This toolkit is for anyone doing their own digital marketing. There are a myriad of tools out there and it’s hard to navigate which ones are best for you.

Here’s what we generally recommend using to get you started!

Analytics & Optimization

Google Analytics
Use this for tracking goals, optimizing your sales funnels, trends in your ecommerce conversion rate, and demographics data.

Optimizely
Use this for A/B testing and conversion rate optimization. This is especially important when you are running advertising campaigns, to make sure your landing pages and sales funnels are as effective as possible. Think of it as insurance on your marketing spend.

HotJar
Use this for heatmaps and screen recordings. This tool is like looking over your visitor’s shoulder while browsing your site. While you can’t watch all visitors cruise your site, this is a great way to gain insight into customer behavior and to help you solve problems that arise on your site.

Customer/Lead Acquisition

GetSiteControl
Use this to gather feedback from your site visitors and customers in the form of surveys and engagement widgets. You can also use it for email opt-ins and promotions.

ActiveCampaign
Use this platform for email marketing automation and as a CRM. At Metacake, we love it because it is very easy to use and also provides a lot of functionality.

Intercom
Use this tool for live chat. This is the tool that we use on our site for chat. You can script the chat, do some complex logic, and respond via email so you do not always need to be online.

Custom Landing Pages

ClickFunnels
Use this tool to easily build funnels on your site without any knowledge of coding. With this tool you can deliver lead magnets and test various offers to see what sales funnels are most effective for your audience.

InstaPage
Use this to create beautiful marketing landing pages without a developer. Other alternatives are
Leadpages or Unbounce. All of these tools allow you to do split testing and to capture email leads as well as to push visitors down the sales funnel.

Advertising

Facebook/Instagram/Twitter
Use these social media tools for interest based ads. With this tools you are able to hypertarget people based on their interests and inject ads directly into their experience path.

Google Adwords
On the contrary, use this for intent based ads. Rather than serving ads up based on users interests, you are paying for placements based on keywords your audience is searching for…this means they are actively looking for a solution. You can also experiment with ads on other search engines such as Bing Ads or Yahoo Advertising.

Perfect Audience
Use this for retargeting. You can follow your audience around after visiting your site and serve them ads that will bring them back to your site. This is best suited for ecommerce, but can be used for other types of businesses as well. Another option for retargeting is Adroll.

These are our typical digital marketing tools, but we’re always in search for the latest and greatest. If you have a favorite tool that is not on this list, let us know!