23 Online Marketing Tools You Need to Use

These 23 online marketing tools make your life easier, boost engagement, increase customer research, and grow your website. The team at Digital Darts use every tool recommended here. Best of all, they are free. Most have paid options but you can do great things with free versions.

Why do tools matter? Your skills to market a business is the greatest factor you can control to keep it alive. The right tools aid your skills, making you more efficient and effective. The best online marketing tool is the one that suits your needs.

The most recent statistics show there are 400 million businesses worldwide. Competition is stiff. The ease of starting a business does not make having one easy. Statistics in the US show that 20% of small business close within their first year. 10% close in the second year, 7% in the third year, and 3% each year on average from then on. No one sets on a new venture with the view of having to shut it down. Yet, in competition there is always opportunity. Richard Branson, said, “Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.”

Digital marketing tools allow you to create effective marketing campaigns, execute, test them and measure their success. From coming up with content, sourcing influencers, fixing SEO mistakes, communicating, and doing deep work, use these marketing tools to grow your business.

Klaviyo For Email And SMS Marketing Automation

Klaviyo enables you to send personalized and targeted emails and texts to your customers, which improves sales.

You can create email automations for nearly anything under the sun you can think of, from people who abandon cart to customers who ordered a particular product twice. Klaviyo’s visual flow builder makes creating email, SMS—and all the conditions for them—a pleasure to work with.

Klaviyo integrates with more than 200 platforms allowing access to your data from a single place. You can import customer lists in Facebook and Google Ads to help the ad platforms find more customers like those people. It is the Rolls Royce we depend on for email marketing in Shopify.

Ahrefs For SEO

Ahrefs is one of the must-have online marketing tools that can take your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts to the next level by boosting your organic website traffic.

• The “Site Explorer” tool can check both your backlinks and your competitors. It will show you the keywords of your competition, which ones they are ranking for, the websites linking to their websites, and the quality of those backlinks.
• When you use the top pages tool, you can discover the pages on a website that get the highest traffic.
• With “Keyword Explorer”, you’ll have a variety of keywords along with their search volumes. The in-depth information Ahrefs provides can tell you the keywords you should target and the estimated amount of traffic you can get with them.

I highly recommend Ahrefs for SEO because it is comprehensive. It has the best and largest live backlinks, estimated to be more than 14 trillion.

We provide our Google Ads and SEO clients with data they want from Ahrefs, courtesy of our agency subscription with the company. If you’d also like to enjoy this benefit, get in touch with us.

Digital Darts Link Building Tool for Backlinks

When other websites link to yours, it can help your website rank higher in search results. This is where the Digital Darts link building tool comes in.

The first benefit of getting links is referral traffic. The second benefit is improved rankings since Google factors backlinks in its ranking algorithm.

The Digital Darts link building tool makes use of breadcrumbs in search engine results to detect link opportunities for any market. You enter a keyword related to your website then you get hundreds of links opportunities.

These opportunities are for directory submissions and blogs that welcome guest posts. When you can write blogs on other people’s websites, they include a link to your website. This leads to more traffic to your website and the backlinks boost your SEO.

DataFeedWatch For Feed Management

Feeds are used across nearly every major ad platform. Beyond ads, feeds can also push information into third-party marketplaces to manage listings.

DataFeedWatch is one of the best tools that can help you achieve this as it helps you create an effective product catalogue with highly optimized data about your business and products. Not enough marketers pay attention to every piece of data in their feeds.

The tool has high accuracy since it can download product and inventory data when you want. You don’t want to be wasting money advertising an out of stock product or bidding aggressively on a product with 8 out 9 variants out of stock.

For Facebook Ads, the most important optimization you can make with the feed is imagery. Stores by default use the first image of the product listing, which is often an uninspiring picture of the product on a white isolate background. You can customize your feed to include user-generated content to instantly boost the ROI of your catalog campaigns.

For Google Ads, you get complete freedom to customize the feed to increase impressions and click-through of product listings. Include your cost of goods sold in the feed to segment the profit margins of product groups. This lets you discriminate bids to scale profit.

If you run Google Ads or Facebook, you must use DataFeedWatch to boost your efforts.

Triple Whale For Attribution and Financial Wisdom

There are three metrics every ecommerce business investing in marketing needs to measure for optimal use of their money:

1. New customer ROAS (ncROAS) measures efficiency.
2. Marketing efficiency ratio (MER) measures effectiveness.
3. Profit on ad spend (POAS) measures profit.

The problem is, how do you get this data?

All marketing channels cannot separate new versus repeat customers. The data exists only in Shopify so a solution needs to access your Shopify. You also need ad spend across multiple channels pulled together into one location. You need a third-party solution to gather the three metrics of ncROAS, MER, and POAS.

To get these key three marketing metrics, I recommend Triple Whale. The tool also gives you extra insight for decisions with your own server-side pixel to track first-party data. This deals with tracking limitations of Apple’s privacy policy.

We ask all clients to sign up to Triple Whale because it becomes the heart for growth. Triple Whale can become the central source of truth for your Shopify store to view all meaningful data in real-time. See the tool in action to profitably scale your advertising.

Google Analytics For Analytics

I cannot talk about online marketing tools without mentioning Google Analytics.

Google Analytics gives you statistics about your business that you can help to improve your marketing.

You’ll get information like your bounce rate, the amount of traffic on your website, how long users took on your page, and so on. From this, you’ll know what is working in your marketing campaign and the areas you need to step up.

If you use Shopify, it is important to know how to set up Google Analytics for your Shopify Store.

Typeform For Exciting Forms And Quizzes

One of the most effective ways of growing your sales is by increasing your leads. Typeform can help you with this. That’s why we’ve included it in our best Shopify marketing tools.

Typeform enables you to engage visitors to your website with exciting and interactive quizzes, forms, and surveys.

The usability is beautiful. Users can have fun filling out this information that they’ll easily provide their emails which you can use to build your contact list and turn these visitors into paying customers.

Typeform has integrations with other platforms such as Klaviyo, Canva, and Google Sheets, making it easy to access your data across these products.

Google Docs Editors For Documents and Collaboration

Google Docs Editors makes collaboration easier and more effective because it allows you to store documents, presentations, spreadsheets, images, and more. Team members can edit these documents then share them.

The interface inside all the tools makes each easy to learn. You get enough options to do what you need without the complexity.

Compare that to the Microsoft suite. If you haven’t used it consistently, you can’t find what feature you need. It is bloatware that they can’t fix because they must accommodate decade-long users of their software.

The change history feature makes editing documents secure so you don’t have to worry about team members accidentally deleting stuff.

Slack For Communication

Slack is an online marketing tool that makes communication at the workplace easier and more effective. The platform lets all team members communicate through messages, files, and video conferencing calls.

You can create channels for groups of people to isolate activity. This promotes productivity because everyone can concentrate on communication for that particular project.

An added advantage is that Slack works well with other tools you might already be using. A tiny list of popular integrations include Dropbox, Zoom, Google Drive, Mailchimp, and Google Calendar. There’s so many integrations now for Slack that it can become a notification platform for anything you want. You can minimize switching from Slack to another app.

Be sure to use /giphy in chat for top-tier gif communication.

ClickUp For Project Management

ClickUp is an online platform that makes it easier for teams to track and manage their work. It helps you and your team to be connected and more organized since you can see what everyone is working on and what tasks they’ve completed. Team members at Digital Darts have a browser tab for ClickUp open all day.

Through ClickUp, you can:

• Assign each team member tasks.
• Incredible views for any type of reporting you can image. It all depends on your use of custom fields.
• Help your team identify which tasks are a priority.
• Allow your team to communicate when they are stuck on a project while staying on top of tasks. If a comment needs to be action, it can be marked as an action step in one-click.
• Reference anything inside your ClickUp with the /link shortcut.
• Upload files and manage documents like a wiki.

ClickUp has all the major integraions like Slack, Google Drive, and even Google Assistant.

If you’re on another project management platform, you shouldn’t necessarily move to ClickUp. Use what works for you, but use something. ClickUp does everything that Notion can do, but in a simpler format. We used Asana for 10 years prior to moving to ClickUp, so I can also recommend Asana. Their feature development was slow and they lack flexibilty compared to the power of ClickUp.

Foreplay For Managing Paid Social Creative Inspiration

Sometimes, the Facebook Ad Library sparks your creativity with an idea for your next ad. Other times, it’s the creative center on TikTok.

The problem comes in when you want to use these scattered bits of inspiration that you have as screenshots, links saved somewhere, or you have to go back to the source and download the ad.

This can be tiring. You also lose your swipe file. That’s why Foreplay you should consider for your online marketing strategy.

Foreplay allows you to save the ad you’ll use as your inspiration so it is available forever. You can create boards for groups of ads, which can be shared with clients.

Frame For Teamwork On Video

If your marketing strategy involves the use of videos, Frame could be for you since it makes collaboration among your team much easier.

Through Frame, you can upload your projects in video formats and then share them with your group or clients so they can give their opinions and criticism. This prevents a lot of back-and-forth where you send a video project to everyone individually then wait for feedback.

Since you can provide feedback and also see other people’s comments, it ensures you are on the same page regarding the execution of a video.

Frame integrates with other video editing software such as DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere, and also apps like Google Drive and Dropbox. This gives you a clean workflow to speed up video production.

Shopify Collabs For Influencer Collaboration

Shopify Collabs lets business owners connect with influencers to help them promote products.

This latest online marketing tool allows you to enjoy the benefits of collaborating with brand influencers like direct sales, creative production, imagery or video for your website, and better SEO rankings when the influencer mentions in your brand on their website.

Other marketing tools you can check out that offer similar services include Incense, Tagger Media, and Grin.

Stock Up For Free Royalty-Free Photos

We all need good photos but sometimes don’t want to pay for them. Some people say blog posts with images get up to 94% more views compared to those without photos.

Stock Up came in to save the day by providing more than 25,000 great images you can use for free.

Examples of other platforms that provided free royalty-free photos include Burst, Adobe Stock, and Reusable Art.

GTmetrix For Analyzing Website Speed

A slow website can increase your bounce rate hence costing your website traffic, contributing to poor customer experience and making your SEO rankings drop.

You don’t want to deal with that. The first step to fixing your website speed is testing to know if it loads slowly.

GTmetrix can help you with this since it:

• Tests how fast your website loads in different nationalities, using various browsers and internet speeds.
• Enlightens you on what is slowing down your website and how you can use the various features to correct it.
• Informs you of any changes to your website speed over time.
• Notifies you whenever your website is slow so you can fix the issue.

ShareX For Screen Capturing And Sharing

Screen captures let you create standard operating procedures, share information with support of software tools, and communicate with your team.

With ShareX, you can capture screenshots and record GIFS with one keyword shortcut then share them. I used ShareX to produce most of the images in this article.

Vmaker For Video Capture Of Screen

Vmaker gives a video version of ShareX in an easy-to-use interface. Vmaker allows you to record your screen, webcam or both of them.

You can use the videos for customer support, educate potential customers about a product, and build standard operating procedures for your team.

Screaming Frog For Technical SEO

Screaming Frog is among the online marketing tools I highly recommend because it’s great for advanced-level SEO. It is the primary tool in our complete guide to Shopify SEO.

Checking each page of your website is not only exhausting but leaves room for error. It’s easy to not see a duplicate page or notice a blog is missing a meta description and so on. Businesses use Screaming Frog because it can comfortably crawl all websites in record time no matter their size.

You enter your domain then wait for the crawl to complete. The tool then avails the crawl data for you to improve the website’s SEO. You get nearly every on-page SEO factor presented to you in a variety of reports.

1Password For Password Management

When you’re running an online business, you have more passwords than you can remember. Sometimes, even the thought of coming up with another one is tiring. Using the same password across different websites increases your risk of an account being cracked.

Statistics show that 81% of people who get hacked experience this because of weak or stolen passwords. That’s why you need an effective password management system and I recommend 1Password.

This online marketing tool protects your personal information such as credit cards and passports by generating a secure note for each document then saving those details there. 1Password makes it safer to share login details of accounts with your team members. You can create “vaults” for individuals or groups to manage categories of passwords in bulk.

We moved away from LastPass for password management after repeated security leaks and liking how 1Password has a secret key that becomes a second barrier to accessing all passwords.

Digital Darts Google Ads Keyword Tool for Paid Search

If you do pay per click advertising and do not extensively use keyword match types, stop losing money. Use the Google Ads Match Type tool to quickly modify your keyword list in your search campaigns.

Default to phrase match types then include an exact match of each keyword. For high volume keywords that perform well, peel out the exact match version into their own ad groups then write ad copy and ad extensions. This lets you improve the click-through and conversion rate of the keyword to scale your search campaigns.

Convert For Split-Testing

Part of great marketing involves testing different strategies to see which one gives you the best results. If you constantly apply changes to your website without testing, you may mess up what’s working well or worsen what needs to be improved. This happens because you’re operating in the dark.

Convert.com is renowned for its rapid Shopify integration and extensive knowledge repository, enabling you to conduct a wide array of tests with ease. Convert has unique advantages for Shopify Plus merchants like theme testing, debugging transactions for tests run on the checkout, and granular tracking based on language, location and demographic data.

Changes don’t have to be major. You can swap the colour of an add to cart button to see if it increases clicks and sales. However, little edits rarely move the needle. For the most impact, the elements you test should be closest to the checkout or rooted in a hypothesis from research. For more help with conversion rate optimization in Shopify, read my free book.

Brain.fm For Music That Aids Deep Work

If you’re like me, sometimes you need music to be productive, especially if you’ve been working for hours. But not any music works for me.

I need something that helps me focus. I found YouTube music to be too hit-and-miss due to lyrics and the whole composition.

As the name suggests, Brain.fm doesn’t provide any regular music. Its selection is made up of songs with soft rhythmic pulses that according to science, stimulate your brain, without being distracting and therefore improve how you work.

So when you want to hit that deadline, work faster, or be more productive, you know where to get your music.

Emojipedia For Finding Emoticons

You need emojis in your life 😊🥳. If you don’t use them in your marketing, you need them in Slack, Asana, and email.

Emojis can make you more human, help the right message be more memorable, and help non-verbal communication.

Think of Emojipedia as an encyclopedia on emojis. It gives you a brief background about each emoji, tells you the suitable scenarios in which to use the emoji and then allows you to copy it. You can then paste it anywhere that you want to use it.

If you want to improve your social ad copy, consider adding emojis to add emotion, inject humor, or increase the organic feel.

Take Your Online Marketing To The Next Level

Successfully carrying out a single marketing campaign is not easy. Achieving this for multiple campaigns is even harder.

The good news is that by having these online marketing tools, you’re equipped for battle.

I’d like to know, what digital marketing tool could you not live without?