5 Essential Digital Marketing Tools for 2017

If you want to reach your marketing goals for the year, you’re going to need some help. Below, you’ll find a list of five super useful digital marketing tools that can assist in a variety of areas of your business, from content creation to social media updates.

Google Analytics – Get To Know Your Audience

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There’s a lot of data to keep track of when it comes to conversion rate optimization and digital marketing. Plus, as technology continues to advance, more and more methods exist for people to interact with your business, including tablets and smart watches.

Consequently, gaining a full understanding of your target audience—what people like, dislike, how they interact with your website and so on—becomes more challenging. But in order to create an effective marketing strategy for your business, you really need to know your audience.
Google Analytics helps with this.

What Google Analytics Can Do For You

  • Measures bounce rates
  • Measures conversion rates
  • Reveals where your visitors are coming from

Mention – Discover Who’s Been Talking About You

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This is a cool tool that tracks almost all online mentions of your company or brand, including those made on social media, thus allowing you to optimize your digital promotional efforts.

You can also use Mention to track specific keywords and stay up-to-date on relevant industry discussions. This way, you can participate in these conversations in real-time, and consequently, spread brand awareness with a targeted audience.

What Mention Can Do For You

  • Creates alerts for specific topics and words and phrases that you want to track (including your company’s name and industry keywords)
  • Sends daily emails with your tracking results

Feedly – Discover The Hottest Content Trends

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It’s not always easy coming up with fresh content ideas for your blog or website, never mind ideas that are likely to go viral. But Feedly is a great tool to use precisely for this dilemma.

Feedly allows you to select the different types of content and topics you’re interested in. Then, you’re able to sort the posts by popularity—that is, those with the most shares and engagement—so you can discover what the hottest topics are.

This way, you stay on top of the trending topics in your industry so you can continually deliver content that your audience loves.

What Feedly Can Do For You

  • Aggregates all of the recently published content that meets your criteria
  • Sorts publications by popularity

Copyscape – Don’t Get The Boot From Google

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Plagiarism is always a no-no. “From an SEO perspective, however, this really is a life or death matter,” says Brock Murray. “The worst potential consequence of plagiarism is the risk of being deindexed by Google,” not to mention the damage this type of thing can do to your reputation.

Moreover, you can still be punished for duplicate content even if someone else is the plagiarizer at large (that is, someone swipes your content and posts it as their own). So you need to take precautions and check your webpages regularly to see if any copies exist.

Copyscape is the tool to help you do this.

What Copyscape Can Do For You

  • Scans webpages automatically every day, searching for copies online
  • Sends updates when any duplicate content is found
  • Places free Copyscape banners on your website, preventing your content from being stolen

BufferApp – Streamline Your Social Media Posting

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Every business needs a social media presence. But updating social media profiles is a major time-suck. With BufferApp, however, you can pre-load content for a variety of social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Then, BufferApp posts the content for you according to a posting schedule that you specify.

You shouldn’t use BufferApp exclusively, though. If you want to optimize your social media presence, you need to also engage in real-time, organic posting, especially by interacting with your audience.

Bonus Tool: If you ever run out of things to post about, Quuu is a great tool for content curation. You can connect Quuu to your BufferApp account and then have hand-curated content automatically delivered to your BufferApp queue.

What BufferApp Can Do For You

  • Automate the social media posting process by scheduling content in advance
  • Assess the popularity of your updates based on likes, comments, clicks, shares, and reach

What do you think of this list of digital marketing tools? Have you tried any of them before? Are there any other tools you’d recommend?