There is no shortage of paid software out there in the world of digital marketing. Anyone who works in digital marketing can attest to this fact when they log into Facebook and get dozens of ads.
Ask five different digital marketing professionals and you’ll get a totally mix of tools. But, this is my personal digital marketing toolbox that I either pay for or my company pays for. It’s stuff that you should probably have, or have a variation or competitor to. Warning: Mac apps galore ahead. Sorry, PC fans.
SEO & PPC Tools
My most used tools are usually dual purpose, having both SEO and PPC implications. For me, that means a great advantage with competitive research, link analysis and keyword research.
The reporting functionally in Raven Tools is worth the price of admission alone. I have had clients say that Raven’s PDF reports are the best they’ve seen from a digital agency. They’re easy to customize and have reporting options for lots of your digital marketing metrics.
Plus they have tons of options for regular link research, competitive monitoring and much more.
- Wordpress (StudioPress Themes)
My engine/CMS of choice for most websites, Studiopress themes are great for a SEO-friendly Wordpress theme. While many Wordpress themes subscribe to more and more features, they keep it slim by design. You won’t find 5 megabyte pages with dozens of .js files here. Clean code, beautiful designs and a great third party support network.
The kicking off point for anything technical SEO is Screaming Frog. It’s the equivalent of bringing a calculator to a math class.
Despite it’s reputation, Scrapebox is a great tool for pulling vast amounts of data from Google in short order. I’ve saved hours of copy-paste time by utilizing a smart search in Scrapebox and exporting to .txt then slicing and dicing data in Excel.
I can find out about 80% of your website’s targeted keywords, paid media strategy and profitable keywords while using SEMRush. The keyword research module is great for finding stuff that Google AdWords can skip over and the ranking data is nearly flawless in its accuracy for me.
My default keyword research tool. While there are dozens of third party tools (I often double check data in), Google’s data has to be the best place to start. They’ve made recent improvements in geographic data sets, device breakdowns and landing page keyword estimates.
While Excel for Mac can be frustrating, it’s still needed to cut up and analyze any data in a PPC and SEO campaign. Full admission here that Numbers isn’t half bad. The PDF exports are more attractive than the Excel alternatives.
- Landing Page Software (my reviews here)
For paid traffic, homepages are almost never the answer for lead generation. Make a great focused landing page and watch your conversion rates skyrocket.
- Facebook Audience Insights & Power Editor
Cutting up demographic and psychographic data has been made far easier with these tools. Want to find out how many males in Myrtle Beach are interested in the New England Patriots and iPhones? Yeah, it can do that.
Want to measure interest in cat memes or Barack Obama over time?
Conversion Rate Optimization
My preferred tool for split testing, A/B tests, heatmaps and clickmaps is the recently rebranded VWO. Easy to use and understand, VWO is a great tool to make changes to your website and see the results measured.
Email Marketing
My preferred email marketing platform, Mailchimp is the best email marketing tool for most businesses. You can segment lists, fire off autoresponder sequences and design beautiful emails with their tools. For most needs, Mailchimp will do a fantstic job at very affordable prices.
Social Media
Buffer is my preferred social media platform. Their $10 plan is powerful enough for most smaller companies and offers great functionality like RSS feeds, 12 social media profiles and fantastic link click data. Highly recommended software.
Playful design, power user features and they had mute way before the official Twitter apps. It’s worth the price
To capture what people are saying about you, I’ve yet to find a paid platform that provides enough value to make it worth it. Alerts works well enough for me.
Project Management
My collaborative project management tool of choice. Easy to use, no learning curve and the right mix of power-user features.
My personal project management tool. The iOS app is great and features like reviews and perspectives make doing GTD like a walk in the park.
Code Editing & Design
I’m no programmer, but when I need to edit code, Sublime Text is my go to.
My default FTP and code editor is Coda. I’ve yet to find anything faster when uploading changed files to a server. It’s almost instantaneous.
For adding photos to my S3 bucket to other FTP needs, the duck is where it’s at.
Photoshop is overkill. Pixelmator is just right (features, price and learning curve). I use it for Facebook graphics, simple logos and photo editing.
Miscellaneous
Want to create a mind map, sitemap or just think in terms of topics, subtopics and see it visually? Fantastic app here to do just that.
How I write every word I publish on the internet, including these. The best writing app I’ve ever tried.
Want to make beautiful, simple presentations?
Notes, images, PDFs synced across devices with no fuss.
I kick it old-school with about 50 RSS feeds. Here’s my preferred syncing engine and reading platform on iOS and Mac.
Anything else?
Any tools I missed or that you use a lot? Let me know in the comments below.
