Digital Marketing Tools
Tools are an essential part of internet marketing and this section offers an introduction to some of the best internet marketing tools among the almost endless array of tools available.
All-in-One Internet Marketing Tool
HubSpot is a terrific tool that offers a variety of functions ranging from SEO recommendations and social media management to lead nurturing. There are better tools just for SEO like SEOMoz or SEO Book, better tools for social management like Radian6, and better tools just for marketing automation, but as an all-in-one tool, I know of nothing like it.
Eloqua, Marketo, and Pardot, HubSpot’s main competitors, essentially have no options for getting leads. Their focus is solely on what happens once a user becomes a lead.
Dharmesh Shah, one of the founders of HubSpot, says that it only “competes” with these other internet marketing systems in the way an iPhone competes with a digital camera. He says, “Sure the iPhone has a camera, but that’s not the only reason someone buys an iPhone.” See the chapter on HubSpot for more details (Chapter 15).
Website Auditing / Competitive Analysis
These website auditing and competitive analysis tools help you to analyze your website and score it in a number of different areas from SEO to social media. When you can view your site against your competitors, it helps you to understand better where you’re going wrong and what you can do to help improve.
- Marketing.grader.com by HubSpot. Plug your URL into marketing.grader.com and it gives you a score—from 1 to 100—reflecting your website’s visibility to the search engines, social media presence, blog activity, conversion optimization, and more. The best part is the report, which gives you tips and step-by-step instructions to improve your search-social-friendliness. You can run this tool on any site, so use it to check out your competitors as well.
- SEMrush is an SEO keyword research tool that shows you what keywords your competitors are ranking well for and what that traffic might be worth. It also shows you to some degree what your competitors are buying for keywords in AdWords and the cost per click.
- Compete.com is one of the most well-known competitive analysis tools for things like comparing unique visitors. The number of visitors it shows won’t likely line up exactly with your website analytics, but it is good for getting a ballpark “read” on which sites get lots of traffic.
Content and Blogging Tools
These content generation and blogging tools help you to add content to your website by making it easier to add content through a CMS system, checking for duplicate content, managing blog comments, and optimizing your blog.
- WordPress is a free, open-source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS). It is simply the best. So many people use it that the add-ons and plug-ins, like Yoast’s SEO plug-in, make it a must-have.
- Copyscape checks for plagiarism and is partnered with Google. The free search is limited to 10 results. The premium service costs a few cents per search.
- Disqus is a another well-respected tool for managing blog comments.
- The All in One SEO Pack plug-in from Yoast is great for SEO-optimizing your blog.
Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
The conversion rate optimization tools help you take your current website visitors and turn them into customers. By analyzing current user behavior, then A/B testing and generating leads through chat and forms, getting more traffic isn’t the only way to get more business.
- Usertesting.com tests go for about $49 each. You get a 15-minute video of people speaking into a microphone as they try to do assigned tasks on your website. The text summaries and videos show you what is wrong with your site in terms of usability, and/or what people like. Usability testing used to be just for big companies, but now smaller firms can do it for short money.
- Google Optimize is a free website testing and optimization tool which is now integrated into Google Analytics. Testing alternate versions of headlines, images, and various other elements is the only scientific way to know you are using content that converts.
- Visualwebsiteoptimizer.com is an easy to use A/B testing tool that uses a point-and-click editor (no HTML knowledge needed!).
- nGagelive.com can help you increase conversions and lets your website users chat with a representative 24/7. By letting the nGage representatives ask for customer contact information and what they are looking for, you don’t have to worry about being available to chat. The nGage reps won’t answer questions about your business; they just collect information and then you follow up.
- Liveperson.com allows you to run your own live chat.
- Feng-gui.com lets you see where visitors’ eyes are looking. This is a robotic approximation versus very expensive eye tracking, but it provides great insights and is loved by many conversion experts.
- Unbounce.com lets you publish and test landing pages online without developers or software.
Email Marketing Tools
These email marketing tools help you to create high-quality email marketing campaigns, tame your email lists through subscription management and segmentation, and A/B test the effectiveness of your subject lines, headings, and content.
iContact, Constant Contact, Vertical Response, and MailChimp are all high-quality, low-cost email options.
Keyword Research Tools
These keyword research tools aid you in uncovering keywords that you may not have thought of. From there, you can optimize your website using the keywords, and generate additional content that will help get traffic to your site.
Google AdWords Keyword Tool: Data coming directly from Google.
The following short list includes tools that are also good for keyword research:
- KeywordSpy
- Wordtracker
- Keyword Discovery
- Lexical Database
- Übersuggest.org takes your keyphrase and extracts “Google Suggest” suggestions for it and lets you export results to a text file to give you expanded keyword ideas.
Marketing Automation Software
Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua are among the very expensive marketing automation tools, but have high-end functionality if you have hundreds of thousands or millions of leads. Try HubSpot if you want to start automating things like lead nurturing but want a less expensive integrated web marketing solution that is easier to set up and use.
Miscellaneous Internet Marketing Tools
Here are some additional miscellaneous internet marketing tools, ranging from sales databases and affiliate marketing tools, to URL shorteners and organizational tools.
- Salesforce.com – Best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) software. You can manage your sales contacts and keep detailed information about their likes and interactions with your company. It is extremely powerful when integrated with your website through contact forms and/or through HubSpot.
- AdSense – Google AdSense allows publishers to place ads on their websites and share in the profits with Google.
- AdWords – Google AdWords is an advertising program that uses text ads and display ads where the advertisers only pay when an ad actually gets clicked and sends someone to your website.
- Affiliate Marketing Tools – Affiliate marketing allows merchants to expand their reach by paying a commission to publishers (such as blogs) willing to place advertisements on their website that link to a merchant. Get thousands of people linking (with nofollow links) to you and get great visibility that only has a cost if you make money!
- Commission Junction and LinkShare – Two outstanding affiliate marketing tools.
- Bitly.com – Offers URL shortening/redirection service with real-time link tracking. Essential for Twitter, etc.
- Basecamp – Project management software used by millions of companies to increase productivity and collaboration. It is also a great way to make sure all your marketing information gets backed up off your team’s computers.
- Qualaroo – Consider offering a one- to three-question survey on your site (using Qualaroo) to see what customers are feeling and to get feedback. This type of market research for pennies on the dollar is well worth trying.
- WiseStamp.com: Put your blog URL in your email signature.
- Google Trends
- Google Insights
- Evernote – Simple note-taking software to keep you organized. Works well with paper scanners to get all your piles of loose papers into a searchable database.
- DoneDone – Very simple and highly effective for tracking projects.
- Balsamiq – Great for mocking up ideas/wire- framing and highly intuitive for non-developers or non-designers. Lots of cool drag-and-drop elements.
- “Google Operators”: Try using site:yoursite.com as a search in Google, which will show only pages Google has indexed for your site.
- Basic operators are here: google.com/help/operators.html.
- Advanced operators are here googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html.
- VeCapture – Captures abandoned online transactions and registrations. Shopping cart abandonment software isn’t for everyone, but it does work. Our friends at VeInteractive are one of the clear leaders in this space and work on a commission-only basis. You only pay them a percentage when a customer you otherwise would have lost comes back and buys. If you have very little traffic, it likely won’t give you a big boost.
- Sitemap and page URL/title generator – auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp
- Whois.net – Allows you to check a website’s age.
- ADA compliance check (The Americans with Disabilities Act) – Making a site work well for the visually impaired also helps it for SEO because robots and spiders don’t “see” but crawl through links and tags.
- Clean IP check with mxtoolbox: Check your server’s IP block for other websites that may cause your site to be blacklisted. Free: MX Lookup. Paid: DNSstuff.
- Pingdom – Lets you conduct a site speed test, and monitor website uptime and downtime.
- W3 Total Cache – Makes your WordPress site load faster.
- Xenu Link Sleuth broken link tool – Under “File | Check URL…” enter the URL of the link list/resources page. Also, add the first part of the URL (just through the root domain) to the “Do not check any URLs beginning with this” box, to eliminate internal links. Look for links that come back with a status of “not found” (a 404 error).
- The “Wayback Machine” – An Internet archive that has a huge record of websites and their multiple versions dating back to the early 1990s.
- Google Alerts – Set up Google Alerts for name, company name, and topics of interest to you. This is invaluable for finding bloggers that have linked to your posts, so you can go to their blogs and thank them in the comments.
- Flickr Creative Commons Search–Royalty-free Images – Using Flickr’s advanced search, you can find Creative Commons licensed images that you can use with attribution in blog posts, etc.
- Camtasia – Allows you to make screencasts of your products, demonstrations, etc.
Aftermarket Domain Sites
- Buydomains.com
- Afternic.com
- Sedo.com
- Flippa.com (where you can buy whole sites and domains with content)
Paid Search Marketing Tools
Without a strong and well-organized PPC campaign, you could be throwing money away. These paid search marketing tools (PPC Tools) with help you to analyze your PPC data and manage your campaigns through bid management and other tools to increase your click-through-rate and lower your spend.
Search Engine Optimization Tools
These search engine optimization tools are helpful resources for analyzing your on-page optimization, backlinks, and other aspects of search engine optimization, helping you make strategic improvements where you need them.
- SEOMoz PRO is the top SEO software, with dozens of tools and valuable SEO resources. Membership in SEOMoz PRO gives you campaign-based web apps, dozens of SEO tools, webinars, and full access to Open SiteExplorer.
- SEOMoz’s Open Site Explorer pulls data from over 50 billion web pages and about 10 trillion links. Here at McDougall Interactive, it is our go-to source for exploring links and the links of competitors.
- SEO Book offers a great forum and a set of free and paid web-based SEO tools.
- SEO Book’s SEO for Firefox Plugin is an indispensable quick analysis tool. You get data such as: PageRank, Google’s Cache Date, Traffic Value, Site Age, del.icio.us, del.icio.us Page Bookmarks, Diggs, Diggs Popular Stories, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Y! links, Y! edu links, Y! gov links, Y! Page links, Y! edu page links, OSE links to page, OSE links to domain, Blekko domainlinks, Technorati, Alexa, Compete.com rank, Compete.com uniques, Cached, Dmoz, Bloglines, Page blog links, wikipedia, dir.yahoo.com, BOTW, Business, and Majestic SEO linkdomain
- SEO Book’s Hub Finder Sites that link out to several competitors are worth getting links from them yourself. You can plug in 2 to 10 of your competitors to see sites that link to as many of them as you specify.
- Google Search Console is very useful tool that you can use to analyze your website’s performance and fix errors.
- SEO Browser shows how a search engine looks at your site. It strips away the CSS or any styles, and displays text and links.
- Firefox SEO and Social Tool Plug-ins (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox) There are thousands of add-ons for Mozilla and lots of great ones for SEO and social media marketing.
- Raven has a tool set including SEO, social media, and advertising tools.
- Majestic SEO links intelligence tools for SEO and online public relations and marketing. The link tools are outstanding.
Social Media Marketing Tools
These social media marketing tools help you to navigate the expansive world of social media by giving you the ability to post to multiple platforms, keep track of your social media across channels, and discover new opportunities for expanding your social media reach.
- Radian6 – A social media monitoring, engaging, and sharing tool that is the industry leader. Starting at $600 per month per domain.
- HootSuite – Lets you publish updates, track activity, and analyze results across multiple social networks including Twitter and Facebook. HootSuite also integrates with HubSpot. (HootSuite has a free version.)
- Twellow – Twitter Yellow Pages.
- TweetBeep – Keep track of your brand reputation by getting alerts through email when your brand is mentioned on Twitter.
- Twitter Grader – A site that ranks your influence in the Twitter world based on an algorithm. You can see where you stand in your town, city, state, or country.
- Tweet Adder – Helps you auto-manage your Twitter followers.
- Twitterfall – It’s like an animated RSS reader, but with such nice additional features as location filtering and exclusions. I like Twitterfall as a way to keep up with the very latest in what people are saying about topics you’re following, as well as the simplicity of aggregating multiple topics. This monitors the entire Twittersphere, not just the people you follow. It’s a good way to impress upon reluctant executives the volume of conversation around a market or brand.
- Listorious – Although Listorious has recently been trying to rebrand itself as an expertise locator, its core value is in its collection of Twitter lists curated by members. If you want to find lists of CIOs, or marketers, or people in the construction industry, Listorious is the place to start. I recommend newcomers to Twitter go here to quickly find lists of people to follow, which is the first step in building your own follower base.
- Social Mention – Allows for comprehensive social media searching, and indexes blogs, tweets, and message board posts.
- Sprout Social
Website Analytics Software
These website analytics software packages allow you to track website visitors, integrate with other platforms like SalesForce, show you user paths and behaviors, track phone calls, and analyze your social media effectiveness. Knowledge is power!
- Google Analytics – Excels at giving you great insight into how people are getting to and interacting with your website. It shows you where visitors are coming from, what they are actually clicking on, and how they are interacting with your site.
- HubSpot – As HubSpot says, “Google Analytics shows you raw numbers of users. HubSpot shows you real people.” Analytics software is useless without traffic and leads to track and then follow up on, so HubSpot combines driving traffic with analyzing and converting it. Google Analytics has great data and even A/B testing ability, but HubSpot is fully integrated with your sales team and lead nurturing program. Ideally, you should use both.
- ClickTale – Lets you watch users’ click paths and how much they scroll on your website. This tool provides additional essential analytic information that Google Analytics does not.
- Crazy Egg – Has been referred to as the “poor man’s ClickTale.” It is a highly regarded tool that starts at only $9 per month and has a free 30-day trial. You can see where users click and discover what Google Analytics is not telling you, thanks to heatmap, scrollmap, and overlay tools.
- Adobe SiteCatalyst powered by Omniture – Adobe Site Catalyst is expensive, more complicated to install and use than Google Analytics, but has powerful testing systems and integration with Salesforce and email systems. This allows you to connect the information your sales team gathers with your web data. Google Analytics Premium is a flat $150,000 per year and is a competitor to this advanced tool.
- CallRail – The authority for exposing what happens before, during, and after phone calls generated by your website down to the keyword level.
- Facebook Analytics/Facebook Insights – Click the gear wheel in your Facebook Fan Page and choose “View Insights” to find the main Insights dashboard for the total number of likes, number of friends of fans available (potential reach), how many people are actively talking about your page, and your total weekly reach.
- YouTube Insight – Offers analytics that show what your viewers like and don’t like so you can improve your video marketing. You can filter reports by content, geography and date, and there is an interactive geographic distribution map that comes with most reports. You can track most views and subscriptions as well as how long viewers spent watching your videos.
- Twitter Analytics – See how much of your content got shared across the Twittersphere, the volume of traffic Twitter sends to your website, and the effectiveness of your Tweet button integration. You can also see the number of favorites and retweets.
- Followerwonk.com – A Twitter analytics tool that provides follower segmentation, social graph tracking, and more.
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