Modern companies simply can’t grow without digital marketing. That might sound dramatic, but it’s an essential truth that all digital marketers know and understand. A strong tech stack not only encourages growth but saves valuable time, enables connection with customers, and supports smart decision-making.

In what seems like an endless sea of tools and platforms, it can be hard to know what to invest in. You know you need tools - but having the right tools is essential. What are the must-haves for growing companies?

This list was compiled by our experts and offers guidance on which tools can make the biggest difference. Here are the ten best tools for effective digital marketers.

The Right Tech Stack Matters

A digital marketer is only as effective as their tools. When so much of modern marketing depends on digital platforms, it’s essential that you have the right tech stack in place to support your efforts and achieve your goals.

There are many reasons why an effective tech stack makes marketers more effective, but most of them boil down to the following:

1. Efficiency - A well-chosen tech stack can automate time-consuming tasks, such as data analysis, reporting, and campaign management. This allows marketers to focus on strategic decision-making and more creative aspects of their work, improving overall effectiveness.
2. Data-driven insights - A robust tech stack enables marketers to collect, analyze, and interpret large amounts of data. By leveraging advanced analytics tools, marketers can gain valuable insights about customer behavior, preferences, and trends. This data-driven approach helps optimize marketing strategies and improve business outcomes.
3. Personalization - Marketers need to leverage customer data and segmentation tools to deliver highly personalized and targeted campaigns. By tailoring messages and offers to specific customer segments, they can enhance customer experience and increase engagement.
4. Automation and scalability - Automation is a game-changer in today’s marketing landscape. A well-integrated tech stack allows for automation of repetitive tasks, such as email marketing, social media scheduling, and lead nurturing. This automation not only saves time but also enables marketers to scale their efforts and reach a wider audience without increasing manual workload.
5. Collaboration and communication - A modern tech stack often includes collaboration and communication tools that enable seamless teamwork and coordination among marketing teams. These tools facilitate efficient project management, brainstorming, and content creation, leading to better collaboration and improved productivity.

Simply put, a well-designed tech stack empowers digital marketers to streamline their workflows, make data-driven decisions, deliver personalized experiences, automate tasks, and enhance collaboration - all of which will drive better marketing results.

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10 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools

So, just what are the tools that make up the “right” tech stack? That answer will be different for every company and will depend on several factors like goals, budget, bandwidth, product offerings, and much more. In general, though, here are some of the tools that a majority of digital marketers will find hugely helpful.

1. Google Data Studio

A powerful data visualization tool that allows users to convert raw data into informative, easy-to-understand reports and dashboards. It's particularly valuable for its seamless integration with other Google products like Analytics, Ads, and Sheets, as well as third-party data sources. The platform supports real-time collaboration, enabling teams to work together on reports, enhancing productivity and decision-making. Its user-friendly interface allows for easy customization of reports to fit specific needs without requiring advanced technical skills. Dashthis is a similar tool that offers a more streamlined, automated report generation process, which can save time and simplify the sharing of comprehensive marketing reports, making it an excellent alternative.

2. Audiense

Social listening is a key tool for building out better marketing, but many brands don’t take the time (or have the tools) to do so. Audiense helps marketers to practice social listening in order to identify trends and potential customers. You can also use the tools to identify and segment various social media audiences. This can add real value when creating highly targeted campaigns or customer personas. By digging into demographics, different personality traits, and customer sentiment, you might be surprised by what you can learn and apply. Audiense is particularly tuned into X (formerly Twitter), so it’s great for both B2B and B2C companies who are more active on the platform.

3. Respona

Traffic from search engines is crucial in today’s online landscape. Organic traffic, in particular, is meaningful to any brand who wants to expand their reach. Link-building is an essential component of SEO, and there is certainly a science to it that can be difficult to master. That’s where Respona comes in. With Respona, you can streamline your outreach process in 4 simple steps. Whether you want to generate backlinks from reputable sites, book interviews with popular podcasts, get more press from publications, or recruit affiliate partners, you can use Respona’s templates and AI-powered tools to make the process simple. Many marketers say that what used to require multiple tools can all be done through Respona, and there are several ways to automate key processes. We are particular fans of the plug-and-play templates with step-by-step instructions to build compelling campaigns.

4. Shift

This innovative browser integrates all of your web apps into one location, resulting in a seamless online experience. It’s valuable for anyone who spends time online, but it’s particularly helpful for people who tend to visit many different apps or websites. We all know that digital marketers wear a lot of hats and must manage several tactics at the same time, and Shift can help them view all of the necessary applications that help them to do their job. Specialized Workspaces mean that you can set up a browser experience specific to different campaigns, clients, etc. For example, one Workspace may contain Slack, Instagram, and Gmail for one particular client account and TikTok, Trello, and Outlook for a different client. In this way, you can customize your work environment to the exact tools that you need - without all of the logging in and out. This provides valuable time savings and helps users avoid errors and quickly access all of their most important tools in one place.

5. Sprout Social

A comprehensive social media management platform, Sprout was designed to help businesses organize all of their content and a calendar in one spot. In that way, digital marketers can organize, schedule, and publish their assets, as well as view analytics about their performance. Sprout offers a full suite of analytics tools that take the guessing game out of content creation and optimization. Plus, they offer a Smart Inbox that provides a birds-eye view of all of your social messages so that you can respond in a timely manner and better understand the sentiment around your brand. In general, Sprout Social offers a variety of tools that marketers will find valuable in putting together effective content plans and gaining insights that can help with all of their digital efforts.

6. HubSpot

Most digital marketers are already familiar with HubSpot, but it’s always worth a reminder about how valuable this tool can be. Known for its CRM and inbound marketing capabilities, HubSpot recently launched an email marketing platform as well. It’s worth exploring the HubSpot email tools since they are integrated with other HubSpot products and offer impressive deliverability on top of simple-to-use functionality. HubSpot also offers a “free forever” CRM option and loads of other popular marketing tools that savvy professionals rely on. Users can take advantage of 2,000 email sends per month, along with contact lists, drag-and-drop email building, and several ready-made templates to make creating campaigns a breeze. Another great thing about HubSpot is the number of integrations it offers. This means marketers can bring a lot of their tools together to share insights and create, manage, and track campaign activity.

7. Moosend

Speaking of email, for those looking for a robust but affordable email platform, this one is a winner. Moosend is very user-friendly and simple for companies who are beginning to build out their email list. Best for small to midsize organizations who are early on in their marketing journey, Moosend offers codeless campaigns, simple automation, and intuitive reporting all in one platform. However, they also offer an Enterprise plan that is trusted by larger brands like Vogue or Sephora. There are also other capabilities, like landing page features, including mobile popups and countdown timers. There is a free trial that users can take advantage of for 30 days. Using this, marketers can explore all of the features and functionality available. Then, they can upgrade to a paid plan (either Pro or Enterprise).

8. Ahrefs

Did you know over half of all website traffic comes from search queries? That is why marketers can get really hung up on SEO. Ahrefs is the gold standard when it comes to brainstorming keyword ideas and finding opportunities to rank. Use the platform’s site explorer to check any URL's top organic keywords while also estimating how much traffic a competitor receives for any given term. You can also view a site’s top-performing content and sources of backlinks. This makes it a fantastic tool for researching similar sites and developing content that can keep up with your competition.

9. Optimizely

If a significant portion of your brand’s revenue comes from online activity, then you need to pay special attention to conversion rates. Everything you can do to keep people on the page longer and direct them to take another action is a step in the right direction of adding to your bottom line. Optimizely is a great tool that can help with landing page experiments and audience segmentation. Use the platform to test major or minor edits to your webpages in order to improve conversion rates and improve the user experience. They also offer a content management system that helps marketers to plan, create, and publish eye-catching content. E-commerce marketers find the suite of tools quite valuable, as they can use them to create personalized experiences that are more likely to convert.

10. Datanyze

Finding and connecting with new leads in a B2B atmosphere isn’t easy - but your sales goals depend on it. It’s not always easy to gather the necessary information to build out contact lists and profiles, but this tool can help significantly. You can view a variety of contact information such as email addresses, phone numbers, LinkedIn profiles, and more gathered from a variety of sources. You can also export files directly into Excel to be uploaded into your preferred CRM system; users say that Datanyze is affordable, accurate, and innovative. You can try it for free and see how the added information can improve your sales pipeline, and then there are multiple paid plans to meet a variety of needs.

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Honorable Mentions: Other Helpful Tools

The tools we mentioned are great for almost any digital marketer. That being said, there are plenty of other options for more specific tasks and functions. Here are some of the tools we suggest exploring if you want to take certain parts of your marketing mix to the next level.

Loomly

This tool is great for small teams who need to organize and collaborate on content. Take advantage of built-in calendars, deadlines, and workflows that can make coming up with new ideas and scheduling content simple. Users appreciate the clean and intuitive interface as well as the affordability, which makes it ideal for smaller teams or those just getting started.

Clearscope

For search engine marketers, this tool is a helpful addition for capitalizing on keyword opportunities as well as optimizing existing content. Content writers in particular find it a great resource for recommended keywords, readability scores, and heading suggestions. Whether you’re writing from scratch or just refreshing current content, the tools offered on Clearscope are a writer’s best friend.

Hotjar

For people who are curious about how users interact with their website, Hotjar is incredibly insightful. Using heatmaps, you can get a real-time visual of your visitors’  actions and behaviors on your website. Hotjar also offers actual video recordings of your visitor’s journey, so that you can literally see areas for improvement and optimization.

Shift: A Digital Marketer’s Best Sidekick

Shift is the first app-integrated browser. It streamlines your digital life into a single, intuitive view. Known for convenience and speed, Shift ensures that all of the accounts, profiles, and tools you rely on are intuitively within reach. Plus, Shift eliminates the need for searching, opening, and logging into accounts, which allows users to quickly manage their digital lives with ease. Shift was designed differently from other browsers and offers these powerful features that make overall online management easier:

• Seamless App integration -  Choose from over 1,500 integrated apps and connect each of your accounts for convenient access.
• Epic Search - Search across all of your accounts, apps, files, and tools to find exactly what you’re looking for, all in a single search.
• Unified Calendar - Sync each of your calendars into one convenient view.
• Bookmarks Manager - Organize and save your most-used websites into a focused and customizable bookmarks bar.
• Notifications Management - Customize notification settings to schedule quiet hours, mute alerts, or show/hide unread badges for focused browsing.
• Email Management -  Manage all of your email accounts across Gmail, Outlook, and Office 365 in one centralized window.
• Workspaces - Whether it’s for work or personal, Shift organizes your apps, accounts, tabs, and bookmarks into dedicated workspaces for focused browsing.

In particular, users find that the enhanced notification management and Workspace offering can really transform the way they use the internet. Shift makes it easy to implement some of the important best practices that can reduce app clutter. For example, one of the most annoying aspects of today’s online landscape is being exposed to too many notifications, which can limit productivity. With Shift, you can streamline notifications so that you get them all in one place and only in the way that you want them to appear. Shift makes it easy to customize the notifications that you get from various platforms so that they can actually be helpful rather than cumbersome.

A smart digital marketer with the right tech stack at their disposal is nearly unstoppable. If you choose the right platforms, you can create compelling campaigns, automate a ton of tasks, and discover insights that can help you grow your business. This list of digital marketing must-haves is a great place to start exploring your newest tool. Make sure to follow our blog to keep up with timely advice on all things tech.

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