When it comes to digital marketing, having the right expertise on your side is essential to success. However, having the right tools at your disposal can also play an integral role, helping you be more productive, efficient, and strategic.
Take a look at some of the tools that we use for our own marketing efforts here at Thomas, and see how you can incorporate them into your industrial marketing.
Canva
One of our personal favorites, Canva is a design tool that can help you create professional-looking digital and print marketing collateral. With access more than one million stock photos, graphics, and fonts, you can easily create professional quality media for your business.
Canva’s drag-and-drop feature makes graphic design simple for anyone with very little learning curve required. Use Canva to create graphics for:
- Social media
- Presentations
- Flyers and brochures
- Business cards
- Blog graphics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool from Google that allows you to keep track of a variety of metrics pertaining to your website — visits, time on page, bounce rate, etc. This information is critical to evaluating your website’s performance and driving optimization efforts.
HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one inbound marketing software program that combines everything your business needs to create and deploy successful marketing campaigns. HubSpot’s CRM, marketing, sales, and customer service hubs provide full-service solutions for all aspects of your business.
In particular, HubSpot’s marketing hub can help you automate many common marketing tasks — tracking visitors, scoring leads, triggering emails. It also makes it easy to make changes to your website or content via an extremely friendly user interface. Lastly, HubSpot’s built-in analytics can help you gauge the performance of all aspects of your marketing, including website performance, email campaigns, social media, etc.
Ahrefs
If you are getting serious about search engine optimization, Ahrefs can be a very helpful resource.
Ahrefs offers a range of tools including keyword, backlink, and content research as well as competitive analysis, rank tracking, and web monitoring. It makes it easy to see why your competitors are outperforming you so that you can tailor your own digital marketing approaches.
Lumen5
We probably don’t have to tell you (again) how important video marketing is today. What we can tell you, however, is that creating videos isn’t as difficult as you would expect.
Lumen5 automatically generates videos using your existing blog articles and other content, using AI to match words with images and other media. The results are engaging, social media-friendly videos that look professional, but which take only minutes to create.
Optimizely
Successful digital marketing is all about testing, learning, and, ultimately, improving. This mantra applies to your website, your emails, your forms, landing pages, etc.
Optimizely allows you to experiment with virtually every marketing channel, making it simple to conduct A/B tests and drive continuous improvement.
Trello
Keeping track of all of your marketing campaigns can be as much work as actually executing those campaigns. Trello, a web-based project management tool, simplifies the process with a user-friendly dashboard that makes it easy to organize, schedule, assign, and prioritize different tasks.
Full Story
When visitors land on your site, what do they do? That’s the question FullStory can help you answer.
FullStory captures user sessions so you can watch them live or later. It also can segment user sessions by different attributes, including the visitor’s location, specific pages visited, time spent on page, etc.
With this visibility, you can identify potential points of frustration, analyze the performance of individual pages, and refine your website and funnels to optimize user experience.
SEMrush
SEMrush allows you to manage SEO, content, social media marketing, and advertising all in one spot. Comprehensive analytics, keyword research, content audits, and other features show you how your digital marketing performs collectively.
BuzzSumo
Creating content is an important part of digital marketing. However, it can be difficult to determine which content is actually working. Enter BuzzSumo, which gives you insight into how your existing content is performing, what kind of content you should be producing, and how you stack up to your competitors.
Thomas WebTrax
Thomas WebTrax is the first Opportunity Intelligence tool built specifically for industrial manufacturers and suppliers. Going beyond analytics, Thomas WebTrax can help you turn the anonymous visitors that come to your site into actionable leads. It allows you to track buyers throughout their buying journey, from Thomasnet.com, to your website, to RFIs and phone calls. You can also identify the opportunities that matter to your business, refining visitors by industry, geography, company size, and other filters. Armed with all of this insight, your sales team can engage prospects in more meaningful conversations that drive wins and revenue.
More than 11,000 manufacturers use WebTrax. If you’d like to get started, you can sign up for your free account now.
