The marketing toolset is always evolving
Platforms change, customers change their consumption habits, what was effective a year ago is likely to have less impact. Here are some of the tools I’ve used to simplify tasks and help teams become more efficient. Another good list of martech tools and also this list.
Market & Brand Insight/ Competitors
How to research competitors and target their customers. It includes tools such as Similarweb a way to find in-depth information about competitors’ websites. A great fast, inexpensive service for research from £500 upwards is Attest. Useful for creative research, segmentation, new products etc.
Creative
Unsplash offers free high res images, even for commercial use.
Pixabay is a great royalty free image bank.
Pixlr is an easy to use free image editing tool.
Canva a free creative platform that makes creating ads for social platforms, infographics and simple artwork super simple.
20dollarbanners is a subscription based banner shop for low priced banners e.g. $20 per banner.
Powtoon and Promo offer simple ways to self create animated videos for social channels. Paid alternatives include Goanimate $39 per month, or the more expensive Promoshin.
Content
Best read on how to produce content that actual works ‘Lean Content’.
Where to publish content after you’ve spent hours creating it.
BuzzSumo is a great content analysis tool. Use it to research the most socially engaging content for your topic so you know what works. It also includes brand and keyword monitoring, influencer and competitor research. Free and paid $99 per month pro version. A great how to use guide.
Use Ritetag to check the best #s to use to join relevant conversations and be heard.
Screencloud is a new service that allows you to easily manage all your screens in multiple locations from one central dashboard in real time.
CRM/ Marketing Automation
Salesforce is the market leader which I’ve implemented within multiple organisations, you’ll need support to make it work in your organisation. Active Campaign is very powerful for automated workflows. Hubspot a good user friendly alternative. Marketo and Eloqua enterprise level.
Mail-tester useful to score your emails on spammyness from 1-10.
Lemlist bulk send personalised emails such as adding prospect company logos.
B2B
Whoisvisiting or leadfeeder; tools that not only shows the names of companies who visited your site but also workflows them to sales/ customer service/marketing for follow up. Snov a great cold outreach automation platform tool including finding emails from social profiles.
Google Analytics – shows the names of visitors company branded IP addresses for free.
Marketing automation – lead acquisition and nurturing tools.
QWORY – B2B search engine to support lead generation.
Download details from every business in the UK from Companies House then use SIC codes to find your target industry.
Content Management/Multi Channel Management
The backbone of omni-channel is a flexible CMS, nowadays with predictive capability (AI), however, they take considerable time to set up. All of these are evolving their capabilities; Magento, Druple, Shopify, Episerver, Adobe. Sitecore is one of the most powerful end to end solutions I’ve seen along with IBM Digital Analytics (previously Coremetrics).
Personalisation/ Customer Journey Optimisation
Personalise or customise website content based on a whole range of attributes; user profiles, behaviours, user intent, products researches or external datasets like weather, driven by AI. Understand ‘why’ users are taking certain profitable or unprofitable journeys, why sales were up one day through an insight tool such as Contentsquare or
MouseflowMany of the following solutions deliver customisation across multiple channels. This is probably the most exciting area of martech today; Fresh Relevance, Dynamic Yield and Optimizely, Emarsys, Ometria. Personify focuses on the 95% of anonymous website users using intent not past behaviour to personalise. A useful table of personalisation software.
Planning
Linking brand perception to revenues – brand distinction vs central to your category, which one will pay off for your brand?
Segment Personas template and advice on how to develop personas and the pitfalls.
ROI template for $20.
Analytics
I‘m a big fan of Google for data reporting. Not only GA but Google Search Console, GA’s sibling which monitors your site performance in Google Search. Features include; locating 404s, analysis of top performing queries/landing pages, viewing who is linking to your site. I used Google Data Studio to set up board level company reporting recently, with database technical support from SoWhatAnalytics.
Outside of Google Analytics there are paid platforms that track customer behaviours and marketing investments across multiple data sources.
Audiense is a great free Twitter analytics tool; create graphs of follower interests, search on job titles and export data to Hootsuite to reach out.
Heapanalytics is different to the usual analytics which only track what you specified each tool to track. Instead this software tracks all web and app user behaviours retrospectively. Very powerful.
Klipfolio is a realtime cloud based dashboard reporting tool that pulls together data from most sources into your own designed dashboard(s). Great to see KPIs on the go and customisable for different internal audiences.
Tableau – Similar to Klipfolio but aimed at enterprise. It also pulls independent data sources into meaningful charts. A good way for marketing to provide customer insight to the rest of the organisation.
Alteryx is a platform that pulls together independent data from different systems in order to blend it together into meaningful statistics in infinite ways to gain insight. Runs predictive analysis in hours not days.
Website Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
Hotter is a free tool to see ‘what’ users are doing on your site. Create feedback forms, surveys, click tracks for heat mapping users along with analysing drop offs and conversion funnels. Crazyegg does similar.
SumoMe a simple to use growth platform that enables highly targeted messaging to support CRO. Also great at list building. Integrates well with many email providers like Mailchimp and HubSpot.
Kissmetrics another simple platform to grow customers using targeted messaging based on behaviours.
View old versions of websites at Wayback Machine.
Insight & Review Platforms
It’s critical to set up ‘listening’ processes to feed customer insights into strategy development. Brandwatch is a new style of brand monitoring solution. Behavioural Economics data shows how strongly reviews help motivate consumers to purchase. Ecommerce review platforms include; Baazarvoice, Feefo, Google, Yotpo (strong in pushing reviews out to social channels). In travel I’ve put in Guestrevu.
Loyalty
New loyalty tools such as Letyano are superior to simple card mechanics as the comms and offers can be tailored more easily to the individuals preferences and behaviours.This tool is an instant feedback tool for instant offers and has multiple brands on the app. Others ensure the user has a real time record of their points and activities.
Referral tools such as Mentionme and voucher solutions such as Voucherify support growth.
SEO
Answerthepublic is fantastic for keywords.
Scrapebox to harvest volumes of keywords, urls, scrape emails off websites.
Media Buying
Albert the most automated and sophisticated media optimisation tool.
TubeBuddy helps manage YouTube content by finding underserved content areas, find keywords, check competition levels before developing random video content.
Snip.ly a great free tool – take news content and put your ad over it then post on Twitter/ Linkedin/Facebook. Helps build email list.
Take part in Facebook groups like 4Networking, to engage target audience with useful content but join as a person not company. Encourage out of groups to social/website. Need likes/comments, invite audience to like FB page.
Instagram – stories is where the reach is currently. Map #s to content.