It’s 2020, the year when digital marketing spend finally passes traditional adspend, and online marketing comes into its own. Marketing jobs are increasingly digital, with demand growing for machine learning engineers, customer experience officers, marketing data scientists, and growth marketing experts.
Digital marketers need digital tools to help them conceptualize, create, deploy, measure, and report on the success of their campaigns. In 2020, these tools and apps proliferate, which can make it difficult to identify not just the best tool for the job at hand, but the best tool for your organization as a whole.
If you are a retailer trying to leverage email marketing to drive traffic to a small eCommerce store, your needs will be different than an agency with a large stable of clients requiring ad campaign reports delivered weekly. And that comes in addition to marketing spend justification to a roomful of stakeholders.
Whether you are looking for tools to speed productivity by automating manual tasks, or require market research to be streamlined for more effective campaign planning, there is an app, a tool, or a suite of tools ideal for your purpose.
We’ve curated a list of apps and tools to cover ten critical areas of digital marketing, and added five more for adjacent tasks. Each tool listed is either designed specifically for the task at hand or stands out in the field for that specific area. Many tools offer a range of uses, and you may find that a single tool suits your overall needs better than a grouping.
Automated workflows: Zapier
What
Zapier lets you connect multiple apps and employ if/ then setups to share data across platforms and create smooth automated workflows seamlessly. It allows you to complete routine tasks automatically, reducing the amount of time you spend on admin and increase the time you devote to growing your company.
Why
With Zapier, there’s no coding knowledge required. You can connect more than 1500 apps, including marketing campaigns tools like Facebook Lead Ads, Hubspot, and ClickFunnels. Start with the free option then upgrade to premium levels as you scale, with monthly or annual payment options.
How
An event in any of your connected apps can be used as a trigger to begin a workflow, traveling through connected apps with as many steps automated as possible. From lead generation to email marketing to ad tracking, Zapier makes it easy to engineer and automate complex workflows.
Customer relationship management (CRM): HubSpot
What
One of the most popular CRMs to date, HubSpot helps design customer experiences and track consumers through every phase of their relationship with your company, from the first contact to their lifetime value as a repeat customer.
Why
Hubspot helps you create new business pipelines that center your customers. It’s incredibly scalable, allowing you to choose your degree of support from marketing, sales, and email automation to customer self-service and support options. You can benefit from free tools and CRM, monthly and annual plans, as well as expert guidance if desired.
How
Every piece of information from every interaction is saved so that future interactions can build on the relationship already in place. Hubs for marketing, sales, and service help you generate leads and capture contact information, follow through to close deals, and keep customers coming back for more with world-class support.
Easy sales funnel builds: ClickFunnels
What
ClickFunnels is a marketing campaign tool that lets you build complete sales funnels. These can help you capture leads, follow-up, convert leads into customers, upsell, cross-sell, and create customer loyalty and retention. You can use a single funnel over and over to grow new business with multiple marketing campaigns or create individualized funnels for each new campaign.
Why
With ClickFunnels, it’s OK if you don’t have an IT department or even a single programmer on tap. The process is broken down into easy DIY steps, with a single dashboard and a drop and drag editor. There’s no commitment; plans can be used on a month by month basis, and membership paused and picked up again on demand. Data is stored in the system, and you can download it when needed.
How
ClickFunnels helps you identify what kind of funnel you need (lead generation, sales, retargeting) then walks you through the build process. You can build multiple campaigns and landing pages, and send targeted emails to a dozen leads or a thousand without worrying about getting tagged for spam.
Simplified email marketing: ConvertKit
What
ConvertKit is an email marketing and automation software solution that lets you create emails, build campaigns, and offer incentives from a single simple setup.
Why
With a complete range of tutorials, including live and on-demand workshops and more than 25 comprehensive guides, ConvertKit is intuitive and easy to deploy. Choose from a monthly or annual plan based on your number of subscribers.
How
ConvertKit teaches you how to design and write emails that convert. It includes form building options to capture leads, automation to streamline drip campaigns, and strong landing page creations to drive consumer action.
Aggregate social media management: Sprout Social
What
Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management platform designed to allow multiple users to manage multiple platforms without duplicating work. Expansive reporting options make it ideal for handling high touch client accounts.
Why
Sprout social automates and streamlines tasks and workflows for social media managers and marketers, social customer care agents, and social analysts and strategists. Per-user pricing across three tiers allows customization for multiple users and social profiles.
How
Sprout Social employs social listening to uncover trends and actionable insights from social data. It delivers an easy way to plan, organize, schedule, and deliver content across platforms. It tracks and supports engagement on social with a unified inbox, and measures performance to generate reports that can be shared internally and externally to inform next best actions.
Customized chatbots: ManyChat
What
ManyChat allows the power of Facebook Messenger and SMS based communication tools to be leveraged for sales and marketing with automated bots that convert interested consumers into customers.
Why
ManyChat offers the ability to quickly build a bot based on a template related to your business, or entirely from scratch. Choose a free plan or a pro plan that adds email marketing and other features.
How
Your bot can engage and nurture leads, build your contact list, make appointments or schedule bookings, and even complete sales within Messenger with Paypal or Stripe integration. It integrates with Shopify, HubSpot, Zapier, and more.
Agile marketing management: Cyfe
What
Cyfe is an all-in-one business management dashboard, enabling you to monitor all your marketing channels like email, SEO, SEM, social media, and analytics from one place.
Why
Cyfe quickly and flawlessly automates your reporting, providing precise measurements on all aspects of your business. You can monitor how your organization is growing and share information readily across your company and client base with free dashboards. Start with the free plan and scale to the monthly option that provides the perfect number of dashboards and users for your organization.
How
No more siloed and scattered data – Cyfe makes it easy to visualize real-time data and metrics to track how your brand or clients are performing across Salesforce, Google Analytics, ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Infusionsoft, and internal databases.
Business intelligence and data analysis: SEMRush
What
SEMRush functions as an SEO and social media management tool, a market research option, a paid traffic optimizer, and a content marketing toolkit. It can be leveraged for e-commerce or enterprise businesses, to build your brand from the ground up
Why
You can access 40+ tools, join webinars, take “academy” classes, and access the help center for a comprehensive FAQ, videos, how-tos, and user manuals. If you want to be hands-on without losing productivity, this can be the fastest way to learn how to market your company effectively. Plans can be month to month or annual.
How
SEMRush discovers, analyzes, and help leverage data for better deployment and tracking of your marketing efforts. From competitor research to advanced team management, you can use this tool to drive online visibility and improve ROI.
Mobile marketing metrics: Adjust
What
Adjust is a mobile attribution solution that can define where your mobile traffic and sales are coming from, drilling all the way down to which version of which ad prompted an action on the part of the viewer.
Why
Being able to track your mobile website and ad performance metrics is vital to assigning results. Adjust ties each user back to the ad they interacted with, for full transparency in reporting and ROI. There is no setup fee, and pricing is tiered based on your needs.
How
Adjust integrates with more than 2000 partners, managing marketing data, and creating a clear picture of where marketing spend is driving results and where changes need to be made.
Clear marketing reporting: NinjaCat
What
NinjaCat is a unified marketing analytics and reporting platform, helping to enhance the efficiency of your workflow by creating reporting templates and leveraging an automation process to generate all reports and dashboards.
Why
A template library makes it easy to get started quickly and confidently scale efforts. Design customizations allow for a slick, professional delivery. The ability to add insights and recommendations within each report delivers a high-level experience suitable for C-suite and stakeholder perusal. Pricing is customized based on your requirements.
How
Campaign performance can be tracked and shared with branded client-facing reports, margins & markups can be baked into cost-related metrics. Additionally, roll-up reporting can aggregate data across multiple accounts.
Honorable mentions
No list of marketing tools for heightened productivity would be complete without apps and tools for adjacent functions like:
- Project management: Asana
- Content creation: GatherContent
- Team management: Teamwork
- Communication: Slack
- Shopping automation: ThriveCart
TL;DR: The list without the hype
No patience for a series of soft sales pitches? No worries. The top tools for each key marketing area are:
- Automated workflows: Zapier
Planning to have a lot of tools, but already worried about workflows and organization? Zapier connects everything together.
- Customer relationship management (CRM): HubSpot
Just want to be able to have all your marketing stuff, including content, in one place? Hubspot has a plan for that.
- Sales funnel builds: ClickFunnels
Always wanted to learn how to build a sales funnel, but didn’t know how? Get started with ClickFunnel and be funneling like a pro in no time.
- Email marketing: ConvertKit
Hoping to keep things simple with a straightforward email marketing plan? ConvertKit turns your contact list into a powerhouse for conversions.
- Social media management: Sprout Social
Social media turning into your biggest headache? Consolidate and manage everything flawlessly from a single dashboard.
- Customized chatbots: ManyChat
Ready for your very own chatbot? Automate SMS and Facebook Messenger sales with a bot built by you, for you.
- Marketing management: Cyfe
Ready for the big time? Manage your entire enterprise from a centralized location and take your marketing to a whole new level.
- Business intelligence and data analysis: SEMRush
Are you all about the data? This tool gives you everything you ever dreamed of plus some things you never imagined.
- Mobile metrics: Adjust
Can’t quite figure out what’s going on with your mobile marketing? Find out exactly who, what, where, when, and why with complete transparency.
- Marketing reporting: NinjaCat
Clients clamoring for an update? Make reporting easy and professional with clear metrics organized to show off your results.
- Project management: Asana
Want to be able to stay organized with multiple irons in the fire? Plan projects, upload files and assign tasks with ease.
- Content creation: GatherContent
Need a way to create and manage content? Gather it together and manage it on an intuitive, feature-rich platform.
- Team management: Teamwork
Too many cooks in the kitchen? Bring your workforce into line with a task assignment method that has reminders and accountability built-in.
- Communication: Slack
Longing for the ability to communicate seamlessly? Chat in real-time, hop on a call, rally the troops for a team meeting, and share files with ease.
- Shopping automation: ThriveCart
Just want to make it incredibly easy to buy your stuff? Turn curious consumers into converting customers in just a few clicks.
Ready to take your marketing initiatives to the next level in 2020? Assemble your team and choose the tools that will deliver the most focused results for each one of your marketing needs.
For marketing campaigns designed around promotions and infotainment, Woobox makes it easy to create beautiful contests, giveaways, coupons, polls, quizzes, and much more.
Need Help?
Woobox support is available from 8 am to 5 pm PST, Mon. through Fri at 1-360-450-5200 and support@woobox.com.
