Digital Marketing Tools for Your Online Business

11 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools for Your Online Business

Building and growing an online business is not for the faint-hearted. The competition is stiff, customer behavior hard to predict and trends keep changing by the day. Maintaining a healthy and growing web presence in the face of such challenges calls for a cool head and a lot of acumen. If you are running an online business, handing over the reins of your business’s marketing to an independent agency is ideal. This lets you focus your energies on running your business which, as said earlier, is a highly demanding task.

However, digital marketing is incredibly important today and the list of tools put together in this blog is meant for individuals and businesses who’d like to keep their marketing in-house. The blog should also be handy for budding digital marketers who are familiarizing themselves with the world of online advertising and analytics.

1. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a research and tracking tool that allows you to search for content that is popular on social media, find influencers in a particular domain/topic, receive alerts based on trigger factors like brand name, keywords or links, monitor competitors and analyze their content.

BuzzSumo is the perfect tool in your quest to create viral content. You can use it to find out what kind of content related to your niche is being actively shared on social media. The tool presents you with a large amount of data which can guide you in creating shareable content. And once your blog or channel has the right kind of content, it’s only a matter of time before social media picks up on it and turns it viral.

Find out more about BuzzSumo.

2. Google AdWords (Keyword) Planner

The keyword planner from Google is a fabulous tool that can help you unearth all the right keywords related to your niche. One of the best things about this tool is that it’s 100% free. You can use it to get keyword ideas, discover the search volume for any keyword, evaluate the competitiveness of your own keywords, get estimates of traffic for a given keyword bid and create new lists by integrating multiple keyword lists together.

Before initiating a PPC campaign, the most important thing to have is a set of keywords related to your niche. The planner helps you with this and makes your PPC campaign more effective not only in terms of efficiency but overall costs as well.

Sign-in with your Google account and check out the Google AdWords Planner.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is hailed as one of the most powerful tools for marketers. While most marketers refer to it informally as a ‘backlink checker’, Ahrefs is much more than that. It gives you a list of websites and blogs that link to your competitors. If your website or blog is full of original and informative content, you can use this tool to find out the sources of your competitors’ backlinks and contact them to link back via your content.

Among Ahrefs’ other popular features include ‘Site Audit’ and ‘Alerts’. The former tests and monitors your site for routine SEO issues while the latter notifies you of any changes in your backlinks, keyword rankings and web mentions.

Get Ahrefs free trial to explore the tool’s full list of features.

4. Moz Toolbar

The SEO Toolbar from Moz is a must for any digital marketer. The brainchild of Moz founder Rand Fishkin, the tool enables you to see all important search metrics from your browser itself. This includes important metrics like Page Authority (PA), Domain Authority (DA) and how many backlinks a given website has.

The toolbar can be added to your browser as an extension and once enabled, shows the above data under every result that appears in Google’s search results page. When it comes to getting a basic understanding of a website’s SEO friendliness, the Moz toolbar has few alternatives.

Download and try the Moz Toolbar for free.

5. Hootsuite

HootSuite helps you manage multiple social media accounts from a single platform. With well over 15 million users worldwide, the tool is the most popular social media management application.

HootSuite is useful when you want to share the content you’ve created across multiple social media networks. It allows you to simultaneously share content links across 35 different social media networks. With HootSuite, logging in to each network separately to post links is a thing of the past, which saves you time. It also allows you to measure some important social media metrics that influence your business and offer customer service through social media.

HootSuite offers both paid and free versions.

6. MailChimp

MailChimp is a popular marketing automation tool that you can use to create, execute and analyze email, ads and other messaging campaigns. The tool makes email marketing extremely easy.

When you build your website or blog and offer good content, people are likely to subscribe via email for your updates. Now sending mailers to multiple subscribers is not possible through normal email service providers. MailChimp lets you send emails to any number of people while also enabling you to style your emails professionally, ensure better deliverability and adhere to privacy laws. The tool also bundles in useful analytics that tells you if your emails were successfully delivered and opened by people.

Explore MailChimp’s other features here.

7. Google Analytics

Perhaps the most widely used tool among digital marketers around the world, Google Analytics has few rivals when it comes to the extent of analytics it measures. Of course, that it’s built by the world’s most popular search engine does help matters.

Once your website or blog is up and running, it gets visitors. With Google Analytics, you can further parse details like how many visitors your site gets daily, where are those visitors coming from, which countries do those visitors belong to, which part of your site they spend the most time on, which part of your site sees the least number of visitors etc.

Using this information, you can optimize and brush up areas of your website that see low visitor interest. The tool is also useful to decide your content strategy as it shows you exactly which type of content on your site is most popular with your visitors.

A freemium service, Google Analytics is central to creating, executing and monitoring any online marketing campaign.

8. Google Trends

Yet another tool from Google that helps adjust your marketing campaign, Trends shows you which search terms related to your niche are trending at any given moment. People search for different terms even when the niche remains the same and this tool tells you which search terms are now popular and which ones have fallen by the wayside. You can use Trends to see which search terms and topics are gaining in popularity and design your content strategy accordingly.

Check out Google Trends to know if the search terms you’ve been working on are still popular.

9. SEMRush

When it comes to a comprehensive list of features and analytics, SEMRush has few rivals. Among the things you can do with it are keyword research, keyword ranking, checking backlinks, finding out competitor links and even performing a thorough SEO audit of a website or blog.

In fact, quite a few famous marketers claim to use the only SEMRush for all their digital marketing needs. Yes, it’s that comprehensive. The tool’s database of domains and keywords extends to 130 million and 800 million respectively, which helped earn it a place in countless lists of the best SEO tips and tricks for 2018.

Increase your online marketing ROI today with SEMRush, which offers a paid version after a free trial period of 14 days.

10. Google Search Console

Formerly known as the Webmaster Tool, the Search Console was one of the first tools where you could submit your website after launch. Packing in plenty of features and tools, the Search Console helps optimize your website for the user as well as the search engine.

Aptly named considering its function, the Console lets you track your website’s performance, submit content that you want to be scrawled and remove the ones you don’t, identify issues, monitor backlinks, view queries that led visitors to your site from the search engine etc.

The Console also alerts you in case anything goes wrong with your website like crawling errors, rise in 404 pages, manual penalties, malware detections etc.

Visit Google Search Console to see how your site is performing across these different parameters.

11. SEOQuake

One of the most popular add-ons for browsers, SEOQuake is a well-updated extension that provides you with a lot of essential SEO metrics. Embedding the add-on to your search engine gets you even faster results.

SEOQuake allows you to find out SEO metrics for any page, discover keyword difficulty, analyze external and internal links, and compare URLs, among others. In terms of displaying different metrics on the go, SEOQuake is one of the best.

Install SEOQuake for your browser today and simplify the way you monitor SEO metrics.

If you’re managing your own marketing campaign or learning the ropes of online marketing, these 11 tools offer a great starting point. But if you’d like to know more about the benefits of outsourcing your marketing to an agency, get in touch with us today. Among the leading digital marketing solution providers in India, eLuminous offers an entire suite of marketing services that include SEO, SMM, PPC, Email Marketing and mobile marketing.