10 marketing tools to use in 2017

Monitoring your marketing activities, like which channels work best for you and what engages your customers, can be challenging. There are thousands of tools out there – and it can feel overwhelming.

We’ve narrowed down the options to 10 that’ll help you get started – whether you need tips on putting together a list of keywords or you want to find out how to measure the results of your campaigns.

Your customers are bombarded with marketing messages every day, from Facebook ads to billboards, posters and emails, and their attention spans are selective. Use these tools to figure out what makes your brand different and how to compete with the noise.

The tools:

Understand your customers:

1. Crazy Egg – Monitoring how people interact with your website will tell you where to make changes to increase conversions. Crazy Egg can provide you with heat maps that show you where visitors click, how far they scroll down a page and when they leave your site.
2. Zarget – A/B tests on your website are essential to ensure you create a strong user experience. Zarget allows you to conduct, analyze and receive feedback on your A/B tests.
3. Mention – Pay attention to what your customers are saying about you on other platforms. Mention can help you improve your brand visibility by allowing you to monitor what your competitors are doing and what your customers are saying about you. It also illustrates where you can create a presence online to reach your target market and avert any crises.

Have a conversation with your customers:

1. Social Media: Hootsuite will post to all of your social networks and provide you with data-driven results to improve the performance of your social content.
2. Email:Reply.io can automate your emails with personalized messages. Reply.io also has a VoIP calling feature and a lead generation feature. If you need help with email design, check out the ideas on Really Good Emails.
3. Search Engine Optimization: WooRank helps you audit your website, determine what keywords your customers are using in search engines and monitor your performance. Note that Google’s Keyword Planner is also a great tool that you should try, especially if you are using AdWords.
4. Content: Guestpost can help you plan your posts, research ideas, connect with your customers and get your content published on other websites. Blogging can be beneficial for driving traffic back to your site and it has the potential to spark interest in your company for a very long time. Medium is another great platform to post blogs on.

Manage your campaigns and process:

1. HubSpot – Manage all of your marketing efforts under one roof. Your website, blogs, landing pages, emails, leads, SEO and social media can all be covered by HubSpot. You should also check out HubSpot’s Website Grader, CRM and Sales software.
2. Autopilot – Connect the apps that you are using and automate communication tasks. With Autopilot you can create your customer journey and ensure that you get the right messages out at the right time. Email, SMS, in-app messages and more are available to use.
3. AdWords – Reach your clients online with text-based search ads, graphic display ads, YouTube video ads and in-app mobile ads. Google’s Help centre is extremely useful for marketers who are just starting out. Explore more free Google Tools as well.

Our Growth Marketing Playbook is another helpful resource that will help you figure out how to do simple experiments to determine the right marketing channels for your business. It has lots more tools for you to explore and test.