16 Essential Tools for Digital Marketers in SMEs

Author: Guest Post / Source: Duct Tape Marketing

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Like any good craftsman, a digital marketer needs tools to perform to the best of his abilities each day.

Through the years working in marketing, I’ve tried and tested a lot of tools. Some bad, some good and a very few extraordinary. I’ll focus on the latter group today and hope this essential selection will help you do things better, quicker and more efficiently.

A digital marketer these days wears many hats: some of us are content marketers, others focus solely on SEO, but some marketers, especially in SMEs and startups, they do it all. That’s why I’ve chosen tools to help you at every aspect of a digital marketer’s job.

We’ll start with content marketing tools, going from content creation to the SEO optimization of that content, followed by e-mail and social media marketing tools.

Don’t write more content, write better content.

2 million blog posts are being published every single day.

So during the time, it took you to read up to here, about 1000 new blog posts saw the light. Unfortunately, 99% of them will never get to shine.

Why?

Because they don’t add value or stand out.

Of course, standing out is easier said than done. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to turn the odds in your favor.

The first thing you should do is find something to write about. But not just anything, I see a lot of content marketers that have an idea and immediately start writing.

I believe there’s something else you should do first.

Research.

In this day and age, there’s so much data available. So getting an estimate of the potential success of your article BEFORE you write it is a must.

Here are the tools you need to do it:

1. Feedly (Free)

In Feedly, you can follow all your favorite blogs in one space. No need to go visit them all one by one.

It’s pretty straightforward to set up a profile, add some interesting blogs you’re probably already reading and start spotting popular topics. It’s not as difficult as it sounds. Thanks to their popularity metric. (Check out the number column between publisher and title.)

Feedly has a paid plan with a bunch of extra features, but I’ve managed just fine with the free version.

2. Buzzsumo (Paid)

This tool does a little bit more than just show topic popularity. It will tell how many backlinks an article has and more importantly, where they came from.

Awesome for link building. Because guess who makes a great audience to reach out to for link building?

People who have already shared similar content, that’s who.

Buzzsumo offers a free 14-day trial, after that, you’ll need a paid plan. It’s not the cheapest at 99$ per month. If link building is not your top priority, you might want to give this one a pass.

3. Keyword Planner (Free)

Both Feedly and Buzzsumo are great to discover popular topics. But for more in-depth analysis we use Google’s Keyword Planner.

This free Google Adwords tool is developed to discover additional keywords to advertise on, but I also use it to give me a nice idea about the search volumes for the topics I found with Feedly or Buzzsumo. Just type the keywords and it will tell you the average monthly searches and the level of competition. Using these insights will give you an idea of the potential audience for your topic.

PRO TIP: When doing keyword analysis for SMEs we suggest focussing on medium to long tail keywords. They might have less traffic, but there will be less competition and it will be easier to rank higher in Google’s search results page. (SERPs)

4. MOZ (Paid)

A great tool with a ton of features. The main features relevant to us are those which offer an estimated monthly search volume, a keyword competition indicator in Google SERPs and a variety of SEO features to optimize your website on- and off-page. You get a lot of bang…

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