Sometimes there seems like an impossible amount of marketing tools available today. If you search for “best marketing tools,” you might find something like this graphic from Curata.
While it might be impressive, it sure is overwhelming.
So what are actual marketers using? We asked a whole bunch of them to share one tool they couldn’t live without and why. Here are their responses.
Nimble
Nimble allows me to pull reporter and influencer information, tag and organize, and automate email, outreach and followups. It even sends me reminders when I haven’t interacted with someone in a set amount of time. It’s crucial for my PR and social marketing efforts.
Chris is the founder of CutCableToday.com and is an avid blogger and website builder.
Surprisingly, LinkedIn is my favorite.
I do a lot of mobile marketing, which is a wild wild west of innovation and pitfalls. Knowing who you can trust to deliver quality, at scale, is paramount to being successful. LinkedIn helps me keep track of marketing professionals I trust, as they progress in their careers. These go-to people are the ones I can take risks with on a campaign.
Aurelie is the founder and CEO of Akila One and has helped blue chips and rising stars alike leverage mobile for 8-digit revenue expansion and successful exits.
Hootsuite
The one marketing tool I can’t live without is Hootsuite. As an agency, we have multiple clients across many industries and each has unique needs for social media. With Hootsuite, we can schedule posts and monitor accounts for multiple platforms, all in one dashboard.
One issue with advance scheduling of social posts is that you may post something insensitive if it’s not updated to reflect current events. For example, you wouldn’t want to post “congratulations to all the Boston Marathon runners!” just after news breaks about a terror incident at the race. With Hootsuite, we can use the app to keep an eye on scheduled posts and make changes as necessary.
Kate owns NewEra Collective, a boutique marketing agency that specializes in small business marketing strategy for almost any industry.
Serpfox
As a content marketer, my bread and butter comes down to focusing on the most effective keywords and embedding them in value-driven content. I could spend days making up keywords, but there needs to be technique and analytics behind them to ensure success for my clients. This is why my essential tool is Serpfox. It gives me the keyword rankings that I need to market effectively. Without it, I would be taking shots in the dark.
David is the founder and director of Nimble Media.
IFTTT
The one tool I can’t live without is IFTTT. It’s an amazing mobile app that allows you to manage all your social platforms and emails. I even talk about it on dates when people ask me for tips. IFTTT is a genius tool and has the most robust functionality I’ve ever seen. Most of my followers don’t even know I’m using it and my posts get shares and reshares. I use it with my clients as well.
Alina is a solopreneur, technologist, and social and digital marketing expert.
Mixpanel
Marketing is all about the data. I could market a product without any tools at all but without the data, I’m flying blind. That’s why my one tool I can’t live without is Mixpanel. It shows me exactly what’s happening on our site and in our app, which channels and campaigns are working best, and helps me decide where to focus our marketing efforts.
-Sid Bharath
Sid is the VP of Growth at Thinktraffic
Ahrefs
My vote for the one single marketing tool I can’t live without goes to Ahrefs.
If used correctly, Ahrefs is incredibly powerful to understand more about the authority of your own, or a competitor’s, site and its content as well as what content is being heavily shared on social media. With strong technological infrastructure behind it, Ahrefs has a large index size and high crawling frequency that helps the tool find links faster and more exhaustively than other tools, according to my own observations.
I use the “Site Explorer” as my source of truth to evaluate domain authority and backlink profiles. The “Alerts” function is great for marketers who like to be notified about new backlinks, mentions or new keywords a website is ranking for. The “Content Explorer” and “Keywords Explorer” allow marketers to understand what content had a great resonance on social media and the competitiveness for certain keywords—both very helpful product features for a marketer’s content creation phase.
Johannes is a Senior Marketing Analyst at HubSpot, formerly Search Quality Analyst at Google and can be found on his Analytics Blog
Drip
The one single marketing tool I can’t live without is Drip. As a solopreneur, my time is limited. Automating my lead-nurturing frees up my time to focus on other business priorities, while still allowing me to keep in touch with prospects regularly.
Lauren helps entrepreneurs generate (and nurture) more leads through their WordPress and Shopify websites.
[Related: Learn how to accelerate your lead-gen practice with engaging content]
Autopilot
The combination of Autopilot’s simple user interface, Salesforce integration, and its price makes it a must-have in every marketer’s toolbox. We run leads through trigger-based nurturing journeys, send out customer updates, and even onboard our customers—all through Autopilot. It’s an amazing tool that strengthened our marketing automation capabilities almost from the minute we got it!
Kevin is the CMO at ShipMonk
WhatConverts
Every business needs a tool that unifies lead tracking for online and offline events. In our case, we work with a lot of firms that receive both phone and web leads. We use WhatConverts to help these businesses understand what leads are coming from what channels (search ads, display ads, social media, etc.), whether through website or phone. This tool integrates nicely with Google Analytics, AdWords and other tools. It also makes it really easy to set up new tracking phone numbers. We couldn’t live without it.
Bill is the Digital PR & Display Media Manager at Inseeve Interactive and VP of Content for the San Diego Chapter of the American Marketing Association
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the one marketing tool I couldn’t live without. It gives me all of the data I need to see how we are performing. SEO, PPC, Social, Referrals; all of it is right there in one place. One of the most useful features of GA is the ability to see Assisted Conversions. With this metric I can see exactly how customers are getting to us and how each channel plays into their journey. It is a wealth of knowledge that is invaluable to see how well we are preforming.
Dustin is an entrepreneur and Digital Marketing Director for ShippersSupplies.com
CinchShare
CinchShare is an amazing social media scheduling tool that seems to be listening to the voices in my brain when they roll out new features. Integrated graphic design tools, posting to Facebook groups and events, easy Pinterest integration. They’re revolutionizing social scheduling!
Karen is an expert at helping entrepreneurs and diverse businesses profitably use LinkedIn and a range of other social spaces
Intercom
My favorite marketing tool is Intercom.io.
With this tool, we are able to send out automatic email reminders for specific events. For example, if a homeowner hasn’t rescheduled an additional appointment after their initial appointment, Intercom will fire a reminder email.
Also, if a vendor has not performed a service that was on his calendar for the day, it will send him a reminder email that the property needs to be completed or it needs to be rescheduled.
With these practices in place, Intercom has saved us countless hours on follow up emails and we have seen over a 40% uplift in conversion after Intercom’s implementation.
Gene is the co-founder of GreenPal
Canva
Research continues to show how effective visuals are when it comes to marketing. From increasing social media engagement to blog shares, images are vital for marketers in this day and age.
Canva is a fantastic free tool for creating custom images to share in all sorts of channels—including digital and print. You can upload your own images to manipulate, use their free templates and graphics, or pay for premium elements for just $1 each.
With this tool, you don’t need a graphic design degree to create customized, compelling visuals for your marketing campaign. I find myself using it nearly every day!
Emily is the Senior Director of Publicity at Three Girls Media, Inc., a public relations and content marketing firm
What’s your favorite marketing tool?
There’s no shortage of high-quality content marketing tools available—we wish we could mention every single one! If we missed your favorite, let us know. We might include it in an update to this post.
