At some point in the world of digital marketing, you have to decide that you and your team can’t do everything all on their own. A craftsman is only as good as the tool they use, that’s why it’s necessary to have a complete and varied tool kit. We rounded up a definitive list of digital marketing tools we simply cannot go without here at Digithy and sorted them out by category from design to SEO. These are the digital marketing tools in our tool box.
Design
CREATIVE PROCESS
Miro > An online collaborative whiteboard platform to brainstorm as if you and your team were in the same room.
Principles A place to learn about and create Design Principles. Our favourite? Of course “Design with empathy: Understand our customers and end users better than they understand themselves.”
Sneakpeek > A library of printable grids to sketch wireframes...because sometimes web designer miss pencils and paper!
RESOURCES
Pexels The best website to find copyright free pictures and videos to use on websites, flyers, social media posts…
Freeicons.io Free vectors and icons to use in your project, simply look for a word and explore. Remember to check the allowed use (personal/commercial) to give credit to awesome designers!
UIhut Thousands of free and PRO templates, illustrations, icons, and graphic assets for the web. Everything you can think of is here. Note: free users will have a limit of 25 downloads per day.
Ionic Free premium designed icons for use in web, iOS, Android, and desktop apps. You can download them as .svg to have them in the highest resolution possible!
FONTS
Myfonts.com How many times have you seen a poster and wondered if you could use the same font for one of your graphics? The life changing feature of Myfonts is “WhatTheFont”: it allows you to upload a picture and the website tells you which font has been used for that particular graphic.
Google Fonts A fantastic library of free types to use in your web and printed projects.
Fontshare A great alternative to Google Fonts! Amazingly designed and professional typefaces for you to download and use in your projects.
Archetype Need to see if the pair of fonts you chose really works on the page? Archetype lets you choose your typography, from H1 to body, and displays it in a simple layout. You can use your local fonts or choose from their Google Fonts library. If you have no clue of what makes a good pair, click on “Pick Fonts” and scroll through their suggestions! Once you’re happy, you can export in CSS or download the fonts.
COLOURS
We always need inspiration, and we are grateful that the web offers so many hints. Here are our favourite tools to create colour schemes:
COLOR HUNT Like browsing? Scroll through an endless feed of color palettes; when you find ‘the one’, simply copy the HEX code in your design!
COOLORS.CO Need to be inspired with just one click? Generate color schemes by pressing the spacebar; you can add up to 10 colours to combine, lock the ones you like and keep randomising the others.
PICKER If you saw a picture that was so harmonious that made you wonder if you could use their shades to create a scheme, Picker is the tool for you. You can pick colours from images and find the HEX code to use them in your design.
Content Writing
Most good articles begin with equally good keyword research, but it generally helps us with our content creation too!
KEYWORDS & SEO
Keywords Everywhere: a great way to see a word’s search volume on Google along with keywords that could further inspire ideas for content or give you an idea of long tail keywords or related search queries.
Answer the public: social listening is an important part of the keyword research process. The website generates a list of popular questions related to your chosen topic or keyword, the list can be downloaded as a csv so that you can manually add it to your own research.
WRITING & EDITING
Grammarly. Our relationship with Grammarly is a committed one. This grammar correction app works very much like Microsoft Word’s spell-check. It's great at catching spelling and grammar mistakes but additionally lets you know how a sentence can be improved and if it makes sense through rephrasing, it can even spot plagiarism. We love everything about it and the fact that it integrates with Google Docs and Chrome means you can grammar check wherever you write!
Hemingway Editor, a digital marketing tool that is focused on simplifying complex sentences. If you want to truly improve your content and optimize it for the internet, then really making sure that it is simple and concise is the best way to go. Though these days there is a movement towards long form content, simple and readable language is the best way to go and Hemingway is great at analysing your sentences and suggesting how to improve them.
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin, so if that’s your go-to content management system we definitely recommend it. Yoast measures readability of your content, and if the language needs to be changed it also offers recommendations on what needs to be added to optimize the content overall.
Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator: content writing doesn’t only include the act of writing but the creativity of coming up with an idea, Hubspot’s tool helps by allowing you to search 5 nouns as keywords and it will generate 5 possible ideas and more if you opt for their premium option.
TRANSLATION
DeepL is a translation tool that allows you to translate any text including doc or powerpoint files. It takes care to do the translation in a mode that is colloquial as well and not merely literal.
Reverso Context is another translation tool we can’t go without that offers translation but also options to see the different ways to use the word in the context of a sentence.
Marketing strategy & Analytics
Google Trends is our go-to in the first steps of customer understanding, and it’s a great support when it comes to market and demand research. It allows us to research a keyword in a specific area of the world and understand if there’s any traction and demand in that specific area. It’s also a great support tool to use when you need to decide how to target your advertising.
Google Analytics is THE digital marketing tool when it comes to analytics. It provides detailed information on where your users are accessing your website which can vastly improve and change how you approach your content. You also get to see which parts of your website are more popular, which can help you choose topics to come or to alter your strategy. If you use it in combination with Google tag manager, you can also track buttons and links clicks on your website and reach the stars!
Community Platforms: These are essential for customer understanding, their needs and what you can provide to make them happy. We usually use Reddit and Quora, but depending on the business, there are many more you can find that are topic/sector-related.
On-platform analytics tools: Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube analytics are places you need to check if you want to create a compelling content plan, making sure you respect each platform’s needs. You’ll find a lot of the information in Google Analytics which for us is essential, but the platform-specific analytics will help you analyse content and see the post-related engagement and results.
Google Keyword Planner when it comes to advertising on Google, this is the best tool to plan your keyword strategy and lists for the different campaigns. It gives you relevant suggestions based on your first input, and suggests new keywords when analysing the product page.
SEO Analysis
If you need to analyse your SEO to understand how your website is performing and what you can improve, there are two go-to digital marketing tools we like to use: Moz and Ahrefs.
Moz: Moz helps you understand how search engines ranks your website they have a number of tools from free options such as the moz bar, to premium options like Moz pro or Moz local for small businesses
Ahrefs: Ahrefs can conduct a site audit to help you rank better on google, it features a number of tools specifically geared towards helping your site perform better and optimizing it for users.
These digital marketing tools are what the Digithy team finds to be the most helpful in our process from A to Z, give them a try and let us know what you think.