Best Marketing Tools [2021]

Looking for the best marketing tools?

Scott Brinkler from Chief MarTech reckoned there were about 8,000 marketing tools at the last count!

And it’s likely the list will keep growing if the past 10 years growth is anything to go by:

With so many tools to choose from, it’s easy to get lost in umpteen lists. That’s why we decided to create the ultimate list!

The list of marketing tools below is by no means exhaustive. It’s merely a “small” selection of the best marketing tools to help marketing teams create the right toolkit for their business.

Plus, it’s sorted into different categories so that you can hop to a particular section or peruse the whole list at your leisure.

Enjoy!

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Best Social Media Marketing Tools

Social media tools are used by individuals and teams of all sizes to increase brand awareness, manage workflows, and engage online communities through social media. Tools typically allow you to:

• Manage multiple platforms/accounts
• Plan social media content
• Publish social media posts
• Schedule social media posts
• Interact with communities
• Store content and archive posts

Buffer

Buffer is an easy-to-use social media management platform trusted by individuals, brands, and agencies to help social media marketers work more efficiently and effectively. It includes tools for publishing, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the global leader in social media management used by millions of individuals, brands, and organizations worldwide. It includes tools for social media monitoring, listening, publishing, analytics, and reporting.

Mention

Mention is a social listening and media monitoring platform that lets you easily track what is being said online about a brand or a product, get comprehensive industry analytics, and measure the impact of your marketing and PR activities.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that allows marketers to connect with audiences, streamline publishing workflows, collaborate in real-time, and gather actionable insights.

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Best Marketing Analytics Tools

Marketing analytics tools enable an organization to manage, evaluate, and control its marketing efforts by measuring performance. These tools can help businesses improve their return on investment (ROI) by identifying their effective marketing campaigns.

These tools typically allow you to:

• Collect data on marketing campaigns from various channels.
• Monitor marketing campaigns and targeted audiences.
• Analyze the results and compile marketing campaign insights.
• Visualize marketing campaign performance via a dashboard.

Here’s our Top 5:

Clicky

Clicky is a real-time analytics tool that makes it easy to monitor, analyze, and react to your website’s traffic and discover how people are using your site.

It filters out referrer spam and bots so that you get accurate data on every individual visitor, page view, and event. Plus, you can also view heat maps by page, visitor, or segment.

Databox

Databox helps you to track the performance of all of your data in one place. You can track progress towards your goals, visualize performance trends, make more informed decisions, collaborate, and report as you go using custom views and in-depth insight‌s ‌for‌ ‌each‌ ‌function‌ ‌in‌ ‌your‌ ‌organization.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool that provides the latest insights into how visitors arrived on your site, the amount of time they spent there, how they came to know your site, how they use your site, and how you can keep them coming back. Plus, you can measure sales and conversions and track UTM parameters.

MixPanel

Mixpanel is an excellent product analytics tool that helps companies measure the data that matters, make decisions fast, and build better products. Its powerful, self-serve product analytics allows you to engage, convert, and retain more users.

Supermetrics

Supermetrics is the #1 reporting automation tool for PPC, SEO, social, and web analytics. It helps digital marketers pull all their analytics data into one place, including spreadsheets like Google Sheets, Data Studio, Excel, and BigQuery, and data visualization platforms such as Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI for reporting and analysis.

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Best Content Marketing Tools

There are hundreds of content marketing tools that serve tons of different purposes, from content ideation to production, optimization, and promotion.

Here’s our Top 5:

AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a simple content search tool that allows marketers to get instant, raw search insights directly from their customers’ minds. The software uses Google autocomplete data to generate every useful phrase and question people ask around your keyword.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo provides insight into what content is working for any topic or competitor by analyzing hundreds of millions of pieces of content. You can see metrics like social shares, backlinks, and which influencers share any given piece of content.

Google Docs

Google Docs lets you create and edit text documents in your browser. Multiple people can work on a document simultaneously, with every change saved automatically, which makes it perfect for content marketing collaboration. Add-ons allow you to upload Google Docs directly to your CMS, such as HubSpot and WordPress.

Grammarly

Grammarly offers you detailed, real-time suggestions for improving word choice and tone, making sentences clearer, and fixing‌ ‌grammatical‌ ‌errors. Whether your team is writing emails, articles, or social media posts, Grammarly helps them produce work that reflects your brand.

WordPress

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) that allows you to host and build websites. It uses themes and plugins to customize the design and layout to fit your brand’s content. You can either self-host with WordPress.org or host your site via WordPress.com.

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Best Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing tools help marketers send commercial messages to groups of people via email. Typically, they let you:

• Design and build customized emails via HTML/CSS or WYSIWYG editors.
• Preview and send test emails.
• Store, track, segment, and manage email contact lists (subscribers).
• Provide campaign-based reporting and analytics.

Here’s our Top 5:

AWeber

AWeber is a market leader of small business email marketing software. It helps you quickly build responsive landing pages, load and manage contacts, send amazing emails, deliver push notifications instantly,‌ ‌and‌ ‌analyze‌ ‌results‌ ‌– all without‌ ‌having‌ ‌to‌ ‌be‌ ‌a‌ ‌tech‌ ‌whiz.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact provides small businesses and nonprofits with all the tools they need to market ‌ideas,‌ ‌build‌ ‌a‌ ‌professional‌ ‌brand‌ ‌online,‌ ‌attract‌ ‌customers,‌ ‌and‌ ‌sell‌ ‌more‌ ‌products. Its email software lets you create professional emails, turn ecommerce leads into contacts and loyal customers.

iContact

iContact helps brands of all stages and sizes get results with their email marketing. Its easy-to-use tools help you design beautiful emails, personalize your messages, automate your communications, and grow your audience.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that ‌helps‌ ‌small‌ ‌businesses‌ ‌grow‌ ‌faster. Besides sending marketing emails and automated messages, you can create targeted ad campaigns, build landing pages, send postcards, manage reporting and analytics, and sell online.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is an all-in-one marketing platform to help you engage with your contacts and build stronger customer relationships by sending targeted and relevant messages.

In addition to email marketing, you can send transactional messages via email and SMS. There are also tools for marketing automation, SMS marketing, Chat, Facebook Ads, and a CRM to keep all your customer details in one place.

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Best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools

Search engine optimization (SEO) tools are designed to improve the ranking of content in search engine results pages (SERPs) organically. The software typically lets you perform one or more of the following:

• Research competitors to unearth their organic keywords and backlink strategies.
• Research keywords and see how difficult‌ ‌it‌ ‌would‌ ‌be‌ ‌to‌ ‌rank.
• Research content to discover the most popular content on any topic and find the best ideas.
• Optimize content using AI, semantic SEO, and automated‌ ‌SEO.
• Track your search rankings along with your competitors’.
• Find the strongest backlink opportunities in your niche.
• Audit websites to discover what SEO issues they have and learn how to fix them.
• Generate performance reports on optimization-related metrics.

Here’s our Top 5:

Ahrefs

Ahrefs’ all-in-one SEO toolset can help you with competitor research, link building, keyword research, content research, rank tracking, and website audits.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console gives you insight into your site’s search traffic and performance, allows you to identify and resolve any issues, and makes sure it ranks in Google.

Moz Pro

Moz Pro is an all-in-one suite of SEO tools that lets you crawl and audit your site(s), discover link building opportunities, optimize content, analyze competitors, research keywords, and create custom reports.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler tool that helps you improve onsite SEO by extracting, analyzing, and auditing data for common SEO issues, such as broken links and duplicate meta descriptions, page titles, and content.

SE Ranking

SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO toolset that’s perfect for small business owners and agencies. It includes tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, keyword suggestion and grouping, keyword position tracking, backlink monitoring, website auditing, and professional reporting.

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Best Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tools

Search engine marketing (SEM) tools help you manage and optimize paid search campaigns activities, such as targeting valuable keywords, optimizing ad copy, images, and landing pages, plus ‌tracking ‌key‌ ‌metrics.

Here’s our Top 5:

Google Ads Editor

Google Ads Editor is a free, downloadable app that lets you create, edit, and preview multiple ads offline in draft mode before they go live. You can also track important campaign metrics, like click-through rate, cost, position, and conversion metrics.

Google Keyword Planner

The Google Keyword Planner is a useful SEM tool for generating keyword ideas and getting volume and CPC estimates right down to the country, state, and city levels. Once you’ve identified the keywords you want, you can add them to your Google advertising plan.

Optmyzr

Optmyzr is one of the best SEM tools available, especially for agencies managing various clients. You can launch, track, and manage multiple PPC campaigns on the Google and Bing search platforms.

Semrush

Semrush is an all-in-one marketing platform. Its Advertising Toolkit has all the research, analysis, and planning functionality you need to build profitable SEM campaigns. You can find the best keywords for every PPC campaign and monitor your competitors’ ad copy and landing pages.

SpyFu

SpyFu is a PPC competitive intelligence tool that lets you see which keywords your competitors are buying on Google Ads and check out which ad variations they’ve tested. Plus, you can monitor your PPC rankings on Google and Bing.

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Best Marketing Automation Tools

Marketing automation tools automate marketing actions or tasks, streamline marketing workflows, and measure marketing campaign outcomes. These platforms provide automation features across multiple marketing channels, including email, social media, SMS, and digital ads.

Marketing automation tools usually come with advanced email marketing features, such as A/B testing, spam filter testing, scheduling, and segmentation,  plus extensive analytics features to measure the success of a‌ ‌campaign‌ ‌across‌ ‌segments‌ ‌and‌ ‌channels.

Here’s our Top 5:

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign includes hundreds of pre-built automations combining personalized email marketing, powerful marketing automation, and a smart CRM. There are also 300+ integrations, including Shopify, Square, Facebook, and Salesforce. Brands of all sizes use its comprehensive segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat, and text.

Drip

Drip’s comprehensive tracking, hyper-segmentation, and robust email marketing automation allows marketers to build stronger and more profitable relationships with their customers and scale as their business grows.

Intercom

Intercom is a Conversational Relationship Platform (CRP) consisting of a business messenger, a suite of management tools, a customer database, and further integrations with over 250 apps.

In short, the platform has everything you need to build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences across the customer journey – without overwhelming your team.

Marketo

Marketo Engage is transforming marketing automation by bringing together customer data, content, automation, and analytics. Marketing and sales teams can use the platform to coordinate interactions with customers that are‌ ‌both personalized and measurable ‌–‌ ‌and‌ ‌do‌ ‌it‌ ‌with‌ ‌efficiency‌ ‌and‌ ‌scale.

Omnisend

Omnisend’s email and SMS marketing platform helps ecommerce brands increase their sales on autopilot, converting their customers with custom-made, highly-relevant emails and texts.

Its full integration with ecommerce platforms, pre-built automation workflows, and intuitive, no-code editing make it a dream to use.

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Best Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Tools

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy that targets companies rather than individual customers. ABM software automates and reduces the time-consuming process of identifying prospects and devoting the appropriate resources to nurture the most promising accounts.

Here’s our Top 5:

Demandbase

Demandbase’s ABM platform includes a full suite of tools that helps B2B marketers find, engage, and convert accounts into customers. It connects all customer data in one place, for a unified approach to account-based sales and marketing, across multiple channels.

LeanData

LeanData provides a set of products powered by Salesforce for marketing, sales, and revenue management with lead-to-account matching at its core. With LeanData, sales reps receive only the leads they need, so they can close more deals and drive more revenue faster than before.

Terminus

Terminus is a full-service ABM platform that helps marketers target the right accounts with dynamic data, engage them with unified multi-channel campaigns, and access the performance metrics of those campaigns. Understanding these reports enables you to target accounts more effectively.

Triblio

Triblio’s ABM platform specializes in the growth of account pipelines and combines account-based advertising, web personalization, and sales activation tools to optimize campaigns across multiple channels. These campaign tools and analytics run on a proprietary AI-powered purchase intent engine that scores the level of interest each account has in making a purchase.

6sense

The 6sense Account Engagement Platform helps B2B organizations achieve predictable revenue growth via the power of AI, big data, and machine learning. It equips revenue teams with everything they need to know about their buyers so that they can generate more opportunities, get into those opportunities sooner, increase the deal size, and compete and win more often.

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Best Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tools

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) software provides testing and visualization tools to help you improve user experience and increase conversion rates. CRO tools, such as  A/B testing software, Heat maps, and Landing page builders, work alongside other digital analytics software to track visitor behavior.

Here’s our Top 5:

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg gives you access to five different types of heatmaps, a visitor recordings/session replay tool, A/B testing, and user surveys. It’s a complete CRO package to understand what your web visitors are doing and transform your business by improving the user experience.

Hotjar

Hotjar’s behavioral analytics software helps you understand how users are using your site, collect user feedback, and convert more site visitors into clients. When you understand user behavior better, you can make the right changes, improve the user experience (UX) and improve conversions.

Optimizely

Optimizely is a leading experience optimization platform. Its AI-powered personalization and experimentation platform provides A/B testing, multivariate testing, and server-side testing tools, plus website personalization and feature toggle capabilities.

Google Optimize

Google Optimize lets you make website changes and set up an A/B test in minutes to see which version works best. You can then deliver a tailored version to each customer and your business. Plus, it’s now also integrated with Google Analytics and Google AdWords.

Unbounce

Unbounce helps you convert more of your visitors into leads, sales, and customers. The drag-and-drop builder lets you create and publish your own landing pages without needing a developer. And the conversion intelligence insights ensure you have the best campaign performance every time.

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Best Public Relations (PR) Tools

Public Relations software allows PR professionals to collaborate effectively with contacts, as well as plan, manage, distribute, and track campaigns. Some tools may also provide media monitoring functionality, competitive media analysis, and broadcast solutions to help PR professionals make knowledgeable decisions.

Here’s our Top 5:

Brand24

Brand24 is a practical, affordable, and user-friendly PR tool. It helps agencies and brands track and analyze conversations around‌ ‌their‌ ‌clients,‌ ‌brands,‌ ‌products,‌ ‌and‌ ‌competitors.

Brand24 enables its users to monitor their online reputation, prevent a PR crisis, track the results of their campaigns, find brand ambassadors, reach out to influencers, engage communities, improve social customer service, and monitor their competition.

Cision

Cision is one of the best-known and most feature-rich PR platforms around. It recently acquired Brandwatch – a global leader in social listening and digital consumer intelligence – to strengthen its market position.

Cision provides advanced distribution, tracking, and analysis features to ensure you never miss a mention or fail to prove the value of your PR efforts. You can also run content amplification campaigns through the site so that your editorials and content appear in recommended sites.

Meltwater

Meltwater’s media intelligence platform gives organizations the information advantage to access billions of online conversations and extract relevant insights to manage their brands strategically. It allows teams to interact on social media, curate content, track competitors and emerging stories, and measure the results of their efforts.

Newswire

Newswire is a top-rated press release and media distribution platform that lets you distribute your news to traditional and digital media outlets, making it easy to launch and track effective press release campaigns.

Prowly

Prowly lets PR professionals manage media relations more effectively while saving time on routine tasks. With this user-friendly and modern tool, you can find relevant media contacts easily and organize them into‌ ‌a‌ ‌PR‌ ‌CRM,‌ ‌create‌ ‌visual‌ ‌press‌ ‌releases,‌ ‌send‌ ‌personalized‌ ‌email‌ ‌pitches,‌ ‌and‌ ‌maintain‌ ‌journalist-friendly‌ ‌newsrooms.

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Best SMS Marketing Tools

Companies use SMS marketing software or business text messaging software to coordinate and execute marketing campaigns via SMS (Short-Message‌ ‌Service). Using software like this builds brand loyalty and engagement by sending customers timely, personalized messages.

Here’s our Top 5:

Attentive

Attentive is the most comprehensive personalized text messaging solution boasting 99% open rates, over 30% click-through rates, and more than 25x ROI. Using real-time behavioral data, Attentive automatically sends engaging text messages to each subscriber at every step of the customer lifecycle.

EZ Texting

EZ Texting is a cloud-based messaging platform that allows businesses of all sizes in the U.S. and Canada to reach and engage their mobile audiences. You can use it for sales and promotions, alerts and notifications, lead generation, and customer service.

Podium

Podium’s Interaction Management platform uses messaging to make it convenient to interact with your leads, customers, and team at every customer touchpoint. You can message your leads and customers, get reviews and feedback, collect payment, and communicate easily with your team, all in one easy-to-use inbox.

Postscript

Thousands of Shopify stores trust Postscript to manage their SMS Marketing. You can grow a TCPA-compliant subscriber list, use your Shopify data to have two-way conversations with customers, create targeted text marketing campaigns and text marketing automations, such as abandoned cart recovery, shipping notifications, welcome series, and loyalty offers, to give your revenue an immediate bump.

Twilio

Twilio enables software developers to use its web service APIs to programmatically make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and handle other communication tasks.

With Twilio’s API-based SMS services, you can send and receive text messages globally, deliver SMS alerts, notifications, and reminders, and provide customer care through two-way SMS interactions.

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Best Local Marketing Tools

Local marketing software comprises tools for local SEO, local listing management, and online reputation management.

Local SEO software helps businesses get listed in the Local 3-Pack (aka Map Pack) at the top of a Google results page. It may also send accurate listings to search engines, track local search rankings, monitor online reviews, and optimize a company’s Google My Business profile.

Local listing management software provides a central hub for managing and updating location data, such as name, address, phone numbers (NAP), store hours, and menus, on customer-facing platforms.

Online reputation management software helps brands track and engage with local customer reviews on various platforms.

Here’s our Top 5:

BrightLocal

BrightLocal is a local marketing platform that puts you in control of SEO, business listings, and reputation management. Small companies, multi-location businesses, and agencies use it to monitor existing local citations and identify new opportunities, track local search rankings, and manage reviews across multiple websites.

GatherUp

GatherUp provides everything you need to gather, manage, and market your customer feedback, online reviews, and testimonials in one centralized platform. You can save time by creating workflows to automate feedback requests, surveys, and review requests. And you can also share attention-grabbing images of your best feedback and reviews on your preferred social media channels.

Moz Local

Moz Local helps boost your brand’s local visibility and ensures your listings are correct, consistent, and visible on every directory site. Both small businesses and large enterprises use Moz Local to identify, confirm, and delete duplicate listings and manage reviews on the most popular sites from one central dashboard.

Whitespark

Whitespark’s local SEO toolset helps you build citations, track rankings, and earn reviews to fast-track your success in local search. You can use the Local Citation Finder to track your existing citations, discover new opportunities, and identify the citations your competitors already have (that you’d like, too). And you can use the Reputation Builder to increase your online reviews, customer feedback, and testimonials.

Yext

The Yext Search Experience Cloud platform keeps your online business information accurate and consistent. It helps brands provide correct, up-to-date, official answers to consumer questions across the entire search ecosystem from your website to search engines, voice assistants, maps, apps, chatbots, directories, and social networks.

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Best Marketing Tools in a Nutshell

Marketing tools come in all shapes and sizes to meet the requirements of different marketing teams. Make sure you take the time to evaluate which software is right for your situation.