Here are some of my favourite tools for marketers. Some are free, some are premium, but I’ll let you know what’s what.
As it stands, I don’t get any commission from these, so they are purely based on my own experience.
To be honest, even if I did get commission, I’d only feature tools I believe in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
These are your basics.
Google Analytics (Free) – Your website should have this set up as standard. It will tell you which of your pages have the most visitors and engagement, and where your visitors are coming from. It will also show you which pages have the most conversions, and where that traffic comes from. Read my simple guide to getting set up.
Google Tag Manager (Free) – Worth setting up to save you getting a developer involved every time you need to add or change tracking tags. Read my simple guide to getting set up.
Hotjar (Free & Paid) – A feature-rich and easy to use tool for heatmapping your site visitors. It will show you where you visitors click/scroll the most on your pages to help figure out UX problems,
Microsoft Clarity (Free) – A free version of Hotjar. This one benefits from heatmapping your whole website, rather than just individual pages like Hotjar. However, the interface is more complex and it has a steeper learning curve.
These are my go-to tools for SEO tasks, like keyword tracking and research, and technical auditing.
Ahrefs (Free & Paid) – Pronounced “Ay-Haitch-Reffs”. A very feature-rich tool for keyword tracking, competitor research, keyword research and backlink tracking. Also does tech audits.
Semrush (Paid) – Basically does the same stuff as Ahrefs, but also has content writing tools. It’s pretty spendy though. Also does tech audits.
AnswerThePublic (Free & Paid) – Helps you to find questions related to your chosen keywords. You can then use those for FAQs and blog topics.
UberSuggest (Free Trial, then Paid) – A lightweight keyword research tool by Neil Patel.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Free & Paid) – I love SF. It’s by far my favourite technical auditing tool. The learning curve is quite steep as the UX isn’t forgiving, but it will give you everything you need to know in terms of website health.
You know what? Most social management tools do pretty much the same thing, so it really comes down to your preference and budget.
Expect the ability to schedule posts, cross-post automatically across all channels, monitor your social channels, respond to comments/messages and reporting dashboards.
Here are some of the good ones:
Sprout Social (Paid)
Falcon (Paid)
Hootsuite (Paid)
Want to stay sane? Try investing in a few of these tools…
Sunsama (Paid) – This is my personal choice for organising my day to day. It pulls in tasks from all your other tools, like calendars, email, Trello, Asana etc and lets me shuffle them around to schedule my day.
Motion (Paid) – Like Sunsama, but offers a degree of intelligence with AI. The AI will shuffle your tasks around to fit your day, depending on how things are going with meetings and other tasks. Clever.
ClickUp (Free & Paid) – More of a project level tool. ClickUp is basically a to-do list on steroids. I found it very helpful when I was working in an agency to keep track of all the goings on with multiple clients.
Monday (Free & Paid) – Useful for teams and individuals juggling multiple projects. The features are endless, so I recommend giving the free plan a go to see if it can help with you and your team.
Trello (Free & Paid) – Stripped back Kanban board. I’ve used this in every job in my career in some way or another. It’s just a refreshingly simple way of keeping on top of projects.
Chat GPT/Bard (Free & Paid) – Honourable mention to our new AI overlords. I use Chat GPT every day for everything from proofing to ideating and coding. Weirdly enough, I didn’t use it to write anything on this site, but it did help me formulate my thoughts. Don’t believe everything these guys say, and you’ll be right as rain 😉
Now and again, I’ll be adding new tools to this list if I think they are worthy. If you want be notified about that and other helpful stuff, subscribe to Clarity, my newsletter.
