Key Takeaways
- Explore 15 lesser-known digital marketing tools to enhance your strategies without major costs.
- Tools like Follow.It and HotJar help optimize follower engagement and offer insights into user interactions, respectively.
- BuzzSumo helps analyze content performance, helping you create shareable, relevant content.
- Use tools like the Hemingway App for clearer writing and Libsyn for effortless podcast hosting.
- Quora and SEO Site Checkup support your content’s relevance and technical SEO, respectively.
Do more with less. How often have you heard that when it comes to your digital marketing efforts?
With so many digital marketing tools available today, it’s tough to keep track of them all, especially the lesser-known ones.
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. Follow.It
This tool is the new Feedburner, 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, and RSS feeds, but they have their limitations, such as a reluctance to follow you and a low chance of seeing your tweets or notifications if they do.
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.
A 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 fewer?
To be successful with your content marketing efforts, you need to create content that your audience wants to share.
With 80 percent of B2B marketers and 75 percent of B2C marketers using blogging for their content marketing efforts, you need to analyze which content is working and which is not.
One tool to help you review your content’s performance and compare it to your competitors’ is BuzzSumo.
It provides information on which topics are resonating with readers, so you can write blog posts on trending topics, and it 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 a simple, direct style.
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 aged 12 and older 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 are 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, understands your competitors’ SEO profiles, and delivers 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 regularly checking your website(s) for broken links.
Checking for broken or dead links on your website doesn’t have to be time-consuming.
To fix broken links in your content, you can use tools like the 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 the 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 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, ensure your websites and landing pages use the Open Graph protocol so your content is optimized for social sharing 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 complies with the Open Graph protocol and Twitter Card requirements.
11. Pixlr X
Once you get the perfect image from a free image website for your content, make sure it looks good with it.
Instead of purchasing a license to Adobe Photoshop, you can use a tool like Pixlr X to help you resize 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 enhance your writing.
Make sure you don’t publish content without vetting it with a tool like Grammarly.
14. WhatRuns
This Chrome browser extension provides X-ray vision into web design and helps you identify the 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 is enter your website’s URL, then choose the date you want to look up.
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.
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?
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