Digital marketing tools help you create campaigns to promote your brand, services, or products online. Regardless of your marketing goals, an effective tool should enable you to become more efficient and give you insights into your campaigns. Learn more about the powerful digital marketing tools that can strengthen your marketing efforts.
What are digital marketing tools?
Digital marketing tools are software that help you plan, execute, and analyze your marketing efforts across digital channels. They can enhance your marketing strategy by improving targeting and reach. They also provide valuable insights into your audience and your campaigns that can guide your decision-making and automate tedious tasks.
The best digital marketing tools depend on your marketing goals, budget, and expertise. Many require a subscription, though you can often test them out through a basic free version. There are also free digital marketing tools, which may have limited capabilities.
Benefits of digital marketing tools
Here are a few ways digital marketing tools can help you build better marketing campaigns:
Automated tasks
Automate digital marketing campaigns to save time. Shopify’s Automation tool, for example,, makes it possible to automate customer communications from your Shopify store.
Audience insights
Digital marketing tools provide insight into your audience, helping you create campaigns that resonate. For example, if you learn that most of your followers are between 18 and 25 years old and live on the West Coast, you can use specific terminology or references they’ll understand and connect to.
Quantifiable results
Digital marketing tools give you data. You can track many types of metrics, including conversion rates, ad performance, and cost per acquisition. These data points can illustrate what parts of your campaign are working and which aren’t, which can help you pivot and adapt to changes or plan future projects.
For example, if your audience is more likely to open newsletters with questions in the subject line, you can adapt for the remainder of the campaign.
Top digital marketing tools
- Analytics reporting
- Content management
- Design
- Email marketing
- Landing page builders
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Project management
- Search engine optimization
- Social media marketing
There are many tools for improving your digital marketing strategy:
Analytics reporting
With analytics tools, you can track and visualize data for your digital marketing campaigns. For example, when launching a new line of suits and ads for your apparel brand, Google Analytics can reveal your traffic sources, user engagement duration, visitor demographics, and more. These numbers can help you better understand your audience, what ads they gravitate toward, and what suits they prefer.
Content management
A content management system (CMS) lets you create, manage, and distribute high-quality content. A content management tool makes it possible to draft, edit, and publish your content in one place so it is accessible to others on your team.
Design
Marketing teams can use design tools to create visual content. With Canva, a digital template editor, and Adobe Photoshop, you can whip up assets, like infographics and illustrations, for social media.
Canva prioritizes ease, with a drag-and-drop interface aimed at non-designers. Businesses can use Canva’s brand kit integration to maintain visual consistency across campaigns. And with its collaboration tools, teams can work together on projects.
Adobe Photoshop, on the other hand, goes beyond basic editing for digital marketers. Marketing teams can use the photo editor for color correction, blemish removal, and background changes, allowing teams to fully customize various assets, like infographics and website banners.
Email marketing
Email marketing tools help create, send, and track email marketing campaigns. Tools like Shopify Email or Klaviyo can help you design professional-looking emails through a customizable template builder and manage subscriber lists.
Shopify Email, for example, works directly in Shopify to help you send emails quickly and easily. Pick from dozens of templates, pull in your products, discounts, and images automatically, and segment your marketing emails with built-in segmentation tools.
Landing page builders
When users click on a link in an email, social media post, or other digital platform, it takes them to a landing page. To capture leads, your landing page must be compelling and easy to navigate.
Tools like Leadpages have a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor, even for those with no coding experience. Its A/B testing capabilities and optimized templates enable marketing teams to create high-converting landing pages to capture leads.
Unbounce helps marketers create high-converting landing pages that match their targeted keywords. Unbounce further optimizes conversions with A/B testing to identify the most effective landing page variations.
Pay-per-click advertising
With pay-per-click marketing, you pay only when a viewer clicks on your ad. A platform like Google Ads lets you create and optimize ads that appear on Google search and partner websites. You can also try social media platforms like Facebook and X to target specific demographics.
Project management
A project management tool lets you efficiently plan, manage, and execute projects collaboratively. Digital marketers can use tools like Asana and Trello to plan content calendars, track progress, assign tasks, and brainstorm ideas.
Asana acts as a digital command center for busy digital marketing teams, streamlining project management by enabling marketers to create tasks, assign deadlines, and collaborate on campaigns. With features like Kanban boards and progress tracking, teams can stay on the same page and easily identify bottlenecks.
Trello also offers visual pinboards with drag-and-drop functionality, so marketers can create workflows, track campaign progress at a glance, and move tasks between stages like To Do, In Progress, and Done. Team members can collaborate by adding comments, uploading files directly to cards, and assigning tasks to each other.
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization tools, or SEO tools, can help you appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) and capture organic traffic. Google Search Console can help you understand how your website performs on Google. Ahrefs is a great digital marketing tool for conducting keyword research; it can help you identify high-volume, low-competition search terms that align with your business.
Ahrefs also helps you uncover broken links on your website and provides insight into your competitors, including what keywords work for them and how much traffic they get as a result.
Semrush, another keyword research platform, equips digital marketers with a varied SEO toolkit to make it possible to identify high-volume keywords, analyze competitor strategies, and track their website's ranking over time. Semrush audits on-page SEO to ensure content is search-engine friendly and offers tools to track backlinks.
Social media marketing
To make social media management (SMM) more efficient, you can schedule social media posts and analyze performance with tools like Buffer or Later. While platforms like Facebook and X let you schedule posts ahead of time, an SMM tool helps create content consistently across different accounts.
Digital marketers can also use Buffer to curate high-performing content, customize posts for each platform, and schedule them for optimal engagement times. Buffer offers analytics to track clicks, shares, and follower growth, providing insights to optimize social media strategies and maximize campaign reach.
Later’s user-friendly interface also allows you to schedule posts across platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. You can use Later to curate visuals with built-in editing tools, preview posts before publishing, and adapt captions to each platform. Later also offers analytics for tracking engagement metrics and identifying top-performing content, allowing marketers to refine their strategy and schedule content that resonates best with their audience.
Digital marketing tools FAQ
What are digital marketing tools?
Digital marketing tools are virtual apps or platforms that help you plan, execute, and analyze marketing campaigns. They provide valuable data like website traffic and campaign performance.
What are five examples of digital marketing?
Five examples of digital marketing are offering a free ebook to those who sign up for your newsletter, creating SEO-friendly content on your blog, running ads on search engines, sending a text message to users to announce a sale, and answering product questions on a TikTok video.
What is SEO in digital marketing?
In digital marketing, implementing an SEO, or search engine optimization, strategy can help you appear on search engine results pages and organically draw users to your website. Marketers do this in various ways, like creating informative content that answers a search query or using relevant keywords.
