5 Best Digital Marketing Tools to Grow a Business

The difference between a digital marketing professional and someone who dabbles in online marketing can be summed up in the tools they use. Here are the top 5 tools that we recommend.

SimilarWeb.com – When you need a competitive digital marketing strategy for any business in about 5 minutes, use this tool.  Type in a competitor name and get a full detailed report.  SimliarWeb provides a behind-the-scenes look at what organic keywords and PPC keywords are getting them traffic.  What channels are working, and what social media is working for them.

Google Trends – Many people use Google's Keyword tool to find keywords, but we prefer to see what search phrases people actually have used in the past.  Google Trends gives actual data of the search phrases that have been used since 2004.  We can narrow the geography down to the state level, as well as only look at certain categories or Google properties, such as Image, Shopping or YouTube.  Looking for writing ideas and topics that will attract interest? Use Trends to find hot topic for blog posts.  Enter a basic term, narrow to last 30 days and look for the related queries that have a +% or “breakout”

Canva.com – Want to produce professional looking social media posts?  Canva saves us time and money with their low-cost stock photos and professional memes.  Canva has several very professional looking templates where you can edit all aspects of the design to make it relevant to your business.

Chrome extension vidIQ for Youtube – Youtube is the #2 search engine in the world, but getting your video found in YouTube search is complicated.  Now you can uncover the secrets to success behind well ranking YouTube Videos.  When doing a search in YouTube, VidIQ pops-up to give a lot of information for this keyword in YouTube.  Especially look at the Keyword Score which shows search volume and Competition score.  Look for keywords that have high volumes and low competitions.

Chrome extension Keyword Everywhere – Finding the right keyword to optimize a page around can seem like an art-form.  Gathering accurate data can be time-consuming and inefficient.  Using this extension while doing Google searches, we can quickly see relevant search volumes and PPC data.  The information appears under the search bar with a search volume per month statistic.  Test different variation of keywords to see which search volume is highest.

Ahrefs.com - Ahrefs is a link research tool that provides a wealth of information about a web link.  The first think you'll see is the number of backlinks that a url and domain has.  The referring domains with the number of links coming to the page.  In addition you can generate many keyword suggestions with traffic estimates for websites that rank in the top ten search results. In order to optimize a page, it helps to know where the page page currently.  Ahrefs shows historical ranking data for a page for specific keywords.  Ahref also will show keywords that competitor sites rank for, but your site does not.  There are many other benefits and features to Ahrefs, and while the tool can be expensive, the entry level program is affordable to any business that wants to get serious about their SEO.

SocialPlanner.io - If you're like us, the hardest part of content marketing is figuring out what content is going to resonate with your audience.  This is where SocialPlanner.io comes in.  It's an all-in-one content marketing & social media scheduling tool designed to help brands and businesses find, plan and publish engaging content.  There are three core features we like.  Content Discovery: Discover trending content on social media and from around the web, the type of content that generates high engagement from fans and followers. Content Planning: Plan publishing of your content across all their social media accounts in one place with our easy to use, visual drag & drop calendar. Content Publishing: Found something hot? Automatically schedule and publish social media posts to all your social channels right inside SocialPlanner.