What digital marketing tools are essential for product marketers?

Before using any tool, think: When you own a handyman business, with plumbers, carpentry, fence and gate repair, and electricians, it's CRUCIAL to put yourself into the customer’s perspective. So, we need to understand that, in most cases, these handyman services are required for a particular urgency. If we are talking about SEO, there is one BIG element to consider when you are planning a KW strategy with long-tail KW: 1. Geographic Element If you are in Santa Monica, chances are you will type “Plumber Santa Monica”, if you are NOT in Santa Monica, you aren't relevant to that customer So it's deeply important to consider adding your town, state, or neighborhood when you are planning a KW strategy, so you can be really relevant.

(!) The 'difficulty' metric in keyword tools gives an estimate of how challenging it might be to rank for a keyword. However, always cross-check manually by analyzing the top-ranking pages. Sometimes, you'll spot opportunities the tools missed.

I spent over 10 years at Google, so fair warning that my response will be biased. With that out of the way, Google's keyword planning tools, including Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and Google Search Console, empower marketers to identify relevant keywords, optimize content, plan campaigns, and make data-driven decisions. These tools help marketers reach the right audience, improve search rankings, and drive organic traffic, contributing to business growth. In particular, they're useful for planning SEM campaigns to augment and support your product marketing and content programs, especially for upper funnel/generic terms to engage potential customers while they're in the discovery phase of the marketing funnel.

For those unfamiliar with Product Marketing, start with basic free tools like Google Analytics and native social media platforms. In a one-person marketing team, essential digital tools include SEMrush for advanced SEO insights, Hootsuite or Buffer for social media management, and Mailchimp or HubSpot for streamlined email communication. Visual content creation is empowered by tools like Canva or Adobe Spark. CRM systems like Salesforce aid in customer relationship management, while Marketo or Pardot for marketing automation ensures efficient lead nurturing. HubSpot can also serve as an integrated solution for outbound email, marketing automation and social media, minimizing costs in a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

Google Analytics is one tool I would not go without. It provides valuable insights on how users are engaging with your sites and much more. It has crucial data that is very valuable for business owners.

When getting started with content creation, decide what you'd like to do and just get started. There's no right or wrong time. Draw that roadmap, write that article, shoot that video, type out that post or create that channel. There are so many tools to help with simplifying the processes like Canva for easy designing, Grammarly for better sentence structure, ChatGPT to help with prompts, platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn & X to find your audience. And consistency is key!

(!)Tools like Canva offer convenience with ready-made templates, but don't let them dilute your brand's unique voice. Always customize templates to fit your branding. And while Grammarly is great for grammar checks, ensure your content still retains its originality and personality.

There are many tools to choose from to help you create text, photography, and video-based content. 1. Create Content: - ChatGPT for content ideas and copywriting - Canva for visually appealing content - CapCut for mobile video editing. 2. Hardware - Quality mobile phone - Professional cameras for high-grade photography and video content. - Adobe Creative Suite for advanced production, graphics and editing. 3. Persona This is often overlooked. Instead of simply having great Canva graphics with imagery. Consider having a real person in front of the camera speaking and allowing for authentic communication to filter through. 4. Content Scheduling - Metricool has a nice free option with more advanced features available with Hootsuite.

1. Any decent publishing platform with a CMS 2. Canva for ease and cost 3. Grammarly Pro for writers 4. Chat GPT for ideation 5. Veed.io for video

As a marketing "army of one," I cut my teeth in the Adobe suite and Microsoft Office. While I still use Adobe Premiere for video editing and Adobe InDesign for certain print projects, when it comes to digital creation, my go-to, must-have, where-have-you-been-all-my-life tool is Canva. Number two on my list is ChatGPT. With those two tools, I can get so much more done in a day than any point in 20+ years in marketing.

There are many email marketing tools that are vital to any business or organization that wants to grow. What we need to focus on is how to make the most out of these tools and bring results. Here are 5 areas you need to cover in order to have a successful email marketing campaign: 1 - Subject line The sole goal of this is for the recipient to open the email. Create curiosity and be relevant 2 - Talk about what the subscriber is interested about. Do not add fluff to the content of the email, be precise to the topic 3 - Add a Call to Action If you dont ask, you dont get. Again, be precise with the Question 4 - Offer to unsubscribe 5 - A/B test & measure Whats working? Do more of that. If its not working, iterate and improve

Harnessing the power of your existing customers gives better ROI than new customer acquisition. For this, email marketing is a tried and tested formula to reach out. There are multiple factors one should consider to send out a powerful communication to get great outcomes like personalization, action driven subject line, crisp body text, multiple CTAs and mapping out action based email program. I suggest A/B testing on all of these to gain insights and plough back the learning. I have personally liked Hubspot and Eloqua tools to send out and automate the whole email marketing campaign.

Email marketing continues to offer the best ROI at scale in connecting with the right users at the right time. It provides a direct channel to engage users at every lifecycle stage, outperforming expensive alternatives like paid media, events, or sales team outreach. With 90+% of potential buyers being out of the market at any given time, email marketing offers a unique opportunity to maintain engagement, educate, and nurture leads until they are ready to make purchasing decisions. Advancements in email marketing tools like Hubspot have made it easier than ever to automate personalized outreach cadence and content at scale based on individual interests and behaviors (eg. time zone send, personal interests, behavior-based messaging).

In my experience, personalized emails drive unparalleled results. While Mailchimp, HubSpot, and ConvertKit excel in managing campaigns, the real game-changer is personalization. Tailor content, segment your audience, and A/B test for optimal impact. Elevate your strategy—transform routine emails into compelling conversations that drive results.

The obvious one for me and my clients is Mail Chimp. I've found that it's the most user-friendly platform and makes the process of creating "journeys" easy. The 3 main "journeys" or "flows" I like to implement off the bat are: 1. Customer Acquisition - What strategy or strategies will work best for attaining email list sign ups at the lowest cost possible? 2. Customer Nurture - What can we say in 3-5 scheduled emails to turn potential buyers into loyal returning customers? 3. Return to Cart - How can we direct the potential customer back to their cart to finish the purchase without coming off as "pushy"?

Social media marketing tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social are game-changers for product marketers. I've personally seen the impact, especially with Buffer's post scheduling streamlining my strategy. Hootsuite's collaborative features enhanced team coordination, fostering a unified brand voice. Additionally, Sprout Social's analytics provided crucial insights for fine-tuning content and maximizing audience engagement. These tools aren't just accessories; they're essential for boosting awareness, engagement, and ultimately, sales. Embrace them, explore their features, and watch your social media game soar.

Creating, analysing to optimising social media posts can be a pain if done manually. Tools enable marketers to schedule posts, track engagement metrics, and gain valuable insights into audience behavior. Marketers can maintain a consistent online presence, monitor brand mentions, and strategically plan content to reach their target audience effectively. Additionally, these tools often include features for social listening, competitor analysis, and ad campaign management, providing a comprehensive toolkit for optimizing social media strategies. In an era where social platforms play a significant role in brand communication, these tools are essential for marketers to maximize their impact, build brand awareness, and drive engagement.

A great tool for monitoring and analysing social media ad performance is a platform called Swydo. It’s one of the best platforms I’ve ever come across, you can connect multiple data sources and it gives you results in real time. Perfect for ads across Google, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter & LinkedIn. You can also create reports on the platform to send to your clients and it generates a dashboard link that clients can track in real time.

Companies use multi-varied social media platforms especially B2C as compared to B2B. That is when the social media marketing tools like Hootsuite, HubSpot come in critically to schedule your posts on all the social media platforms, do social media monitoring and listening by responding to followers' comments/messages, collaborating with your teams and connect with other tools and platforms too. Analytics and deeper insights are also available to derive the KPI and performance of your social media marketing posts and campaigns.

WeChat is the most important social media channel in China. I highly recommend WeChat index which could measure company or product exposure and influence across entire WeChat ecosystem.

Google Analytics is an essential tool for marketers, providing a comprehensive view of audience behavior, preferences, and feedback across various digital marketing channels and platforms. By tracking and evaluating key metrics, events, and KPIs, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns and optimize strategies for improved ROI. GA also facilitates data visualization and integration with other tools, enabling you to make informed decisions and enhance overall product marketing strategy. The GA intelligence feature is also amazing, allowing you to ask questions about your data ChatGPT style and receive insights, significantly simplifying the process of understanding your data.

Google Analytics is one of the top free web analytics tool available. Almost, Every SEOs use google analytics for reporting for their websites. Here, I'll let you know the top 3 things that one should focus in Google analytics. 1. Traffic Acquisition - Analyze your traffic source - Organic, Paid, Direct, Social, Referral, to know how users visit your website. 2. Demographics - This will help you to know who comes to your website, from which location, device language, devices they use, age & gender. 3. Events & Conversions - what activity your users are doing in your website - viewing your content, scrolling, clicks CTAs, submitting forms, buying products. While reporting, add more columns to further analyze your website. eg. Page + Source.

On the web analytics side, other than Google Analytics, I am a big fan of FullStory and Hotjar for unique session analysis. Especially when you are looking for conversion optimizations on landing pages. If you can get user permission for tracking, you can do critical product funnel and retention qualitative analysis too

AppsFlyer stands out in the realm of mobile app marketing, making it a valuable tool for marketers who want to track and analyze the performance of their mobile marketing campaigns in detail. It helps in understanding which marketing efforts are driving app installs, engagements, and conversions, thereby enabling marketers to make data-driven decisions to optimize their mobile marketing strategy.

While there are several excellent project management tools out there, ClickUp has stood out for me in terms of its versatility and user-friendly features. the most important part for me is that, you are going to be managing projects at the same time, but it is very likely that these projects have specific characteristics, so you will need to tailor your space to each project. Yes, you can tailor your project around the tool you use, however, I could see how doing it the other way around helped me to save up to 40% of time while completing the tasks successfully. I always advise: - dedicate a good time to set the space to what the project requires - review and adjust - explore integrations -> will help you save admin time

Project management tools are absolutely critical for product marketers. When picking the "right" project management tool, it's important for product marketers to consider what other tools each team in GTM is using. For example Product may be using JIRA and CS might be using Asana. Be thoughtful about how you interact with GTM teams and who you really need to collaborate with and who is really more of a reviewer or influencer. If the product marketing team is large enough to have its own system, however, there are new platforms like Ignition that are focused on PMMs.

Given the need for product marketers to work cross-departmentally, I believe it's of utmost importance to build a project management culture within product marketing. In other words, visibility into initiatives being executed on, stage of execution, backlog of requests and key stakeholders tied to delivery. Additionally, product marketers need to show value and keeping a backlog of requests will support resourcing discussions.

Trying to do product marketing without project management tools is like trying to row a boat without any oars. You're not going to get very far with everyone hand-paddling in the water. Product marketing is in the unique position of working across sales, customer success, product, and marketing. Everyone needs information from everyone else to be effective. Everyone needs to know what they need to do, and when. Trying to do all of that in Slack is... well, it would be a learning experience, that's for sure.

Surprised they didn't mention Slack! Many organizations use Slack for communication. I've found Asana to be user friendly and fairly easy to navigate.

Summing up in less than 150 words most tools being used - Analytics - GA/Mixpanel/Heatmap - AB testing - VWO - Landing Pages - Hubspot/Custom - Lead Management - Leadsquared/Zoho/ - CRM (Email/SMS) - Webengage /MailChimp/Sendgrid/Twilio - CRM ticket management - Zendesk/Fresh desk - Website up/down- new relic - Social Media Monitoring/Management - Sprinklr/Buffer/Hootsuite - Design/Creative/Copywriting - Canva/Figma/Jasper/Chatgpt/Mid journey/Grammarlly Project Management - Asana/Google Sheets/Jira

Essential Digital Marketing Tools for Product Marketers: * Website analytics: Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics * Social media management: Hootsuite, Buffer * Email marketing: Mailchimp, HubSpot * SEO: SEMrush, Ahrefs *Content management: WordPress, Drupal * Project management: Asana, Trello * CRM: Salesforce, HubSpot * Marketing automation: Marketo, Pardot * A/B testing: Optimizely, VWO These tools help product marketers: * Track website traffic and user behavior * Schedule and publish social media posts * Create and send email campaigns * Improve website ranking in search results * Manage website content without coding * Plan, organize & track marketing projects * Manage customer data and track interactions * Automate marketing tasks

In my experience, the best tools for your team will depend on your specific needs and budget. It's also important to remember that tools are just one piece of the puzzle. A successful product marketing strategy relies on having a solid understanding of your target market, a clear product messaging, and effective execution across all channels.

Most important tools for Product Marketing Manager are mainly in three buckets - 1) Qualitative research compiler- Confluence by Atlassian is best 2) Hypothesis testing - VMO or Mutiny is ideal 3) Sales or Cold outreach or Attribution softwares - Salesloft, Gong, Outplay and Factors.AI