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5 Great Tools Every Digital Marketer Should Use

5 Great Tools Every Digital Marketer Should Use

If you work as a digital marketer, you have to use various tools to promote brands through digital media. There are many digital marketing tools available for different purposes – and since digital marketing is still evolving – new tools are coming out all the time. However, you can’t use them all. Here is a list of 5 useful tools that you should definitely include in your digital marketing toolkit:

#1 WordPress

Every modern business owns a website these days. However, not all businesses can afford to hire developers to create their websites, so they use website building platforms that don’t require any coding skills. Currently, the most popular website building platform and content management system (CMS) is WordPress. It is very intuitive and easy to learn while offering a wide range of useful features. According to codeinwp.com, “WordPress is the fastest growing CMS, with roughly 500+ new sites being built daily in the top 10 million websites on the web”. This makes WordPress a very important tool that every digital marketer should know how to use.

#2 Hootsuite

Digital marketing is largely focused on social media and having a good social media strategy is essential for the success of any business operating in today’s digital world. Businesses often want to promote themselves on multiple social media platforms, but taking care of all social media activities on multiple platforms can be overwhelming. To ease that process, digital marketers can use Hootsuite, which is an online tool for managing multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. You can use it to monitor social media activity on all of your profiles, schedule posts in advance, and engage with your audience. Most importantly, this tool saves digital marketers a lot of time, which they can use to focus on other aspects of their work.

#3 Facebook Business Manager

This is another social media tool, or more specifically, a tool for managing Facebook pages and ad accounts. In FBM, you can manage multiple pages and ad accounts, which is especially useful if you work with multiple clients. On every page you can publish and schedule content, get insights, create events, etc., while in the ad accounts you can create and run ads for your clients. Obviously, FBM is only useful for businesses that own a Facebook page, but Facebook is still the number one social network in terms of active users. Nowadays most businesses do own a Facebook page, and that’s why FBM is a must-have in every digital marketer’s toolkit.

#4 Canva

Canva is an online tool used for designing different types of graphics, which uses a simple drag-and-drop format. Featuring a variety of photos, illustrations, fonts, and other elements, it’s an excellent tool for creating visual content. There are ready-to-use design templates like: social media, presentation, infographic, book cover, blog banner, brochure, and many more. However, there’s also an option to create a design with your own custom dimensions, and many of the photos and other elements are available for free. Using Canva doesn’t require any special designing skills – all you need is a bit of creativity and imagination.

#5 MailChimp

The last tool on this list is MailChimp –  an online tool for email marketing. Emails are still an effective method of communication, so a lot of businesses focus on creating effective email marketing campaigns. In MailChimp you can choose from a variety of email templates or design your own custom email using the available content blocks: image, text, buttons, social share buttons, etc. You can also create contact lists and campaigns and later check MailChimp reports to see how well your campaigns have performed. Creating beautiful emails and newsletters is often an essential part of an effective marketing strategy, so make sure you add this tool to your digital marketing arsenal.

The Best Tools for Social Media Analytics

The Best Tools for Social Media Analytics

You might publish great social media content and create great marketing campaigns–but if you want to know exactly how well you’re performing on social media you need analytics tools. But what does social media analytics really mean? To answer this, I’ll use the Wikipedia definition: ”Social media analytics is the process of gathering data from stakeholder conversations on digital media and processing into structured insights leading to more information-driven business decisions and increased customer centrality for brands and businesses.”

The number of analytics tools available right now can make your head spin, and new tools are coming out all the time. However, you need to choose the best tool for your brand. So, let us help you make the right decision! Currently, these are some of the best tools for social media analytics:

Sprout Social

Networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google plus

Price: Starting at $99 per user per month

Sprout Social integrates with most of the major social networks, and its solutions are tailored for different business types: enterprises, agencies, and small businesses. You can use the platform for both social media management and analytics. This means you can plan and deliver content, engage with followers, and track your performance–all from the same dashboard.

Brandwatch

Networks: All

Price: Not available

Brandwatch is a great analytics tool that takes data from social media and the web. It’s a leading tool for social listening, which means you can monitor your customers’ conversations about your brand and industry. Additionally, Brandwatch gives you the ability to conduct competitive analysis and get key customer insights, which can help you make better-informed decisions about your social media activities.

BuzzSumo

Networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google plus

Price: Starting at $79 per month  

BuzzSumo is a powerful tool for analyzing the performance of content from your website and social media. It lets you know which content and which social networks produced the most shares, it helps you find out which topics are trending in your industry by entering a keyword, and it helps you determine which content length and content format to use. BuzzSumo can also help you decide which influencers to target and to find out where your competitor’s backlinks are coming from.

Google Analytics

Networks: All

Price: Free

Although Google Analytics (GA) is essentially a web analytics tool, it can also help you get important social media information. For instance, you can see which social networks are driving traffic to your website and how many social media users convert into leads or customers. Likewise, you can measure your social media ROI and use UTM parameters to track social media campaigns.

Simply measured

Networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube

Price: Not available

Simply Measured offers three different products for social media marketers: social listening, social analytics, and social media management. You can see competitive social analytics and measure the performance of five social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

Other social media analytics tools that are worth mentioning:

Tailwind – A tool utilized for Instagram and Pinterest, with a price of $9.99 per account per month.

Iconosquare – This is the best tool for Instagram analytics, with a starting price of $9 per month.

Tweet reach – A social media analytics tool specifically for Twitter, with a starting price of $29 per month.

A Beginner’s Guide to Hootsuite

A Beginner’s Guide to Hootsuite

#1 What is Hootsuite?

Hootsuite is a popular online social media management platform, which you can use to manage multiple social media accounts from one place-the Hootsuite dashboard. It was created in 2008, and currently has over 15 million users worldwide. The platform supports social network integrations with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, WordPress, and others.

#2 How to use Hootsuite

Creating an account

To get started with Hootsuite, you should first create an account. Depending on your needs, you can choose to use Hootsuite’s free plan, or one of their paid plans.

The free plan includes managing up to 3 social media profiles, basic analytics, 30 scheduled messages, and other free options. With the paid plans you get some additional features, such as managing more profiles, unlimited scheduling, and multiple users. Their prices currently range from $19 to $499 per month.

You can set up your account by adding the required information, and change the settings for your profile information, language, notifications, etc.

The Dashboard

Once your account is set, you will go to the Dashboard. This is where you will post and monitor all your social media content. You can customize and organize your Dashboard by creating tabs and streams.

Tabs are created automatically for each social media network, but you can also create tabs to monitor your competitors, collect some kind of information, or for other purposes.

Streams are columns that display the content from your social media networks, such as timelines, messages, news feeds, etc. In this section, you can monitor the activity on your profiles and engage with your audience.

Publishing and Scheduling Content

Using the “compose box”, you can create and publish or schedule your social media content. You can write text, upload media, and add links to your posts.

After you create your posts you can publish them to one or multiple social media networks at once. Additionally, you can schedule posts for later, by simply choosing the date and time you want your posts to be published.

#3 Other Hootsuite Features

Analytics

Hootsuite has its own analytics feature, which you can use to measure your social media performance. The tool tracks data from your social media platforms and delivers it in series of easy-to-understand charts. You can also create business reports to analyze your social media progress.

Apps and Extensions

The Hootsuite Apps feature lets you add other social media networks for which the platform does not offer direct support. With this feature you can put YouTube, Gmail, Mailchimp, Tumblr, and others in your stream, to further organize and improve your social media activities.

Hootsuite also offers multiple browser extensions, useful for quickly sharing content to your networks, directly from any page. A great extension is Hootlet, which you can install to post and schedule content from anywhere. It sits in your browser toolbar, so you can easily access it at any time.

Mobile

There is also a Hootsuite mobile app, which is available for iOS and Android. With the app you can access your account from anywhere, add streams, schedule posts, and be in control of your social media activities even while you’re on the go.

Free Tools to Help You Boost Your Content Marketing Efforts

Free Tools to Help You Boost Your Content Marketing Efforts

As you get started, publishing insightful and enjoyable content you’ll rapidly discover a variety of ways to improve research, produce material and allocate content on social media. Listed below are free tools that will help you achieve word-perfect writing:

#1 Thesaurus.com

Creating a captivating and fascinating reading experience is essential in a world full of content clutter. To keep away from replication, and to keep people interested, make sure dull language isn’t tainting the reader experience by sprinkling in different words. You can use Thesaurus.com to add more style and grace to your content.

#2 AdWords Keyword Planner

As a content marketer, you should continuously conduct research regarding keywords that can give your website a boost. AdWords permits you to rent ad space at the top of search results on a pay-per-click basis, whereby you select the keywords you want your ad to appear for. The more searches you run, the more you’ll comprehend in what way the tool works. Also, numerous searches give you a better impression of which keywords best suit your site.

#3 Google Trends

Google trends is the ideal way to produce new ideas for your blog and other content marketing opportunities. Although, the search engine giant’s Keyword Planner can offer you various keywords related to your business, you need an additional method to perform keyword research to discover relevant topics and see what’s trending.

#4 SiteLiner

SiteLiner is an important tool because it can detect duplicate content which can damage your SEO. Therefore, it’s essential that each of your web pages is unlike any other web page. Search engines return only to the resources that add the most value and having identical content causes confusion. In other words, it suggests that you’re likely to be filtered out of results. SiteLiner is a phenomenal tool for rapidly checking your site. The app is capable of scanning 250 web pages, free of charge, and it can detect broken links as well as help you eliminate roadblocks that can damage the user experience.

#5 SERP Preview

It is imperative that your blog posts and site pages are optimized for the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Portent’s SERP Preview tool allows you to see how your web pages will be shown in Google search results. This tool conveniently allows you to improve your URLs, Page Titles, and Meta Descriptions that contribute to a better understanding of your content performance and higher rankings.

#6 CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer

Writing great headline is significant to attracting attention and encouraging click-throughs, and CoSchedule’s ‘Headline Analyzer’ is a unique tool that analyzes and displays the strength of your blog post title.

#7 Answer The Public

Answer The Public enables you to input keywords applicable to your line of business, which it then uses to show groups of connected search queries that people are actively typing into Google. This is valuable for keyword research, as you want to be writing about the things that matter the most to your audience.

5 Useful Tools for Social Media Marketing

5 Useful Tools for Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is all about creating and publishing awesome content on social media, with the aim of getting and retaining customers. Although it sounds easy, it can sometimes be a very demanding job. Luckily, there is a variety of online tools that you can use for creating and managing your social media content. So, I made a list of 5 handy tools that can help you work on your social media marketing projects.

#1 Canva

Canva is an online tool for creating graphic designs and documents. It is used by both professionals and non-professionals. You can use Canva to create many different types of designs such as: social media posts, presentations, posters, postcards, flyers, and many others. There are number of different layouts and elements you can choose from when creating your designs. In the free version of Canva there are a lot of photos, icons, illustrations and other elements that you can use for free, but there is also a great choice of priced elements that you can buy for 1 dollar.  There are also paid versions of Canva (Canva for work and Canva Enterprise) which offer additional options, but the free version works good enough for most people.

Page link: https://www.canva.com/

#2 Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform, for managing multiple social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Instagram, and many more. This tool is great if you need to manage a few different social media accounts. There is a dashboard where you can publish and schedule content on all your accounts, you can receive messages, monitor the activities of your followers and interact with them, etc. You can do all of this for free if you manage up to 3 different accounts, or you can upgrade for an additional cost, and get more options.

Page link: https://hootsuite.com/

#3 Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great content tracking tool. When you want to track information on a certain topic, Google Alerts can notify you via e-mail about the most recent articles, web pages, blogs, scientific studies and other information sources, which are on that topic. This way you can be constantly updated with new information about any search term you want to track, without spending time doing your own research. This can be very helpful if you’re writing blogs or any kind of content. You can set either g-mail or a different e-mail address to receive your Google Alerts, and you can use this tool for free.

Page link: https://www.google.com/alerts

#4 Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free website analytics service, that tracks website traffic using a tracking JavaScript code, and creates reports. It’s one of the most powerful tools businesses use for getting different website statistics and data about their customers. So it provides you with great insight you can use for your marketing strategies. In Google Analytics you can set and track different social media goals and metrics, which can help you make appropriate marketing decisions in the future.

Page link: https://analytics.google.com/

#5 Asana

Asana is a web-based tool, that teams use to track their tasks and projects. It allows them to easily coordinate their work by online collaboration. You can use Asana to organize your team, supervise the work progress of your employees, or to work together with your colleagues on certain tasks. Using this tool, you can more conveniently share and comment projects with your team, compared to using an e-mail. This tool can be also helpful for coordinating your social media marketing activities, especially if you have an outsourcing job.

Page link: https://asana.com/