As we enter a new decade, we can expect Digital Marketing to continue to hold sway over the business landscape for the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, new technologies and techniques, changing trends and evolving algorithms ensure that field remains highly dynamic and prone to change. Therefore Digital Marketing professionals need to be on the lookout for the most effective tools that can help them execute a proper strategy, take their marketing campaigns to the next level and zoom past the competition.
Here is our list of the Top 10 must-have Digital Marketing Apps & Tools for 2020!
1. Slack: Communications & Networking
Price: Free for small or medium companies, $2.67/user/month* for SMBs, $5/user/month* for large businesses, custom pricing for extra-large businesses
Slack, touted as a ‘smart alternative to email’ is one of the most popular business communication services today and it is likely to remain so in 2020.
Slack is great for networking and also for teamwork. It operates in dedicated spaces called ‘channels’ for organized, focused conversations without unnecessary distractions. Working in these channels gives everyone in the team a shared view of a project’s purpose and progress, and thus streamlines communications and collaboration.
Slack can be integrated with many other tools including Google Drive, Trello and Giphy, among others.
2. Ahrefs: Keyword research for SEO
Price: 4-tier pricing: $99* Lite (1 user/5 projects), $179* Monthly (1 user/10 projects), $399* Advanced (3 users/25 projects), $999* Agency
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool to help businesses understand why their competitors rank high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and what they can do to outrank them.
The tool provides an organic search report so users can see exactly which keywords their competitors rank high on and the amount of traffic driven by each of them. Ahrefs crawls 5 billion web pages daily, has an index size of 16 trillion known links and has data for 150 million keywords in the USA alone – making this one of the best and most comprehensive keywords comparison/analysis tools in the market.
3. Hubspot: Marketing & CRM
Price: Free to $2,240/month (USD) for enterprises (depends on the plan or ‘hub’ purchased)
HubSpot offers a number of tools to help you grow your business. Many of these tools are free so you can set up web forms, popup forms and live chat software, design email marketing campaigns, analyze website visitors’ behavior and plug your customer data into the CRM – all without paying a rupee (or dollar!).
The paid tools offer more sophisticated options, especially for Marketing Automation. With these tools, you can:
- Manage your content and social media
- Connect with and convert leads
- Grow website traffic
- Increase sales conversions and shorten sales cycle and do a lot more.
4. Yoast SEO: Website Content Optimisation
Price: The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is free. The premium plan starts at $89 for 1 site (includes 1 year free updates and support)
Yoast SEO is an excellent tool to help you optimize your content and boost your ranking in Search Engine Results Pages.
Enter the keyword or key phrase you’d like your post or page to rank for in search results. The plugin will run a check on your content to check whether you’re using the keywords often enough and in the right spots.
In the Premium version, you can add related keywords to the tool. It will analyze your text for these keywords and all variations of the original word or phrase and thus take SEO content optimization to the next level.
5. Canva: Design
Price: The basic version is free. The Pro version costs $9.95/month*
If you quickly need simple yet creative graphics for a piece of content but don’t want to involve a graphic designer, Canva is a great option.
Use Canva’s design templates and graphic assets to create everything from brochures, announcements and invitations to flyers, logos and marketing collaterals (both online and print).
6. Trello: Team Collaboration
Price: Plans range from free to $9.99* (Business Class) and $20.83** (Enterprise Class)
Trello is a feature-rich collaboration tool that enables organisations to manage and prioritise projects in a systematic yet user-friendly way.
Users can create ‘cards’ and include comments, attachments and due dates so every member of the project team is on the same page status-wise. With its built-in automation capabilities (triggers, commands, etc), Trello enables you to remove time-consuming, manual tasks from your to-do list so you can focus on what really matters. With its simple boards and lists, Trello facilitates teamwork, boosts productivity and provides clarity on projects in the pipeline.
7. Hootsuite: Social Media Scheduling
Price: Free for individuals (1 user/3 social profiles), tiered pricing for Professional, Team, Business and Enterprise levels
Do more with your social media content with Hootsuite’s social scheduling app.
Hootsuite enables you to keep your social presence active 24/7 by automatically scheduling multiple social media posts at once and across multiple platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. You can easily create and plan your content, and collaborate with your team in real-time using its interactive, media-rich planner.
Hootsuite also offers a content curation service where you can search, post and tag pre-approved content. You can also measure and review your social media results with its customisable, easy-to-create reports, and get meaningful, actionable insights about your customers and campaign content.
8. Mailchimp: Email Marketing
Price: Tiered pricing, plans start free and go up from $9.99 (Essentials) to $14.99 (Standard) and $299* (Premium)
With Mailchimp, you can create email campaigns and digital ads, design landing pages, build websites and do a lot more to build your brand and achieve visibility.
Mailchimp’s easy-to-use email builder tool enables you to design and send branded emails to engage your audience and grow your business. It offers powerful automation capabilities along with other advantages like real-time analytics, a content studio and professional templates to simplify the process and make it more effective.
9. Google Ads: Advertising on Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
Price: Pay-per-click payment
Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) is the gold standard for Google SERP advertising. It offers an excellent, time-tested way to display your products or services on Google’s results pages for specific queries. By bidding on a particular keyword and creating a compelling message, you can get your ad to appear at the top of the SERP. Thus you can capture the attention of ‘high-intent’ visitors searching for the kinds of products or services you offer.
Ads can appear on Google Search and Google Maps, and across Google’s network of partner sites.
10. Google Analytics: Website Analytics
Price: Free. Pricing for the paid version, Analytics 360, is customized for larger enterprises.
Google Analytics has been around for over a decade and it’s likely to stick around for another!
This tool offers a number of functionalities that provide an in-depth look at a website’s (or app’s) performance. It can show you who is visiting your website and from where. It can analyze which pages they’re starting their searches from and which pages they’re spending the most time on. You can set up specific ‘goals’ for your website, track events to understand user engagement, check how your ads are performing in Google Ads, build a high-performance e-commerce setup and do a lot more.
Signing off
So there you have it! Our Top 10 Digital Marketing apps and tools for 2020!
Technology will continue to evolve in 2020 and there’s a huge benefit in adopting these new tools for your business!
Read more: Data-Driven Personalisation_Is this the Future of Digital Marketing
Great list! I’ve been looking for some new tools to help with my digital marketing efforts, so this is really helpful. Thanks for sharing!
Great read regarding some aspects on digital marketing tools. Thanks for this.