50 Powerful Marketing Tools for Business Scaling [+ Tips]

Explore both paid and free marketing tools tailored for both big and small businesses. From content creation to data analytics, this comprehensive guide delves into various best marketing tools, providing examples and expert advice to enhance your marketing efforts without breaking the bank.

In today's digital landscape, businesses increasingly rely on streamlined online marketing tools to optimize their strategies. Social media managers, in particular, face the challenge of managing dynamic digital tasks, making social media marketing tools essential for efficiency and project management.

A proficient marketer understands the importance of mastering a diverse array of online marketing tools and platforms. By becoming proficient in SEO, design, data analytics, or CRM, marketers can elevate their careers and achieve success in their endeavors.

This article explores various types of marketing tools, including digital marketing tools, analytics tools, SEO tools, email marketing tools, project management tools, and more. It also highlights free options, providing practical examples and actionable advice for skill improvement.

Content creation in marketing can be images, videos, audio, and written content that help build a brand or market a product or service.  

Content strategy and creation is increasingly important in marketing as brands hope to connect to their audience online through social media networks. Creating engaging, unique content using a content marketing tool and managing your content using a content management system will help you increase your target audience and generate buzz. 

Here are five content marketing tools:

WordPress

WordPress is versatile software that enables users to create and manage websites with ease. With a variety of themes and plugins at their disposal, users can tailor their landing pages to perfection, incorporating advanced features such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to attract and engage website visitors. Additionally, WordPress offers a free plan option, providing users with essential tools to kickstart their online presence. 

Wix

Wix stands out as an alternative website-building platform, especially for beginners who may find its interface more user-friendly compared to WordPress. However, in contrast to WordPress, Wix offers fewer customization options. Nevertheless, Wix users benefit from inclusive website hosting as part of their marketing efforts.

Grammarly

Grammarly, an AI-powered writing app, augments your content strategy by furnishing suggestions for grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It streamlines the writing process, thereby optimizing your marketing material and enhancing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Utilizing the free version of Grammarly can significantly improve your content creation and marketing endeavors.

Hemingway App

Hemingway will analyze your writing and provide suggestions for trimming wordy phrases or simplifying overly complex passages. It doesn’t, however, scrutinize for grammar or spelling errors.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an easy-to-use tool for content marketing that has many applications. Users can search for trending content, look for influencers in their field, and monitor mentions. 

Social media marketing involves using multiple platforms to reach new customers, deliver content, monitor performance and views, and build a brand image.    

Social media tools are increasingly valuable in marketing strategies, as more people engage with brands on social media posts and platforms and make purchases based on the content they see there. 

What marketing tools are useful for social media? Here are five great social media marketing tools: 

Hootsuite

Hootsuite allows users to manage their social media posts across all platforms in one spot. The app is also used to plan and schedule posts, and they have an analytics tool to monitor your engagement. 

Buffer

Similar to Hootsuite, Buffer is a digital marketing tool that helps you schedule and track posts, but with an easier user experience. It’s more commonly used by smaller organizations that don’t need as many extra features. 

Sprout Social

Marketers use Sprout Social to schedule and publish posts, develop a content calendar, monitor responses, and manage chats. They even have AI to generate responses to routine questions. 

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social media management tool that lets you find influencers, track customer data, and measure your marketing campaign. 

SocialPilot

Like Buffer, SocialPilot is a social media management tool that’s best for smaller businesses. You can use it to manage posts with its scheduling tool, track performance, and discover content. It also integrates with Canva. 

Marketing teams use analytics to collect data that informs their decisions on marketing campaigns and optimizes their marketing strategy. 

Data is essential for successful marketers. They use data analytics to track their performance, discover trends, monitor traffic and website visitors and customer interactions, and understand their target audience, all of which shape their marketing strategy. 

Here are five popular marketing tools for data analytics:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a well-known marketing tool. Users can measure and analyze the activity on their website and landing page, like clicks, conversions and lead capture. 

MixPanel

MixPanel is an alternative to Google that helps you track page views and offers funnel reporting. Unlike Google Analytics, it also allows you to track individual user data by identifying their names and email, which could be useful for email marketing.

Google Search Console

While Analytics deals with user’s data and engagement, the Search Console gives you data on search-related traffic like your average position in search results and click-through rates. 

Raven Tools

Raven Tools is an SEO-focused suite that tracks data like backlinks and keyword research and rank tracking. 

SEMRush

SEMRush is a digital marketing tool that helps you identify trends and keywords and can perform audits of your site’s visibility on search engines.

Customer relationship management is about managing and tracking customers’ interactions throughout their customer lifecycle. 

CRM tools are crucial in marketing since it’s used to collect data, identify sales opportunities, improve customer support, and automate interactions.

What are the marketing tools most used for CRM? Here are five of the most common: 

Zendesk

Zendesk is used by companies to support customer service teams. They have a ticketing system that amalgamates customer requests in one spot, as well as a ‘knowledge base software’ which lets you make and share support information with potential customers. 

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot is used by marketing and sales teams to generate leads through email marketing, lead capture forms, and more. 

Zoho CRM

Zoho is suitable for a smaller business as they have fewer features than giants like HubSpot, and a lower cost. They help you organize tasks and create reports and offer chat and email. 

PipeDrive

PipeDrive is sales-focused software that offers a sales team lead pipelines, a document library, and marketing automation for customer responses. 

Moosend

Moosend offers email templates and automation, website tracking, and more. They also offer campaign testing by creating and comparing two different marketing campaigns. 

Email marketing is a strategy that involves sending promotional material or messages to customers by email. It includes managing email lists and creating well-designed campaigns that have a clear call to action. 

Like other digital marketing tools and all the tools in marketing out there, email marketing tools can also help generate leads on landing pages and sales and can be automated to streamline your marketing tasks. It’s also a great source of data by tracking open rates and click-through rates. 

Here are five different types of direct mail marketing tools:

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is email marketing software that helps you create engaging email campaigns. It allows you to manage subscription lists, automate customer experiences, and integrate third-party apps like Shopify. With its 30-day free trial offer, it is a tool you shouldn’t miss.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact an email marketing tool that offers more scaled-down features than Mailchimp, making it a potentially better choice for beginners. Their email templates are quick and easy to use.  

Brevo

Brevo, previously called SendinBlue, is an email marketing platform that has a number of competitive features like free email templates in its free version, with paid plans allowing for integration with WhatsApp, text, and Facebook ads in addition to email. 

Campaign Monitor

This email marketing tool is useful for managing and segmenting your email lists as well as SMS marketing. They offer email templates, a drag-and-drop editor, and have automated features like welcome emails for new subscribers. 

GetResponse

GetResponse offers a lot of the features that a typical email marketing software would to produce the best marketing strategies, but they’ve evolved to include webinars, conversion funnels, and push notifications, among others. More importantly, it offers a free trial for up to 30 days.

Search engine optimization is used by marketers to generate organic traffic to their site by ensuring it ranks highly in a relevant search. 

SEO or lead generation tools are an important element of digital marketing, as Search Engines still dominate the internet user experience, and few people look past the first page of their search results. Having your site rank higher in a search will increase traffic and generate more leads and sales. 

Here is a few common SEO marketing software: 

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a heavily featured SEO tool. You can use it for keyword and content research as well as to audit your site to optimize your SEO. Unfortunately, it has a steeper learning curve than other SEO tools and doesn’t offer a free plan. 

Ryte

Ryte is an SEO tool that analyzes your website for quality of content and usability. They offer keyword recommendations and link and conversion tracking. 

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

This SEO tool is a website crawler that shows you broken links, URLs that are blocked, and page data like the quality of your titles and meta descriptions. 

Moz

Moz offers two different products: Pro, and Local, each with their own special features. You can use Moz to do research and competitor analysis on keywords or websites you’re competing with, to explore link building, and to see how you perform in local searches. 

Majestic

Unlike Moz, Majestic is more narrowly focused on SEO through backlinking. It’s useful for tracking backlink changes over time, and for evaluating link quality. 

Video Marketing Tools

Video marketing involves creating and distributing video to engage with a target audience. It might include digital content creation, proficiency with social media platforms, storytelling, live streaming, and more. 

Video marketing is increasingly important as marketing has evolved online. Social media platforms and sites that feature video are widely used, and video can be an engaging way to reach an audience and make connections. 

Here are five of the most popular video marketing software: 

Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro is a professional level video editing software that supports many different video file formats and integrates easily with other Adobe software. 

Final Cut Pro X

Final Cut Pro has a simple user interface that allows you to directly create and upload a TikTok or YouTube video to the platform. They also use a Color Board for color editing.  

Animaker

Animaker is video editing software that focuses on animation, and it’s useful for beginners through to professionals. They offer a catalog of stock video and images. 

Vimeo Business

This video hosting software offers 5 TB of storage. They have a number of collaboration tools that enable you to share videos with colleagues, who can leave comments. 

Wistia

Wistia is a video hosting tool with a Google optimized gallery feature and data tools to track your performance. 

Website Optimization Tools

Website optimization focuses on enhancing a website to improve user experience and could include improving site speed, mobile optimization, SEO, and user-friendly navigation. Conversion rate optimization involves using data to track visitor behavior and feedback to increase the likelihood of converting visitors to customers.  

Site optimization and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is useful in marketing because it improves the visitor experience and increases conversion rates. Websites that aren’t user friendly and don’t adjust to feedback won’t perform as well. 

What are the marketing tools most commonly used for website and conversion rate optimization? Here are just a few: 

Optimizely

Optimizely has a customer data platform that tracks customer experience, and a commerce cloud which uses AI to provide a customized shopping experience. 

Unbounce

Unbounce is a landing page builder that has optimization features like A/B testing for different pages. Their site is user-friendly with a drag-and-drop function. 

Hotjar

Hotjar is an analytics platform with a number of functions. Their Heatmap tool lets you see how visitors interact with your site, and their survey tool lets you curate user surveys to gather more data.  

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg lets you view traffic on individual web pages with features like heatmaps, scrollmaps, and split testing.  

Google Optimize

Google Optimize is a website testing tool that integrates with Google Analytics for even more insight. Users can choose between A/B, multivariate, and redirect testing. 

Event marketing involves planning and promoting events that cater to a brand’s target audience. These might be trade shows, product demonstrations, conferences, and virtual events. 

Event marketing is a great way to network, generate leads and sales, and increase your brand reach. 

Here are five popular event marketing tools: 

Eventbrite

Eventbrite is a ticketing platform that allows users to create ticketed events for users to share or find. It integrates with a variety of different platforms and tools. 

Cvent

Cvent is event management software that lets you manage guest lists, clients, vendors, sponsorships and more. They even help with venue sourcing.

Splash

Splash offers templates for event pages, social cards, and confirmation pages. One of their features is an easy-to-use guest registration, and they integrate with apps like Slack and Salesforce

Bizzabo

Users on Bizzabo can create event sites and apps, as well as networking communities for their events. 

Whova

Whova is an event management tool that lets users update guests with polls, event info, messages, and photos from the event.  

Marketers use graphic design tools and AI powered design tools to create visual material that promotes their products or brand image and reaches their target audience. 

Marketing material should be well-designed, engaging, relevant, and unique, making graphic design a crucial marketing skill.

These are some of the most common software used for graphic design:  

Adobe Creative Cloud

The Adobe Creative Cloud includes a range of tools like Photoshop for image editing, Premier Pro for video, and Illustrator for generative AI. The tools you subscribe to will depend on your specific needs and type of content. 

Canva

Canva is a content creation software that offers templates, free image elements, and easy drag-and-drop editing. 

Sketch

Sketch is a vector-editing platform that allows users to modify their images without affecting the original. Their Symbols feature is great for creating avatars and icons. 

Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer is another vector design tool with an easy-to-use interface and design elements like shapes and lines. Users can save their designs in multiple formats. 

Piktochart

Piktochart is a beginner-friendly design tool for infographics and presentations. It allows users to make maps and interactive charts, making it great for data. 

No matter what your skill level is, it’s important to continue your learning journey and enhance your proficiency in various marketing software and tools. There are several ways to improve your marketing skills and increase your employability. 

Online courses

Online courses are a great way to learn new skills. Sites like Coursera, Udemy, and Skillshare offer low-cost training courses in a variety of marketing software, while a number of schools offer online certification in different marketing skills.

Workshops and webinars

Look for workshops and webinars in areas where your skills are lacking. This is also a great way to network in your field, enhancing your skills even more. 

Experiment with different tools

Lots of people learn by doing, and experimenting with different marketing software can help you master that tool more quickly. 

Refining your business's marketing approach frequently involves harnessing the power of free tools tailored to different functions, such as content creation, SEO, site optimization, email, and social media marketing, along with data analytics. Choosing the appropriate marketing tool is essential for ensuring alignment with your goals and effectively engaging your target audience.

Though managing marketing for either a big business or small business encompasses a broad spectrum of tasks, mastering these free tools is feasible through experience and commitment. By experimenting with various marketing tools and actively seeking opportunities to hone your skills, you can significantly elevate your marketing capabilities. 

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--- Originally Written by Tiffany Quinn ---