Gone are the days where the only way to get in front of potential customers is to pay for a printed billboard on the highway and hope that the right people see it! Thankfully, digital marketing—the practice of utilizing online technology to reach and engage your audience—has emerged with cost-effective and highly targeted options to help you optimize your efforts.

Whether you’re a seasoned digital marketer or just getting started on your online marketing journey, it’s always worth equipping your toolbox with a wide array of go-to resources! From Google Analytics to SEMRush, here are 10 tools (paid and free!) every marketer should have bookmarked—along with ways they can help you save both time and money in your efforts.

#1. Google Analytics

What is it?

Google Analytics is a web tool that provides actionable reporting about your site activity and user information. It’s a free analytics service that is available to anyone with a Google account once they link their website to the platform on the back end, and the resource we recommend first to all of our clients.

How can it help?

Google Analytics is an essential tool for developing a basic understanding of how your website is performing. Using the reporting function, you can identify the sources of your website traffic (whether that’s social media platforms, partner blogs, search, or otherwise), evaluate the amount of time spent on your various landing pages, learn the demographics of your site visitors (location, device use, interests, and more), and importantly, track overall conversions.

Through Google Analytics, you can explore real time insights as well as build custom dashboards and reports tailored to compile the information that matters most to your business, plus integrate with other solutions within the Google Marketing Platform, like Google Ads. Ultimately, having access to these insights allows you to make informed strategic decisions backed by data.

#2. Canva

What is it?

Canva is a graphic design tool that offers a robust assortment of easy-to-use templates, allowing you to customize online content for your business’s social media posts, videos, presentation slides, infographics, logos, and more. There are many resources within the free Canva plan, plus opportunities to access additional features via paid premium plans.

How can it help?

Organic content creation is an essential component of building healthy relationships with your customers to achieve your digital marketing goals. If you’re limited on time, don’t have a background in design, or both, Canva can provide a solid foundation from which you can build. It’s also a handy tool for whipping up graphics that can be used for advertising purposes.

#3. Hotjar

What is it?

Hotjar helps marketers understand how site visitors interact with your content using heat mapping software and journey recordings, as well as other interactive options for connecting directly with customers, like surveys and interviews. There are free versions that offer access to the core components, plus premium upgrades for enterprise-level solutions.

How can it help?

Hotjar’s heat mapping technology is an especially powerful resource for visual learners who prefer to evaluate a customer’s journey as they experience it. This offers a unique first-person perspective that doesn’t often get translated through your standard dashboards and allows you to gain a deeper understanding of user behavior.

#4. Google Search Console

What is it?

Google Search Console is an essential and free tool for developing a deeper understanding of how your site is performing via Search, and importantly, what specific queries are bringing traffic and inspiring conversions. From a technical standpoint, Google Search Console monitors the health of your website, scanning for security risks and prompting you to correct site crawling and indexing issues that could affect your visibility.

How can it help?

Google Search Console is quick to identify issues and offer solutions for how to correct them, which is key to maintaining and improving your Google SEO rankings. The Search landscape changes daily, so matter how long your site’s been up and running, it’s important to use tools like Google Search Console consistently.

#5. Goolge Keyword Planner

What is it?

Google Keyword Planner goes hand-in-hand with Google Search Console in that it’s a free tool that helps you uncover various key words and phrases that may be of particular interest to your customers. Within this platform, you can brainstorm and then perform searches of relevant phrases to determine the volume of them that come through monthly in your area.

How can it help?

Keyword research is a bit of an art and a science, and the key is to identify words and phrases that receive enough attention to draw in a consistent stream of queries, but not so much competition that your site never hits the first page in Search rankings. The Google Keyword planner tool helps you build a bank of options that you can test through the creation of landing pages on your website or Google Ads you build.

#6. Hubspot

What is it?

Hubspot is a customer relationship management (CRM) technology that allows you to organize and manage the interactions your business has with current and potential customers. Whether you have a full team or run the show on your own, Hubspot’s solutions make it easy to coordinate the marketing, sales, service, and operational functions of your company under one roof, avoiding the trouble that can sometimes arise when synching multiple systems. With a series of free marketing tools as well as comprehensive starter, small business, and enterprise solutions, Hubspot allows you to customize your experience no matter what stage of growth your business is in.

How can it help?

Hubspot is a tremendous time saver in that it centralizes all of your customer data so that you can focus on engagement rather than record-keeping. Its educational tools help you better understand how to take advantage of the breadth of automation, marketing, and advertising solutions that live within the platform. While Hubspot is our top choice, a CRM platform of any kind is an absolute must-have for keeping organized and achieving your strategic marketing goals.

#7. Mailchimp

What is it?

Mailchimp helps you design emails and analyze your email marketing performance, offering optimization solutions along with campaign performance analytics. The platform provides resources for building landing pages and interactive content, creating automated email journeys, and its ability to sync with sales platforms like Shopify allows you to clearly evaluate return on investment. 

How can it help?

Mailchimp is a sophisticated platform, but it’s also quite user-friendly. Using artificial intelligence and interpretive analytics tools, Mailchimp can guide you in the right direction as you build and iterate on your campaigns, and help you with segmentation even if you don’t have a traditional marketing background.

#8 Litmus Email Testing Tool

What is it?

If your focus is on email marketing, Litmus offers a unique testing feature that allows you to preview your campaigns across different email clients so that you can be sure they’re optimized no matter where they appear. Litmus also provides recommendations and education on best practices based on its decades worth of past data.

How can it help?

There’s nothing worse than spending hours formatting an email, only to discover the images you painstakingly placed don’t render properly once they hit your customers’ inboxes! Litmus helps take much of the guesswork out of the optimization process so that you can feel confident your subscribers will receive messages the way you intended for them to.

#9. Semrush

What is it?

Semrush is a comprehensive marketing platform that consolidates more than 50 unique search engine marketing (SEM—hence the name!) tools supporting your search engine optimization (SEO), content creation, market research, advertising, social media marketing (SMM) and search engine reputation management (SERM) efforts. With various pricing tiers and some free a la carte options, you can uncover as many insights as you desire.

How can it help?

Semrush houses multiple analytics tools in one place, making it easy to perform research and analysis across all of your digital channels. In addition to tracking performance of your own business’s content, Semrush provides access to tons of market data so you can evaluate your place within the competitive sphere.

#10. Accessibe

What is it?

AccessiBe is a tool that scans your website to ensure it’s compliant with the terms of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) via AI-powered widgets and custom audits with their team’s accessibility experts. AccessiBe’s offerings help you to better understand how a disabled person might find difficulty navigating your website, while confirming whether your pages are inclusive to those who use screen readers, have cognitive disabilities, experience motor impairments, among other disabilities. This is a paid tool with a free trial period that also offers various certifications.

How can it help?

It’s estimated there are more than 1.3 billion people in the world who experience a disability, but scanning for accessibility across digital platforms is often an afterthought during the design process. AccessiBe can help you identify quick solutions for improving the accessibility of your website, so that more people can learn about what you have to offer while feeling that their needs have been accounted for.

Making the Most of Your Marketing Tools

Just as every business is unique, so should be the way you utilize all of the amazing marketing tools at your disposal. If you need some help connecting your business accounts, could use guidance analyzing the data that’s generated, or would like long-term support making the most of the different platforms available, the Doukas Media team is here for you. Contact us today to schedule a complimentary website audit!