24 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools in 2020

You probably already know how important social media marketing is today. According to We Are Social, there are more than 3.7 billion active internet users and 2.8 million global social media users — meaning expansive digital marketing options. But how can you make your digital media campaigns as efficient and effective as possible?

For starters, familiarize yourself with the apps, tools, and other resources below. Then consider becoming a Digital Marketing Certified Associate. 

Digital Marketing Tools You Should Consider

Email Marketing

1. MailChimp

Overview

MailChimp is a web-based email marketing service. In addition to sending marketing emails like newsletters, you can create targeted campaigns and automated messages. It offers templates that can be customized as well as a number of options for sending emails.

Features

• Customizable forms and templates
• A/B testing
• Social media plug-ins
• Automation workflows
• Multiple campaigns
• Real-time reports
• Tutorials

Pricing

The basic plan is free and includes up to 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails per month. Other plans are available for $10 to $199 per month.

2. HubSpot Sales

Overview

Focused on the sales process as a whole, HubSpot Sales allows you to create and share email templates. Every lead’s contact info, email leads, and clicks get logged automatically.

Features

• Automated emails, including follow-up emails
• Works with Gmail, G Suite, and Outlook or Office 365 for Windows
• Email tracking, including open, click and reply data
• Customizable templates

Pricing

Subscriptions are $200 to $2,400 month, billed annually.

Social Media Management

3. Buffer

Overview

Buffer makes managing your social media easy. Nicknames like “The Siri of Social Media” and “Social Media Assistant” have been applied to Buffer. It allows you to optimize your posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, App.net, and Twitter, by scheduling them in advance; Buffer posts them at the best time based on time zone.

Features

• The free trial period for paid plans
• Detailed analytics
• Multiple social networks
• High security with two-step login
• Posts the same message to all platforms or customizes for each

Pricing

Two plans are available for individuals: Individual, which is free, and Awesome, which is $10 per month. Three plans are available for teams and agencies: Small, which is $99 per month; Medium, $199 per month; and Large, $399 per month.

4. Sprout Social

Overview

Sprout Social provides solutions for social media management, marketing, analytics and customer service. It’s integrated with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and more. You’ll get excellent statistics across all of your interlinked social networking sites. Sprout Social has become an incredible force in the social media world in a short time.

Features

• Social media dashboard
• Link performance analysis
• Can view Twitter follower demographics and contact details
• Discover customers by interest or by location
• Monitor competitor activity
• Customer relationship management tools
• Integrated analytics
• Free trial

Pricing

Offers three plans: Premium, $99 per month; Corporate, $149 per month, and Enterprise, $249 per month.

5. Wyng (formerly Offerpop)

Overview

Wyng lets you configure and personalize digital, mobile, and social campaigns. It also lets you view and manage user-generated content and much more.

Features

• Integrate with other enterprise platforms, such as Experian and Sprout Social
• Build custom configurations using open-source technology
• Auto-response in real-time
• Customizable templates
• Preview rendering for mobile, tablet and desktop devices
• Real-time reports

Pricing

Contact Wyng to get a breakdown of plans and prices.

6. Nanigans

Overview

Nanigans offers “profit-driven advertising automation” designed for in-house advertisers. Founded in 2010, the company helps marketers achieve social and mobile performance marketing goals using workflow automation, predictive optimization, and more.

Features

• Official partner of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
• Industry-leading advertising automation software
• 100-plus reporting attributes
• Cross-channel ROI (return on investment) automation

Pricing

Nanigans is one of the most expensive advertising tools on the market, but it’s also one of the best. Contact the company for a demo and pricing.

7. Facebook’s Power Editor

Overview

A powerful tool designed for bigger Facebook advertisers, Power Editor lets you create, edit and publish multiple ads at once. Facebook’s Ad Manager is for beginners; Power Editor is a more advanced and effective way of managing ads.

Features

• Manage many ads simultaneously
• Import ads using Excel
• Find what you want quickly using search filters
• Works with Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Edge

Pricing

Varies based on the campaign.

Interested to know more about social media marketing strategies? Check out the Advanced Social Media Marketing Course. Enroll now

Analytics

8. Google Analytics

Overview

Google Analytics is a comprehensive freemium web analytics service available to anyone with a Google account. It helps you understand your site users and figure out which digital campaigns are working and which aren’t.

Features

• Custom reports
• Cross-device data
• Segmentation for analysis of subsets
• Built to work with Google’s other media and publisher products

Pricing

The standard version of Google Analytics is free. The premium version is $150,000 per year.

9. Kissmetrics

Overview

A web-based solution, Kissmetrics helps in analyzing, recognizing, understanding, and enhancing the metrics that drive online business. The biggest difference between it and Google Analytics is that user behavior is more accessible on a multisession basis.

Features

• Real-time tracking
• A/B testing
• Funnel and cohort reports
• Design editor
• Behavior campaigns and behavioral comparisons
• Software integration
• Revenue reports

Pricing

Subscription plans start at $500 per month. You can request a demo.

Task and File Management

10. Trello

Overview

All marketers can benefit from Trello, which is a software developed for managing projects. It has cards that are like sticky notes that you can arrange on aboard. An individual card has deadlines, checklists, images, colored labels, attachments, and notes from any others sharing the board with you. There is no limit to the number of boards you can have.

Features

• Collaborate with others in real-time

• For companies of all sizes

• Integrate apps into the workflow

• Offers email notifications and an activity log

• Attach photos and drawings

Pricing

In addition to a free basic version, there’s a Business Class option for $9.99 per month when paid annually, and an Enterprise option for $20.83 or less.

11. Dropbox

Overview

Dropbox is a tool for sharing, saving, and syncing files. Files saved on Dropbox can be accessed from anywhere around the world, including on mobile devices, and can be shared with people who don’t have a Dropbox account.

Most e-mail services limit the size of attachments, meaning large files generally can’t be sent over e-mail. Photos, videos, Word documents, presentations, and spreadsheets can all be backed up and shared using Dropbox.

Features

• File storage and sharing
• Accessible from any device
• Preview ability
• Automatic updates
• Simple link sharing via email, chat or text message
• Online backup and file recovery
• Offline access

Pricing

The basic version is free; the upgraded option costs $9.99 per month when billed monthly or $99 billed annually.

12. Evernote

Overview

Evernote didn’t take long to carve out a niche for itself in the world of digital marketing. The application is designed for note-taking and archiving. You can also put together web articles and save images, and share everything with your team. The app is available on a range of devices. Once you make a note, you can access it from anywhere.

Features

• Web clipping support
• Edit rich text and sketches
• For mobile and desktop devices
• Store notes, web clips, files, and images
• Record audio
• Share notes and collaborate on files

Pricing

The basic plan with up to 60 MB of new uploads per month is free. The Plus plan, with 1 GB of uploads per month, is $34.99 per year; the Premium plan gets you 10 GB and costs $69.99 per year.

SEO

13. Raven

Overview

Reports are what tell you if a campaign is working and if targets are being met —report generation and presentation take up a considerable amount of a marketer’s time. Raven is an SEO toolkit that makes creating marketing reports easier. It also helps you research, monitor, and manage your social media, content, pay-per-click (PPC), and search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns.

Features

• Automated marketing reports
• More than 20 data connectors, including Google Analytics and Facebook Ads
• Site auditor tool automatically crawls sites to gather data
• Create unlimited campaigns
• Very user-friendly
• Free trial

Pricing

Contact Raven to find out about pricing.

14. Visual Website Optimizer

Overview

Visual Website Optimizer lets you create various versions of your website and landing pages to see which would generate maximum sales. You can request a demo.

Features

• A/B testing
• Split URL and usability testing
• Behavioral and geographical targeting
• Revenue tracking
• Plug-ins and integration
• Real-time reports

Pricing

Three plans: Startup, $49 per month billed annually (or $59 per month billed monthly); Business, $129 per month billed annually (or $155 per month billed monthly); and Enterprise, $999 per month billed annually.

15. Moz

Overview

Moz began as an SEO consulting company in 2004. It offers Moz Pro and Moz Local to help you improve search rankings to get more views and customers. Moz Pro is “the SEO toolset that’s got it all: keyword research, link building, site audits, and page optimization,” according to the website, while Moz Local helps with SEO-integrated business listings.

Moz Pro Features

• Industry-leading SEO metrics
• Many ranking tools
• Site audit tool identifies errors
• User-friendly analytics
• Free trial

Pricing

Four plans, from $79 to $479 per month, both paid annually.

16. SEMrush

Overview

SEMrush helps you maximize your efforts in the areas of SEO, PPC, social media, content, and public relations. It offers info on things like best-performing posts, performance versus the competition, and strategy analysis, and trending topics.

Features

• Analytics cover organic, advertising and keyword research and more
• Data visualizations for fast competitive analysis
• Site audit
• Brand monitoring
• Position tracking

Pricing

Three monthly plans (lower prices for annual billing): Pro, $99.95 per month; Guru, $199.95 per month; and Business, $399.95 per month.

Master many facets of SEO including keyword research, technical SEO, link building, analytics, with the SEO Training Course.

Content Marketing

17. BuzzSumo

Overview

When you’re creating your marketing strategy, you’ll need to look for what is trending on sites and what is clicking with your audience. BuzzSumo is a tool that ranks content shared on social media sites based on the number of hits it gets. You can easily find who the most influential content curators or aggregators are within any niche.

BuzzSumo also gathers statistics on the industry’s influencers along with their associated websites. When used wisely and paired with some of the other tools on this list, the possibilities are endless.

Features

• Content insights, alerts, curation, discovery, and analysis
• Influencer amplification available
• Competitor analysis and comparisons
• Social backlinks and advertising filters
• Open API

Pricing

Three plans (prices are for monthly billing): Pro, $79 per month; Agency, $239 per month; and Enterprise, $559 per month.

18. Kapost

Overview

Content marketing is big. And Kapost is a tool that combines world-class software and expert service to help you deliver content that gets results. It’s designed to help you manage the whole content marketing process, from planning to ideation to production and finally to distribution and analytics.

Features

• More than 60 out-of-the-box integrations
• Open API
• Plenty of support through consulting services and more
• Customizable content dashboard and workflow
• Cross-channel content performance metrics
• Automated email notifications
• Can manage videos, blog posts, e-books, white papers, presentations, emails, landing pages, and webinars

Pricing

A subscription starts at $3,500 per month.

Master various aspects of planning and executing content marketing strategies to create impressive content with the Advanced Content Marketing Certification Course.

Visual Marketing (Images and Videos)

19. Piktochart

Overview

Piktochart helps you create professional-looking infographics even if you have no design experience. The tool provides over 100 templates that you can customize or just fill out.

Features

• More than 600 professionally designed templates
• Very user-friendly interface
• Library of more than 4,000 images to use
• Import data from Excel or Google spreadsheet or Survey Monkey

Pricing

The basic plan is free. There are two upgraded versions: Lite, $15 per month; and Pro, $29 per month.

20. Vimeo

Overview

The highly popular Vimeo site is a platform that lets you view, upload, and share videos. It has mostly original content instead of TV shows and movies.

Features

• Can embed your own logo into the video (Pro version)
• No ads before the video, unlike YouTube
• Supportive community
• Fewer videos than YouTube, so less competition for viewers

Pricing

The basic plan is free; upgraded plans range from $5 to $50 per month.

21. Unbounce

Overview

Unbounce helps you build, publish, and test landing pages. The site provides an easy-to-use editor to create high-conversion landing pages.

Features

• Landing page and overlay templates
• Real-time stats
• A/B testing
• Lead generation tools
• Multiuser and client management
• Integrations
• Text replacement automatically changes selected keywords to match those used in search queries
• Free trial

Pricing

Three plans (based on annual billing): Essential, $79 per month; Premium, $159 per month; and Enterprise, $399-plus per month.

22. GoToMeeting

Overview

Meetings and calls with clients are a given, but you don’t have to be there in person. Video-conferencing software GoToMeeting lets you have meetings online, making it easy and cost-effective to collaborate with colleagues and interact with customers.

Features

• Access to instant meetings with a single click
• One-time scheduled and recurring meetings
• Seamless audio
• Recording option
• Integrated scheduling with Microsoft Outlook
• Use on Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone or Android
• Free trial

Pricing

Three plans (based on annual billing): Starter, $19 per month; Pro, $29 per month; and Plus, $49 per month.

Automation Software

23. Pardot

Overview

Pardot is a web-based marketing software that helps you streamline lead management and create and track online campaigns. It offers modules for building and managing elements like forms and landing pages.

Features

• Customizable templates
• Email testing with automated CAN-SPAM compliance
• Lead scoring, grading, and management
• Tracking and analytics
• Top-notch customer support
• Real-time sales alerts

Pricing

Three plans: Standard, $1,000 per month; Pro, $2,000 per month; and Ultimate, $3,000 per month.

24. Marketo

Overview

Marketo bills itself as a “world leader in marketing automation for companies of any size.” It’s a pioneer in innovation and offers a range of products; it also lets you tap into the insight of expert marketers through its Marketing Nation.

Features

• Easily build and scale automated marketing campaigns
• Explains search marketing, landing pages, web personalization, more
• Integrations
• Analytics
• A/B testing
• Ad targeting and mobile engagement

Pricing

Varies based on the bundle chosen.