Looking for the best marketing tools?
Scott Brinkler from Chief MarTech estimates there are over 11,000 marketing tools in 2023, and the list will likely keep growing if the past ten years’ growth is anything to go by.
With so many tools, getting lost in hundreds of lists is easy. That’s why we decided to create the ultimate list!
The list of marketing tools below is by no means exhaustive. It’s merely a “small” selection of the best marketing tools with outstanding features to help marketing teams create the right toolkit for their business.
Plus, it’s sorted into different categories, so you can hop to a particular section or peruse the whole list at your leisure.
Enjoy!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Individuals and teams of all sizes use social media tools to increase brand awareness, manage workflows, and engage online communities through their social media profiles. These tools can help you in several ways:
Any social media marketing tool should integrate with many social media platforms. For instance, Loomly integrates seamlessly and lets you schedule automatically with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Business Profile & TikTok.
Visual previews: A post planner with a choice of views, such as list view, calendar view, and post overview lets you see at a glance what you’ve scheduled.
Bulk scheduling: This feature makes it easy to share content between social channels. You can save time by creating a post and then easily fine-tuning it for each of your social accounts.
Analytics: The ability to measure your posts’ performance means you can see at a glance which posts do best. You can then use this information to adapt your social media strategy.
Most business leaders today recognize the importance of analytics in any marketing channel. A whopping 84% of business leaders say that customer data and analytics are high on their list of priorities.
The continuing growth in social media users and an appreciation of the value of analytics tools means that the social media analytics market is expanding rapidly. In 2022, it was worth $6.36 billion, and it’s projected to grow by 27.1% annually from 2023 to 2030.
There’s a reason these tools are so highly regarded. Analytics provide crucial information that allows you to continually make improvements to your social media campaigns. In today’s competitive market, they provide advantages you can’t afford to miss.
Similar to analytics, social media monitoring, and listening, keep an eye on what people are saying about your brand, your competitors, and topics relevant to your industry. They help you understand your audience’s thoughts and feelings, spot new trends, and react quickly to these insights.
However, social media monitoring and listening differ from analytics. They’re less structured than social media analytics and don’t necessarily use hard data. Monitoring entails keeping your ear to the ground and catching real-time chatter. Analytics dives deeper, looking at the numbers and patterns behind the chatter.
Along with analytics, social media monitoring and listening are important business strategies. In fact, 80% of brands understand the value of social listening and use it as a key strategic element.
There’s an increasing need for social media automation tools as campaigns become bigger and more complex and audiences grow. Artificial intelligence is increasingly important in automating social media marketing and other business processes. Business leaders are well aware of AI’s advantages to the corporate world, and 57% of leaders plan to increase their AI budget by 25% or more next year.
Automation tools are designed to reduce manual tasks by automating repetitive or routine tasks. They can be used to optimize your scheduling to social platforms, data collection and reporting, basic customer service, managing interactions with followers, monitoring and listening, and social ads management. In addition, AI can produce written content, captions, images, and video.
Automation tools can offer a wide range of features. Here are just a few you might want to consider:
Don’t be tempted to overdo the use of automation, though. You need to keep a balance between automation and authenticity. Followers and customers want to talk to real humans, and ill-timed content could be a huge public relations misstep. So keep checking in to ensure you’re giving the right impression, and adjust your approach when necessary.
There’s no doubt that good customer support significantly impacts your brand image. 60% of business leaders say it improves customer retention. Moreover, social media’s convenience and low cost means it plays an increasingly key role in customer service.
When using social media customer service tools, make sure you find the correct balance between automation and human interaction. Be sure your system can scale up to respond quickly during peak times with many queries.
Social media marketing platforms come in all shapes and sizes, offering a wide range of features and capabilities to help you optimize your social media activities.
Here’s our Top 5:
Loomly is an all-in-one social media management tool that helps your marketing team optimize your social strategy. You can use it to manage every aspect of your social media processes, workflows, and communication on social media. Loomly offers advanced features that allow you to:
No credit card required, unlimited premium features, unlimited collaborators: start your 15-day free trial now.
Buffer is a social media management platform trusted by individuals, brands, and agencies to help social media marketers work more effectively and improve their social strategy. It includes tools for publishing, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration.
Hootsuite is a social media manager tool used by millions of individuals, social media teams, and organizations worldwide to enhance their social media presence. It includes social media monitoring, listening, publishing, detailed analytics, and reporting tools.
Mention is a social listening tool and media monitoring platform that lets you easily track social posts about your brand or product and get comprehensive industry analytics. It helps you track your social media performance and measure the impact of your marketing and PR activities.
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that allows marketers to improve audience engagement through all their social channels. It enables streamlined publishing workflows, collaboration in real-time, bulk uploading, and gathering actionable insights about the performance of your social media content.
Marketing analytics tools enable an organization to manage, evaluate, and control its marketing efforts by measuring performance. These tools can help businesses improve their return on investment (ROI) by identifying their effective marketing campaigns.
These tools typically allow you to:
Here’s our Top 5:
Clicky is a real-time analytics tool that makes it easy to monitor, analyze, and react to your website’s traffic and discover how people are using your site.
It filters out referrer spam and bots so that you get accurate data on every individual visitor, page view, and event. Plus, you can also view heat maps by page, visitor, or segment.
Databox helps you track the performance of all your data in one place. You can track progress towards your goals, visualize performance trends, make more informed decisions, collaborate, and report as you go using custom views and detailed analytics for each function in your organization.
Google Analytics is a free tool that provides the latest insights into how visitors arrived on your site, the amount of time they spent there, how they came to know your site, how they use your site, and how you can keep them coming back. Plus, you can measure sales and conversions and track UTM parameters.
Mixpanel is an excellent product analytics tool that helps companies measure the data that matters, make decisions fast, and build better products. Its powerful, self-serve product analytics allows you to engage, convert, and retain more users.
Supermetrics is the #1 reporting automation tool for PPC, SEO, social, and web analytics. It helps digital marketers pull all their analytics data into one place, including spreadsheets like Google Sheets, Data Studio, Excel, and BigQuery, and data visualization platforms such as Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI for reporting and analysis.
There are hundreds of content marketing tools that serve tons of different purposes, from content ideation to production, optimization, and promotion.
Here’s our Top 5:
AnswerThePublic is a simple content search tool that allows marketers to get instant, raw search insights directly from their customers’ minds. The software uses Google autocomplete data to generate every useful phrase and question people ask around your keyword.
BuzzSumo provides insight into what content is working for any topic or competitor by analyzing hundreds of millions of pieces of content. You can see metrics like social shares, backlinks, and which influencers share any given piece of content.
Google Docs lets you create and edit text documents in your browser. Multiple people can work on a document simultaneously, with every change saved automatically, which makes it perfect for content marketing collaboration. Add-ons allow you to upload Google Docs directly to your CMS, such as HubSpot and WordPress.
Grammarly offers you detailed, real-time suggestions for improving word choice and tone, making sentences clearer, and fixing grammatical errors. Whether your team is writing emails, articles, or social media posts, Grammarly helps them produce work that reflects your brand.
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) that allows you to host and build websites. It uses themes and plugins to customize the design and layout to fit your brand’s content. You can either self-host with WordPress.org or host your site via WordPress.com.
Email marketing tools help marketers send commercial messages to groups of people via email. Typically, they let you:
Here’s our Top 5:
AWeber is a market leader of small business email marketing software. It helps you quickly build responsive landing pages, load and manage contacts, send amazing emails, deliver push notifications instantly, and analyze results – all without having to be a tech whiz.
Constant Contact provides small businesses and nonprofits powerful tools with all the tools they need to market ideas, build a professional brand online, attract customers, and sell more products. Its email software lets you create professional emails, turn ecommerce leads into contacts and loyal customers.
iContact helps brands of all stages and sizes get results with their email marketing. Its easy-to-use tools help you design beautiful emails, personalize your messages, automate your communications, and grow your audience.
Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps small businesses grow faster. Besides sending marketing emails and automated messages, you can create targeted ad campaigns, build landing pages, send postcards, manage reporting and analytics, and sell online.
Brevo is an all-in-one marketing platform to help you engage with your contacts and build stronger customer relationships by sending targeted and relevant messages.
In addition to email marketing, you can send transactional messages via email and SMS. There are also tools for marketing automation, SMS marketing, Chat, Facebook Ads, and a CRM to keep all your customer details in one place.
Search engine optimization (SEO) tools are designed to improve the ranking of content in search engine results pages (SERPs) organically. The software typically lets you perform one or more of the following:
Here’s our Top 5:
Ahrefs’ all-in-one SEO toolset can help you with competitor research, link building, keyword research, content research, rank tracking, and website audits.
Google Search Console gives you insight into your site’s search traffic and performance, allows you to identify and resolve any issues, and makes sure it ranks in Google.
Moz Pro is an all-in-one suite of SEO tools that lets you crawl and audit your site(s), discover link building opportunities, optimize content, analyze competitors, research keywords, and create custom reports.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler tool that helps you improve onsite SEO by extracting, analyzing, and auditing data for common SEO issues, such as broken links and duplicate meta descriptions, page titles, and content.
SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO toolset that’s perfect for small business owners and agencies. It includes tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, keyword suggestion and grouping, keyword position tracking, backlink monitoring, website auditing, and professional reporting.
Search engine marketing (SEM) tools help you manage and optimize paid search campaigns activities, such as targeting valuable keywords, optimizing ad copy, images, and landing pages, plus tracking key metrics.
Here’s our Top 5:
Google Ads Editor is a free, downloadable app that lets you create, edit, and preview multiple ads offline in draft mode before they go live. You can also track important campaign metrics, like click-through rate, cost, position, and conversion metrics.
The Google Keyword Planner is a useful SEM tool for generating keyword ideas and getting volume and CPC estimates right down to the country, state, and city levels. Once you’ve identified the keywords you want, you can add them to your Google advertising plan.
Optmyzr is one of the best SEM tools available, especially for agencies managing various clients. You can launch, track, and manage multiple PPC campaigns on the Google and Bing search platforms.
Semrush is an all-in-one marketing platform for businesses. Its Advertising Toolkit has all the research, analysis, and planning functionality you need to build profitable SEM campaigns. You can find the best keywords for every PPC campaign and monitor your competitors’ ad copy and landing pages.
SpyFu is a PPC competitive intelligence tool that lets you see which keywords your competitors are buying on Google Ads and check out which ad variations they’ve tested. Plus, you can monitor your PPC rankings on Google and Bing.
Marketing automation tools automate marketing actions or tasks, streamline marketing workflows, and measure marketing campaign outcomes. These platforms provide automation features across multiple marketing channels, including email, social media, SMS, and digital ads.
Marketing automation tools usually come with advanced email marketing features, such as A/B testing, spam filter testing, scheduling, and segmentation, plus extensive analytics features to measure the success of a campaign across segments and channels.
Here’s our Top 5:
ActiveCampaign includes hundreds of pre-built automations combining personalized email marketing, powerful marketing automation, and a smart CRM. There are also 300+ integrations, including Shopify, Square, Facebook, and Salesforce. Brands of all sizes use its comprehensive segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat, and text.
Drip’s comprehensive tracking, hyper-segmentation, and robust email marketing automation allows marketers to build stronger and more profitable relationships with their customers and scale as their business grows.
Intercom is a Conversational Relationship Platform (CRP) consisting of a business messenger, a suite of management tools, a customer database, and further integrations with over 250 apps.
In short, the platform has everything you need to build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences across the customer journey – without overwhelming your team.
Marketo Engage is transforming marketing automation by bringing together customer data, content, automation, and analytics. Marketing and sales teams can use the platform to coordinate interactions with customers that are both personalized and measurable – and do it with efficiency and scale.
Omnisend’s email and SMS marketing platform helps e-commerce brands increase sales and meet their business goals on autopilot. It can help increase conversion rates with custom-made, highly relevant emails and texts.
Its full integration with ecommerce platforms, pre-built automation workflows, and intuitive, no-code editing make it a dream to use.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a marketing strategy that targets companies rather than individual customers. ABM software automates and reduces the time-consuming process of identifying prospects and devoting the appropriate resources to nurture the most promising accounts.
Here’s our Top 5:
Demandbase’s ABM platform for businesses includes a full suite of tools that help B2B marketers find, engage, and convert accounts into customers. It connects all customer data in one user dashboard for a unified approach to account-based sales and marketing across multiple channels.
LeanData provides a set of products powered by Salesforce for marketing, sales, and revenue management with lead-to-account matching at its core. With LeanData, sales reps receive only the leads they need, so they can close more deals and drive more revenue faster than before.
Terminus is a full-service ABM platform that helps marketers target the right accounts with dynamic data, engage them with unified multi-channel campaigns, and access the performance metrics of those campaigns. Understanding these reports enables you to target accounts more effectively.
Triblio’s ABM platform specializes in the growth of account pipelines and combines account-based advertising, web personalization, and sales activation tools to optimize campaigns across multiple channels. These campaign tools and analytics run on a proprietary AI-powered purchase intent engine that scores the level of interest each account has in making a purchase.
The 6sense Account Engagement Platform helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth via the power of AI, big data, and machine learning. It equips revenue teams with everything they need to know about their buyers so that they can generate more opportunities, get into those opportunities sooner, increase the deal size, and compete and win more often.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) software provides testing and visualization tools to help you improve user experience and increase conversion rates. CRO tools, such as A/B testing software, Heat maps, and Landing page builders, work alongside other digital analytics software to track visitor behavior.
Here’s our Top 5:
Crazy Egg gives you access to five different types of heatmaps, a visitor recordings/session replay tool, A/B testing, and user surveys. It’s a complete CRO package to understand what your web visitors are doing and transform your business by improving the user experience.
Hotjar’s behavioral analytics software helps you understand how users are using your site, collect user feedback, and convert more site visitors into clients. When you understand user behavior better, you can make the right changes, improve the user experience (UX) and improve conversions.
Optimizely is a leading experience optimization platform. Its AI-powered personalization and experimentation platform provides A/B testing, multivariate testing, and server-side testing tools, plus website personalization and feature toggle capabilities.
The Hello Bar plugin adds customizable popups to your website. You can target messages to users based on factors such as their device and location. It features multiple analytics tools that allow you to run A/B tests, track and analyze performance, and create custom reports. The installation process is simple, and there are built-in integrations with many different platforms.
Unbounce helps you convert more of your visitors into leads, sales, and customers. The drag-and-drop builder lets you create and publish your own landing pages without needing a developer. And the conversion intelligence insights ensure you have the best campaign performance every time.
Public Relations software allows PR professionals to collaborate effectively with contacts, as well as plan, manage, distribute, and track campaigns. Some tools may also provide media monitoring functionality, competitive media analysis, and broadcast solutions to help PR professionals make knowledgeable decisions.
Here’s our Top 5:
Brand24 is a practical, affordable, and user-friendly PR tool. It helps agencies and brands track and analyze conversations around their clients, brands, products, and competitors.
Brand24 enables its users to monitor their online reputation, prevent a PR crisis, track the results of their campaigns, find brand ambassadors, reach out to relevant influencers, engage communities, improve social customer service, and monitor their competition.
Cision is one of the best-known and most feature-rich PR platforms around. It recently acquired Brandwatch – a global leader in social listening and digital consumer intelligence – to strengthen its market position.
Cision provides advanced distribution, tracking, and analysis features to ensure you never miss a mention or fail to prove the value of your PR efforts. You can also run content amplification campaigns through the site so that your editorials and content appear in recommended sites.
Meltwater’s media intelligence platform gives organizations the information advantage to access billions of online conversations and extract relevant insights to manage their brands strategically. It allows teams to interact on social media, curate content, track competitors and emerging stories, and measure the results of their efforts.
Newswire is a top-rated press release and media distribution platform that lets you distribute your news to traditional and digital media outlets, making it easy to launch and track effective press release campaigns.
Prowly lets PR professionals manage media relations more effectively while saving time on routine tasks. With this user-friendly and modern tool, you can find relevant media contacts easily and organize them into a PR CRM, create visual press releases, send personalized email pitches, and maintain journalist-friendly newsrooms.
Companies use SMS marketing software or business text messaging software to coordinate and execute marketing campaigns via SMS (Short-Message Service). Using software like this builds brand loyalty and engagement by sending customers timely, personalized messages.
Here’s our Top 5:
Attentive is the most comprehensive personalized text messaging solution boasting 99% open rates, over 30% click-through rates, and more than 25x ROI. Using real-time behavioral data, Attentive automatically sends engaging text messages to each subscriber at every step of the customer lifecycle.
EZ Texting is a cloud-based messaging platform that allows businesses of all sizes in the U.S. and Canada to reach and engage their mobile audiences. You can use it for sales and promotions, alerts and notifications, lead generation, and customer service.
Podium’s Interaction Management platform uses messaging to make it convenient to interact with your leads, customers, and team at every customer touchpoint. You can message your leads and customers, get reviews and feedback, collect payment, and communicate easily with your team, all in one easy-to-use inbox.
Thousands of Shopify stores trust Postscript to manage their SMS Marketing. You can grow a TCPA-compliant subscriber list, use your Shopify data to have two-way conversations with customers, create targeted text marketing campaigns and text marketing automations, such as abandoned cart recovery, shipping notifications, welcome series, and loyalty offers, to give your revenue an immediate bump.
Twilio enables software developers to use its web service APIs to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and handle other communication tasks.
With Twilio’s API-based SMS services, you can send and receive text messages globally, deliver SMS alerts, notifications, and reminders, and provide customer care through two-way SMS interactions.
Local marketing software comprises tools for local SEO, local listing management, and online reputation management.
Local SEO software helps businesses get listed in the Local 3-Pack (aka Map Pack) at the top of a Google results page. It may also send accurate listings to search engines, track local search rankings, monitor online reviews, and optimize a company’s Google My Business profile.
Local listing management software provides a central hub for managing and updating location data, such as name, address, phone numbers (NAP), store hours, and menus, on customer-facing platforms.
Online reputation management software helps brands track and engage with local customer reviews on various platforms.
Here’s our Top 5:
BrightLocal is a local marketing platform that puts you in control of SEO, business listings, and reputation management. Small companies, multi-location businesses, and agencies use it to monitor existing local citations and identify new opportunities, track local search rankings, and manage reviews across multiple websites.
GatherUp provides everything you need to gather, manage, and market your customer feedback, online reviews, and testimonials in one centralized platform. You can save time by creating workflows to automate feedback requests, surveys, and review requests. And you can also share attention-grabbing images of your best feedback and reviews on your preferred social media channels.
Moz Local helps boost your brand’s local visibility and ensures your listings are correct, consistent, and visible on every directory site. Both small businesses and large enterprises use Moz Local to identify, confirm, and delete duplicate listings and manage reviews on the most popular sites from one central dashboard.
Whitespark’s local SEO toolset helps you build citations, track rankings, and earn reviews to fast-track your success in local search. You can use the Local Citation Finder to track your existing citations, discover new opportunities, and identify the citations your competitors already have (that you’d like, too). And you can use the Reputation Builder to increase your online reviews, customer feedback, and testimonials.
The Yext Search Experience Cloud platform keeps your online business information accurate and consistent. It helps brands provide correct, up-to-date, official answers to consumer questions across the entire search ecosystem from your website to search engines, voice assistants, maps, apps, chatbots, directories, and social networks.
Marketing tools come in all shapes and sizes to meet the requirements of different marketing teams. So, make sure you take the time to evaluate the key features of each tool before you decide which is the right platform for your business.
Loomly is the Brand Success Platform that helps your marketing team streamline collaboration. Start your 15-day free trial now.