15 of the lesser-known digital marketing tools you should know about

Do more with less. How often have you heard that when it comes to your digital marketing efforts. With a lot of digital marketing tools available today, it’s tough to keep track of all them, especially the lesser-know digital marketing tools. You don’t need a lot of money to help you with your digital marketing efforts with today’s digital marketing tools.

15 lesser-known digital marketing tools you should explore

There are some lesser-known digital marketing tools you may not be aware of that can help you with your digital marketing strategy, plan, and execution.

1. Knak

To help you quickly launch your digital marketing, you need to use tools that provide easily-editable templates.

One of the most important areas to increase your digital conversions is your landing pages.

A tool that can help you with landing page templates is Knak.

This landing page tool integrates with two marketing automation systems: Eloqua and Marketo.

2. HotJar

A heat map is a popular conversion optimization tool.

It provides visual representations and summaries of data. It can help you see how your users interact with your websites and landing pages.

At heatmap can help you see how your users interact with your websites and landing pages.

A good example of a heat map tool is hotjar.com.

This tool provides real-time analytics to help you see how your content is performing and what adjustments you need to make to be more successful.

3. BuzzSumo

Did you know that 50 percent of content gets eight shares or less?

To be successful with your content marketing efforts, you need to produce content that your audience will want to share.

With 80 percent of B2B marketers and 75 percent of B2C marketers use blogging for their content marketing efforts, you need to analyze what content is working and what content is not working.

One of the tools to help you review the performance of your content and see how it compares to your competitors is BuzzSumo.

It provides with information on what topics are resonating with readers so you can write blog posts that on topics that are trending and helps you identify influencers who may be interested in your content.

4. Hemingway App

This tool helps you improve the clarity of your message.

This tool will help you write like Ernest Hemingway who wrote in simple and direct manner.

It highlights lengthy and complex sentences. It also shows you common writing errors and suggests that you shorten a sentence or split up sentences.

This tool promises to make “your writing bold and clear.”

5. Libsyn

Podcasts are more popular than ever before.

Six in 10 Americans are now familiar with the term “podcast” and 40 percent of Americans 12 years old and above have listened to a podcast.

Using tools like Libsyn can help you host your podcasts.

To find out how to create a successful podcast on a limited budget and little time, you can learn from two podcasters who launched TriangleCast.

6. Quora

Is your content answering the questions your clients and prospects asking?

To ensure your content answers your clients and prospects most asked questions, you can use websites like Quora to do research on what questions are being asked online around certain topics.

You can also type into Google potential questions you think they may be asking and then go to the bottom of the search results and look at the “searches related” section at the bottom of the SERP.

7. SEO Site Checkup

To fix your technical SEO issues, you should consider using tools like SEO Site Checkup.

This tool analyzes your SEO problems, understand your competitors’ SEO profile and give you reports you can understand and act on. You can try it for free for 14 days.

8. Dead Link Checker

A dead or broken link provides a bad user experience for your website visitors. Google recommends you check your website(s) for broken links consistently.

To check for broken or dead links on your website doesn’t have to be a time-consuming process.

To fix the bad links in your content, you can use tools like Dead Link Checker.

This tool will help you improve your user experience, and increase your website traffic and conversions.

9. Zurb TestSubject

More people are opening emails on their mobile phones.

In fact, 55 percent of opens are now on mobile.

How do you optimize your email for mobile? It all starts with the email subject line.

By using tools like Zurb TestSubject tool, you can see how your emails appear on mobile devices.

10. Social Media Optimizer Tool

Metadata is one of the most overlooked areas of digital marketing but one of the most important.

It tells social media networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter what headline, description, and the image you want to feature.

It can help you get more clicks, views, and shares. To optimize your metadata, you should

To optimize your metadata, you should ensure your websites and landing pages use the Open Graph protocol so you can content is optimized for social shares on Facebook and LinkedIn. For Twitter, it is called Twitter Cards.

Tools like the Social Media Optimizer tool can help you.

This tool can help you ensure your metadata is correct and follows the Open Graph protocol and Twitter cards requirements.

11. Pixlr X

Once you get the perfect image using free image websites for your piece of content, you need to make sure it looks good with your content.

Instead of purchasing a license to Adobe Photoshop, you can use a tool like Pixlr X to help you re-size and crop images via your web browser.

12. Hootlet

This Chrome browser extension helps you quickly shrink links and share content via Hootsuite.

This tool helps you enhance the functionality of your Chrome browser and save you time sharing created and curated content.

13. Grammarly

This Chrome browser extension helps you eliminate grammatical errors and enhances your writing.

Make sure you don’t publish content without being vetted by a tool like Grammarly.

14. WhatRuns

This Chrome browser extension provides an x-ray vision for web design and helps you find technologies used on any website you visit.

There are many browser extensions in the Chrome Web Store but this is one of the must-have extensions.

15. Wayback Machine

Want to know what your website looked like years ago?

All you need to do it enter your website’s URL and then choose the date you want to look at in the past.

You can see how far you have come with your website and digital marketing efforts.

This tool can explore more than 305 billion web pages saved over time.

BONUS: Follow.It

This tool is the new Feedburner that is used by more than 100,000 websites and 1 million readers.

Follow.it helps publishers get more followers and recurring traffic. It also provides a better reading experience for followers.

You could use other follow-tools such as Twitter, email newsletters, RSS feeds but they have their limitation such as a reluctance to follow you and a low chance of seeing your tweets or notifications if they did follow you.

What lesser-known digital marketing tools would you add to this list?

Do you have a favorite tool that many people don’t know about? What is your favorite lesser-known digital marketing tool?