Right now, there are a total 6,829 marketing technology solutions available. That’s a lot! You’ve probably heard of the giants in this space: Mailchimp, Moz, Hubspot, and the likes.
But for every major marketing tool, there’s a smaller, more nimble company ready to blow you away. And it’s these unsung heroes I’d like to focus on today.
Why?
Because more solutions mean more choice for you. And while there is nothing wrong with the big guns, these lesser-known tools often have specific advantages over the market leader:
- Specific focus
- Cost advantage
- More intimate customer service
- Willingness to listen to your specific needs and have the tool evolve accordingly
I promise: any of these 10 handpicked tools will make one aspect of your digital marketing life just that little bit easier.
Let’s dig in!
Digital Marketing Tool #1: WooRank
What is it?
WooRank is a website analysis and SEO audit tool. They extract insights and provide advice on how you can improve your website by tracking and measuring its SEO. They achieve this by using data such as keywords, rankings, search volume, traffic, visitor behavior data, and so on, straight from Google.
Why should you use it?
Losing all your hard earned traffic due to an SEO or website error is painful. But maintaining a website could be a full time job in itself. WooRank helps you by collecting useful website data and will alert you when something is wrong or could be optimized.
They also allow you to compare yourself to your competitors. They check if you’re appearing in the right search results, who’s outranking you and what sources are bringing traffic to your website.
A nice bonus feature is their Digital Marketing Checklist, which takes you by the hand and shows you step by step how to improve your on- and off-page SEO, perfect when you want your latest blogpost to turn into a success.
Pricing
Starting from 59.99$/month or 470$/year. Free trial available.
Digital Marketing Tool #2: Mailshake
What is it?
Mailshake allows you to send personalized cold emails en masse, directly from your personal email. Just upload a spreadsheet with your recipient’s name, contact info, and any other personalization fields you want to include (their blog name, a sentence about something you found on their Twitter, etc.), and you’re good to go.
Why should you use it?
No digital marketing strategy is complete without a robust email marketing strategy, and an essential element of that strategy should be cold email outreach.
You can reach out to:
- People that may be interested in your product
- Journalists who cover your space
- Other bloggers
- Influencers with large social followings
You can set automatic follow-ups if recipients don’t reply, track when they open or click in your email, and manage responses right from within the app. If cold outreach is a part of your marketing strategy (which it should be), Mailshake will save you a ton of time.
On top of that, they have a great blog with plenty of outreach tips and tricks worth checking.
Pricing
Starting from 19$/month or 17$/month if you pay annually.
Digital Marketing Tool #3: Wordable
What is it?
Wordable is a plugin that allows you to import posts and pages from Google Docs to WordPress with a few simple clicks.
Why should you use it?
Digital marketers are always in search of productivity and how they can squeeze more results out of the time they’re given.
Often, productivity gains can be found in the simplest places: where you can eliminate tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming.
In content marketing, if you’re a prolific producer, you probably spend a lot of time uploading drafts into WordPress. It’s repetitive and boring, and over the period of your writing career, it’s incredibly time wasting.
Wordable lets you skip that part of the job so you can focus on the more meaningful aspects of content creation and promotion.
With just a few clicks, you can upload Google Docs to WordPress, and they appear perfectly formatted. It’s a huge time saver if you use WordPress as your CMS.
Pricing
Free plan available. Paying plans starts at 19$/month or 195$/year.
Digital Marketing Tool #4: DrumUp
What is it?
DrumUp is a content marketing tool that doubles-up as a social media post scheduling app (for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram). The tool helps you discover content topics that your target audience would appreciate. It works as a content research and recommendation tool, schedules curated/drafted content across multiple social accounts, and provides insights about your social media strategy.
Why should you use it?
Part of any digital marketer’s job, especially in startups or SMBs, is managing all the social media accounts. This social media and content marketing tool is comparable to the likes of Buffer, Crystal.io or Post Planner, but with the ability to customize your posts.
In addition to saving time on content discovery and sharing, DrumUp also helps you maximize content reach via hashtag and @mention recommendations, native content promotion, content automation, and employee advocacy.
It can also be used to increase social media engagement by using GIFs, custom images and top performing posts from within the dashboard.
Pricing
Starting from 19$/month or 180$/year.
Digital Marketing Tool #5: Bannersnack
What is it?
Bannersnack is a cloud-based, professional banner maker with which you can create fully responsive banners that will look perfect on all screen sizes, on any device.
Why should you use it?
Bannersnack lets you design display ads in every shape or format: you can create HTML5 animations, add videos, links, or embed your own custom code.
It’s pretty intuitive to you use. You can start from scratch or choose a template, you can make your banner unique by adding animations, interactive elements, and powerful Call-To-Actions. To create one, you can drag and drop images, text buttons, and other visuals to create your perfect banner. To top it of, the banners are compatible with all major ad networks.
Pricing
Free plan available. Paying plans start from 12$/month or 84$/year.
Digital Marketing Tool #6: Rocketium
What is it?
Rocketium is a web-based platform that lets you edit videos quickly even if you have no video expertise.
Why should you use it?
A big part of today’s digital marketers workload is creating content in all its shapes and forms. We’ve covered blogging with Wordable, but more and more marketers are producing or repurposing old content into video content. And if you’re not familiar with video editing, you could end wasting a lot of time.
Rocketium solves this with a drag and drop interface and a bunch of features that take away most of the time consuming tasks of the video creation process.
For example, the auto-resizing feature allows the same video to be converted into any other size instantly without any styling tweaks. So you don’t have to spend hours recreating the same video in landscape for YouTube and desktop viewing, portrait for Snapchat and mobile viewing, and square for Facebook and social viewing.
Pricing
Free plan available. Paying plans start at 49$/month or 190$/year.
Digital Marketing Tool #7: Cognitive SEO
What is it?
CognitiveSEO is an SEO toolbox offering core digital marketing metrics for a comprehensive analysis.
Why should you use it?
This tool is particularly interesting for the marketing or SEO agencies out there. Tools like Moz and Ahrefs offer similar functionalities, but even the lowest plan at CognitiveSEO offers multiple users, multiple sites and a white label option at a fraction of the cost.
Some if its other features are:
- Complete backlinks audit
- Automatic unnatural link detection
- The possibility of disavowing links straight from the tool
- Competitors data + comparative audits
- Keyword research tool
- Content optimization tool
- Quick site explorer tool
- Daily rankings updates
Pricing
Free trial available. Paying plans start at 99$/month or 89.10$/month if you pay annually.
Digital Marketing Tool #8: Cumul.io
What is it?
Cumul.io is a dashboarding platform in which you can easily create & share any type of KPI dashboard in minutes.
Why should you use it?
Cumul.io combines an easy drag & drop interface, with more advanced features like linking between datasets. In that way, you can really understand how your marketing actions are influencing the whole customer journey.
It’s a great tool for internal reporting: you can share the dashboards with colleagues or rotate them on a monitor in your office.
Thanks to their integration, you can perfectly use it for reporting to your end-customers as well. For example, if you’re running a marketing agency, you can add marketing performance dashboards to your portal, software or to a simple webpage. Fully white-labelled, and with a secure login per client.
Pricing
Starting from 35$/month
Digital Marketing Tool #9: Mention
What is it?
Mention is a comprehensive media monitoring tool that helps brands track the most important conversations about their brand, competitors, and industry online.
They help our customers monitor and improve their social media performance, find influencers, protect their reputation, and provide better customer care.
Why should you use it?
There’s a lot of noise on the world wide web, and with so many conversations online, it can feel impossible to keep up with it all. Media monitoring lets you collect all these mentions, to analyze when you have time.
Mention helps track online conversations as they happen, wherever they happen. No more scouring the web manually, or waiting for your weekly mentions digest.
Pricing
Starting from 29$/month
Digital Marketing Tool #10: Userlike
What is it?
Userlike is a live chat software for website and mobile support.
Why should you use it?
The combination of low effort, anonymity, and familiarity with chat makes it the preferred channel for many customers.
According to a research by Internet Retailer, 20% of consumers say live chat is their favorite way to interact with a merchant. Live chat was also relatively more popular for simple and shopping-related questions.
On top of that, the fact that live chat is on-site and real-time makes it the only channel that allows you to guide your visitors through your website. A critical question can be resolved on-site, before it puts customers off the purchase. Which could triple your conversion.
Pricing
Free plan available. Paying plans start at 32$/month (billed monthly) or 29$/month (billed annually)
So there you have it: 10 online marketing tools that will make your life just that little bit easier and allow you to do things just a little bit quicker. Do you use any lesser-known tools you can recommend? If so, how did they make your marketing life easier?
About the author
Stefan Debois is the founder and CEO of Survey Anyplace, an online software tool to create engaging surveys, quizzes and assessments. Passionate about the potential of technology to have meaningful online interactions with people, at scale.