15 Marketing Tools That You Need in 2020

In marketing, as with anything else, without the proper tools, no matter how much effort you put in, the results will never be up to the mark.

When marketing, getting the users’ attention can be typically hard. In the era of information, where people’s attention span is being grabbed from all sides, it is getting harder for marketers to come up with something interesting that can grab the consumers’ attention for mere seconds.

To get the best results in marketing, and especially online marketing, you need to not only put in a lot of effort but also get your hands on the proper and effective tools to channel your efforts through. Compromising with the tools will only end up giving you sub par results.

That said, today we bring you a list of best marketing tools 2020 to get the best results out of your marketing methods.

The way marketers engage with users these days has changed. Gone are the days when they used to rely on text-based content. Marketers now rely more on audio-visual content.

While videos have been in fashion for a long time now, audio has just popped up also in demand these days, especially in the form of podcasts.

Podcasts help you get more of the users’ attention as these audio-based offerings require users’ total engagement and attention.

The emerging problem with podcasts is what used to happen with videos: Hosting your videos takes a lot of time, space, and cost. This is where YouTube came in and solved all the problems faced by creators and even helped sprout new creators.

For audios, you now have BuzzSprout. With the help of BuzzSprout, you have a platform to host your podcasts. You don’t have to worry anymore about the hosting and other backend technical stuff; all you have to focus on now is the content you are creating.

It provides essential features like the following:

"My current favorite content marketing tool for 2020 is Buzzsprout. While long-form blogging is dominating right now in the content world as a whole, podcasting is another amazing avenue with untapped potential. Buzzsprout is generally known for podcast hosting, but it's far more diverse. They have a unique set of tools focused on marketing your podcast to drive organic traffic, upload instantly to directories, and some of the most detailed podcast analytics on the market," opined Jeremy Moser.

Ahrefs is the holy grail when it comes to backlinks and search traffic.

It provides you with a suite of seven different applications:

This feature helps you to find the keywords and what strategies your competitors are using. The keywords they are using, which pages are linked to external web pages, check out whether they are doing paid search advertising or not, etc. Knowing what your competitors are doing is a smart move that can help you to devise your plans in a more effective manner.

Keyword Explorer 

This feature helps you to find details about the keywords you are planning to target:‌ volume of searches, unique keyword difficulty score, other keyword suggestions, and so on.

Site Audit 

This feature gives you a general view of what your website’s on-page SEO performance looks like so that you can work to optimize your on-page SEO performance even more.

Rank Tracker 

This feature helps you to compare the keyword rankings with your competitors. Not only that, you can also see your progress with their interactive graphs on average position and traffic, visibility, and where your position is located.

Content Explorer 

This feature helps you to find the top content in your niche. It can help you give a brief idea of what type of content you should be writing about.

SEO‌ Toolbar 

This feature provides you with a toolbar located at the top of the webpage. For every webpage you visit, it will display the relevant data like Ahrefs domain rating, rank, URL rating, and so on.

"For my work leading an SEO team, the tools that have made the most impact for me are Clearscope and Ahrefs on the research side of things, but also Drift in starting conversations when people come to our site from Google," says Brendan Hufford, SEO for the Rest of Us.

If you worry about wrong punctuation or spelling now and then, you should definitely check out Grammarly. 

Grammarly is one of the breakout applications of 2019, having raised $90 million.

Thanks to its AI-powered technology, it reviews your content and constantly checks for any error present in the form of typos and incorrect grammar structure. Not only that, but it also offers you better word suggestions, which helps you deliver crisp and concise content.

You can use it for writing emails, blog posts, social media posts, and so on.

It is available for use as a plugin, which you can incorporate both with Chrome or Word. You can also review contents on the website itself.

“Grammarly. It’s great for a basic clarity and grammatical check. But the new tone and sentiment analysis tools they’ve been testing have been interesting to play around with,” says Brent Trotter, Content Strategist at Clique Studios.

E-mail marketing is one of the tried and tested methods to connect with users effectively. Constant Contact, with an experience of twenty years in the industry, makes the entire process of email marketing much easier and more fruitful.

With the help of drag-and-drop builders and different mobile-optimized templates, you don’t have to worry about the coding and focus more on customizing and effectively targeting your audience.

Further, you can monitor your mail stats, such as the number of emails opened; time spent on each mail; click, open, and bounce rate; etc. It also has options for e-commerce email marketing for converting leads into loyal customers.

"When it comes to marketing tools, we love Constant Contact. Their format is clean and classy and allows for easy link pasting. Their automation allows us to create a warm and inviting email series for those contemplating our counseling or continuing education programs. People need time to get to know you and your company and with well-timed campaigns (one instantly at sign up and then weekly, but not more), you can give new prospects the information and engagement that will allow them to decide if your company is a match for their needs. It also opens up for great conversations and referral opportunities as people discover your amazing content and programs and easily share them with others," believes Joseph Tropper.

SEMrush is one of the most trusted tools in the industry.  It gives you a plethora of useful features like market explorer—which helps you to find new markets and niches and see what the top websites in each niche are doing when it comes to links and keywords. Other tools help you to find the right keywords, keyword position tracking, and so on.

In total, it provides twenty-five different features spread into three different categories: analytics reports, tools, and projects.

Analytics reports, as the name suggests, will provide you with a report on different backgrounds like backlinks, advertising research on competitors (what their ad strategy is), and so on.

Tools feature helps you with a different task, like creating SEO-friendly content, domain comparison with competitors, creating charts for your website and that of your competitors, among other tools.

Projects feature include options like position tracking, site audit, social media tracker, content analyzer, and so on.

It is a feature-packed tool, and you would rarely feel the need to use any other tools for your marketing needs in general.

Images are an integral part of any marketing campaign.

While Photoshop is famous and undoubtedly provides a lot of features to edit the image according to your needs, you have to install it separately, which takes up lots of space and time to load as well.

This is where Canva can come in handy. You can directly edit images on the website, which makes the entire process convenient and efficient.

Further, you get different layouts for presentation, posters, banners, flyers, etc. so that you can easily edit and customize it.

All the basic features like cropping, adding texts, and fade and blur are included. With Canva, you can also make graphs and infographics.

It is a tacit knowledge among writers that integrating SEO and content can be a hard job at times. You either compromise on content while focusing on implementing SEO‌ techniques or the other way around.

Some writers also hold the misconception that SEO is all about writing the keywords two to three times in the post, in the URL, and in the meta description. It cannot be further from the truth. Also, incorporating keywords unnecessarily may come off looking unprofessional to read.

This is where Clearscope comes in handy. With the help of its own search data and natural language processing, it helps you to increase the overall SEO of your content without compromising readability.

After writing the content, you can put it into Clearscope for a review and suggestions to make it more SEO-friendly content. It also provides you with content grading to give you an idea of how much your content can be improved.

"One tool we plan to use more in 2020 is Clearscope. It’s a fantastic on page SEO tool which provides detailed analysis on what you need to write to rank for competitive keywords. The tool scrapes the first page of Google and looks at common factors these sites have from a on page point of view. The tool provides analysis in the correct titles to use, copy and other elements. It’s very easy for content teams to use Clearscope and see a positive ranking increase." says James Norquay, the founder & SEO Director Prosperity Media.

As we mentioned earlier, images are an integral part of any marketing plan. But getting images for your campaigns is a tough job. You have to look for images that are copyright-free but look visually appealing.

Pixabay is one such place. It provides you with free-to-use images that you can easily incorporate into your posts. You also get free illustrations, vectors, and videos if you want to include other multimedia as well.

Before you start writing any piece of content, you should make sure that it is on trend. People want to stay up-to-date with all the latest happenings; thus, providing them with stale content will certainly not work.

BuzzSumo helps you to discover what is trending right now and target your marketing plan accordingly.

It offers four different features:

Discovery, as the name suggests, helps you to see what type of content is trending right now so that you can deliver more engaging content.

Research helps you to know more about the type of content you are planning to target and how it is working on social media platforms.

Influencers help you to find the people important in your niche; this can come handy when building strong networking.

Monitoring helps you to track comments, brand mentions, and other tools like creating alerts for certain keywords and topics.

If you find managing different social media accounts hectic, Buffer can help you out with that.

With Buffer, you can control social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc. from a single place. You can further schedule posts for different platforms and create posts with the help of different team members.

It not only helps you manage multiple accounts but also brings your team members together to help publish better content.

It offers you two more tools:

CoSchedule offers you two different products for two different sets of users. 

For individuals and startups, it offers Editorial Calendar.

With this tool, you can plan all your blog posts as well as social media posts from the same place. You can get done more multiple types of content and schedule it in advance. Posting regularly helps you get ranked better in search engines and keep in touch with your users on social media websites.

For businesses and enterprises, it provides the Marketing Suite. Marketing Suite has tools like asset, social media, work, content, and marketing organizer to take care of all your business needs on the marketing front.

With the help of Convert Pro, you can build in pop-ups and opt-in forms to better engage with your viewers.

There are various types of templates available for use, which with the help of a drag-and-drop builder can help you build your pop-ups in a quick time.

With the help of advanced targeting, you can make sure that the pop-ups are being targeted at the right time for more conversions. You also get advanced features like exit intent pop-ups (which, as the name suggests, will give the readers a pop-up whenever they are about to exit your website).

CrazyEgg is an innovative tool that helps you get new insights other than numeric data, like the average time present on the web page and other data. It helps you get a visual idea of where your customers tend to look and click.

For this, they make use of scroll maps, heat maps, and confetti reports. With the help of these reports, you can accordingly plan where to place your content for more maximum optimization.

It also offers you other advanced features like user recordings and A/B reports. With user recordings, you can see what a typical user does when the user goes through your website. With the help of A/B reports, you can try multiple layouts to figure out which styles work, like choosing different color variants for buttons.

HubSpot is a reputed service used for inbound marketing.

It offers three different services: Marketing, Sales, and Service.

Marketing helps you with increasing traffic and converting more users to customers. They provide tools like lead generation and marketing automation for this.

Sales helps you drive sales from potential customers. It helps you get insights about people who are interested in your product. Tools like e-mail tracking and e-mail automation are included.

Service helps you create and maintain a better relationship with the users. This includes post-sales and pre-sales support. For this, they offer tools like tickets and customer feedback.

For effective marketing, you need the help of various people such as writers, editors, proofreaders, and so on. 

Managing a team of people can be hard. Relying on platforms like WhatsApp and Gmail will not always help you get the best out of your team.

This is where apps like Trello come in. With Trello, you can divide the main task among members and track the progress through boards, lists, and cards. You can keep the entire team on the same page and let each other know what the progress is in each department. 

It also enables you to add files for more effective collaboration.

With over a billion users, YouTube has become the third most popular website after Google and Facebook. This rapidly increasing user base of YouTube and brought videos into the limelight. However, creating videos is not an easy job, you need to have the right tools by your side.

If you're someone who is looking for a handy video editing tool that doesn't need any expertise, InScope is the right fit for you. Here is what Nick Eubanks has to say about InScope-

"I've been using InScope for all my video editing (for 4 different projects) for over a year now. We also used them to shoot and edit all the content from Traffic Think Tank LIVE 2019 (and will be using them again for TTT Live 2020) - the amount attention, care, and professionalism they bring to projects is worth easily 10x what they charge. I can't recommend the service enough to help support your content marketing efforts."

These are the best marketing tools that you can make use of in 2020. You don’t need to make use of all of them, as your priorities and requirements may differ from others.

Hence, it is advised that you make a list of what you think you lack to and can improve in to make your marketing more successful; then you can accordingly choose one of these tools to help you out!