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3 Free Digital Marketing Tools Every Marketer Needs 2023

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Digital Marketing, Tools, Digital Marketer, digital marketing tools, tools 2023, free tools, free tools 2023

When starting your career in digital marketing, have you ever thought about tools and software available to use? Free Digital Marketing Tools have evolved in 2023. There are so many options out there from time management tools to SEO guidance which is why its important to take a step back and really decide what works best for you. This blog will provide some useful free tools below to help get you started. 

Google Keyword Planner

Understanding which keywords to use when creating different content, for example blogs or google ads can seem like a difficult task. However, Google keyword planner is so easy to use. This free tool allows you to discover many new keywords associated with your business/ industry. It works by and offering estimates of the number of times specific words/ phrases were searched. Usefully, the keyword planner actually tells you how much it costs to target. Overall, this free digital marketing tool is fantastic for all digital marketers who are looking for a keyword planner.

CapCut

Free digital Marketing Tools generally enable creating engaging short-form video content. Since 2022 there has been an increase in the popularity of videos via platforms like TikTok and Instagram. CapCut is a multi-purpose video editor which removes complex editing, so it is essentially the perfect tool for new professionals in the industry. Something that differentiates CapCut from other video editors is you can extract audio. For example take a trending sound from Instagram and import the video into CapCut, click extract audio and then you have an easy way to create perfectly timed transitions. 

Digital Marketing, Tools, Digital Marketer, digital marketing tools, tools 2023, free tools, free tools 2023

Canva

An Important tool for a role as a digital marketer is Canva. Canva is basically a source for all your graphic design needs, which is super helpful having this all in one place not to mention convenient. Canva pretty much allows you to create anything from social media content you need to upload, to banners for your new website and it also provides a helpful system of templates to help you incorporate all of this into your outputs.

We all know starting to create content from scratch can seem extremely daunting and this tends to put many new digital marketers in a predicament, knowing tools like this are out there and available free to use by anyone creates so much relief! Because once you know this life gets so much easier. Canva is able to take this to a whole new level by displaying inspiration from various previous creators and the different internal tools and features such as the drag-and-drop feature which makes the experience streamlined.

Summary of Free Digital Marketing Tools

To conclude, a range of free digital marketing tools readily available are so easy to find when you have the web at your finger tips. Don’t be afraid to jump deep in when comes to digital marketing as there are so many useful resources out there that will make your journey as a marketer super easy! It is important to know which ones will help develop your skills, however it is just as easy to find out which ones are best for you by simply trial and error.

These 3 free digital marketing tools will help you to build your best skillset now and in the future as technology advances and trends keep changing. Overall, understanding what tools will drive your development and progression is important for creating successful strategies and campaigns.

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The Art of Digital Marketing: Tips and Best Practices for Success

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A graphic image of various elements within Digital Marketing.

Digital marketing has become a crucial aspect of modern-day businesses, with more and more companies relying on digital marketing techniques to connect with their audience and increase their revenue. However, becoming a great digital marketer takes more than just posting content on social media or running ads on Google. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the industry, a keen eye for detail, and the ability to adapt to ever-changing trends and technologies. In this post, we will discuss some tips on how to become a great digital marketer.

Build A Strong Foundation

To become a great digital marketer, you need to have a strong foundation in marketing principles. You need to understand the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. This knowledge will help you create effective marketing campaigns and strategies that align with your brand’s goals and values. Additionally, it’s essential to understand your target audience’s needs and behaviours, as this information will guide your marketing efforts.

Stay Up To Date With Industry Trends

The digital marketing industry is constantly evolving, with new technologies and trends emerging regularly. To stay ahead of the curve, you need to keep up with these changes and adapt your strategies accordingly. Follow industry blogs and social media accounts, attend webinars and conferences, and read books and articles on the latest marketing trends. This knowledge will help you create innovative campaigns that resonate with your target audience.


Image source link: https://www.vendasta.com/blog/10-steps-digital-marketing-strategy/

Focus On Creating Engaging Content

Content is the backbone of digital marketing, and creating engaging content is crucial to the success of your campaigns. Your content should be informative, entertaining, and shareable. It should also be tailored to your target audience and align with your brand’s values. Consider using different formats, such as videos, infographics, and podcasts, to appeal to different types of learners.

Utilise Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms are powerful tools for digital marketing, and you should use them to your advantage. Choose the platforms that are most relevant to your target audience and create a consistent brand voice across all of them. Engage with your followers by responding to comments and messages, and use social media analytics to track the success of your campaigns. Additionally, consider using social media influencers to promote your brand and reach a wider audience.

Optimise For Search Engines

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a critical component of digital marketing, as it helps your website rank higher in search engine results pages. To optimize your website, use relevant keywords in your content, optimize your website’s structure and navigation, and ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Additionally, consider using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to drive traffic to your website.

Track And Analyse Your Results

To be a great digital marketer, you need to track and analyze your results continually. Use tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic, conversion rates, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This information will help you identify which campaigns are most successful and which ones need improvement. Use this data to adjust your strategies and improve your campaigns continually.

Stay Organised

Digital marketing involves many moving parts, from creating content to analyzing data. To succeed, you must stay organized and prioritise your tasks effectively. Use project management tools like Trello or Asana to keep track of your to-do list and collaborate with team members. Additionally, create a content calendar to plan your content in advance and ensure that it aligns with your brand’s goals and values.

Conclusion

In conclusion, becoming a great digital marketer takes time, effort, and dedication. By building a strong foundation in marketing principles, staying up to date with industry trends, focusing on creating engaging content, utilising social media platforms, optimising for search engines, tracking and analysing your results, and staying organised, you can create effective marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience and drive business success.

Remember to keep an eye out on our blog page for further tips!

My experience of using the Surfer tool to do on-page SEO

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SurferSEO is a useful tool for digital marketers that are looking to carry out on-page analyses of their sites. The audit tab on the SurferSEO site allows marketers to fully optimise their pages, in an attempt to improve their ranking on the Google SERP. Surfer pulls data from the search engine results page, comparing your content to your top competitors. If you or your company want to improve your on-page SEO, then Surfer could be the tool for you.

This blog post will cover the basics of using SurferSEO and its most beneficial features, including Surfer audits and Surfer content editor. Keep reading if you want to explore the Surfer tool in more detail and find out top tips on how to use the platform effectively.

Surfer SEO
SurferSEO

Features of a Surfer audit

There are many features of running a Surfer audit that will help you to improve your content, and in turn, improve your page’s ranking on the SERP.

Word count

When you run an audit on your existing page, Surfer will provide you with a suggestion of the ideal word count for your specific title and niche. The suggested word count is based on your top competitor’s content and is a guideline that you should follow to achieve a first-page ranking on the SERP.

Keywords

One of the best features of running a Surfer audit is that they highlight which essential keywords are missing from your page. Keywords are crucial if you want your page to rank highly on the SERP, so the fact Surfer showcases keywords that aren’t on your page is extremely beneficial for digital marketers. By adding missing keywords throughout your audit, your Surfer score will increase. You should aim for a Surfer score of at least 70 if you want to see any improvements in your page’s ranking.

Headings and paragraphs

Surfer suggests how many headings and paragraphs your content should have. The number of headings is important, as if your page has fewer H2s than recommended, it could mean that your page is not covering the topic in its entirety.

Surfer Audit
SurferSEO Audit

Surfer content editor

Not only can you run audits on existing pages using SurferSEO, but you can also create new content using the optimisation platform. By accessing the content editor tab, you can write your unique content directly onto the Surfer platform, taking full advantage of the features of an audit, such as keyword suggestions.

Surfer Content Editor
Surfer Content Editor

Similar to a Surfer audit, the Surfer content editor highlights the recommended word count, heading count, and paragraph count. It also spotlights keywords related to your niche that you should include in your content. Once you have completed your content using Surfer, then you can copy it over to your preferred platform, such as WordPress to publish the page. Remember to clear the formatting once you have copied the content over from Surfer to avoid any faulty code.

Top tips for using Surfer

Here are a few top tips to remember when you start using SurferSEO to either optimise existing content or create new content:

  • Make sure you set the location as your target geographical demographic. For example, if you want to target an audience based in the UK, set your location as the United Kingdom for your audits and content.
  • You can change your competitors using the SERP Analyzer tool, to remove sites that have extensive domain authority that will make it hard to rank against.
  • SurferSEO is a beneficial tool but it isn’t always perfect. If a keyword doesn’t make sense within the context of your article, don’t use it. Use Surfer as a guide but make sure to rely on your own digital marketing knowledge to make informed decisions.
  • If you are uncertain about how to use certain features on the SurferSEO site, then access the How to Use tab. This tab has a series of blog posts that outline how to use every Surfer tool.

Customer testimonials

Don’t just take it from me. SurferSEO has amassed many 5-star reviews from customers that have used their platform to optimise their own pages. Here is an example of a testimonial left by a previous client:

With NLP words introduced into three, already optimized articles, we managed to reach the top five in Google search for relevant keywords. Within the first month of using Surfer, we recorded 15% organic traffic growth. Now it’s an essential part of our content creation process.

Oksana Kosachenko
GetResponse (Via surferseo.com)

Summary

For digital marketers looking to improve their digital marketing strategy, SurferSEO is a beneficial tool that they could incorporate into their marketing plan. SEO specialists can use the audit feature to optimise existing pages, with the intention of improving their ranking in the SERP and increasing the organic traffic to their site. They can also use the content editor feature to create unique and optimised content for their websites. As a digital marketing apprentice, this tool could help you create high-quality content that produces results for your company. It is easy to use and has been proven to help improve organic traffic and SERP ranking.

A guide to digital tools for your Digital Marketing Apprenticeship

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A computer screen showing editing software

The term “Digital Tool” in your apprenticeship will refer to any software program, online resource, or website which helps you in your role as a Digital Marketer. For a quick guide on the types of digital tools and how they can benefit your Digital Marketing Apprenticeship, read on!

What is a digital tool?

These are tools that you use for:

  • Content creation,
  • Content scheduling,
  • Sending email content,
  • Web metrics, analysis, and reporting,
  • Communication,
  • and more.

Digital tools for content creation:

Content creation spans across text posts, such as status updates and blogs, graphic and infographic content, animated graphic video content, filmed video content, pdf content, email content – essentially any kind of visual that you see online.

Canva

Canva is an online digital tool for making graphics and videos. They have both a free and paid plan available. Canva has a huge library of templates, icons, animations, royalty-free images and music that you can use for your business. It’s a must-have for any digital marketer looking to create infographics, videos, or dynamic presentations with a bit of extra eye-catching content.

Herefish and MailChimp

Herefish and MailChimp are both digital tools for creating templates for email marketing newsletters. They both have a library of pre-existing templates, and the option to create your own from scratch, adding in your company branding.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud is a library of content creation programmes. There are many different ones available, but here were we’ll discuss;

Photoshop

Photoshop is used to create original images, or edit existing images and photos. You can remove distracting objects from a photo, adjust the colours of an image, or create GIF content. Content created in Photoshop has the option to be high resolution, so it is a great programme for logo and asset creation.

Premiere Pro

Premiere Pro is a video editing software. You can cut and move around clips, adjust the speed, audio and colour levels, and layer videos, music and images on top of one another. Premiere can export GIFs, .mov, .mp4, .mp3 and more.

Audition

Audition is an audio editing software. You can import your video content and remove any background noise, amplify the voice of someone speaking, add ambient background noise, and more. Audition is great for anyone looking to clean up audio if you’ve filmed content without a mic – or to polish and perfect audio that already used a mic.

Digital tools for content scheduling:

Content scheduling allows you to plan a date and time for a post on a social media channel. By creating and scheduling content in advance, you can work on other tasks and know that every post is going out as planned.

Sprout Social

With Sprout Social, you can connect multiple accounts to schedule content. You’re given a calendar, which shows all your upcoming posts. You can set posts to go out on specific platforms, at specific dates and times. For certain channels, you can set thumbnail images too. Currently, you can schedule images and videos, but not documents or Instagram carousels.

An image of a person on a computer, editing a video using a digital tool.
A person using video editing software, which is a type of Digital Tool.

Sending email content:

Every email that you receive from a clothing brand, service, or company is classed as email content (or email marketing). This type of content plays an important role in lead generation and can also be used as a method of linking back to your website and social media.

Herefish and MailChimp

In Herefish and Mailchimp, you can create lists of contacts to receive your content, and put together tailored automations to reach these lists. By using these programmes, bulk email campaigns are sent out without having to manually type out each individual address. If you’ve got content you want to go out to people in a specific postcode, make a list for your contacts in… Derby for example, set up the automation, and hit send! Your contacts will then receive it instantly.

Digital tools for web metrics, analysis and reporting:

Web metrics are classed as a specialist area, and will be important in your apprenticeship when showing that you can monitor your social media accounts, pull through data, and interpret it to form short and long term marketing plans.

Instagram Insights

This digital tool is only available through the mobile app. Instagram Insights will give you the ability to see your audience demographics, such as age and location.  You can also view metrics for feed posts and story posts, narrowing these down to engagement, reach, shares, and profile visits.

One feature that sets Instagram Insights apart is the ability to see which days, and time of day your audience is most active. With this, you can develop a content scheduling plan tailored to your business and audience, posting when they are most active and likely to see it.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a one-stop location for all your social platform metrics. You can compare content across channels or view content from one specific platform. Sprout has a Reports feature, where data is automatically pulled through and formed into charts and graphs. This saves you time inputting data to create your own infographics for presentations. Sprout also automatically compares stats from month-on-month, giving you a percentage for each metric so that you can see where stats have reduced or increased.

Herefish and MailChimp

After sending out email content, you’ll need to monitor how it performs. Herefish and MailChimp track data from those who receive your content. They can tell you who received the email, who unsubscribed or opted out, and who clicked a link. They can sometimes also tell you which company the contact works for, and what industry they’re in. This is crucial information to know whether your content is reaching the right audience.

Communication

How do you speak with team members, other internal staff, or external companies? For every email or direct message you send, a digital tool is keeping you connected.

Outlook

Outlook is an email application. You can use it to send and receive emails, schedule meetings or confirm attendance. You can also set out-of-office automatic replies, and make rules to re-direct emails you receive.

Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Skype

After the last few years of lockdown and working from home, you’re likely familiar with at least one of these digital tools. They can be used for online meetings, helping you to communicate from afar. They allow you to share your screen and lead presentations, so this can come in handy for any client proposals you make.

 

Conclusion

There are many digital tools that can be used in your digital marketing apprenticeship. They can make completing tasks much easier, whilst also showing that you have a great understanding of your role as a digital marketer. These digital tools are often part of our everyday lives, without us even realising.

Now that you know how to make, schedule, and report on your content, it’s time to learn some social media etiquette! Check out our guide “The do’s and don’ts of social media as a Level 3 Digital Marketer” to find out more.

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