Regardless of the fact that you are a one-man-army CEO or a member of a marketing team, eventually, you’ll start looking for ways to improve further. Who wouldn’t want a lean money-making machine? The goal of this article is to provide you the best tools out there that every CEO, CMO, PM, or marketer should be aware of.
If you prefer slides instead of reading articles, we’ve got you covered:
Table of Contents
Lead generators
A lead is someone who is already interested in a product or service of some form. It also follows that a lead is someone who has not only heard about your company but some basic communication has been established between your company and the person.
Default newsletter sign-ups do not count as leads, as in most cases they do not represent a specific sales opportunity. If the person who has signed up reaches out to you, only then can he/she be counted as a lead.
With that being said, a decent e-mail marketing automation software is always a must-have tool in every online marketer’s arsenal to generate leads for your company.
Sendicate
Need more customization options? Should you be like TinyLetter just know more? Then Sendicate is the solution. When designing your e-mail, you can choose from simpler blocks (columns, headings, pictures, videos).
Testing is facilitated by the ability to segment the address list. Send a shorter email, and some of them a longer version of the email. You can also use some elegant built-in themes and check the appearance of your mail before sending it. If we are unable to complete the design of an email, we can continue to work quickly on drafts.
MailerLite
Mailerlite’s templates, while unique, look similar to other competitors’ templates. There is no limit to any element of the template, so you can change the header, signature, background colors, and any content.
Drag-and-Drop lets you create your own custom email template in 1 minute. We can also use useful add-ons (Dynamic Countdown Timer, Embed Product Data, Add Video, etc.) so your email can be really interactive.
SEO
If you are doing search engine optimization for your website, and you want to get more visitors from Google organically, then the first step is always keyword research.
You need to find keywords that are relevant to your product/service and have a good amount of monthly search volume. There are monthly fee programs like Ahrefs or SEMrush, which have a monthly cost of approximately $ 100, and their free version is quite limited when it comes to keyword research. The good news is that you have options to get the job done for free!
Google Keyword Planner
Kind of self-explanatory but Google has its own keyword research tool called Keyword Planner. The Google Keyword Planner, which is accessible to anyone within Google Ads, has been a trusty companion for marketers since the beginning. The only drawback is that it works with a relatively large spread.
For example, if you would search for the term “air jordans” the results can range anywhere from 100k-1M. The problem is that the exact values can be anywhere between 100,001 and 1,000,000.
Despite this minor drawback, it’s a reliable and very intuitive tool in every online marketer’s arsenal.
Ubersuggest
Neil Patel is a professional in online marketing who bought Ubersuggest and integrated it into his own website.
He even stated in one of his blog posts that he will develop the tool like the two paid sites mentioned above and will have features, but it will still be completely free and you don’t even have to sign up.
What I personally like about Ubersuggest is its reliability and accuracy. Since it gets its data directly from Google, you can be assured that the data is as good as it gets, and because it provides you exact numbers rather than ranges, you can make smarter decisions. On the image above you can see the same phrase “air jordans” typed into the tool with similar results. However, now you see that the search volume is 165,000 instead of 100k-1M.
User experience (UX): Heatmaps, Session recordings, A/B testing
The optimization of websites to generate more traffic is an increasingly important issue as the share of online shopping in retail traffic is rapidly increasing. Heatmapping, session replay solutions and A / B testing tools also provide support in making business decisions. Since various web analytics services are not mutually exclusive, collecting quality data can be a perfect complement to quantitative data. With full online web analytics services, you can achieve rapid growth in conversion.
Capturly
First, you need user data, then based on what you’ve collected, you might want to make changes.
We can retrieve a lot of useful data from our website using traditional website analytics tools but there are often blurry patches that Capturly can respond to.
Capturly seeks to answer questions such as:
- why am I lacking conversions on my website?
- what makes an “almost” customer bounce off and leave the shopping cart behind?
- how do my visitors consume the contents of my website?
- what are the most annoying parts of a form on my website?
Optimizely
Optimizely is one of the most popular tools among CRO professionals. Those who already use Optimizely have insight and can verify that it is one of the best tools out there for A/B testing.
It scales well, which means it’s a great choice for larger companies or teams who can take advantage of its many features at a higher price. In addition to standard A / B tests, more experienced users can test personalized content or referral system logic, while Stats Engine makes the job of the beginner testers a lot easier.
Project management
No matter what situation you are in, let it be a startup phase or a well-oiled online business, you must know that timing is everything. In other words, “time is money friend”. Project management tools are your best friends when it comes to saving that precious time. They prevent you and your team from going off track and burn money on unnecessary processes.
Asana
Asana is a task management system designed primarily to support real-time interaction between teams. It allows users to visualize their goals, prioritize their tasks, schedule them, and keep track of project progress. Thanks to the calendar function, team tasks can be displayed on the screen instantly in graphical form. Last year it was supplemented with an Android application.
I can safely say that Asana is one of the most popular project management applications, probably due to the fact that for up to 15 users it’s completely free. Perhaps not surprising given that its designer and developer is Facebook’s co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
Their Basic plan is 100% free and it’s a great fit for individuals or teams just getting started with project management.
Trello
Trello is a so-called Kanban software. Kanban is a project management methodology associated with former Toyota Vice President, Taiichi Ohno. It provides users with the ability to move task cards, which is a visual representation of project scheduling. Free for unlimited users but only up to 10MB per file attachment.
It’s just fun to use. Just look at the cards and see the progress immediately. The front of the cards only has the task name, but by clicking on the cards you will find all the information about who is working on what, for how long, and what percentage of readiness is available. With the calendar feature, anyone can see the status of the project.
Because of its simplicity, it lacks some key features. For example, you cannot see a breakdown of a to-do list by a user and due date.
Wrapping Up
For the sake of simplicity I have arranged the tools into 5 categories of online marketing which you are sure to use in your business or if not, I will show you why you should incorporate these into your online marketing strategy starting now.