9 Types of Marketing Tools to Address Your Marketing Needs

Key Takeaways

There are a range of marketing tools available to address all areas of marketing. Whether it's drafting emails, scheduling social posts, or monitoring performance and providing insights, marketing tools can be a real asset to any marketing team.

• Marketing tools help create awareness for products, services, and brands, doing just that, while easing the workload and streamlining your daily tasks. 

• Marketing tools vary by company, needs, and goals.

• Some tools become integrated into a company's daily operations, while others have limited use, like project management software used by marketers to manage team campaigns. 

Learn more about the different tools available by marketing need. Afterward, build your marketing knowledge with the Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate, where you'll learn the fundamentals of digital marketing and e-commerce.

9 types of marketing tools

Marketing is a broad field, so marketing tools tend to vary by company size, team needs, and goals. While many marketing platforms exist, they generally fit into these categories:

1. CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) software maintains customer records and enables brands to communicate effectively with both prospective and existing customers. This robust marketing tool combines sales, marketing, and customer support into one platform, providing brands with a more holistic view of their customers.  

More specifically, a CRM builds customer profiles. It tracks every email sent, question asked, or purchase made by a customer and your team's response. The system helps teams delegate jobs, create to-do lists, schedule demos, and set reminders to ensure each contact receives the necessary assistance and attention at every sales funnel step.   

Automation features allow marketing teams to program certain tasks, like emailing a new subscriber. At the same time, robust reports give decision-makers the information needed to make real-time choices. 

Common CRM tools

• Salesforce

• Zoho CRM

• Hubspot

• Monday.com

2. Social media

Tools dedicated to addressing social media needs can be used to schedule, publish, and analyze content across platforms.

Social media marketing tools provide one central location to manage your accounts. With scheduling tools, you can plan and write posts in advance instead of logging into each platform and manually posting to each one. Social media tools can also help you monitor and take advantage of trends.

Many social media apps offer robust analytics to help social media managers understand who is visiting each platform, what kind of content they like most, and how they choose to engage. Analytics can show you how successful your content is, allowing you to tailor your posts to your audience for more engagement. 

Common social media marketing tools

• Buffer

• Hootsuite

• Sprout Social

• BuzzSumo

3. Email marketing

Email marketing tools allow you to write, send, test, and measure email performance. Email service providers (ESPs) often have pre-made email templates you can use to send a polished message to customers without tweaking designs, saving you time and allowing you to quickly reuse templates with your company’s branding materials already in place.

You can also automate email deliveries, integrate emails with your social channels, and test brand messages to see which resonates with recipients. 

Common email marketing tools

• Mailchimp

• AWeber

• eSputnik

There are also a wide variety of AI marketing tools to explore. These either add AI functionality to some of the tools already discussed, or are completely new apps designed to create original content based on brand voice training, offer personalization at scale, and automate follow-ups.

4. Event marketing tools

Event marketing tools offer event-planning software used to sell and track tickets, collect customer data, stay organized, and collaborate with the event committee. Event marketing tools also allow you to use design elements so your event has a cohesive look with the rest of your branded materials.  

Common event marketing tools

• Eventsquid

• HoneyBook

• Webex Events

5. Marketing analytics

Data now informs many aspects of marketing, so having effective marketing analytics tools in place can help teams understand their audience, see the success of ongoing campaigns, and improve results.

These tools create a more personalized customer experience based on your target market's needs, challenges, and preferences. Marketing analytics tools, which often include data visualization to make data easier to understand, as well as security features to keep your data safe, and sometimes generative AI to help you build models, ask complex questions in your natural language, and create charts and visualizations effortlessly. 

Common data analytics tools

• Tableau

• Looker

• RapidMiner

• Amplitude

• QlikView

6. SEO tools

Search engine optimization (SEO) tools are useful for improving brand visibility on search engines. They can help you analyze how your content appears in search rankings and the search intent behind specific keywords. You can also use SEO tools to understand how to improve your site’s performance and get AI recommendations about improving your content. 

SEO tools can identify keywords to incorporate into your website to improve your search rankings, audit your site for potential problems, and offer actionable steps to fix them.

Common SEO tools

• Ahrefs

• SEMrush

• Moz

7. Lead capture

Lead capture tools help you collect data about potential customers. In its simplest form, this tool allows users to supply their email, telephone, or home address, which sales representatives can use to contact them later. In many cases, lead capture ties into offers you make to your client, such as access to a free newsletter, ebook, or discount code. When users enter their information to access the product, your lead capture tool will create a sort of digital phonebook for sales reps to circle back and contact those potential customers. 

Beyond creating a database of fresh contacts, lead capture tools can also track lead activity, score leads based on their likelihood of conversion, and help reps nurture each lead to encourage more sales.  

Common lead capture tools

• Pipedrive

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator

• Hubspot

8. Marketing automation 

Marketing automation tools put repetitive tasks on autopilot, saving you time and giving your customers a more personalized experience. For example, you might send customers an anniversary promotion every year. Marketing automation tools will automatically determine which promotions need to be sent out every day and complete the task without any extra effort on your part. Other examples of functions that you could automate include reminding customers about an abandoned shopping cart or updating customers on their loyalty status. 

Automation saves marketers time and helps establish a reusable library of content. For instance, marketers can create welcome and birthday emails once and use them throughout the year. 

Common marketing automation tools

• Marketo

• Eloqua

• Pardot

9. Workflow organization

Marketers use project management software to plan, track, and manage multiple projects at once, helping you stay organized and keep the project on track. Project management tools often allow you to project completion dates, assign budgets, delegate tasks, monitor quality, and identify problems quickly. 

You can expect tools to include visuals, like Gantt Charts, so administrators and marketers can see where a project is at a glance. Task lists, reminders, and time tracking are all included, as are communication tools, often in the form of messaging.    

Common project management tools

• Trello

• Asana

• Wrike

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