Top 30 Digital Marketing Tools in 2023 (According to Our Survey)

Chris is an SEO director who has 10 years of experience in SEO, agency side. When not involved in SEO, he enjoys messing around with vintage synthesizers, walks on sandy beaches, and a good cup of tea.

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We asked Ahrefs’ Digest newsletter subscribers one simple question: “What digital marketing tools are you using in 2023?”

Here are the results.

Sidenote.

This was a multiple choice survey, so respondents could vote for all the tools they use in each category. We put together the initial tools list ourselves, but the survey also allowed people to tell us about any other tools they use (which they did).

1. Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is an SEO tool that helps you to:

Understand how Google sees your pages.
Analyze clicks, impressions, and average position.
See which queries bring users to your site.
Find and fix technical SEO errors.
Get your content on Google by submitting sitemaps.

GSC’s popularity among SEOs and marketers is just one of the reasons we decided to integrate GSC into Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker and our free tool: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO toolset you can use to optimize your website and improve your rankings in search engines like Google.

It’s especially useful for the following SEO tasks:

Keyword research – Find keywords that are valuable for your business.
Backlink analysis – Analyze the quality and quantity of backlinks on your website.
Site audits – Audit your website to understand the required SEO improvements.
Rank tracking – Track the rankings of your website and your competitors.

You can try Ahrefs for free by signing up for Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT). Connecting your website to AWT enables you to audit and track the SEO performance of your website.

Editor’s Note

There’s no doubt that Ahrefs is a popular tool. It consistently ranks top in industry polls (see our “vs” page). But our popularity here is probably a little overstated as we surveyed our own subscribers, many of who are obviously Ahrefs customers. So yeah, we just wanted to be transparent about that. 🙂

Joshua Hardwick

Head of Content

3. Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile allows you to manage how your local business appears in Google Maps and Search.

With a Google Business Profile, you can:

Maintain accurate information about your business online.
Tell Google your hours, website, phone number, and location (a street address, service area, or place marker, depending on your business).
Interact with customers.
Attract new customers.

4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog is an SEO tool that enables you to audit your website. One useful feature is the tool’s ability to pull data from other sources such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and even Ahrefs API—giving you a total view of your website’s search data.

5. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress SEO plugin that optimizes your website for search engines. It currently has 5 million active installations and enables you to configure your website to be SEO-friendly.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform. With it, you can publish and schedule your social media content from one dashboard. It supports integrations with Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok.

2. Buffer

Buffer is a social media tool that helps you plan and publish your social media content. It’s also got analytics built into the platform so you can monitor the performance of your posts. It allows you to publish on all major social networks and less popular ones like Mastodon.

3. Later

Later allows you to schedule and post social media content to the main social media platforms. They’re partners with TikTok, Meta, and Pinterest. But you can also post on LinkedIn and Twitter.

4. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that helps marketers grow their social media presence. It centralizes publishing, monitoring, engagement, and analytics. It works across all the major social media platforms.

5. Tailwind

Tailwind is a social media and analytics platform that allows you to schedule your social media posts for platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook in one place.

1. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a leading email marketing automation platform that allows you to track and analyze your email marketing campaigns. It has a drag-and-drop editor, meaning you don’t need any coding knowledge to get an email campaign up and running.

2. HubSpot Email Marketing

HubSpot provides a suite of tools aimed at helping small to medium-sized businesses with their marketing. Among those tools is a well-equipped, personalized email marketing tool that you can use to help boost your email campaign engagement.

3. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign has over 250+ B2B and B2C email templates, making it easy to get your next email campaign up and running. You can trigger emails based on a purchase, site visits, or engagement and also segment your audience for more targeted campaigns.

4. Mailerlite

Mailerlite allows you to automate your workflow and send targeted campaigns. It has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor. Another useful feature is that you can monetize your audience, as the platform integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, and Stripe.

5. Brevo (Formerly Sendinblue)

Bevo (formerly Sendinblue) allows you to create professional-looking emails without design skills using its drag-and-drop editor. It offers unlimited contacts and allows you to track how each email performs—allowing you to learn what works best with your audience.

1. Hotjar

Hotjar is a tool that allows you to see which parts of your pages customers are engaged with. It does this through a number of methods, such as:

Heatmaps
Screen recordings
User feedback
User surveys

2. Optimizely

Optimizely is a split-test tool that provides insights into your users’ behaviors on your website. It allows you to validate new features by running experiments. It’s also a low/no-code platform, so you don’t need to be a technical genius to get an experiment up and running.

3. Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is a free-to-use heat mapping tool that allows you to see how visitors are interacting on your website. It allows you to watch how people use your site with the session recordings. The tool integrates with Google Analytics, meaning you can get a total view of your customers’ interactions on your website.

4. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a popular platform you can use to track and optimize your visitors’ behavior and improve your conversion rate. It includes heatmaps, A/B testing, recordings, surveys and more. If you run a Shopify store you can also easily connect your store and access Crazy Egg from your Shopify dashboard.

5. Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange has a simple-to-use dashboard and focuses on improving your website’s conversion rate. It does this by using dynamic heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys. You can also use this tool to see the entire history of a visitor’s interactions on your website.

1. Google Workspace

Google Workspace provides a suite of tools that you can use to run your business. If you want to create documents, spreadsheets, slides, store files, set up a video call, or simply check your email, you can do them all here.

2. Zoom

Zoom is a video conferencing platform that you can use to hold video conference calls. Its increasing popularity has meant it has never been easier for digital marketing professionals to jump on a call with a client or colleague.

3. Slack

Slack is a collaborative platform where you can work with your team or collaborate with other teams. It uses “Channels” to organize content, bringing all your communication into a single platform. Another benefit of Slack is that it has over 2,000 integrations with your other favorite tools and allows you to automate routine actions.

4. Dropbox

Dropbox is a cloud storage platform that allows you to store your files in a private and secure place. You get 2GB of cloud storage free with Dropbox Basic, so it’s a popular choice for storing and sharing files for collaboration.

5. Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a video conferencing platform that enables you to collaborate with colleagues. Its integration with other tools like Office 365 makes it easy to use if you are familiar with Microsoft’s other products.

Analytics tools

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps collect data about your website’s visitors and how they interact with your website. It’s used by businesses of all sizes to understand their visitors’ customer journey.

2. Hotjar

Hotjar’s a full featured platform that gives you the ability to collect all kinds of data on your website. You can track sessions, bounce rate, top traffic channels, top pages and also your conversion rate all through one dashboard.

3. Similarweb

Similarweb gives you market insights and helps benchmark your digital performance against competitors. It also allows you to generate insights about your audience that can help determine your marketing strategy.

4. Matomo

Matomo gives you 100% control over your data. It helps you to understand what your visitors are searching for, their behavior, and how you can optimize their user experience. It’s used on over 1 million websites.

5. HubSpot Analytics

HubSpot Analytics allows you to analyze your website’s performance metrics, such as sessions and conversion rates. It also tells you which traffic sources bring the most customers over time. Reporting is a central part of the tool, and its integration with the rest of the HubSpot platform is its strength if you’re already using HubSpot.

Final thoughts

Although not part of this survey, a final honorary mention should go to ChatGPT. It’s fair to say it’s changed how many digital marketers work and helped them increase their productivity.

Got any questions? Ping me on Twitter.

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