The 10 best digital marketing tools in 2023

Digital marketing consists of different channels you can use to reach your target audience. For example, you have social media marketing, email marketing and SEO. Each channel has its own pros and cons and its own tools. We give you an overview of the best digital marketing tools so you can get the most out of your marketing strategy.

1. Canva

Canva is an indispensable tool nowadays. Since its launch in 2012, Canva has become one of the most popular digital marketing tools in the world. Remarkably, marketing legend Guy Kawasaki was involved in the project very early on.

With Canva, you can easily design graphic designs. This is ideal for creating images for your Instagram, LinkedIn page or other social media, for example. You can create professional designs with a few clicks without needing much knowledge of design.

Canva also offers a large library of templates, images and icons. So you don’t always have to come up with your designs yourself. When you could use some inspiration, you can select one of their many templates and edit it. Canva has an extensive free version, but offers more features with the paid version.

2. MailChimp

MailChimp is the most well-known tool for email marketing. Marketers often use MailChimp because it is easy to use and has an extensive free version.

MailChimp allows you to completely format your emails in your organization’s corporate identity. However, when you are at a more advanced stage, you need to upgrade to the paid version of MailChimp, which can be done easily.

ActiveCampaign is a popular alternative to MailChimp. This tool is a lot more sophisticated and is often used by professionals. There is no free version.

ActiveCampaign’s advantages over MailChimp are its extensive automation features. ActiveCampaign uses tracking to get leads to take a certain action at each step of the funnel. You can build a complete customer journey that allows you to guide your target audience through several steps to ultimately convert them.

3. Mailmunch

Mailmunch is a handy extension to your existing marketing funnel. With Mailmunch you can easily set up lead generation forms and landing pages.

For example, you can link Mailmunch to MailChimp to build your email list. The convenient thing about working with Mailmunch is that they have standard templates so you can start collecting leads within minutes.

4. HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the best-known CRM systems. But actually, it is more than a CRM system. In fact, they have a comprehensive collection of marketing and sales tools under one roof.

HubSpot allows you to track the progress of your marketing and sales campaigns. By linking HubSpot to your email, you can also manage leads directly from the email. They also have several options for marketing automation.

HubSpot has a comprehensive free version, which is sufficient for most small organizations. For larger organizations, there is a paid version that is very pricey.

5. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is the ultimate SEO tool not to be missed for good SEO optimization. It is an all-in-one tool that allows you to find keywords, track keywords, and analyze your competitors, among other things. They are a bit pricey, but for any business that takes SEO seriously, it is an essential tool.

Ahrefs is trusted by many SEO professionals to find keywords. Because you get accurate data on such things as search volumes and competition levels, you can accurately filter keywords for quality. In addition, there are other useful features such as a Site Audit.

Another popular SEO tool is Semrush. It is very similar in functionality to Ahrefs, but there are minor differences. An SEO specialist will often choose one of the two as their primary SEO tool, depending on their preference.

6. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a useful SEO tool for websites running on WordPress. Yoast SEO allows you to set a target keyword on a page. The tool then gives you tips on how to optimize the page for that keyword. Yoast SEO is a free tool with a premium option, and is one of the most installed plugins within WordPress.

Fun fact: “Yoast” comes from the name Joost, the programmer behind the plugin, from Wijchen, near Nijmegen.

7. Google Search Console

With Google Search Console you can track the results of your SEO optimization. It gives you insight into how many clicks and impressions you get, and how high your pages rank on Google.

You also have additional features in Google Search Console such as manually indexing pages and checking for broken links. This tool is completely free to use.

8. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is another free tool from Google to view your website statistics. Analytics shows you more data than Search Console because Analytics shows general data about the usage of your website. Search Console, on the other hand, focuses specifically on SEO.

With Google Analytics, you can track such things as how much time your visitors spend on the website, how high your bounce rate is and what the demographics of your visitors are.

Google Analytics will go from version 3 to version 4 in July 2023, which is a big step and will also require adjustments if you are already using version 3 for your website.

9. Looker Studio

Looker Studio was formerly called Google Data Studio. It is a free tool from Google for building dashboards.

With Looker Studio you can build professional dashboards to gain insight into your statistics. For example, you can link it to Google Search Console or Google Analytics – and many other tools – to bring all the numbers into view.

10. Hotjar

Hotjar is a tool to measure the website usage of your visitors even more specifically. You can make adjustments based on the data to improve the User Experience of your website or to adjust the content.

With Hotjar you can perform very precise measurements. For example, you can see which parts of a page are viewed the most or where people drop out. They also have a heatmap feature that allows you to see where your visitors are clicking on the website.

Source: https://www.hotjar.com/product/heatmaps/

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