65 Must-Have Tools for Mastering Digital Marketing

Everything You Need to Know to Win Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle

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Philip Mandelbaum
04/11/2022

A set of old-fashioned wood and metal tools, organized on an old dark wood table

Implementing a 360-degree digital marketing strategy without the right tools is like a doctor (or an orchestra) performing without their instruments. Don’t disappoint your audience. Make your job easier — and their lives better — by implementing the digital marketing software that best meets your business’s needs.

So, what are those needs? If you’re like most of us, it’s pretty simple: increase ROI by increasing sales and decreasing spend. Of course, as the old saying goes, sometimes you have to spend money to make money. And that holds true with any marketing tech investments: if leveraged as designed, their upfront cost can quickly be overcome by their ongoing benefits.

The only questions that remain, then, are:

Which types of digital marketing tools do we need?
How should our digital marketing tools work together?

Let’s start with the second question, first, because to develop a 360-degree digital marketing strategy you must think holistically, through the entire customer lifecycle.

Digital Marketing Tools and the Customer Lifecycle

Good business isn’t about closing a deal, it’s about developing a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship with your customers. For marketing (and sales and CX departments), the goal is to maximize the customer lifetime value of each prospect. And the only way to achieve this goal is to nurture your leads, demonstrating transparency, consistency, authenticity and empathy, and delivering personalized, interactive experiences at every touchpoint. The more often and more deeply a consumer engages with your brand across their varied social media platforms and devices, the more likely they are to convert from a lead to a customer and then from a customer to a brand evangelist.

So, how does it work?

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Customer Lifecycle Stages

The customer lifecycle considers the value of a customer for the full length of the relationship, including any support they may need as well as any assistance they may provide in helping to promote the brand on social media. In other words, the customer lifecycle takes into account the customer’s experience, long after an initial purchase is made, which is why it requires seamless collaboration between marketing, sales and CX teams.

The customer lifecycle has five stages:

Reach, when the consumer compares products and brands, conducts research and reads customer reviews, and you have the opportunity to reach them through social media, SEO and digital advertising
Acquisition, when the consumer visits your website or sends you an email or social media direct message, and you have the opportunity to turn a new user into a lead
Conversion, when a new lead has already provided you with their information, and you have the opportunity to convert them from a lead into a paying customer
Retention, when a customer has made a purchase, and you have the opportunity to cross-sell, upsell and maintain a relationship with your new customer
Loyalty, when your customer relationship grows, and you have the opportunity to convert a customer into a brand loyalist (and perhaps an influencer)

The Customer Lifecycle: A Real-Life Example

You post on TikTok an engaging new video from one of your influencers about your latest product
A TikTok user searching that influencer on the social media platform finds your post, follows your account, and clicks the link to visit your website
On your homepage is an interactive questionnaire experience designed to gather user data and direct the user down the right path for an optimal user experience based on their pain points, needs and goals
For the user who has completed the questionnaire and proceeded to an area of your website that would best serve them, you have a library of value-add content that they can download by completing a form, providing you with additional data
For the user who downloaded your content, you’ve developed an email drip campaign to nurture the lead into a paying customer
In your email drip campaign and on your website, you offer a free demo of your product(s) or service(s), and collect additional, more specific information
With all of this first- and zero-party data, your sales team is equipped to not only pitch the right offerings but use the right messaging
Once a purchase has been made, you’re able to obtain additional data on user preferences and behaviors
With all of the data gathered through marketing and sales, the customer success and technical support teams are equipped to provide the best customer experience
Any conversations between the user and support teams are also documented and incorporated into your data warehousing, enabling your customer-facing teams to continue to develop the customer relationship and potentially create a brand evangelist, who will then promote on your behalf, bringing new users to your website (and social media accounts)

With the right digital marketing tools, you can streamline and optimize the entire customer lifecycle.

The 65 Tools You Need to Streamline and Optimize Your Digital Marketing

The following tools will help you maximize your effectiveness across platforms and devices, at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

To determine the best tech solution for each digital marketing need, I compared them based on the following criteria:

Ease of implementation
Ease of use
Features
Specialty
Integrations
Cost

Project Management

Before you can get started, you have to get organized. And the more people you have — and the more dispersed they are — the more important this organization is. I’m not talking HR (a conversation for another day);, I’m talking project management.

When done right, the structure, accountability and connectivity enabled by project management software ensure that:

Projects run smoothly, in time and on budget
Managers deliver results that impact the bottom line
Employees see how their work contributes to the company’s strategic goals and successes

Nevertheless, even though nearly 80% of high-performing projects are completed using project management software, only 23% of organizations have implemented it — and more than six in 10 still use spreadsheets instead!

Project management software is designed to streamline and standardize project management processes and improve collaboration and communication by helping project leads and staff track projects, tasks, deadlines, schedules, milestones and communications. In the last 20 years, I’ve used close to all of them, including Notion, Asana, Dropbox Paper, Confluence, Hive, Trello, Redbooth, Microsoft Project, Zoho Projects, Basecamp, Monday.com and Jira, and I’ve researched the rest.

I recommend:

Macbook Pro laptop open with video conferencing app showing, with greenish blue pottery mug to the side

Collaboration and Communication

Although Basecamp, Monday.com and Jira offer a variety of in-app messaging options (and integrations), it’s important for businesses to provide their in-office and remote employees with the most effective and easy-to-use software solutions for daily check-ins and communications, video meetings and collaboration, and ongoing training.

To simplify and organize your communications internally and with external partners, there is no better tool than Slack
For video conferencing, one-on-one meetings and webinars and presentations, there’s no better tool than Zoom
To assist you in training your employees on best practices, there’s no better screen recording and sharing tool than Loom

Content Creation

Once you’ve equipped your organization with the necessary tools to develop and track projects and facilitate optimal communication and collaboration, it’s time to start creating the collateral you’re going to use to market your brand or product(s)/service(s). And though creating killer content isn’t something that can be taught, content can always be improved by using the best possible tools.

For video, still the most important medium, I recommend Adobe Premiere Pro, the industry standard, with desktop and mobile versions; my kids — who create videos all day long and have amassed cult followings on TikTok — recommend Videoleap, Videoshop and/or CapCut for doing what they do on the go
For creating graphics like thumbnails, icons, web and social banners and posts, whitepaper and brochure templates and more, I once again recommend Adobe, known across industries for its incomparable design apps Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign; of course, there are time-saving apps even the most novice designer can use to build beautiful visual elements, and the best one is Canva, with its countless free templates and graphics, as well as teams, projects and brand kits for project management
To double check your writing, use Grammarly, with its “writing assistant,” automated grammar checker and word processing app plugins; to A/B test and optimize your headlines and subject lines, use CoSchedule

Three people looking over website wireframes

Web Design, Development and Maintenance Tools

Half of all consumers consider web design crucial in developing an opinion of a brand. In other words, whether you consider yourself an online or offline brand, you need an online presence — and before even thinking about social media or some blogging platform, you need to ensure you have your own owned properties that you can control, monitor and leverage to collect user information and inform, inspire and empower customers and prospects.

While there are many content management systems (CMSs) and website builders, I break them down into three primary categories:

For intermediary and expert web designers/developers: Wordpress, the world’s most popular CMS, with countless templates, plugins and customization features
For beginners: Squarespace, with job- and industry-specific templates as well as an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface
For eCommerce websites: Shopify, designed to guide you from business development to web design and from online and offline sales to day-to-day store management

But, as with anything, don’t take my word for it. Do the legwork and, when comparing, be sure to consider not only ease of use and price but also:

Customizability
Security
Prevalence in the market

Web Design for UX

As Michael Schrage writes in Harvard Business Review, “profitability predicated on customer friction, intrusion, and irritation simply isn’t sustainable. Privileging easy money over better user experience is the antithesis of customer centricity.” The title of Schrage’s article is: “Why User Experience Always Has to Come First.” The reason, according to UX professionals like myself, is that high search rankings don’t last if the content doesn’t provide value to consumers. Though more users may visit the site, they leave quickly, feeling disappointed and even betrayed by the brand’s failure to speak to their needs and goals. Needless to say, these users don’t buy anything, and they don’t return.

A well-conceived, frictionless UX design, on the other hand, can raise customer conversion rates up to 400%!

Of course, designing for user experience is easier said than done. You first have to understand your customers, and how your site performs today.

Where have your customers found the most value, and why?
What pages inspired users to leave, and why?

To gather insights on your customers:

Use A/B testing tools to verify which site features drive the most conversions or keep users on the site the longest (more on this later)
Employ, monitor, analyze and leverage the learnings from eye tracking, emotion recognition, brain activity and mouse tracking technologies, such as my two favorites:

Employ, monitor, analyze and leverage the learnings from feedback widgets that provide actionable insights based on user behaviors; consider:

Usersnap
Wootric from InMoment
Medallia (for larger organizations; also good for employee experience)

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Lead Generation

Your team is trained and working collaboratively, your website is built for the customer experience, you’re gathering new zero- and first-party data every day, and your content is being created. Now it’s time to make that content create for you.

What do I mean? Simple: You create content to create opportunities to generate the leads that are most likely to convert to customers and, ideally, brand ambassadors. There are three primary mechanisms for attracting users to your site:

Search engine optimization (SEO)
Social media marketing
Influencer marketing
Digital/Programmatic/Paid advertising and search engine marketing (SEM)

Your site, by the way, should already be dynamically designed for optimal UX and maximum lead generation on desktop, tablet and mobile.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The content you create can be used for interactive (and other) elements on the pages of your website. It can be used for emails, texts, social media posts or digital ads. Or, it can be used to generate leads through search.

This is the purpose of SEO, and though SEO has changed significantly over the years, there are more than eight-billion searches a day on Google alone and 75% don’t click past the first page of results. This means SEO may be different but it remains as important as ever. And while good UX makes use of good SEO, UX doesn’t bring new users to your site.

Fortunately, one thing Google hasn’t done in the last decade is downgrade the value of incorporating the right keywords into quality content, based on what your customers are actually searching for. In fact, Google rewards sites that answer users’ questions, address their pain points and deliver products or services they seek. So, the solution isn’t to forgo your content marketing strategy but to update it to incorporate the latest SEO best practices.

In addition to following my guide on web designing for SEO (and UX), you need three types of tools to develop, monitor and optimize SEO content:

To create content based on what your user personas are searching online, invest in an SEO tool to:

Find out what people are searching for in your niche
Determine the keywords for which your key competitors are ranking
Identify link-building opportunities
Change technical aspects of your site to improve performance in search results

To analyze your content against all your KPIs, identify your most (and least) effective sources of new site visitors and track the effect of your site changes on performance, there’s a free analytics tool that integrates with just about every CMS on earth, outshines any paid option and demonstrates your allegiance to Google
For deeper, forensic, technical SEO analysis, you need a website auditing tool

For SEO-centric website auditing, the one and only option is SEO Spider from Screaming Frog. For site analytics, the one and only option is Google Analytics. But for keyword and competitive research, there are three to consider:

Semrush, the first SEO tool I fell in love with, is easy to navigate, built for competitive and keyword research, and offers the best SEO API available
Moz, which provides great value from its free tools, includes a free Chrome plugin for on-site and on-SERP analysis, and connects you to a strong user community
Ahrefs, which includes by far the best link index, a free Chrome extension toolbar, and the ability to perform keyword research across 10 search engines

If you can afford it, go with SEMRush or Ahrefs; if you’re sticking to free versions, Moz is your best option.

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Social Media Marketing

As a co-creator of the content marketing division of The Associated Press, I can tell you that your content marketing strategy underlies everything. With the content you create, you inform, engage, inspire and empower your prospects and customers. On your website and with your emails and social media posts, you leverage your content — and the content generated by your customers and influencers — to deliver messaging and experiences that are targeted to your audience(s). Of course, while customers on your website and email lists already know your brand, there’s a massive, captive audience of potential customers seeking out content, brands and products on social media.

Want to increase brand awareness and build engagement? Want to generate new site visitors and potential leads? Do it on LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and Reddit. But, don’t do it alone.

With a social media marketing tool like Sprout Social, you can:

Automate most tasks, freeing you up to spend more time connecting consistently, authentically and personally with customers and prospects on their platforms of choice
Deliver responsive, tailored customer support, creating long-term, high-value customer relationships
Gain valuable insights from social media users

Plus, Sprout Social just partnered with Salesforce (more on this below) to manage your “full social media presence.”

Influencer Marketing

Often pigeonholed as a social media strategy alone, influencer marketing leverages endorsements, reviews and product/service mentions from celebrities, trendsetters and social media stars as social proof to increase sales, brand awareness and online engagement. Companies that do it correctly do their research, reach out only to those influencers with influence in their organization’s industry or niche, and leverage their influencers (and other brand evangelists) throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

With businesses now earning $5.20 for every dollar spent on influencer marketing, many are opting to invest in an influencer marketing platform; these platforms provide:

Influencer discovery tools
Searchable databases of potential influencers
Influencer marketplace
Influencer vetting tools
Relationship management tools
Campaign management tools
Content amplification tools
Advanced analytics
Third-party integrations

I have never used an influencer marketing platform, but I’ve done my research, and I recommend requesting a free demo from the following:

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Digital/Paid/Programmatic Advertising and Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Although digital advertising is not as effective or efficient as content marketing or influencer marketing (more on this below), Google estimates that for every $1 spent on Google ads, businesses receive $8 in profit — and nearly six in 10 Millennials report buying something based on an online ad.

You could log in to each and every social media platform’s advertising interface; or, you could invest in SEM and programmatic advertising.

For SEM, there’s no better solution than Google Ads. For programmatic, many recommend Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP or Taboola; for most organizations, I recommend AdRoll.

AdRoll markets itself as a “comprehensive marketing platform… powered by AI and machine learning,” includes expansive cross-channel functions like remarketing and retargeting, display and social media ads, UTM tracking, abandoned cart recovery and consent management, and provides access to more than 200 leading ad networks and two-billion social media users
Best known for its “Around the Web” and “Recommend for You” sponsored ads and links, Taboola uses AI to deliver native advertising, or paid content marketing designed to resemble articles and drive more traffic to your website; Taboola provides access to thousands of websites and apps within its publisher network, but due to pricing is most often used by content publishers and brands with larger budgets and bigger audiences
Adobe Advertising Cloud, another higher-priced option, allows advertisers to holistically plan, buy, manage and optimize ads, “including premium and private inventory deals,” using a single interface

Lead Capture/Conversion Optimization and Data Enrichment

You’ve done all the necessary legwork, and a new user is on your website. Now, it’s up to your site (and optin pages) to:

Convert the user to a lead
Provide you with additional user information to better segment your audiences and personalize your lead nurturing and conversion efforts

Landing Pages and Optin Pages for Lead Capture/Conversion Optimization

Imagine you’re a tech provider, with three tools designed for three unique functions. For each tool, you have a different target audience. For each tool and target audience, you build two web pages designed to generate leads by speaking to how the tool can solve for the audience’s pain points, needs and goals:

A public, on-site landing page accessible via website navigation, breadcrumbs and intrasite linking or direct linking from SERPs, social media, email or text
A No Search, No Follow optin page for site users from audience-specific paid ads

To create these pages, you can easily use your CMS. Or, you can invest in Optinmonster, the best tool built for lead capture/conversion optimization.

Optinmonster integrates with any CMS that allows for code embedding, features dozens of templates and campaign optimization options, and offers a variety of what they call “campaign types:”

Lightbox popups
Floating bars
Inline forms
Sidebar forms
Slide-in scroll boxes
Content lockers
Coupon wheels
Fullscreen welcome mats

Data Enrichment

Google has found that 98% of Americans switch between platforms and devices in the same day, and 90% of all consumers expect consistency in their interactions no matter where they are. That means building trust through customer centricity across your website and/or physical location, social media accounts, emails, text messages, digital ads and customer service communications. So, how do you ensure your customers and prospects feel understood and valued? Demonstrate your value proposition — and your core values — by creating intimate experiences anywhere and everywhere your target audiences are active. Of course, the only way to know who to target, and when, where and how to target them, is accurate, comprehensive data, and obtaining and organizing that data can be overwhelming for less technical digital marketing teams.

If you google “data enrichment tools,” you’ll find best-of lists topped by BeenVerified, Datanyze and Clearbit; personally, I prefer LeadGenius and FullContact.

LeadGenius is a cloud-based data enrichment tool providing:

Contact and account monitoring, leveraging tracking signals, events and triggers from ads, press releases, social behavior, job posts and more
Competitive intelligence and purchase intent, with alerts when target accounts engage with competitive brands online

Also an SaaS-based identity resolution solution, FullContact enables brands and marketing platforms to enrich personal identifiers using hundreds of identity and marketing attribute queries and a unique Identity Graph feature.

But, let’s be honest: Who needs a data enrichment tool when you can invest in a customer data platform (CDP)?

A computer screen displaying advanced website analytics

The CDP

The CDP is a marketing and CX technology designed to unify your data across online and offline sources; it allows marketers and CX professionals to use data for modeling, segmentation, targeting, testing and more, improving the performance and efficiency of your lead generation, nurturing and conversion efforts.

CDPs have four core functions:

Data collection and unification: gathering, standardizing, validating, deduplicating and consolidating data from all sources
Profiling: producing and updating a single profile for each and every customer and prospect
Segmentation: creating custom groupings of customers/prospects to enable smarter targeting and personalization
Implementation and optimization: integrating CDP data with end channels, like email marketing or digital advertising platforms, and developing and deploying the best experiences online and off

The best customer data platform will allow you to combine these capabilities within a single, easily accessible digital hub for marketers and CX professionals, expediting progress from idea to execution, from execution to measurement, from measurement to iteration and optimization, and from one successful campaign to even more successful future campaigns.

When investigating CDP platforms, consider the following:

The types of data your CDP would (and wouldn’t) collect
The type of workflow your CDP would support
The tools your CDP would replace, and why
The tools with which your CDP would integrate, and how
The ways your CDP would address each department’s data usability issues
The ways your CDP will allow the marketing team to improve its strategy through data segmentation and personalization
The ways your CDP will improve the customer experience by providing your agents with complete, up-to-date customer/prospect information
The marketing and CX goals your CDP would help you achieve, such as better conversion rates, fewer abandoned carts, greater customer satisfaction (CSAT) or higher net promoter score (NPS)

Then, request free demos from:

And compare them all to Simon Data, my favorite.

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Email Marketing (and SMS Marketing)

The first email was sent in 1971 and within 20 years we already had a spam problem. In the following three decades, email would rise and fall in popularity as consumers faced increasingly aggressive online advertising campaigns and juggled more and more communication methods. With the advent of social media, some marketing prognosticators even warned of an impending end to the original electronic message. But as we’ve seen: email is not dead. Ninety-nine percent of us check it everyday. And that’s why the email marketing market is expected to more than double by 2027.

Of course, long gone are the days of dropping hundreds of email addresses into the Bcc section of a text email and mass-blasting your contacts from a browser-based email provider. Everyone knows you need an email marketing tool. The question is: Is the free version of Mailchimp enough, or should I invest in a high-powered CRM?

The truth is: for individuals and small businesses, Mailchimp is definitely enough — and since its pricing is based on number of contacts, it can scale with you. Enterprise-level organizations, on the other hand, need more.

A CRM, or customer relationship management tool, tracks and reacts to direct lead and customer interactions like new purchases, email link clicks and customer service communications. Coupled with a CDP, this marketing, sales and CX tool empowers you to better personalize all of your communications.

Here are the best (demo them all):

Sendinblue is an all-in-one platform for email and SMS marketing, also incorporating Facebook and Chat, with a shared inbox, more than 60 email templates, and contact segmentation
Engagebay is an all-in-one solution for marketing, sales and support, and includes email and SMS marketing, website messaging, push notifications, and contact segmentation
Omnisend is an all-in-one email marketing automation platform specializing in eCommerce, with a template library, drag and drop design, segmented targeting, and an automations library with pre-built workflows for every step of the customer journey
GetResponse is an email marketing platform designed for segmentation, personalization and automation, with built-in automations for welcome emails, followups, educational series and sales funnels, a powerful analytics tool, website visitor tracking, and one-click integration for retargeting campaigns

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Sales and Customer Relations: The Final Two (Ongoing) Stages of the Customer Lifecycle

Once you’ve converted a lead into a paying customer, you have the opportunity to begin developing loyalty, in the hopes of retaining them and, ideally, creating a brand evangelist or influencer. Of course, you also have the opportunity to turn them off completely. In other words: this stage of the customer lifecycle represents a balancing act between continually engaging the customer and being perceived as pushy.

The number-one way to maintain your customer relationships is to focus on the customer, and not the sale. To provide value on an ongoing basis, ask questions and listen. Then, use the information you’ve obtained to improve your products and services, as well as your marketing and sales messaging and the customer experience you provide.

To ensure you’ve positioned yourself to benefit from brand loyalty, ask yourself the following questions:

Have you included social media follow and share buttons on your website and marketing emails?
Do you engage with customers and prospects on social media, through chat, and in comments?
Do you offer customers exclusive perks such as discounts and birthday gifts that keep them coming back?
Do you have a referral program that makes it easy for customers to connect you with more prospects?
Have you made your company easily accessible via email, phone and live chat?
Have you developed and implemented an influencer program?
Do you put out requests for and then post user-generated content?

To make cross-selling, upselling and customer relationship management easier, you can rely heavily on the combination of any of my recommended CDPs and CRMs. You could put your money in Salesforce, the most powerful CRM on the market, serving more than 150,000 organizations worldwide. Or, you could invest as much in CX as you do elsewhere.

The Top Nine Customer Support Platforms

You already know that by automating your employees’ more mundane responsibilities, you can free them up to focus on the message, and the big picture. Sometimes, though, CX tech is about more than automating and streamlining; it’s also about organizing, understanding and improving — and that’s where the customer support platform comes in.

These are the nine best customer support tools:

Other support tools, like Sprout Social, specialize in customer success on social media. And social media, in case you missed it, is where it all begins. (Nearly nine in 10 Gen Zers and Millennials initially learn about products they’re interested in purchasing on social media.)

For more on customer success, download Your Guide to Managing the Customer Complaint.

Image Credits (in order of appearance)