Digital Marketing Tools That Are Worth Paying For

Posted by Jason Johnson on Mar 16, 2021 10:00:00 AM
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As a digital marketing professional, you’ve likely received a host of cold calls and emails during your career about hundreds of digital marketing tools that will “forever change the way you do marketing.” While that can’t be true of all of them, there are some digital marketing tools that are worth paying for.

As a digital marketing agency that offers a wide range of services, from web development to content creation to graphic design, each member of our team has a favorite tool that makes him or her better at their job. So, we asked someone from every department, “What’s your favorite digital marketing tool, and why?” Here’s what we heard. 

 

Inbound Marketing Automation | HubSpot

As an agency partner of HubSpot, its products are integrated into many of the services we offer here at PRIME. Through HubSpot, you’re able to build websites, landing pages and forms, publish blogs, manage social media posting, send marketing emails, and track analytics for all of it. Most importantly, it allows you to create automated workflows that cut down everyone’s production time. HubSpot is a one-stop-shop that allows us to integrate all of our digital marketing efforts, and we utilize it for several of the clients we work with.

Prices vary depending on the types of tools you’re hoping to utilize, ranging from $45 per month to $3,200 per month. They also have some free tools to get you started if you want to get a feel for it before you dive in. 

 

Proposal Writing and Management | Proposify

When it comes time to close a deal, I'm a huge fan of using Proposify. Proposify allows you to easily design branded proposal templates. More than that, it allows you to send proposals through its web platform, then track them to see if they’ve been opened, how long they’re viewed for, and if they’ve been signed. You can also manage several proposals at once and stay up-to-date on how they’re moving through the pipeline. It’s a great way to look back at historical proposals and see which ones faired well with clients. Proposify starts at $15 per month for an individual plan and gets steeper from there. For our management at PRIME, it’s well worth it.

 

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Content Writing | Grammarly 

Grammarly is an editing tool that helps you check yourself for grammar, spelling and style issues, especially when you don’t have anyone else to edit for you. While we still always recommend having a real person edit any writing before it’s published, Grammarly does help you catch a lot of basic mistakes that even the best writers make from time to time. Our Content Manager Lindsay McWilliams loves to use it for a final check before publishing blogs online, just to make sure no incorrect apostrophes or uses of “you’re” snuck their way in. Plus, the premium version can help you align your tone and voice, and even detect plagiarism. This is especially important if you work with contract writers that you haven’t yet developed complete trust in. At around $11 per month for an annual membership, it’s a small price to pay for clean, professional copy.

 

Social Media | Lnk.bio

Lnk.bio has become essential for our clients with an Instagram presence. It creates a link to place in your Instagram bio that can host as many links as you want, so you’re not limited to pointing to just one. Our Social Media Manager loves it because enables her to draw more traffic directly to our clients’ websites from Instagram. On the Lnk.bio platform, you’re able to organize links into your ideal order, add thumbnail images and schedule when you want the links to go live. It then allows you to track the analytics of each link so you know how many people clicked through to each one. 

Like most of these tools, there’s a free version that’s fairly limited. For the most robust package, it’s about $25 per account with just a one-time fee.

 

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Web Design | imgix

When it comes to building and editing websites, cropping and editing photos can be a monotonous task that takes up way too much time. imgix helps alleviate that burden for our web developers. “imgix allows you to scale and crop images however you want and makes images much easier to work with on the web,” according to Shane Niederklein, our Web Specialist. It also allows you to upload images to the cloud and organize them by categories, tags, colors and other customizable fields, so you don’t have to scroll through long lists of images to find what you need.

The price for imgix is dependent on your number of images and gigabyte use – generally $3 per 1,000 images, plus 8 cents per gigabyte of bandwidth. Or you can get fancy with a customizable Enterprise Plan. 



Graphic Design | Adobe Stock + Adobe Color 

Like many graphic designers, ours are all about the Abobe products that integrate so easily with InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. Without stock images from collections like Adobe Stock, their day-to-day work would be incredibly difficult. Much like iStock or Unsplash, Adobe Stock allows you to find royalty-free images and graphics that you can manipulate or use directly for the web, social media, print products and more. And if you already have Creative Cloud, it tends to be more cost-effective than subscribing to an additional non-Adobe stock photo source.

Adobe Color is also helpful for selecting color schemes for the brands we work with and exploring current color trends. It’s included in the Creative Cloud suite, so it’s something to play around with and take advantage of if you’re already paying for other Adobe products.

 

Search Engine Optimization | SEO Moz

SEO can be complicated and technical, and search engine algorithms are constantly changing, so it can be very time-consuming to tackle on your own with the free tools available. Having an up-to-date tool like SEO Moz that helps improve SEO with suggestions backed by data is huge. SEO Moz can audit your website for any issues and recommend fixes; track the rank of your identified keywords; analyze backlinks and help you discover new keywords you should be targeting. For us, it’s essential when building a new website for a client, but also for placing ads and making sure we draw all of the organic traffic we can on a regular basis. 

SEO Moz offers several packages ranging from $79 per month for the basics to $600 per month for robust tools that cater to large marketing agencies or in-house marketing teams. 

 

At PRIME, we’re all about connecting our clients with the best tools in the industry so that we can perform our work as efficiently as possible. Interested in how we can use these tools to benefit your business? Let’s collaborate. Reach out to us today

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