23 Absolutely Essential Online Marketing Tools You Will Start Using Immediately

We may be a small but perfectly formed digital marketing agency, yet when it comes to tools we use the lion’s share of what’s out there.

We use these tools daily for our project management, content marketing, social media marketing and SEO.

Since there are so many tools available today, we decided to give you an updated list, but keep in mind we might be holding back on a few for later.

Here are the absolute basic ones and the ones we believe are too cool not to mention.

Content Curation

  • Evernote – It really feels like there are a thousand things you can do with Evernote and the key one for us is curating, organizing and creating content.
  • Feedly – A reborn and a more beautiful version of Google Reader…and much easier to use. We unreservedly recommend everyone to use Feedly… often.

Content Publishing

  • WordPress – In our humble opinion, the best platform you can use. Enough said.

Monitoring, Listening and Conversations

Its vital to be able to listen out to what people are saying about you or your brand, your industry and the trends, you can even monitor the competition.

  • Mention – The free plan is awesome. Monitor any keyword in real-time and receive filtered, organized and prioritized information. Mention often picks up on what gets missed by good ol’ fashioned Google searches. Create alerts for your name, brand, business keywords and even competitors.
  • Google Alerts – Create updates for your business and industry keywords.
  • Twitter Lists – Create lists in Twitter – private and public ones. This is a really efficient way to be able to quickly see what’s happening on Twitter that is relevant to you.

You should also consider checking out:

  • Google+ Communities – A network that is quickly growing and we suggest you join a few of the communities relevant to your business. It’s incredible how active some of these places are.
  • LinkedIn Answers – A great tool for listening and answering especially if you have business customers.
  • LinkedIn Groups – Join groups that are relevant to your business and start networking with people.

Content Scheduling

  • HootSuite – A must-have tool that allows managing multiple Twitter and Facebook streams, scheduling and posting to multiple social media platforms and keeping track of what your followers are sharing, retweeting and talking about.
  • Buffer – With Buffer you can easily schedule content at predetermined times.

Content Sharing/Promotion

  • YouTube – The number one video sharing website. An alternative is Vimeo.
  • Slideshare – Use it to upload your PowerPoint presentations and share with others.
  • StumbleUpon – It randomly generates content for users based on interest. Share your blog articles and content and enjoy the increased traffic.
  • Pinterest – A photo-centric tool where you can share your content and connect with others.

Community Management, Measurement & Monitoring

  • Alexa – High-level information on the traffic of any website.
  • Followerwonk – A great Twitter analytics tool that helps you with social graph tracking and insights.
  • Unfollowers – A tool that shows you who unfollowed you on Twitter, who isn’t an active user and helps you manage your followers base. It also has many other features like whitelisting, really very useful community management tool for twitter.

Project Management & Operations

  • Google Docs – Great for sharing Word documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It’s also perfect for editing documents within a team.
  • Asana – A project management tool for teams and clients. Very easy to use.
  • Trello – An incredibly flexible and easy to use project management tool.

Which are your essential tools? Share with us in the comment box below.

7 Comments

  1. Margaret Saizan on 27th March 2014 at 7:02 pm

    Great list! many thanks!

  2. James Giroux on 27th March 2014 at 3:32 pm

    This is a great list! Thanks for sharing. There’s a cool gantt setup for Asana as well called Instagantt that takes Asana projects and makes them readable by humans.

    • Gavin Aldrich on 27th March 2014 at 3:45 pm

      Instagantt is very useful James, thanks. There are also handy integrations for DropBox and Google Drive, one of my favourites is the Google Chrome extension, it lets you add the current URL as a task so you can read articles later or share them with teammates.

  3. Felix on 26th March 2014 at 10:15 am

    Awesome list. You might want to check MonitorBacklinks.com as well.

  4. Nathan on 25th March 2014 at 11:59 pm

    Wow. Kinda freaky… This looks a lot like my digital toolbox! Most reassuring!

  5. James Corey on 25th March 2014 at 9:07 pm

    This was a great resource that was originally shared with me on G+. Thanks for the great content and resources. Are you aware of any good Hootsuite user guides? I’m new to it and it looks like you may have a better feeling for how to use it than I do.

    • Gavin Aldrich on 26th March 2014 at 2:15 pm

      Hi James, thanks for the feedback, a great resource for Hootsuite is their Quick Start Guide. Let us know if you have any more questions.

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