6 Must-Use Tools to Track and Improve Your Performance Marketing
In the digital era, we are not even questioning the need of tracking and analyzing marketing activities to determine their value for the business. It is nearly pointless to spend even a small budget on a campaign without setting up expectations, KPIs and without measuring the performance. Any positive outcome from such campaigns sounds more like a chance rather than an expected result.
In this article, we are listing some of the most popular and useful tools that can help you plan and lead your marketing campaigns to have a real measurable impact on your revenue, brand awareness or customer lifetime value. They will not only help you improve and optimize your efforts but will also make planning for business development and positioning a little easier.
SEMrush
One of the most popular marketing SaaS platforms is now being used by over 7 million marketing professionals around the World. It started back in 2008 with only 2 separate tools but in 2021 it has 48 tools grouped in several toolkits:
- SEO Toolkit consisting of a useful SEO dashboard, keyword research tools, competitive research tools, link building, rank tracking, on-page and technical optimization tools, and more.
- Advertising Toolkit designed to help you analyze competitors’ performance and better plan your keywords selection, PPC and display campaigns.
- Social Media Toolkit that will help you prepare your posting plan, track, and analyze your performance across social media channels.
- Content Marketing Toolkit to help you find popular content ideas and prepare SEO friendly content on popular topics.
- Competitive Research Toolkit containing tools to analyze the performance of your competitors, the traffic they get and the result from their marketing efforts.
- Management Toolkit created to help you manage all your campaigns from one place and get reporting on your performance.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs promises to marketers better search engine ranking without being SEO experts. The platform is notable for its large database of resources among which are the help center, the blog and its own learning academy. The main modules of the platform include:
- Site Explorer to research your competitors’ backlinks and SEO rankings
- Keywords Explorer to help you find the right keywords for your content
- Site Audit to scan your website for SEO issues
- Rank Tracker to monitor your performance across various devices
- Content Explorer that will provide some fresh ideas for trendy topics and content
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is Neil Patels’ online tool designed to help you get more traffic and improve your SEO. Here is what you can take advantage from by using it:
- Domain Overview – you can get insight into the strategies that are working for others in your market so you can adopt them, improve them, and get an advantage.
- Top SEO Pages Report – discover which of your competitor’s pages are ranking for popular organic keyword phrases and which ones are loved by sites like Facebook. Thus, you will no longer spend time in writing content that no one reads.
- Keywords Suggestions – Ubersuggest provides a free keyword tool to help you think of head terms and long-tail phrases that you can use as keywords.
- Content Ideas – are you aware of the hot topics within your niche? This module will help you identify and work on content pieces that are really appealing to people.
- Backlink Data – with this tool you can see the exact content in your space that people are linking to and which links have the highest impact for you.
Mention
Briefly said, Mention is the tool that will help you monitor the web, listen to your audience, and manage your social media channels. Here are some good ideas how to use it:
- Listen to Your Audience – track and monitor what your audience is talking about across social media.
- Manage Your Brand – it can be very helpful for large brands to identify potential crises and monitor user feedback.
- Competition Analysis – what do they say about your competitors? You will be able to easily track users’ opinion, feedback and their share of voice.
HubSpot
This is the platform offering one of the highest varieties of tools, not only for marketing activities, but for growing businesses online as a whole. If we dive into HubSpot’s Marketing Hub we will discover a rich set of tools that include all you need to successfully attract and retain your customers on the Web. A brief overview of HubSpot’s marketing features will tell you that the platform can help you:
- Attract Attention Online – just like any of the above mentioned tools, HubSpot will help you prepare the best content pieces by analyzing SEO metrics, competitors’ performance and most popular topics on the Web. You will also find support for managing your social media channels, engaging your visitors with live chat or hosting and managing files right inside the platform to share them with your visitors.
- Convert More Leads – HubSpot is going a step further with tools to help you turn more leads into actual buyers. You can try its user-friendly landing page builder, the form builder, the email marketing tool and the lead tracking tool to achieve higher impact of the marketing efforts on your business.
- Get the Most out of Data – the Marketing Analytics tool gathers sufficient amount of data that will be helpful in planning for strategic marketing activities and campaigns. Another useful feature is the opportunity for integration with Salesforce – one of the most popular CRM tools used across wide range of businesses and industries.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a good alternative to all the tools intended to help you plan and prepare your content. By discovering good ideas, trending topics, and popular keywords the platform provides full insights to support the research process and creation of comprehensive content. A notable feature of BuzzSumo is the option to discover influencers – authors and creators with engaged audience and genuine authority on the Web whom you can cooperate with to increase your brand’s engagement level. Indeed, the tool is able to scan millions of profiles before choosing the right influencers for you.
Bonus tool: Zapier
Zapier is more than just a marketing tool. In fact, this is an all-in-one automation platform that can save you hours of work per week. It offers integration with over 3,000 applications to optimize the process of customer management, communication and collaboration within teams, online advertising and monitoring of your performance online.
So, which ones do you choose for your business? No matter how big it is, tracking and improving your results is a must.