There are so many tools at a marketer‘s disposal.
With all the options, it can be come a little overwhelming — to the point that a lot of these powerhouse, unicorn tools get lost in the shuffle.
That’s why I rounded up the marketing tools you actually need.
Every tool on this list is a tool I stand behind, and use in my day-to-day work life.
Read on to discover the 15 tools I can’t live without!
Facebook Messenger messages earn an 80% average open rate an 20% open rate — and those numbers blow email marketing out of the water.
If you want those impressive levels of engagement for your own brand, then the first thing you need to do is a build a Facebook Messenger chatbot.
MobileMonkey is the best Facebook Messenger chatbot builder out there — and did I mention it’s free?
With this MobileMonkey, you can build your first Messenger chatbot easily, with no coding required.
You can use your bot to send out messages (a.k.a. chatblast), answer questions, interact with contacts, conduct surveys, and so much more.
It can help jumpstart your Messenger live support and marketing campaign.
Use your MobileMonkey-powered chatbot to attract leads and drive engagement!
Good content marketing involves having high quality images to go with your text.
Having a source of those high quality images is necessary to deliver the best content possible.
VisualHunt is a great source of free high quality images pulled from many online sources.
Their photos have Creative Commons Zero license, making them free for commercial use.
They also have Creative Commons and Public Domain photos you can embed on your content directly from the website.
Just search the keyword or theme you’re looking for and you should find the images you need.
Nothing beats infographics for delivering information in a visually engaging way.
They’re often better than text, video, and photographs alone, making them a must-have in your content marketing.
With Venngage, you can create amazing infographics for your content in three easy steps.
You can choose a template in Venngage, add your data into charts and visuals, and then customize your design.
With over a hundred templates to choose from, Venngage is one of the best places to create infographics quickly and easily.
If you’re looking to get serious with your digital marketing, then you need an all-in-one SEO platform you can depend on.
Serpstat was designed for professional marketers who are looking to gain that extra edge.
You can get that by having all the data before you to make decisions on any online business marketing plan.
Serpstat has research tools with advanced analytics for you to learn about your audience.
It keeps record of historical data over time, giving you a bird’s eye view of your performance.
You can also group keywords by tags while also gathering insights in your traffic distribution.
That lets you know where you’re getting results from and what needs improving.
This service is great for those looking to add more juice to their content marketing efforts.
Contentful boasts a new, more flexible approach to content management, promising to make blogging and content creation a breeze.
It’s an API-driven content management infrastructure designed to create, manage, and distribute content to any platform or device easily.
Basically, it’s like WordPress, but has a lot more bells and whistles that make it more secure and does your content management for you.
Companies like Spotify, Urban Outfitters, Red Bull, and so on make use of Contentful for their websites.
Running your website on Contentful lets you be steps ahead of everyone else with your content marketing.
Being able to understand how your audience behaves when they view your website can give you tremendous insight.
Hotjar lets you see where your visitors tend to click with its heatmap, letting you know what catches their attention.
You can then adjust your web design and content to encourage more clicks and engagement with your content.
It can also give you recordings of where their mouse cursors tend to go, how fast they scroll, and so on.
You also get to see your conversion funnel, showing how much of your audience goes from landing page to actual conversion.
With the information you get from Hotjar, you can fine-tune your website to bring in more customers and increase your revenue.
Having a Facebook Messenger-powered chat widget on your website is a surefire way to take your engagement and time on page to the next level.
The WP-Chatbot plugin adds a Facebook Messenger widget on your website.
It has complete integration with Messenger and your Facebook business page.
Visitors can then engage with your business easily without having to leave your website.
Since chatbot is integrated with Facebook Messenger, every person who interacts with you on the site will be added to your ever-growing Facebook Messenger contact list — which means you’ll be able to follow up with your chat participants after that initial site chat.
No doubt about it, adding a MobileMonkey chat widget to your site will increase engagement, provide new leads, drive conversions and boost revenue.
Adding an app to your business can be quite an upgrade, letting you reach even more users who use mobile devices.
Buildfire lets you build your own app from simple templates with no coding required.
If you know how to build stuff like websites, chatbots, and so on with templates, then you should be able to build an app here.
It’s almost like MobileMonkey, but for mobile apps on iOS or Android instead of chatbots in terms of what you can do with it.
Of course, building apps involves a lot more than just setting triggers and tasks for a chatbot.
Buildfire helps you throughout that process, letting you create an app that works for your business as you like it.
The best thing about it is it’s free to build an app in Buildfire by yourself, and you can also choose to hire Buildfire to do it for you.
If you’re looking for more help on your content and social media marketing, then this app may be for you.
DrumUp is a free and easy-to-use app that lets you manage multiple social media accounts more easily.
You can curate top content in your niche easily and save time on managing all your accounts by up to 90%.
It can even help you do more and reach out to more people with its great features and compatibility with many platforms.
DrumUp also lets you measure the social media engagement you’re getting through its analytics.
Keeping your profiles updated need not be such a big chore anymore thanks to DrumUp.
Artificial intelligence has made digital marketing even more convenient in recent years, and BrightEdge takes advantage of it.
It lets you do SEO and content marketing more effectively through its AI to power organic search performance.
BrightEdge lets you track and use deep data and context to better your search engine optimization.
It also helps you run a high-performing website through its data intelligence.
You can then create high-quality content that satisfies customer demand through BrightEdge.
The rigors of day-to-day digital marketing work can bog you down over time, making it seem like you’re no longer in control.
Todoist can help you take that control back by doing things like give you reminders on things you tend to forget.
You can enter your tasks for the day and have a list that lets you remember what to prioritize.
But Todoist isn’t just like any other productivity service as it’s designed mostly for business.
This lets you use a sleek interface for tracking your own thoughts, work tasks, errands, and so on easily.
Todoist can definitely help organize your work life with greater deal of clarity.
Visual storytelling is an art on its own, as it’s all about showing instead of just telling.
Visage is a visualization platform that lets content marketers create on-brand visual content easily.
This relatively new app features enable data visualization without all the finangling and hair-splitting.
You just need to enter your data and choose how it can be best shown, and you can edit it there like in Canva.
It also has additional features that makes it great for collaboration, which makes for seamless for group work.
Visage enables seamless ideation, design, distribution, and analytics for your visual content.
Managing all your social media activities can be tedious over time, especially for businesses.
Oktopost makes that easier for B2B enterprises, combining three separate solutions into one.
You get social media management, social employee advocacy, and social media promotions in one tight package.
If you’re looking to up your social media game for your B2B business, Oktopost is worth looking into.
Videos can be some of the best content you can make to increase engagement and conversions.
Vidyard is a tool you can use to make personalized videos easily without having to be an expert at video editing.
It lets you customize your video with ease, and you can then embed it anywhere you want.
With videos you make with Vidyard, you can maximize your first impressions and endear your business more to the people.
Making content is one of the more daunting tasks in marketing, but also one of the most crucial as it’s the meat of the campaign.
But it does get tedious over time and it may seem like you’re no longer in control of your time when you’re in the thick of it.
ContentCal can help you take back control with its visual calendar designed for planning and auto-publishing your social media content.
It’s used by many big companies and agencies for their content and social media marketing needs.
You can learn more on how to go about your content and social media through its analytics.
It also lets you customize your setup so you can tailor-fit ContentCal for every sub-brand, client, or company you work with.
Victory loves preparation, and you too can taste success every single day with a plan laid out in ContentCal.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.