The Best Digital Marketing Tools

Featured article by Emily Roberts, Independent Technology Author

Digital marketing can be a scary prospect, there is so much to think about when creating your marketing campaign, you might not know where to start.  There are of course lots of online courses that you can make the most of, or there are digital marketing courses London based where you can upskill and learn lots of valuable info. We have also put together a list of some great digital marketing tools that can help you make a great start.

Yoast

Yoast is a plugin that can be installed to your WordPress website.  It is used for search engine optimisation and will help you make sure that the content you are uploading is SEO friendly.  Once you add a page or post to your website, Yoast will analyse it and highlight any issues. It uses a traffic light system (red, amber and green) to colour code how likely certain elements are to be visible in search engines.  It will let you know if you have inserted your focus keyword the correct number of times, if you have an effective SEO title, if your meta data is as it should be and more. It will also give you recommendations as to how to fix this making it easy for you to optimise your pages as they should be.

Google Analytics

This is something that you need to ensure is installed in your website, and that you analyse the data on a regular basis.  You can pull reports based on the number of users who have visited your website, their demographic, and where they came from.  If they have come from search engines – you can see which keyword they entered, if they came from social media, you can tell which channel they came from and more.  You will also find out details as to how long the user stayed on the website, and the exact pages they visited.

Hotjar

This tool is perfect for conversion rate optimisation.  When you install Hotjar to your website, it will allow you to see tonnes of data. It will give you heatmaps, where you can see which parts of your website are performing better than others – and you can also set it to record visits.  This mean that you can see the exact experience that a user had when they visited your site. This means that you can get a good idea as to what the consumer likes about your site, and what they don’t and optimise your marketing campaign.  There are both free and paid versions available with Hotjar depending on what your requirements are and how big your website is.

Moz

Moz is a fantastic tool to use for search engine optimisation.  It will crawl your website for you and highlight both technical and non-technical SEO issues that should be addressed and resolved.  It will pull information on things such as 404 pages, any redirect issues, duplicate content problems, and any missing SEO data. Once you have applied the fixes – you can then recrawl the site.  It will also give you in-depth analytics as to how each page is performing on search engines. There is the option to take a 30 day free trial to see how it works for you, and after that it is a paid software, however worthwhile the investment if you want to make sure your website is working as it should be.

Mailchimp

Email campaigns still have a place in digital marketing, and email is a great way to reach out to your client database.  Mailchimp is a free email software to use up to a certain number of contacts and it has some great analytics. It will tell you exactly how many emails were delivered, what the open rate was, and how many people used the call to action.  There are some great templates that you can use to design your mailer, and you can also integrate your social media channels to increase your following there. The data can also be used as part of targeted Facebook ads, giving you more than one way to contact your audience.  Since GDPR has rolled out, you do however need to make sure that you are being compliant and contacting people who have opted in to your communications.

Most of these tools are completely free to use, at least on a trial basis – so there’s no reason why you can’t check them out and see what you think of them.  They will give you some great analysis as to where your campaign is at if you have already started it, and some insight as to what kind of improvements you can make.