As a digital marketing manager, I use multiple tools to help execute different marketing strategies.
Whether that’s researching competition, grabbing a screenshot to share with a team member, evaluating a sales funnel, or checking for SEO issues, there are hundreds of different types of marketing tools that can help you elevate your business.
There are over 87 different online marketing tools in this list that can help with anything from optimizing marketing campaigns to writing content with AI.
Use this list to get ideas and find tools that can help solve a problem you are facing.
Types of Marketing Tools:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tools
- Social Media Marketing Tools
- Content Writing Tools
- Design Tools
- Video Marketing Tools
- Engagement Tools
- Email Marketing Tools
- Content Management System (CMS) Tools
- Lead Generation Tools
- Customer Relationship (CRM) Tools
- Project Management Tools
- Team Collaboration and Communication Tools
- Marketing Analytics Tools
- Sales Funnel Visualization Tools
- Landing Page Builders Tools
- Landing Page and Conversion Optimization Tools
- Webinar Tools
- Screen Capture Tools
What are the best marketing tools?
The best marketing tool will help you solve a problem, save time and money, and elevate your business. Here are my recommendations for the best marketing tools:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
1. SurferSEO
Surfer SEO guides your content creation by analyzing the content from competitors that rank of the first page of Google’s organic search results. It provides you with the terms, headings, word count, and images that you should include to help your content match or be better than the competition.
2. HARO
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a platform that matches journalists with sources that have expertise. You can signup as a source and get a daily email for a target keyword. Sources can give their expertise and in turn, get backlinks from a journalist if the journalists choose you as a source for their content.
3. Ahrefs
This is the go-to keyword and site research tool for every serious SEO. You can review site URL metrics, keyword volumes, analyze the search engine results pages (SERPs), and plenty more. I like to use Ahrefs for keyword research to see what the volume is and how competitive a term is. Their SERP overview shows which URLs are listed on page one of Google for a target keyword and breakdowns the Domain Authority, URL authority, number of backlinks, and more to give you a sense of how competitive the term is.
4. SEMrush
SEM hosts over 50 digital marketing tools and reports for SEO, content, market research, and more. This is a great all-in-one platform if you are an agency or consultant that wants to provide additional data and reports outside of SEO keyword research.
5. MOZ
MOZ is a great tool for tracking your SEO rankings and on-site SEO tips. You can see which keywords your site has improved or lost rankings and get insight into how you can improve your content or metadata to better your chances at ranking higher on the SERPs.
6. Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension
I’ve been using the keywords everywhere tool for years. It’s now a paid tool, but it’s well worth buying some credits. When you google a search term, the extension will show you the search volume and competitive metrics for that term right in your search bar. They get the metrics from the Google API so it matches what you would see in the Google Ads keyword planner.
7. Google Trends
A great free tool that shows you the interest over time for topics or search terms. You can look at different time periods to get a sense of how popular a term is. For example, if you search the term “Olympics” you’ll see the interest spike every four years which correlates with the timing of the Olympics when more users search that term.
8. Google Alerts
What to keep track of certain trends or topics? With Google Alerts you can get a weekly or daily notification from Google on a term you choose. They will provide a list of the latest news and articles on that topic in the email. This is a great way to stay on top of certain trends or industry news. I currently get alerts for crypto, digital marketing, and augmented reality terms. It’s really convenient to get an email and skim for anything that interests you. Save a lot of time from manually reviewing things.
9. Google Search Console
This is a must tool for anyone with a website. It’s Google’s tool to help you review your traffic and performance related to ranking on Google. You can use it to review your site’s performance, search terms, page indexing, and for identifying and fixing issues.
10. Answer The Public
This is a great tool to get ideas about the questions people are asking around a particular topic or term. Simply enter the term and search and you will get a visual breakdown of questions related to that term (who, what, with where, near, why, etc.), comparison terms (x vs. x), and a breakdown of searches in alphabetical order with the estimated Google search volumes.
11. Word Counter Plus
A simple google chrome extension to check how many words are on a page. Just select the words on a website, right-click and select word counter plus and it will show you the word and character length. This can be great for quickly reviewing the length of a blog post or article while you are browsing the web or competitors.
12. Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo is a content marketing tool that helps you find the content that performs well with your target audience, monitors your content/brand’s performance, and identify influencers related to your brand that you can consider collaborating with. Search a term or topic to see what is most relevant and trending in your space.
13. Exploding Topics
Discover topics with recent spikes in search volume for a number of different categories. This is great to get a sense of what is new or trending for a particular category.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tools
14. Google Ads Keyword Planner
The Google Keywords Planner is a free tool accessible in a Google Ads account that lets you see the estimated search statistics like search volume and competition for search terms on Google. You can use the data from here to get a sense of what costs may look like when targeting specific terms.
15. Google Ads Performance Planner
This is a tool built-in Google Ads account that uses campaign historical data to help make create forecasts for your campaigns. Since it uses machine learning you’ll need to have some performance data already from your campaigns to use this tool. It can be super helpful in getting estimated volumes at different targeted budgets.
16. Google Ads Auction Insights
You’ll need to have active campaigns or campaigns with historical data to review performance here. This is a great digital marketing tool because it gives you the estimated competitor impression share on the keywords you are targeting. You can view the data historically which is nice and at the campaign or keyword level depending on the granularity level.
17. Google Ads Ad Preview Tool
Use this tool to check if your search ads are showing and if the search terms are matching the right terms. You can set any location and review mobile and desktop. So if you are based in Seattle, but have campaigns enabled in Texas markets, you can see and confirm the ads are showing there. Also, viewing the ads in this view does not count towards impressions.
18. ClickCease
Google states that they eliminate bot or fraudulent click traffic, but ClickCease takes it a step further by identifying and excluding IP addresses in your ads account that are showing fraudulent behavior. Use this if you are worried about competitors clicking on your ads. It’s unfortunate, but it can happen.
19. SpyFu
This is a great tool for getting competitive SEM insights. You can see the terms that competitors are bidding on and examples of their search ads.
Social Media Marketing Tools
20. Facebook Ads Library
Search for any ad currently active on Facebook’s apps and services. This is a great tool to get inspiration and to review what the competition is running. Simply choose a region, ad category (I choose “all ads” and then search for the name of an advertiser.
21. Sprout Social
Overwhelmed with scheduling your social posts or managing engagement? Sprout Social is the tool you need, it’s the go-to for social customer relationship management and social media publishing and scheduling. Their all-in-one platform is easy to use and on board so you can effectively manage engagement and start leveraging social media growth now.
22. Buffer
Similar to Sprout Social, this is a great option for smaller businesses or social media teams. This is another all-in-one social media management and scheduling tool. Use this tool to analyze what posts are performing best, publish posts, engage with people that interact with your posts.
23. Tailwind
Tailwind is used by more than 1 million members to design and post on Pinterest and Instagram. Easily create engaging social media posts in a few clicks, schedule, and review performance.
Content Writing Tools
24. Jarvis.ai
There are various AI marketing tools available to help you streamline tasks and projects. Jasper is an AI content writing tool that can help you finally defeat writer’s block or write an entire brief for you. Their AI technology has read over 10% of the internet, so it can help write on just about any topic. I recommend using this to help generate ideas when you are feeling stuck though you can use it to create full-length content pieces. Simply provide some inputs like a sentence or two, and Jarvis will generate outputs.
25. anyword
Anyword’s AI was built by analyzing over $250 million in ad spend. Us their AI content tool to help generate social copy that’s engaging and conversion-optimized for any channel. Use this for ad copy, landing pages, product pages, CTAs, and more.
26. Grammarly
Never send or publish content with errors again using Grammarly. This is my go-to grammar and spell checker tool. It goes beyond simply highlighting errors and provides suggested rephrasing and notes on tone. It integrates with your desktop and browser to streamline the editing process directly in docs or apps like Gmail.
27. Copyscape
Check if the content you are purchasing has been stolen from other websites and use it to monitor if another website is using your content. Their premium option allows an API connection to check your content and scan the web if it’s been copied and used on another website.
Design Tools
28. Canva
Easily create professionally designed content for social media, presentations, posters, and more. You can upload your brand’s style guides and use their templates and asset library to create just about any design-related need.
29. Snappa
A design tool to create graphics for social media, blogs, and more. Choose from thousands of templates and license-free assets to create attention-grabbing graphics.
30. Piktochart
Create professional internal and external visual communication pieces like infographics, reports, presentations, and more. They have many templates to choose from that can be easily edited to fit your brand using their drag and drop platform.
31. Smartmockups
Product mockup generator that you can use for both physical and technology mockups. There are hundreds of mockup solutions for all categories, from placing your logo on a mug to showcasing your app on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices. All can be done in minutes using their easy-to-use tool.
32. Adobe Creative Cloud
Hands down the most comprehensive creative suite to handle any design or creative need. Their tools require more know-how but can be great for generating visually stunning pieces that can’t be made from out-of-the-box template solutions. The suite includes Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Premiere Pro, and XD.
33. Kaleido
AI-enhanced tool to remove backgrounds from photos and videos 100% automatically. Use unscreen to remove backgrounds easily with no need for a greenscreen. Remove.bg removes your background from photos.
34. Tailorbrands
Create logos and get a personalized branding kit. In addition, they have other online presence solutions like a website builder, branded merchandise, and business card templates.
Video Marketing Tools
35. Lumen5
Enhance your content marketing strategy with captivating videos made for social media. Their AI technology does the heavy lifting by using your written content like blog posts or scripts to create videos. You can fine-tune the videos with their easy-to-use drag and drop platform. No experience is required.
36. vidIQ
YouTube analytics and optimization tool to help grow your YouTube channel. Get keyword search term volumes, suggested ideas, channel audits, and more to help you create videos that will get more views and engagement.
37. Animoto
Create professional videos for work or home using their drag and drop platform. They have a ton of templates to choose from, like product promotion to real estate listing templates. You can customize the colors, fonts, transitions, music to make it suit your brand or style.
38. Biteable
Create stunning promotional, explainer, social, and animated videos using their templates and video maker. Their in-house team is always creating beautiful animations and assets to use in your videos. They have great guides to help assist you in making the best video. For example here is their page on creating an explainer video.
39. Vimeo
A video platform where you can create and host your videos all in one central secure place. They have solutions for webinars, live streaming, analytics, video management, and more.
40. embed.so
Embed pop-up videos directly on your website. Once the video is embedded users can see a preview of the video and click to open it to watch the video. There are a ton of use cases on using this tool, but you can do welcome videos, explainer videos, and much more. Simply upload a video and embed it all within a few steps.
Engagement Tools
41. ViralSweep
Easily create custom promotions for your business. Anything from sweepstakes, contests, instant wins, purchase promotions, and more. Viralseep integrates with just about every platform, like Shopify and WordPress, and is trusted by some of the biggest brands.
42. ClickSend
Send and receive messages directly with your audience with easy to create SMS and MMS campaigns for individuals or groups. Repurpose emails into SMS content using their Email to SMS product. Their API also allows you to integrate directly with your business’s existing applications.
43. Braze
Customer engagement platform that can help segment your web and app users and provide multi-channel messaging and solutions. Use their powerful analytics to understand how your users behave and interact with them at the right time to elevate your customer engagement.
44. Intercom
More than just an AI chatbot, Intercom offers conversational support, engagement, and marketing solutions. Streamline your support to resolve customer inquires quicker and allow your team to focus on high-priority tasks. Their support funnel is great in that it focuses on proactive, self-serve, and human support to manage requests and keep your customers happy.
Email Marketing Tools
45. ConvertKit
Known as the email marketing tool for creators, this is a robust tool made to simplify email marketing. Easily create forms that can be added to your site and automate workflows to make sure your users are routed through the correct sequence.
46. Aweber
Email marketing tool. Grow and build your email list using AWeber’s automation, segmentation, and tagging along with their integrated Canva designer.
47. Hunter
Find contacts of a company by using their email finder through domain search, professional industry, or even verify the deliverability of any email address.
48. SendFox
A simple email marketing tool that you can use to create and send unlimited emails to your contacts. Geared towards content creators that want to convert fans into customers.
Content Management System (CMS) Tools
49. Contentful
A centralized content platform using structured content so you can manage and organize your content at scale and deliver it across channels.
50. Hubspot CMS
A content management system that directly integrates with HubSpot’s CRM makes it an attractive choice for any business. There are plenty of features for marketers like SEO recommendations, website themes, adaptive testing that allow you to focus on marketing rather than managing development requests, which is typically the case when not using a CMS.
Lead Generation Tools
51. Leadfeeder
A B2B platform that identifies the names and companies of users visiting your website. Their segmentation tool scores the leads to find the highest quality traffic and then passes the leads to sales.
52. Zoominfo
Use Zoominfo’s solutions and powerful B2B database to correctly identify and connect with your ideal customers and drive growth. Get correct business details for high-quality opportunities and understand what conversations are most relevant to those opportunities. This helps marketers capture and convert more high-quality traffic and sales to turn those into closes.
53. Slintel
A B2B sales and marketing software to enrich your leads data in your CRM to make sure prospects’ data is up to date and fresh. Also used to get verified emails and direct dials for high-quality potential buyers along with gathering insights into user behavior.
Customer Relationship (CRM) Tools
54. Hubspot CRM
They have a robust free version and also a premium version for more enterprise-level needs. Keep your customer data organized in one central platform and take advantage of marketing and sales tools like prospect tracking, meeting scheduling, email tracking notifications, live chat, and more.
55. Salesforce
Used by over 150,000 companies in varying sizes, Salesforce helps you deliver seamless interactions with your prospects and customers by managing all customer data in one central hub that is integrated across a company’s departments and teams.
56. Monday
Manage the entire customer life-cycle from a single platform. Use templates to get started quickly in optimizing your customer journeys and sales funnels.
57. Pipedrive
A CRM developed by salespeople for helping you move more leads through the pipeline to closed sales. Manage your opportunities in one central location and adjust and automate workflows to fi your business needs.
Project Management Tools
58. Asana
Use Asana to manage projects from brief to completion. Easily communicate with team members regarding tasks and track statuses to hit key deadlines. Log hours and review reports to understand how time is spent across projects and clients.
59. Trello
A Kanban project management application that uses boards and cards to identify and prioritize tasks and projects. Tag team members and collaborate on card statuses and project next steps.
60. AirTable
Manage projects and utilize multiple views (gallery, kanban, Gant, and more) to understand how projects are developing.
Team Collaboration and Communication Tools
61. Mural
A visual collaboration platform that has a virtual whiteboard where you can add notes and organize information for brainstorming sessions to process improvement or even note-taking. Great for collaborating with teams over virtual calls.
62. Slack
A team collaboration tool to keep your marketing team connected. Easily message and stay connected with team members using direct messages and channel messages. You can also set up external channels to connect with clients via messaging. This can be helpful for serving high-priority clients beyond phone and email.
63. Calendly
Used by over 10 million users worldwide, simplify scheduling meetings by integrating Calendly with your calendar. Reduce the back-and-forth emails with clients by providing a link for them to view your available times and pick a timeslot. The meeting will automatically book on their calendar and can be adjusted if needed.
64. Slido
Create interactive and engaging meetings by leveraging polls and question prompts during meetings. Can be used for in-person events and virtual meetings without the need for members to download anything.
65. Loom
Video messaging platform that allows you to create video messages that can be instantly shared.
66. Zoom
Video conferencing platform to host and run virtual meetings.
Marketing Analytics Tools
67. Oribi
A data analytics tool that helps provide actionable insights from your website data. Understand trends, what events drive conversions, which marketing channels are working, visitor journeys, marketing attribution, and more.
68. Amplitude
Digital optimization products ranging from a powerful analytical platform to personalized experience tools. Use Amplitude to evaluate customer journeys and understand which journey leads to conversion or drop-offs. Deliver personalized experience to users utilizing behavior segmentation and predictive personalization using machine learning.
69. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful free tool to review website analytics. Review site behavior metrics like sessions, users, goal completions, and even review attribution models to see how they compare across channels. Easily integrates with Google Ads to create audience segments for digital ad campaigns and Google’s Search Console to review organic search terms.
Sales Funnel Visualization Tools
70. Funnelytics
Visually create your sales funnel and customer journey using your marketing and sales data to review performance and identify opportunities. Use this to create a marketing strategy that aligns with your goals and objectives.
71. Geru
Quickly model and simulate different marketing funnels to see how it will impact revenue and traffic.
Landing Page Builders Tools
72. Instapage
Landing page platform where you can easily create mobile-responsive personalized landing pages. You can create at scale by utilizing predesigned templates and blocks that can be used on any page and saved so they can be updated globally.
73. Unbounce
Create conversion-optimized pages utilizing their Smart Builder that estimates which designs will convert better before you even publish by using billions of conversion data points.
74. Leadpages
Unlimited drag and drop landing page builder that is mobile responsive.
75. ClickFunnels
Drag and drop sales funnel pages that are optimized to move a user through a particular path like purchasing a product or submitting an email.
Conversion Optimization Tools
76. Pingdom
Check your website load time by pasting in your URL and selecting a test location.
77. Hotjar
Website behavioral analytics platform. Understand user behavior using heatmaps and record user videos to find what is working well and what needs to be improved on your website.
78. MouseFlow
Similar to Hotjar, another option for understanding user behavior on your websites.
79. Crazy Egg
Another behavioral analytics platform with A/B split testing capabilities. Review heat maps and create split tests (no coding necessary) to further optimize your website for conversions.
80. Optimizely
Digital experience optimization platform with solutions ranging from web a/b tests, enterprise CMS, commerce management, and more.
81. Yieldify
Personalization platform to provide unique experiences to website visitors using AI-powered prediction, segmentation, testing, and more.
82. VWO
A/B testing platform with out-of-the-box solutions to start testing and optimizing right away.
Webinar Tools
83. Livestorm
Enterprise-level webinar software to manage webinars from start to finish. Features include a central dashboard to manage promotional emails, create registration pages, and utilize engagement features, along with analytics to gather insight from participants.
84. Demio
No download webinar platform built for marketers. Create engaging webinars that can be used for top-of-funnel marketing efforts.
85. WebinarJam
Host up to 5,000 participants with up to 6 presenters in one presentation.
Screen Capture Tools
86. Snagit
Screen capture tool and editor to quickly take screenshots and add text and shapes to highlight things. Screenshots are great for quickly sharing visuals that would be much harder to explain in words.
87. Camtasia
Screen recording tool and editor for making professional-grade tutorials, demos, and more. Easily record your screen, add effects, and even choose a video template to streamline the video creation process.
88. GoFullPage – screen capture
A reliable screenshot chrome extension that will scroll and capture your entire browser window in just a few seconds. There is a paid version that allows you to make edits like cropping, but I have the free version to be more than sufficient.
What are the best digital marketing tools?
Here are my favorite digital marketing tools:
- AHREFS
- Snagit
- SurferSEO
- vidIQ
- Google Trends
What are the best marketing tools for small businesses?
The best marketing tools for small businesses are those that save you time and money while being affordable to use. Here are my favorite marketing tools for small businesses:
- Buffer
- Keywords Everywhere Chrome Extension
- AHREFS
- Hubspot CRM
- Slack
- Asana
- Google Analytics
- ConvertKit