9 Tools Every Inbound Marketer Should Be Using

As you may know, the marketing performances of a company are closely linked to the technology it uses on a daily basis. Today I want to introduce you to a few select tools every inbound marketer should use in his day to day work, which will free up time for more important management tasks. Project management, competitive analysis, keyword research and editorial calendar creation are all tasks that we go through on a daily basis and on which we’d like to spend less time. We put together the 9 tools every inbound marketing professional should be using to help you manage your day to day tasks.

Let’s take a look at the 9 proven and tested tools that can really change and make your job easier when it comes to managing inbound marketing!

1- Trello

Yes, project management can be simplified! Hourray! Trello is a project management platform that I really like for the flexibility it allows. Inviting everyone who’s involved in a specific project will help you follow the progression of different tasks. We use it ourselves to manage our content calendar and to collaborate with our clients.

One thing I love about Trello is that it sends us individual notifications according to the projects we are working on. For example, every contributor receives a notification when his article is due. Whether it is used for creating a content calendar or managing your ongoing projects, Trello is a very user friendly tool that anyone can learn. It is completely free to sign up for a general account, but if you use their affiliation program: every time you invite someone to a Trello board, and they register, you get one month free of GOLD membership which has some really cool additions! 🙂

2- Compete

I discovered this tool while watching an interview with Avinash on online competitive analysis. As we all know this is a step crucial step when elaborating and developing digital strategies. There are various tools that allow us to analyse our competitors’ online activities, but I really like Compete because the data is very precise and of it’s ease of use.

The tool helps you analyse the online performances of you competitors websites and the traffic they generate from social media, it helps you see the global portrait of your competitors’ online presence and take strategic decisions accordingly.

3- Followerwonk

Wondering how to find good, influential and participating followers on Twitter? Followers who are influential in your area of expertise and who follow and interact with your competitors are the people you want to follow and engage! Followerwonk is a paid tool owned and operated by Moz that will help you with all of the above!

OK, seriously though, Followerwonk is the best in all respects to analyse Twitter accounts. You can search Twitter bios to find the best users to follow, find influencer’s in your niche, and you can classify the results according to the number of tweets, followers, followings, days old and social authority just to name a few.

This is only the first awesome thing you can do with Followerwonk.

You can also compare different profiles only by entering a Twitter handle and get a complete report including their respective number of followers, number of tweets, social authority, percentage of retweets, percentage of @contact and percentage of URL tweets, which gives you an idea of what your competitors are doing on Twitter.

You can also analyse one’s followers and the people they follow. This function can be very useful if you want to follow and interact with the most influential followers of your competitors. Followerwonk is a tool owned by Moz as mentioned, and included in the Pro Subscription.

4- Buzzsumo

This tool can help you identify the most popular articles according to a specific key word! It can therefore help you find new ideas, topics and trending articles to help with content creation, as well as identify the social medias on which X or Y content created the biggest buzz.

As content creation is the heart of any inbound marketing strategy, Buzzsumo can be very useful and save you some time finding trendy content to create or share!

5- Topsy

Topsy and Buzzsumo have some common points, they both can help you put together an awesome content calendar by sorting trending topics and articles. However, Topsy focuses on the content shared on Twitter about subjects you choose. You can therefore answer various tweets about a given topic even if you don’t follow the «Tweeter» which helps you spread your network and reinforce your positioning about that subject.

On Twitter we often follow people in our area of expertise but rarely do business think about the people who occasionally have questions or thoughts about their products or services, for example, Inbound Marketing. We might miss those people because they aren’t in our network, and therefore miss an opportunity to engage and make contact. With Topsy, you can see every tweet about for example, inbound marketing in the last hour, day, 7 days or 30 days. It eases your real-time marketing efforts and avoids loosing sales opportunities.

6- Soovle

Knowing your audience is part of a good inbound marketing strategy, therefore knowing which keyword they search for on different search engines is important, and that’s exactly what Soovle does! Yay! Soovle helps you do a daily follow-up on your keyword campaigns and make sure your still in the game!

7- Compfight

No one wants to receive emails asking to remove images due to copyright infringement. Compfight is a very relevant tool because it helps you find images that are free of copyrights and that you can use on your website. You just have to enter a keyword in the search bar, as you’d do it on Google Image for example.

8- Mailchimp

Emailing is an important part of any inbound marketing strategy. Therefore finding a platform that allows you to do it and access complete analytic reports, is gold! Mailchimp might just be every inbound marketer’s best friend, because it’s complete and free! Mailchimp allows you to access data like the opening rate of your emails, the click-through rate (CTR) of your links, and the unsubscribe rates from launched or in progress campaigns.

Sending an email is as easy as 123. You create an account, import you mailing list and you’re ready to send your email! You can also link your Mailchimp account to your forms for automatic contact list updates.

9- Unbounce

Creating Landing Pages is also part of the inbound marketing process and this is what Unbounce does. It helps you create, design and optimize landing pages with an integrated A/B testing tool. Here at Ludis Media, we use HubSpot to centralize our inbound and digital marketing tools and activities. If you don’t have that opportunity for whatever reason, Unbounce is a great tool to support your lead generation and A/B testing efforts.

You probably have your own set of tools to help you in your daily tasks, so please help us grow our list by adding and introducing your own examples below in the comments. We look forward to learning from you!

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Justine Voyer

J’occupe le poste de Spécialiste des Médias Sociaux et Communications chez Ludis Media et touche fréquemment à des mandats de marketing, mon domaine de formation académique. Je me fais un plaisir de bloguer hebdomadairement sur le blogue de Ludis Media à propos de sujets d’actualité! Je suis très sociable donc n’hésitez pas à me rejoindre sur les réseaux sociaux, c’est moi qui se cache derrière les profils sociaux de Ludis Media!

Latest posts by Justine Voyer

• The ABCs of Google+ - 17 June 2014
• 9 Tools Every Inbound Marketer Should Be Using - 9 April 2014
• Client – Affairesdegars - 15 October 2013