Digital Marketing Software

Dec 13

The 7 Best Digital Marketing Tools of 2021

by Crunch Ranjani

Online marketing tools can help you execute your business strategy with more confidence and ease! Whether you’re hoping to reach a wider audience as a wellness professional, or looking for ways to impact more people as a community or nonprofit leader, utilizing the right tools can expedite your progress. In this article, we’re sharing our team’s most favorite design, marketing, and analytics tools that can help you grow your business or community project in the new year.

1) Coolors

Pop over to your favorite brand’s website or Instagram feed. What stands out? Do they have a cohesive “look” that makes everything appear seamless? Achieving that for your brand is easy with Coolors!

A fun website that allows you to explore and experiment with color palettes, Coolors is a great place to start figuring out your brand colors. Even if you have established brand colors, this is a valuable app to create distinct color palettes for new products, services, or events. Coolors offers an “Explore” function that showcases trending color palettes, and you can also search for palettes that feature specific colors using color codes. The best part? It’s free!

2) Canva

Creating all kinds of collateral for your business is a breeze with Canva. From social media posts (in the correct size!), blog images, logos, and more, Canva simplifies the design process so you can have professional-looking images in minutes.

Canva offers pre-designed templates to kickstart your design process. Search the general terms of the content you want to create (e.g. ‘meditation’ or ‘quote’) and use filters to narrow your search. Once you find a template you like, edit it to fit your brand by changing the fonts, images, and color scheme. You can also add different elements, shapes, graphics, and stock photos to bring your graphics to life.

With the Pro version ($12.99 per month), you can create your own brand kit and save your brand colors and fonts for easy reference. We recommend having one script font and one or two Serif and San Serif fonts as part of your brand kit. You can use a font that stands out for headings and titles and an easy-to-read font for longer chunks of text. Canva Pro even allows you to upload your own font files so you can quickly and easily create professional graphics for your business - no prior experience needed! Start creating gorgeous designs with Canva here!

3) Kapwing

Are you repurposing all your Facebook Lives into Reels and Instagram Videos? If you aren’t, it’s a great time to start, and Kapwing can help you do that quickly and easily! Many of us get intimidated by editing videos, but it only takes a few steps to edit your Facebook videos to be repurposed onto other platforms with Kapwing.

Unlike more robust video editing tools like Adobe Premiere, Kapwing allows you to edit your videos in the cloud and uses less of your computer’s resources. You can also add text, captions, shapes, emojis, backgrounds, and audio to spice up your videos. The best part about Kapwing is that it allows you to adjust the canvas size of the video to fit each platform perfectly - ideal for some quick editing for social media! Most of Kapwing’s features are free, but paid plans start at $16 per month for access to premium features.

4) Google Trends

Stumped on what content to create or what keywords to use to draw more visitors to your website? Maybe you’re looking for inspiration for a new business, service, or product name. Google Trends is an excellent free tool to help you with this research!

Type in an idea or topic you want to focus on in the search bar and Google Trends will show how popular this term has been over time. It also shows related topics and related queries, which is a great place to look for associated keywords. You can customize your search by location, industry, time frame, and other elements to get more relevant and accurate information. Google Trends even allows you to compare search terms to see which keywords perform better.

5) SparkToro

If you need help brainstorming related keyphrases to use in your content, SparkToro is the tool for you! Simply enter a search term, and SparkToro will provide an entire database of research and analytics you can tap into for insights to use in your marketing, PR, and SEO efforts.

For every search term, SparkToro provides information on what other terms they may search, as well as relevant hashtags. This is a handy tool to help you create targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram. While the free version of SparkToro is limited to five searches per month, the paid version (starting at $38 per month) offers more searches in addition to exclusive features such as audience insights, hashtags used, and relevant podcasts!

6) Creator Studio

If you’re spending hours posting content to your social media platforms, Creator Studio is going to be a gamechanger for you. Native to Facebook and Instagram, Creator Studio is a free social media marketing tool available to business pages that allows you to upload content directly from your desktop.

Save time by scheduling content in advance and stop worrying about whether you posted something to Instagram or Facebook every day. Creator Studio also offers analytics and reporting to help you see which posts performed well, gain insights about your audience, and track your progress and growth over time!

7) ConvertKit

Ready to get serious with your email marketing? ConvertKit is a user-friendly and affordable option that simplifies the process of connecting with your audience via email!

Use ConvertKit to create forms and landing pages to gather new subscribers using pre-made templates within minutes. You can customize the templates to suit your needs and set up integrations with different analytical tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Business to track the success of your email marketing campaigns. You can also create tags for subscribers to only send them relevant information and automate workflows to streamline sending emails to your list. If you’re just starting out, ConvertKit offers a basic plan for free with limited functionality, but for additional features and more robust capabilities, plans start at $9 a month. Sign up today to start building those relationships with your audience!

Disclaimer: Using this link for your purchase earns us a small commission at no extra cost to you.

These days, there are hundreds of free digital marketing resources available. There is no perfect combination of these tools that will work for every business, but these seven tools are a good starting point. Don’t be afraid to experiment with these tools and others to find the right mix that suits your needs to form a solid foundation for your online business! With the right tools in place, you will feel more confident about executing your marketing strategy to grow your business.

If you're interested in learning more about which digital marketing tools are the perfect fit for growing your business in 2022, feel warmly welcome to schedule your free introductory consultation at the link below. We can’t wait to support you on your entrepreneurial journey!