Top 17 Marketing Tools (to Make You a Smart Marketer!)

Promoting products & services, generating leads, driving sales, and improving brand image using various marketing tools and techniques is what defines the life of a marketer.

The role of a marketing professional is challenging and full of responsibilities but at the same time, it’s fun and exciting too.

Being a digital marketing expert for over a decade, I tried a countless number of marketing tools to aid the marketing campaigns of my organization. I found some tools to be highly effective while many others were only so-so and the remaining tools were a total waste of time, I must say.

From my personal experience, I would like to tell you that trying different marketing tools to find the best ones is a lengthy and time-consuming process.

However, you do not have to waste your precious time in doing all that research work because I am listing the best online marketing tools that work for almost every marketer out there.

Additionally, the list of marketing tools is divided into various categories so that it’ll become easier for you to find the best tools that can meet your specific marketing requirements to make a perfect marketing plan.

Let’s get rolling!

Table of Contents [show]

What is a Marketing Tool?

In the simplest terms, a marketing tool can be a technique, strategy, or software used for promoting the products or services with the intent to boost the sales of a business.

However, the marketing tools that I am referring to in this article are the software that you can use to facilitate your everyday responsibilities as a marketing professional.

Looking to manage your marketing team and projects from a single place? Try ProofHub now!

Best Marketing Tools For Marketers

Project Management

1. ProofHub

ProofHub is a leading project management and team collaboration software that you can use to manage your marketing projects as well as your teams effectively. It combines all the essential tools that you need to plan, collaborate, organize, and deliver projects on time. Define workflows and break projects down into smaller, manageable tasks.

The Kanban boards in ProofHub let you track the progress of each task and see them moving through the different project stages. Moreover, you can attach files and add comments to a task. The integrated chat tool even makes it possible for you and your teammates to have quick conversations over text messages.

Key Features:

Being an all-in-one project management software, ProofHub comes loaded with a wide range of features with the most prominent ones as follows:

• Online Proofing

Online proofing allows you to review, proof, and approve designs & documents in real-time. To give feedback or suggestions while reviewing a file, all you need is to add comments to the design file or the document. Additionally, the markup tool makes it possible to highlight and add feedback to the specific regions of a file. 

• Gantt Charts

Gantt charts incorporated in ProofHub offer a visual representation of the overall project timeline. You can view task schedules, drag and drop tasks to modify their schedules, set task dependencies, and highlight the critical path of a project. In addition, Gantt charts in ProofHub also give you the flexibility to associate milestones with tasks and track the progress of each task.

• Files & Documents Storage

With ProofHub, you will get cloud storage to bring all your project files to a single place and manage them with relative ease. You can upload files from your computer or from third-party file storage services, including Box, Dropbox, GoogleDrive, and OneDrive. You can store multiple versions of a file and attach files to tasks and share them in chats, discussions, etc.

• Timesheets

Tracking time for each task that you are working on becomes convenient with the in-built timers in ProofHub. While timers offer automatic time tracking, you can also make manual time entries to keep an accurate record of your working hours. All the time data gets stored in timesheets that you can access whenever you want and use them for various purposes like payroll, client billing, time management, and much more.

• Custom Reports

Reporting is an essential part of project management and with ProofHub, creating detailed project reports is just a few clicks away. The software lets you create and customize both project and resource reports. It is quite easy to highlight specific data in reports by picking parameters of your choice. You can even download the reports and use them in meetings to discuss project progress and make plans for better utilization of resources.

 Ups:

• Simple and easy-to-understand interface with little to no learning curve
• Activity logs make it easy to keep track of everything happening within projects
• Create custom roles and set different permissions for each role
• IP restriction helps to prevent unauthorized access to your ProofHub account  

Downs:

• Limited app integrations 

What’s ProofHub Best For?

ProofHub is the ideal tool to have ultimate control over all your projects, tasks, and teams.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using ProofHub?

ProofHub has two simple pricing plans:

• Essential – $45 per month (billed annually)
• Ultimate Control – $89 per month (billed annually)

Capterra/G2 Ratings:

Capterra – (4.3 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.4 / 5) stars

Make sure that none of your marketing tasks slip through the cracks? Start using ProofHub to manage all your projects! 

2. Todoist

Managing the tasks of a project effectively makes it possible to complete your projects on time and the Todoist app is the right tool for that. It allows you to create interactive to-do lists that you can use to keep a track of all your tasks. You can easily organize and prioritize your tasks with Todoist and make sure that you never get off track.

With the quick add feature, you can create new tasks and organize them in no time. Moreover, it’s quite easy to see the details, like subtasks, added comments, the due date of a task through from the task view. Also, you can bring your teams to the Todoist app and assign them tasks directly through the app.

Ups:

• Real-time notifications for everything happening within a task
• Color-coded graphs help you to visualize your daily and monthly productivity
• Easy access to the completed tasks of a project

Downs:

• A limited set of project management features
• Not suitable for large organizations

What’s Todoist Best For?

Todoist app is great for streamlining all the tasks of a project and keeping your everyday work well-organized.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Todoist?

Todoist has two paid plans:

• Premium – $3 per user per month (billed annually)
• Business – $5 per user per month (billed annually) 

Capterra/G2 Ratings:

Capterra – (4.5 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.4 / 5) stars

Social Media Marketing and Management

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is among the top-rated social media management software providing marketers the ability to manage all their social media campaigns. By having this software on your side, you can easily plan, create, and schedule all your social media campaigns with relative ease.

It’s also possible to manage your social media teams effectively with Hootsuite. You can set different permission levels for individual team members and control what they can access. You can regulate the permissions separately at the organizational level, team level, and social account level.

Ups:

• Performance monitoring of all your social media from one place
• Allows you to create and manage social media ad campaigns
• View customer messages and queries from different social media accounts and reply to them directly from Hootsuite’s Inbox   

Downs:

• The user interface seems dull and outdated in terms of design
• A fair amount of time required to get familiar with the software’s functionality

What’s Hootsuite Best For?

Hootsuite is the ideal choice for anyone who wants to integrate and manage several social media accounts from a centralized location.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Hootsuite?

Hootsuite has four different pricing plans:

• Professional – $29 per month (1 user) (10 social profiles)
• Team – $129 per month (3 users) (20 social profiles)
• Business – $599 per month (5+ users) (35 social profiles)
• Enterprise – Custom pricing

Capterra/G2 Ratings:

Capterra – (4.3 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.1 / 5) stars

4. Crowdfire

If you want to manage the social media of your business in a simple and effective way, Crowdfire is the ideal app that you need on your side. It is one of the best social media management platforms and offers best-in-class features to help you stay on top of your social media profiles and campaigns.

By using Crowdfire, it’ll become easier for you to boost your social media engagement and growth. Moreover, the platform allows you to publish content on blogs, and you can also interact with customers to provide them excellent customer service. You can also discover relevant content to share with your audience and even schedule posts to publish them automatically at different times.

Ups:

• Easy to learn and use
• You can curate articles as well as images to be used across your social media accounts
• Queue meter helps you ensure that your social profiles stay active
• Customizable reports simplify the way you measure, track and understand your business’s ROI
• Competitive pricing

Downs:

• Doesn’t work well with LinkedIn
• The free version comes with a limited set of features

What’s Crowdfire Best For?

Crowdfire is flexible enough to meet the social media management needs of individuals, agencies, and businesses. 

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Crowdfire?

Crowdfire has three pricing plans:

• Plus – $7.48 per month (5 social media accounts)
• Premium – $37.48 per month (10 social media accounts)
• VIP – $74.98 per month (25 social media accounts)

Capterra/G2 Ratings:

Capterra – (4.1 / 5) stars

G2 – (3.9 / 5) stars

5. Buffer

Buffer is yet another popular app for managing multiple social media accounts using a simple dashboard. You can integrate all the major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn with the app.

You can draft posts, schedule them, and analyze the performance of each social media campaign. With Buffer, you can harness the power of social media to increase the brand awareness of your organization and drive customer engagement.

Ups:

• Remarkable UI and UX design
• The in-built calendar lets you see all your scheduled content on different social platforms at a glance 
• You can share posts with your teammates and ask for approval before publishing them
• It’s easy to measure social media performance and create detailed reports for analyzing how your efforts are paying off

Downs:

• Pricey for individuals and small businesses
• Lacks team management features

What’s Buffer Best For?

Buffers make a great choice for marketers who want a simple and intuitive app for managing social media.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Buffer?

Buffer has two different products for publishing and analyzing performance on social media. Here are pricing plans for each product:

Buffer Publish:

• Pro – $15 per month (1 user) (8 social accounts)
• Premium – $65 per month (2 users) (8 social accounts)
• Business – $99 per month (6 users) (25 social accounts)

Buffer Analyze:

• Pro – $35 per month (8 social accounts)
• Premium – $40 per month (10 social accounts)

Capterra/G2 Ratings:

Capterra – (4.5 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.3 / 5) stars

6. SocialPilot

If you want to add some automation to your social media management work, SocialPilot is just the right tool. You can add the URL of your business’s website and other websites that you follow to share their blogs automatically on your social media.

With SocialPilot, you can view and reply to messages, comments on multiple Facebook profiles in real-time. The integrated social media analytics lets you analyze the engagement on social posts and also helps to understand the audience’s behavior. Also, you can document the analytic reports of your social platforms by downloading them in the PDF format.

Ups:

• Assign roles to team members and define their access levels
• Content recommendations from across the web
• Bulk scheduling makes it possible to schedule social posts for upcoming weeks or months

Downs:

• It’s somewhat difficult to navigate through the app

What’s SocialPilot Best For?

SocialPilot is particularly great for managing your social media accounts on Facebook.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using SocialPilot?

SocialPilot has four different pricing plans:

• Professional: $25 per month (3 team members) (25 social accounts) [billed annually]

• Small Team: $41.66 per month (5 team members) (50 social accounts) [billed annually]
• Agency: $83.33 per month (10 team members)(100 social accounts)
• Enterprise: custom pricing

Capterra/G2 Ratings:

Capterra – (4.4 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.3 / 5) stars

SEO and SEM

7. SEMrush

SEMrjush is one of the top-rated digital marketing tools for business that you can leverage to plan and monitor all your SEO strategies. It allows you to search relevant keywords for your website, analyze competitor’s SEO strategies, and create SEO-friendly webpage and blog content.

Apart from SEO, SEMrush can also help you with PPC (pay-per-click) ad campaigns and boost your business’s sales. It is a comprehensive software that can meet both your SEO and SEM needs, like backlink analysis, organic traffic insights, content audit, competitive research, and much more.

Ups 

• Comes with a wide range of useful tools and features
• Suitable for marketing teams of every size
• Data-driven solutions for developing powerful content strategies

Downs

• Pricing is quite high for individuals, freelancers, and startups

What’s SEMrush Best For?

SEMrush can help you with almost all of your digital marketing strategies.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using SEMrush?

SEMrush has four pricing plans:

• Pro – $83.28 per month (billed annually)
• Guru – $166.62 per month (billed annually) 
• Business – $333.28 per month (billed annually)
• Enterprise – custom pricing

Capterra/G2 Ratings

Capterra – (4.6 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.5 / 5) stars

Website Optimization and CRO

8. Hotjar

As a marketing professional, you need to analyze and understand the behavior of users visiting a website. Hotjar is a specialized behavior analytics software that allows you to gain better knowledge about user behavior with features, like heatmaps and visitor recordings.

The software also makes it possible for you to get feedback directly from users. This feedback data is useful for identifying the factors that trigger them to perform certain actions. With Hotjar, you can embed surveys on a website or share it with users to get their feedback.

Ups:

• Easy to set up and use
• Allows visitor targeting using URLs, device and user attributes
• You can export user responses in CSV or XLSX format

Downs:

• Suitable only for websites, you can’t use it for apps 

What’s Hotjar Best For?

Hotjar provides important user behavior information that you can utilize to improve the overall user experience of a website.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Hotjar?

Hotjar has three pricing plans:

• Personal (Plus) – $39 per month (unlimited team members)
• Business – Starts at $99 per month (unlimited team members)
• Agency – Custom pricing

Capterra/G2 Ratings:

Capterra – (4.7 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.3 / 5) stars

Content Creation

9. Canva

Canva is the preferred choice for marketing teams to create visual content that can be used in various marketing campaigns. The best thing about this tool is that it offers professional design templates that allow you to create beautiful graphic content without having hardcore graphic designing skills.

Whether you want to create stunning infographics that engage people with your content or videos to help customers learn better about your product/service, Visually can help you create a wide range of content.

Ups 

• Allows you to create a wide range of content
• Comes with several advanced image editing features
• You can use free icons to make your designs more impactful

Downs

• Lack of collaborative features

What’s Canva Best For?

With Canva, you can create eye-catching designs for your marketing campaigns easily.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Canva?

Canva has two pricing plans:

• Pro – $9.95 per user per month (billed annually)
• Enterprise – #30.00 per user per month (billed annually)

Capterra/G2 Ratings

Capterra – (4.7 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.7 / 5) stars

10. Creatopy

Creatopy is an intuitive ad design platform that helps you easily craft engaging ads that fit all your needs, including banners and other display ads, social media ads, and video ads. You can start from industry-specific templates and standard sizes or create your own custom designs. By taking advantage of the high-quality stock photo, video and audio libraries, you can truly bring your ads to life.

Due to its automation capabilities, Creatopy allows you to generate large volumes of ad variations with just a few clicks, eliminating repetitive tasks. In addition, the platform gives you the possibility to work in bulk, creating sets of ads that can be edited and downloaded simultaneously.

Ups:

• Access to a mix of automation, animation and customization capabilities,

• Intuitive interface and short learning curve

• Scalable pricing model

Downs:

• It’s a new product, so new functionalities are still under development

What’s Creatopy  Best For?

Creatopy makes ad design easy for everyone and comes with a mix of automation, customization and animation options, allowing users to level up their advertising game.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Creatopy

There are four types of plans that users can access: Free, Create, Automate, and Enterprise. The Create pricing plan starts at $17/month (billed yearly).

Capterra/G2 Ratings:

Capterra – (4.6 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.4 / 5) stars

ProofHub project management will surely boost your productivity. Try now.

Email Marketing

11. 11. SalesHandy

Making effective email marketing campaigns to boost a business’s sales is what SalesHandy can do for you. The tool allows you to automate and track the outreach of emails sent to prospects. 

SalesHandy comes equipped with several powerful features that help marketers to take maximum advantage of email marketing. It enables you to create personalized emails to target different customer segments, schedule emails, and track the performance of email campaigns in real-time. 

Ups 

• Compatible with Gmail and Microsoft Outlook
• Create and save email templates to cut the time required for drafting frequently used emails 
• The auto follow-up feature helps improve customer engagement and reply rate

Downs

• The user interface is not up-to-date
• Email tracking can be better

What’s SalesHandy Best For?

SalesHandy is a great tool for managing several email campaigns from a single interface.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using SalesHandy?

SalesHandy has three pricing plans:

• Regular – $7 per user per month (billed annually)
• Plus – $16 per user per month (billed annually)
• Enterprise – $40 per user per month (billed annually)

Capterra/G2 Ratings

Capterra – (4.4 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.2 / 5) stars

12.  MailChimp

Mailchimp is an all-in-one integrated marketing platform that is quite popular for its capability to create meaningful email marketing campaigns. You can use this software to draft professional emails for your customers and drive sales.

Its pre-designed email templates and drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to create engaging emails in no time. Additionally, you can manage multiple email campaigns using MailChimp and track all of them in real-time to make sure that all your efforts bring the desired results.

Ups 

• The content studio store images and files that you can use readily in emails
• Allows you to create transactional emails, such as order confirmation emails.
• Integrated analytics tools make it possible to analyze audience behavior and engagement

Downs

• Suitable for small businesses
• Lack of advanced features

What’s MailChimp Best For?

With Mailchimp, it’s easy to launch and track email campaigns even if you have little experience of email marketing.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using MailChimp?

MailChimp has three pricing plans:

• Essentials – Starts at $10.40 per month
• Standard – Starts at $15.53 per month
• Premium – Starts at $310.50 per month

Capterra/G2 Ratings

Capterra – (4.5 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.3 / 5) stars

13. Systeme

Systeme.io is an all-in-one software to build an online business (no need to download anything on your computer) that allows you to:

• build your email list
• create sales pages, email capture forms and popups
• send newsletters (and lead magnets) to your subscribers
• create sales tunnels
• host your online trainings
• create (pre-recorded) webinars
• collect payments for your trainings (and other services such as coaching or even physical products)
• create your affiliate program and find your affiliates
• edit invoices and manage your affiliates’ commissions
• find partners to sell in affiliation thanks to the integrated marketplace
• get statistics on your business (turnover, conversion rate, number of sales, email opening rate, etc.)

Ups: 

• It is the easiest tool to use to build an online business
• Systeme.io is the most competitive offer in the world. You will not find on any other tool so many features for so little money

Downs:

• Systeme.io allows few integrations today

What’s Systeme.io Best For?

Systeme.io allows anyone to start an online business for free in less than an hour.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Systeme.io?

Systeme.io has four different pricing plans:

• Freemium – Free (up to 1 000 contacts)
• Startup – $27 per month (up to 5 000 contacts)
• Webinar – $47 per month (up to 10 000 contacts)
• Entreprise – $97 per month (up to 15 000 contacts)

Capterra/G2 Ratings

Capterra – (5 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.4 / 5) stars

Video Marketing 

14. Viewbix

Viewbix is an interactive video platform that marketers can use for improving their video marketing strategies. The powerful video analytics makes it possible to see how your videos are performing and get useful data to optimize videos for better viewer engagement.

By using Viewbix, you can easily identify the sections of your videos that most viewers find engaging. This way, it becomes possible to create meaningful content that delivers messages to your audience effectively.

Ups 

• Supports cross-platform distribution
• Viewer engagement analysis and real-time campaign optimization
• You can add links to videos

Downs

• Clunky user interface

What’s Viewbix Best For?

The video marketing solutions offered by Viewbix helps businesses of all sizes to improve their ROI from their video assets.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Viewbix?

• Standard – Starts at $10 per month

Capterra/G2 Ratings

Capterra – N/A

G2 – N/A

15. VidIQ

For marketers who want to optimize YouTube videos to have a better reach, the VidIQ software is the perfect tool. It allows you to improve the visibility of your videos and expand your audience.

Apart from offering detailed insights for YouTube videos, VidIQ also provides metrics that reveal audience engagement with your videos on Facebook and Twitter.

Ups 

• Allows you to perform comprehensive keyword research for YouTube videos
• Analyze competitors and discover content that is working well for them
• It’s easy to know the performance of your YouTube channel with its channel audit feature

Downs

• Do not support integration with many popular social media platforms, like Instagram
• High-end plans are quite expensive

What’s VidIQ Best For?

VidIQ is the best choice if your video marketing campaigns are mainly focused on YouTube.

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using VidIQ?

VidIQ has three pricing plans:

• Pro – Starts at $7.50 per user per month
• Boost – Starts at $39.00 per user per month
• Boost+ – Starts at $415 per user per month

Capterra/G2 Ratings

Capterra – (5 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.7 / 5) stars

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

16. Salesmate

Salesmate is among the leading CRM software that allows you to automate your sales process and build better relationships with your customers. It comes loaded with several advanced CRM features that enable you to drive sales and retain customers.

The software offers a simplified pipeline view to visualize, organize, and prioritize your deals with customers. It also has smart email features that you can use to track how customers are interacting with your emails.  

Ups 

• Easy to use
• Allows team members to collaborate on sales
• Detailed analytics and sales activity reports make it easy to visualize your sales team performance 

Downs

• Suitable for startups and small businesses
• Too many features can overwhelm users

What’s Salesmate Best For?

With Salesmate it’s easy to keep every activity of your sales process well-organized 

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Salesmate?

Salesmate has three pricing plans:

• Starter – $12 per user per month (billed annually)
• Growth – $24 per user per month (billed annually)
• Boost – $40 per user per month (billed annually)

Capterra/G2 Ratings

Capterra – (4.7 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.5 / 5) stars

17. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM is among the top tools for marketing professionals for boosting sales activity and managing interactions with customers. It also lets you have a bird-eye view of your sales pipeline with its interactive visual dashboard.

The software comes with a plethora of features, such as live chat, email templates, and meeting scheduling, etc. that come handy while reaching and connecting with prospects.

Ups 

• Responsive user interface design
• Allows you to track all your business deals
• Comes with an integrated email automation system

Downs

• Steep learning curve

What’s HubSpot CRM Best For?

HubSpot CRM allows you to streamline the lead generation and sales process. 

How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using HubSpot CRM?

HubSpot CRM has three pricing plans:

• Starter – Starts at $40 per month
• Professional – Starts at $400 per month
• Enterprise – Starts at $120 per month

Capterra/G2 Ratings

Capterra – (4.5 / 5) stars

G2 – (4.3 / 5) stars