The 10 Best Resources for Digital Marketing

Make your online marketing more effective and efficient with our 10 best digital marketing resources.

With so many marketing tools at your fingertips online, it can be difficult to know where to start. Some activities may offer quick wins but have no longevity whilst other might be more time consuming but offer bigger rewards. In this guide we’ll share with you 10 of our favourite tools to help you get the most out of your online marketing to drive sales.

1. SEO Moz

When is comes to search engine optimisation, SEO Moz are at the top of the game. The tools available from Moz will enable everyone from complete beginners to advanced specialists to gain an understanding of how their website is performing in search. Some of the tools include: Run a website audit to check for issues such as broken links, missing page titles or URLs which are too long Compare your websites search visibility to your competitors Select keywords you’d like to rank for and track your performance against them See where your inbound links come from and compare them to your competitors SEO Moz offers a paid for subscription to access all their tools but if you just want to test the waters you can try their suite of free tools. In addition to their free tools, Moz also have an exceptional blog offering guidance and tips, free online courses in SEO, plus they regularly host free webinars led by their knowledgeable experts.

2. Wordstream

If you work with pay per click marketing across several different platforms such as AdWords, Bing and Facebook, Wordstream will help you to consolidate your efforts by giving you one platform from which you can manage them all. In fact they suggest that they can make your PPC efforts so efficient that you’ll only need to spend 20 minutes a week managing your campaigns. When it comes to search engine marketing, Wordstream are leaders in PPC marketing and the platform they’ve created really reflects this. Reporting is made easy with dashboards that combine the performance of your campaigns across each platform and actionable insights are given to help tweak and improve your performance.  

3. Writemaps

When it comes to being an online retailer, one of your biggest hurdles is digital merchandising and ensuring that visitors to your website can find your products easily. Part of this is ensuring your website has the right taxonomy and a tool such as Writemaps is a great way to help you visually plan out your site map ensure that your categories and content is easy to navigate.

4. Hot Jar

Hot Jar is a tool which tracks how your visitors use and interact with your website through heat maps and recordings. You can see how many people are clicking the banners on your homepage to see which is driving most interest and you can also filter results by visitor device to check if those on specific phones, tablets or browsers are having any difficulties on the site. Simply put, Hot Jar is a tool that enables you to make more informed decisions when it comes to the layout and content on your website.

5. Canva

Creating content to promote the products you sell can be especially time-consuming, particularly if you don’t have an in-house photographer or graphic designer. Canva is an online tool which has been created to tackle this problem. Using Canva you can quickly and easily create images for social media, emails and blogs using a huge library of templates and stock images, often only $1 per use, which is far more affordable than stock imagery websites such as iStock by Getty images. Canva is a free tool to use but there is a paid plan which allows you to upload and save your branding such as hex codes as well as save your own branded templates.  

6. Pexels

As mentioned previously, creating content to promote your business is difficult, especially if you’re limited on resources with a small team. Pexels is a website where you can find all of the best free stock photography on the internet which you can use as a commercial business – without the need to give attribution to the photographer. Whilst these images will never replace your product images, they can be used as lifestyle imagery to help shape your brand and give it a sense of identity.

7. Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a tool which visualizes data to give you insight into new keywords and phrases you can target to reach the right audience through SEO. It uses the automated suggestions from Google and Bing that appear when you begin to type your query into their search bar and the emotion and intent that the user might have. The tool gives you results in a variety of formats including a brain storm and alphabetical lists, so no matter how you like your information presented, it’s sure to resonate.

8. Hootsuite

Just like with managing PPC campaigns, managing social media across multiple platforms can be incredibly time consuming. Hootsuite allows you to manage everything all in one place, you can even connect your Trustpilot and Mailchimp account to manage reviews and email campaigns from the platform too. On Hootsuite you can quickly create streams for a focus keyword to get involved with conversations e.g. you could monitor the keyword ‘gift’ so if someone tweeted ‘looking for the perfect gift for my Dad’s birthday’ you could respond with some ideas. You can also create streams for your competitors to keep an eye on their activity and streams for your customers so you can regularly get involved in conversation with them. One of the most popular features of Hootsuite is the ability to schedule your social media posts. You can schedule posts adhoc as you go along or bulk upload posts using an excel sheet template for maximum efficiency.

9. Smart Insights

Smart Insights is packed with practical and actionable ways to improve your business. Think of it as a library of tried and tested tool kits for business and marketing. Whether you want to write a new SEO strategy, create an attribution model in Google Analytics or develop an online retail merchandising plan; there’s an array of knowledge here for you to tap into. Whilst you have to pay membership to access all of the resources, there are also free guides available too and if you sign up for an account you’ll also be sent additional free templates and whitepapers from time to time.

10. AdWords Keyword Planner

Even if you’re not currently running any campaigns on AdWords, you can still access the Keyword Planner which you can use to establish trends and demand for certain keywords. On this example below we’ve typed ‘gifts for women’ and you can see demand grows in October and November before peaking in December for Christmas – which might leave you with the decision to allocate more time and/or budget to this campaign during this period. You can also see which keywords have least competition so you can determine if it would be beneficial for you to include them in your SEO strategy. If you are running PPC campaigns, the keyword planner allows you to easily compare costs for keywords and potential traffic volumes which can help you to maintain your budget whilst also growing your site traffic.

We hope you found our 10 suggestions for marketing tools helpful. Let us know your thoughts and if you have any suggestions of your own you’d like to share with us in the comments below.