Every digital marketer uses a variety of tools each day that allows them to perform their job quickly and efficiently. These tools perform many different tasks that range from creating contact forms to email outreach to pay per click. These are the 10 most essential tools any new marketer should use.
- Builtwith:
Builtwith is a research tool that allows you to see what particular websites are using as well as current technology trends. To accomplish this, Builtwith has its own crawler bots that “scan” websites to discover what widgets, analytics, frameworks, publishing, content delivery networks, advertising, aggregation functionalities, document information and encoding a website consists of. This data can be used to make strategic information about your own company and which technologies you should employ. As an additional feature, you can also generate lists of general site information that can be very useful in other research situations.
- Wayback Machine:
Who said time travel wasn’t real? They must have never heard of the Wayback Machine. While this tool performs only one function, it can be very useful in certain circumstances. The Wayback machine is a portal into the past that allows you to view a website as it was when the machine scanned it last. The Wayback machine constantly crawls the web and takes a snapshot of a site and saves it. When working with a client, they once described to me a function on their old site that they wanted to re-implement. All I needed to do was go to the Wayback Machine and I was able to obtain all of the information I needed about their previous functionality.
- Spyfu:
Spyfu is an all-encompassing keyword research tool that provides insights into organic and paid keywords. You can use Spyfu to determine either your company or your competitors ranking keywords, budgets, and opportunities. My favorite aspect of Spyfu is their Kombat function. This allows you to directly compare your site to two of your competitors and compare keyword performance head to head. A Venn diagram is generated that allows you to assess your strengths and weaknesses, even allowing users to generate a list of keywords that your competitors rank for. When doing keyword research, always start with Spyfu.
- Instapage:
Instapage is a website that allows you to build landing pages quickly and easily. The interface is extremely easy to navigate and uses drag and drop editing. Instapage allows you to edit any features on your page and Spyfu integrates with 3rd party sites such as Wufoo, Sales Force, Constant Contact Google and much more.
Instapage also allows for easy analytics tracking with a drop down menu where you can place Google analytics tracking code. Instapage comes equipped with lots of templates that make designing your page very easy. You can also publish you page in a variety of ways making this the perfect solution for anyone looking to create a killer-landing page in a short amount of time.
- Open Site Explorer:
Moz is one of the most trusted names in SEO and for a good reason. One of their most used tools is the Moz Open Site Explorer. This tool provides a comprehensive link analysis that can give you valuable insights as to what your strengths and weaknesses are in terms of SEO. From open site explorer you can determine your page authority, domain authority, linking root domains, total links and social signals. Additionally, you can segment your link information into new links, inbound links, linking domains, link opportunities and more. Not only can you run these reports on your website, but you can also dig deep into your competitors and gain insights from their information.
- Shutterstock:
This is a very simple tool but as a marketer, you will find yourself using this tool weekly or even daily. Often when creating content for your company or client, you will need images. Shutterstock has over 75 million royalty free stock images to choose from making this a must for any content generation. With plans priced for companies of all sizes, Shutterstock should be your go-to for images. I currently use Shutterstock images in Google ads, Facebook ads, landing pages and articles.
- Wufoo:
Wufoo is a website that easily allows you to create contact forms to be used on any site. Wufoo’s form builder is a drag and drop solution that allows you to ad any number of custom fields you would like. These fields each have their own settings that can be tinkered with to fit your unique needs. Additionally, Wufoo allows for you to customize a theme that can be applied to all your forms and reflect your company’s image.
When you complete your form, just copy the automatically generated code into your site and your done! As if these features were not enough, Wufoo also keeps track of all your form submissions and will email you each time a submission is received. Every great marketer uses Wufoo forms, it is often one the first things we do when we acquire a new client.
- Google Analytics:
One of the most essential tools you will use as a marketer is Google analytics. Google analytics is a free service that monitors all aspects of a website’s traffic. This data is broken down into different segments to allow for easy insights. Data can be broken down for any period of time to determine your sites organic, paid traffic, referral traffic, and more. You can also gain additional insights into your audience and their behavior on your page.
Installing analytics on your site is extremely easy. You just have to copy a pre-generated code into your sites back end and you’re good to go. Another extremely useful feature of Google analytics is the ability to create custom goals on your site and track them as conversions.
- Google Trends:
Google Trends, is another useful tool by Google allows a user to view search interest in particular terms at specific times. All you need to do is go to the home page and see the trending items and you will immediately understand how useful this tool is. When used for your company, you can determine if there is enough search volume on specific terms you are going after. This can be valuable information to any advertisers looking to determine search volume and interest. This data extends back over a decade allowing users to make inferences about how searches trend over during particular times of the year.
- Google Adwords Editor:
Google Adwords Editor is a program you install on your computer that assists you in managing your campaign efforts. The editor has a few functions, primarily managing bulk editing/uploads, viewing statistics, managing multiple accounts, offline editing, and additional editing/copying features not included in the online application. The bulk-editing feature of Adwords is extremely helpful and simplifies the process much more than the online application; I now do all of my editing in the Adwords editor.
The program is also very efficient as it takes just one click to download all current data and one click to upload any changes. Each changed is marked by a particular color to easily differentiate what has been changed and what has not. Another great feature is how the editor allows you to “keep” your changes or discard them before finalizing any decision.
