Some of the tedious processes in a marketing campaign, such as sending emails or communication, can now be done through automation, can be centralized, and be made efficient. Startups and small businesses looking to grow in the digital marketplace need marketing apps that could help you gather valuable data like social media trends, audience feedback, website traffic, and more.
Plenty of marketing tools and software online right now handle every aspect of marketing projects and even beyond. But you don't have to scour online to get the necessary apps for promoting business. What we have is a list that encompasses every aspect of marketing tactics that you will ever need to lead the digital marketplace, no matter the size of your company.
Canva - Great Graphics, Simple Tool
If you need creative graphics for marketing purposes without the skills, or a person skilled in graphic design, Canva is your best shot.
Save time creating blog images and compelling presentations when you use Canva, which has an extensive library of stock elements and incredible graphics templates encompassing a wide range of marketing tactics like advertising assets, social media posts, and blog images. Its interface is straightforward and newbie-friendly since you can simply drag and drop the elements and edit the templates, like colors.
However, experienced graphic designers will find Canva limited in its creative control, especially those with experience with raster graphics editors like Adobe Photoshop. Moreover, if you opt for its free version, some of the better templates available in Canva will only be available for its paid version.
Its paid version, however, allows for much easier editing with its Magic Resize and automatically matches the video footage assets to soundtracks powered by AI. The paid version starts at $15 monthly and increases with the number of users and features added.
So, all in all, Canva is a proven and tested tool for quick and professional-level-looking graphic designs for your marketing campaigns. It is excellent for small business owners who are on a tight budget and still exploring its brand style guide.
Slack - Business Communications Nexus
Communication is critical in any business setting, and Slack allows it to be centralized and organized, as the is essentially a messaging/forum focusing on project management and workplace administration for businesses. How it helps, the marketing teams is how it makes it easy to collaborate with someone in real-time.
Moreover, it allows integrations to other workplace and marketing tools like Trello, allowing for a more seamless and efficient work process for the marketing team and beyond.
Someone might notice the similar aspect between Slack and Discord and wonder why people have to use Slack instead of Discord when the latter is free and essentially does the same thing. As mentioned, Slack focuses on workplace aa, and thus companies must have control over the communication channels, policies, and rules.
Discord is essentially closer to a public website because even though Discord servers can be made private, Discord-wide policies may conflict with companies, particularly regarding privacy.
Simply put, Slack gives better control to the end-users and companies than Discord.
Slack offers a free tier plan and a Pro and Business tier that costs $7.25 and $12.50 a month, respectively but offers premium features like secure collaboration with outside organizations, unlimited integrations, and 24/7 support.
Mailchimp - Everything the Marketers Need about Emails
Email marketing campaigns remains one of the strongest choices for marketing projects. Generally, it increases conversion rate since focusing on the target audience who will likely purchase a product or service reduces costs in marketing campaigns.
The problem is that marketing effort through emails is difficult. Certain expertise is needed to craft the best email that gets your desired response. Also, the tedious process of gathering the valuable email list for the newsletter will make the process look daunting. But it doesn't have to be - Mailchimp can help you.
Mailchimp provides a marketing app that automates emails and creates targeted ad campaigns. This service is significant to online businesses looking to take advantage of things like abandoned shopping cart rates, as this provides a valuable list of potential customers stuck at the bottom of the sales funnel due to purchasing process complications like payment method issues.
Mailchimp provides a Free plan for those who want to try it out first, and paid versions, Essential, Standard, and Premium that start at $13 a month, which offer exclusive and important features around email marketing strategies like Content Optimizer, Advanced Segmentation, Automated Customer Journey, and Email Scheduling.
Trello - Make your Project Management Easier
Marketing campaigns involve much work and tracking them individually, especially if time is against you. You might get complications when things don't go in order or on time. That is where Trello comes in.
It is a project management app that organizes the workflow of your marketing team and beyond through an easy-to-use and innovative dashboard that can be segmented across different work processes depending on your project roadmap and can be viewed on any mobile device. Moreover, it integrates other popular tools like Google Drive and Slack for a more seamless operation.
Trello has a free version that already has useful features like 2-factor authentification, unlimited activity log, and Power-ups per board. But if your marketing teams are looking to get the most out of the Trello, Standard, Premium, and Enterprise plan, starting at $5 a month per user if billed annually, provides services like saved searches, workspace views as calendar or table, admin and security features, simple data export, power-up administration, multi-board guests, Free SSO and user provisioning with Atlassian Access, and more.
Hotjar - See What Website Visitors See
Do you wonder where your website visitors usually are? What page do they watch the most? Which call-to-action clicked the most? Your marketing is probably looking to find the answers, but you don't have to do extensive research for that when Hotjar does it for you.
Hotjar is a popular website behavior analytics tool that records visitor behavior on your site. It tracks where a visitor clicks your website, what button users tend to repeat click (e.g., if the button is not working, also called rage clicks), and the page scrolls through heatmaps.
Knowing these trackable and measurable behaviors allows you to get actionable insights and find gaps in the website design to improve your website response speed and efficiency, which translates to a higher conversion rate.
You can get 35 daily sessions with Hotjar in its free version, which gives you the heatmaps you need for your data insights. You can get their premium features like segmenting data, app integrations, frustration, and confusion signals, site metrics, a dedicated customer success manager, and priority support, which starts at $32 a month.
Hootsuite - A Handy Facebook Ads Manager and More
It's a no-brainer that big and small business owners use social media sites for their marketing campaigns or simply to build brand awareness. It's cheaper, quick to create, and provides valuable insights from your audience's feedback, and reaction, with a reach that spans globally. Hootsuite saw your opportunity, so they created the popular social media marketing tool that organizes multiple platforms into a wonderful, efficient, easy-to-use dashboard.
Hootsuite is one of the best social media management tools out there. It is a significant time-saver for companies wishing for a larger target audience through multiple social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which are handily organized for easier tracking and observation of social media accounts.
Moreover, Hootsuite's social media management tool is built with marketing purposes in mind, so they offer features like competitor trends and schedule posts on calendars for your company journey to lead the digital marketplace.
Hootsuite is a sizable investment for startups, starting at $99 monthly.
Google Analytics - Comprehensive Data for Your Marketing Analytics
Google gets the majority of the search engine use globally, so marketing strategies like SEO often put Google's algorithm in mind. So it is no surprise that they also offer tools for marketers to track down valuable data about your website through Google Analytics. It pretty much tells you everything you need to know and things you don't need to know.
It tracks valuable data like the number of visitors, where your users are located, user interest, which page provides the most traffic, website speed, etc.
Essentially, Google Analytics only provides you with the raw data, and you are set to do the analysis for yourself. However, this tool is completely free. Its paid version Google Analytics 360, is tailored for established corporations with its features like a data sampling threshold of 1 billion hits against 10 million hits from the free version, data freshness of less than 4 hours against the free version's +24 hours - at a price of $150000 a year.
Sparktoro - Streamlined Audience Research
Audience Research is a fundamental step before marketers plan out campaigns. But researching, in general, is a tedious process and can cost you time just to gather the data before even making the analysis.
Luckily, Sparktoro exists, and they provide the essentials of data-gathering, such as popular hashtags, the audience most followed social media account, website, and analysis with popular sites like Reddit and Youtube, by doing keyword research related to your interest.
User information is also segmented according to demographics like gender and age, which allows you to create your ideal customer persona.
Sparktoro has a free version, which provides 50 searches per month. Its premium version cost starts at $50 a month but includes valuable information like demographics(age, gender, and location), social media results, and website results, and provides insights that you get inspiration for your marketing campaigns, like influencer marketing or target ad campaigns.
Mopinion - Makes Customer Surveys Easier
There is always value in audience feedback. It is where you can find the gaps in your online marketing, product quality, and brand identity from your audience's lens. But just like any data-gathering efforts, you can create surveys quicker using Mopinion.
Mopinion streamlines the surveys through easy customization by drag-and-drop features and an extensive choice of templates for you to ask the right questions to your audience.
Moreover, they integrate your brand's visual identity for people to recognize you easier and seamlessly adapt to any mobile devices - smartphones, tablets, and laptops. You create customer surveys for your website, apps, and emails and get data for marketing analysis like customer satisfaction and net promoter score.
Mopinion Standard Plan starts at $259 per month when billed annually and custom pricing for Enterprise. Alongside the features mentioned, Enterprise offers a personal onboarding process, White Label to remove Mopinion's branding, and Bespoke Training Services.
Ahrefs - SEO Expert's Favorite in Increasing Organic Traffic
SEO is one of the leading digital marketing practices closely connected to digital marketing strategies like content marketing and social media marketing. After all, you can create high-quality content, but what's the point of no one reading them?
Ahrefs is one of the best tools that makes your website visible in search engine results. It provides comprehensive data about your website performance, like organic traffic, referring domains, backlinks, etc.
Moreover, Ahrefs allows you to plan your content marketing strategy by providing information on which relevant keywords give your site the best traffic potential and engagement. You don't have to do much tedious guesswork to rank up in search engines like Google when you can efficiently tailor your blogs and landing pages.
Ahrefs pricing starts at its Lite version, costs $99 a month, and provides features like an SEO dashboard, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, and more. Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise plans provide more valuable information alongside the Lite features like SERP updates, Site Explorer, Batch Analysis, Google Data Studio, Google Ads, and more.
Final Thoughts
The development of AI technology changed the game for marketing apps, and you can expect these marketing apps to integrate AI into their features. Moreover, many marketing processes can still be automated or made efficient with tools, so remember to keep an eye out for them. It will cost you hundreds of dollars a month if you choose to get all the listed tools, but they provide most of the workload needed to build your marketing strategy. Remember that much of the creative aspect of the marketing efforts should come from you, as you still need to ensure that your value proposition tells your audience that your brand offers a one-of-kind statement and service from your competitors.
Feeling paralyzed by your choices of marketing apps for your brand-building? Equip your company with the right experts with Evolv! We are a team of passionate experts with experience working with leading digital brands like Deep Structure. We provide sleek web design services from insights from Hotjar, tailored marketing assets from the audience you've built with Sparktoro, and compelling video assets for you to post with Hootsuite. Start your brand-building journey with us today!
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