99 top tools for digital marketing strategy and ROI

27 October, 2016

We hope you all had as brilliant a time as we did at this year’s Leeds Business Week, run by The Yorkshire Mafia. It was another successful week for everyone involved – to top it all off we won a bottle of champagne for the best selfie at the Leeds Business Lunch – and we’re already excited for next year!

To start off the week, Jonny spoke at Social Media on Toast, where he explored the maturing buying habits of millennials and why marketing strategies must adapt to keep up.

In his second event of the week, Amazing Tools for Social Media Strategy & ROI, Jonny shared his favourite tools for planning, running and measuring effective digital campaigns. As promised, here are our 99 top tools for social media strategy and ROI:

Planning Tools

• Buzzsumo: Tracks niche content. Can promote with influential heavy sharers.
• Twilert: Tracks brand mentions, utilises email to provide fast customer service.
• Followerwonk: Demographic analysis. Identifies the best time to post for specific followers and fans, and tracks which accounts have biggest impact.

Insight Tools

• Iconosquare: Tracks which posts do well, what people are talking about, which filters receive attention.
• Socialbakers: Insights into your performance compared to competitors and the industry.
• Citation Labs: Blogger outreach.
• HowSociable: Measures social media performance of a name/brand.
• Edgar: Analyses past successful posts and reposts.
• Keyhole: Tracks hashtags for real-time results. Network opportunities. Tracking engagements.

Management Tools

• Hootsuite: Aggregates content into one dashboard. Useful for resolution times for customer service issues by tracking team.
• Evernote: Keeps track of all reference notes, materials etc. Indexed and cross-referenced.
• Google Docs: Collaborative documents with real-time editing and tracking.
• Sprout Social: Aggregated dashboard. Scheduling of posts. Provides a list of networkable connections.
• Tabula: Extracts PDF data and converts into CSV and Excel files.
• Buffer: Schedules your social media updates. Install the Chrome extension to easily share a webpage.

Content Tools

• GIPHY: Creates GIFs from any videos.
• FreeImages: Find stock photos.
• Canva: Create graphics.
• PRISMA: Create artistic pieces from photos.
• Afterlight: Frames, filters, backgrounds.
• Quick: Add text to photos.
• Piktochart: Creates infographics and stats easily.
• OneLook: Displays related keywords and searches.
• Boomerang: Capture GIFs.
• Hyperlapse: Capture time-lapses.
• Layout: Create collages.
• Relay: Create & schedule graphics for social media.
• Iconosquare: Analytics and management tool for Instagram.
• Later: Schedules Instagram posts.
• Instaquote: Text to images.
• Thinglink: Layering content e.g. links, videos, maps, images. VR enabled. Interactive.
• Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator: Generates blog topics from related nouns.
• Alternative video software: Imovie, Vintagio, Lapse-it, Yakit.
• Alternative video platforms: Wistia, Brightcove, ZiMovi.

Channel Tools

• MailChimp: Integrated platform for marketing emails, campaigns and reporting.
• Dotmailer: Email marketing across platforms.
• SumoMe: Grow website traffic.
• MailMunch: Captures leads and converts into lifelong followers.
• CRM: Actionable customer insights, maintain communication channels (Infusionsoft, Hubspot, AWeber, Really Simple Systems, Salesforce)

Monitoring Tools

• Google Alerts: Monitor trends with real-time precision.
• Mention: Can keep track and assign tasks based on your mentions.
• TweetDeck: Monitor trends and tweet success.
• Feedly: Discover new content.
• Addictomatic: Find out latest news on any topic.

Analytical Tools

• Google Analytics: Social referral. Customised dashboards. Value of traffic. How users move through site.
• Majestic: Information on URLs, including what works and is successful.
• Clicktale: Provides heat maps and other analysis of websites.
• Bitly: Short links for Twitter and data analysis of how the links performed.
• Kissmetrics: Tracks users through your site for customer behaviour. Repeat visits monitored and mapped. Tracks which conversions come from which platform to show where ads work.
• Twitonomy: Analytics of Twitter performance, and how other users performed.
• Moz: Open Site Explorer: Info on your site on Google. Local: Good for getting on local search. SEO: Good for online visibility and how to improve.
• Cyfe: All-in-one dashboards.
• Clicky: Real-time web analytics.
• NetBase: Collates user sentiment.
• Rival IQ: Looks at competitors.
• SEMrush: Research service for online marketing.
• Klout: Finds most influential engagement.
• Quintly: Compares against competitors.
• Kred: Calculates your social influence.
• True Social Metrics: Dashboard of collated metrics.
• AgoraPulse: Analyses loyal followers.

Website Optimisation Tools

• Screamingfrog: Analyses the architecture of a website.
• Web Page Test: Analyses website structure.
• Woorank: Good for lead generation.
• GTmetrix: Analyses web page speed performance.
• Leadpages: Tests landing pages.
• Unbounce: Build landing pages.
• Google Keyword Planner: Generates relevant/related keywords to your search.

Twitter Tools

• Tweetreach: Checking of trends.
• Hashtracking: Monitoring of hashtags.
• Trendsmap: Location based analysis of tweets and trends.
• RiteTag: Hashtags to use to be seen now and over time.
• Talkwalker: Centralised social media listening, protect reputation.
• Audiense: Plans depend on followers. Tracks ROI for paid and earned media. Segmentation.
• Twazzup: Real-time monitoring and analytics.
• Commun.it: Complete follower management dashboard.
• Manageflitter: Monitor your followers and unfollowers in depth.

Conversion Tools

• Google PageSpeed Insights: Analyses web page content and suggests how to make page faster.
• Crazy Egg: Heat maps, click maps and scroll maps that show how users navigate your site.
• OptinMonster: Converts visitors into subscribers.

Tools we can’t live without

• Slack, Wunderlist, Teamwork Project Management, Xero, Insightly, IFTTT, Zapier & Evernote.

Have you got any other great tools which we have left out?

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