location for what you’d do in each individual platform. You can compose and schedule posts, monitor account mentions and coordinate multi-platform announcements all from one application. It is used by over 200,000+ users and is available in six different languages. This tool can be a huge time saver for organizations with several social media accounts to oversee.
Sprout Social®
Another powerful social media management tool, Sprout Social allows for multiplatform account management from a single site. Along with posting and scheduling capabilities, it also features audience monitoring tools and strong analytics capabilities. This is an excellent option for anyone looking to simplify their oversight of multiple social media accounts.
Buffer®
Also a huge player in the social media management sphere, Buffer features the post scheduling, monitoring and analytics features you’d expect to find in a consolidated social media management app. This tool is often a great option for smaller organizations or businesses that can take advantage of their free or low-cost options.
Search engine marketing tools
To get traffic to your website, you need to know what people are searching for. Being familiar with the ever-growing list of search engine marketing (SEM) tools is a great way to stand out in the digital marketing world.
Semrush®
As far as SEO tools go, Semrush is one of the most well-known on the market. This platform offers useful keyword research tools, performance tracking abilities, link building tools and ways to keep tabs on the performance of competitor sites. A very useful tool for mapping search engine–based marketing strategies.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a web tool often used by bigger businesses because of its efficiency. It can quickly scan a website and find broken links, audit redirects, analyze the effectiveness of page titles and so much more. While bigger companies may use the paid version, Screaming Frog does offer a free version that individuals can use to familiarize themselves with its features. This is a valuable tool for keeping up with web maintenance issues that can hurt your site’s overall performance.
Moz® Pro
Moz Pro is an excellent and versatile SEO tool. Moz is a longstanding (founded in 2004) source of great search engine marketing related insights, and its platform is as strong as any. They offer keyword research tools, page rank tracking, web maintenance crawls, analytics features and much more.
Design and creative marketing tools
As a marketer, you might not be tasked with all of the design, copywriting and layout work that comes with building digital marketing assets—but it certainly helps to know your way around some common design-related software.
Canva®
One of the best go-to tools for creating any kind of graphic for a business, Canva helps create images for “social media, web banners, marketing brochures, flyers, business cards, presentations and just about everything in between.” Canva is a must-know digital marketing tool because of its ability to be used in tandem with so many others.
Adobe Creative Suite®
The long-standing market leader for creative tools, Adobe Creative Suite is a go-to for design professionals. Everything from vector graphics, photography, video and 3D animation can take form in one of the Creative Suite products. While not always easy to master, knowing the basics of using this software bundle is an asset for most marketers.
Ziflow®
As a marketing professional, there’s a good chance you’ll spend some time reviewing marketing assets and leaving notes for design teams to work from. Depending on the system used, this can be a cumbersome process—one that Ziflow aims to simplify. This proofing tool allows users to leave review comments in layout to assets ranging from banner ads to videos or even entire in-use websites with a simple-to-use interface.
Figma®
Figma is an incredibly useful tool for marketers focused on user experience and user interface design. This product allows teams to work collaboratively on design elements, with loads of time-saving features that can help cut down on tedious work (like manually resizing every button on an interface.)
A world full of new tools looking for new builders
With all these digital marketing tools out there in the world, the most skilled marketers will have their pick to assemble a full toolbox.
Is this a world that you find yourself ready to explore? Check out "Bytes to Boardrooms: 6 Technology Skills that Are Valued in Business" and "What Is Digital Marketing? A Beginner's Guide to Modern Marketing."
1Sarah Lebow, “Digital will account for 71.8% of US media ad spend this year, up 16 percentage points from 2019—and growing,” Insider Intelligence, November 7, 2022, [accessed January 2023] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/digital-us-media-ad-spend.
Creative Suite is a registered trademark of Adobe, Inc.
Buffer is a registered trademark of Buffer, Inc.
Canva is a registered trademark of Canva Pty Ltd.
Figma is a registered trademark of Figma, Inc.
Google is a registered trademark of Google, LLC.
Hootsuite is a registered trademark of Hootsuite Media, Inc.
Hotjar is a registered trademark of Hotjar Ltd.
HubSpot is a registered trademark of HubSpot, Inc.
Mailchimp is a registered trademark of The Rocket Science Group, LLC.
Mixpanel is a registered trademark of Guangdong Nanguang Photo & Video Systems Co. Ltd.
Moz is a registered trademark of SEOmoz, Inc.
Omnisend is a registered trademark of Omnisend Limited, Ltd.
Ruler Analytics is a registered trademark of Ruler Analytics, Inc.
Semrush is a registered trademark of Semrush, Inc.
Sendinblue is a registered trademark of SENDINBLUE SAS.
Sprout Social is a registered trademark of Sprout Social, Inc.
Unbounce is a registered trademark of Unbounce Marketing Solutions, Inc.
UserTesting is a registered trademark of Usertesting, Inc.
Ziflow is a registered trademark of Ziflow LLC.
