What Tools are Canadian Marketing Specialists using today?

The more choices we have, the harder it is to choose! This rule seems to apply to everything, from what to wear to picking a flavour of ice cream. It is especially true when deciding what tools to incorporate into your marketing plan and day-to-day operations.

As marketing professionals, we can all agree that there are a LOT of options available in today’s market. With so many tools to choose from, picking the right one for your business is a bit overwhelming. Not every tool is a fit for every team, sometimes you need to find the one that works best for your specific features.

Marketing Tools

We asked Canadian Marketing Professionals what tools they use to help them run their businesses. Check out their insights below:

Gerrid Smith, CEO & Founder of Property Tax Loan Pros

I strongly recommend Hootsuite. It is a top-rated social media management tool for marketers, allowing them to keep track of all their online campaigns in one place. You can plan, create, and schedule all of your social media campaigns with relative simplicity when you have this software on your side. With Hootsuite, you can also successfully manage your social media staff. One of my favourite features in the Hootsuite Platforms is that it allows me to provide different permission levels to different team members. This allows me to manage who has access to what information on three different levels - organizational, team, and social account.

Kavan Sohal, SEO Instructor, Jelly Academy

One of my favourite tools and what I believe to be a must-have tool for any SEO specialists is Screaming Frog SEO Spider (SF). This tool will crawl any website to extract valuable information, from which you are able to audit or build your SEO strategy around. SF includes valuable information, such as what your current SEO page titles and meta description are for current pages, as well as review any potential issues with those tags. It's also a great way of discovering any missing alt tags or broken links, and that's just the basic function of the program. The benefit of this is it allows you to develop a roadmap for the most important issues plaguing your website which ultimately makes the process of what to work on that much more accessible and congestible.

Greg Tucker, Lead Generation Guru at Leadbright

A marketing campaign can be built around multiple channels like email, social platforms, and pages in our own website in order to maximize its effectiveness and reach. Because of this, we rely on more than one tool to execute our marketing campaigns. Our current strategy is to focus on inbound marketing through organic, email, and social traffic. One favourite is Marketmuse. Marketmuse is used to research the topic 20 ranking articles for the keyword we are writing for and pulls in questions and topics that we should be talking about in order to write a thorough and well structured article that answers the search query. Another recommendation would be, Campaign URL Builder. This is a free tool from Google that adds a bit of extra code at the end of a URL, and enables us to track the performance during the campaign. Each unique URL created will indicate the source (Such as social media) as well as the medium (Such as Twitter) to help us figure out which area of the campaign performed the best .

Michael Alexis, CEO of TeamBuilding

One of the tools I rely on most is trends.google.com. This site is a free tool by Google that gives you insights into relative search data going back years. I believe the foundation of a successful marketing campaign is making sure that what you offer is what consumers or potential clients actually want. Google Trends can show you very clearly whether people are looking for your product or service, and also how they might phrase it or any nuances. For example, you might think that “kitten food” would be a successful campaign, but it turns out that nearly everyone searches for “cat food” instead. For our business, this data-based approach has led to a few major wins. For example, in 2020 when Covid hit, we spotted an opportunity to offer and sell virtual team-building events in the market. Later in the year, we anticipated and then saw a large increase in searches for virtual holiday parties. Both of these insights became the foundation of our marketing campaigns, leading to efforts in SEO, ads, email marketing and more.

Marie Lamonde, Content Marketing Specialist with DashThis

As someone who uses a fair amount of tools, I have several recommendations. The first would be DashThis, (ok, I’m biased but still) because it is so important to track your digital marketing efforts to see what’s working or not. The tool allows to connect with 37 major marketing tools used by marketers every day (Google Analytics, Facebook, Mailchimp, Instagram, Semrush, Moz, and more) It gathers automatically all your marketing data and presents it in an easy to understand report that you can share with your boss or your clients. The second would be Hubspot! Their CRM, and marketing automation tool allow us to implement so much personalization in our communications, it is so powerful and flexible that we can almost do anything with the tool. Particularly useful for email marketing campaigns.

Michael Hummelburger, CEO of Sales therapy

Aside from Trello (which I have relied on because of its awesome features such as progress charts, the Kanban board view and the Gantt charts), one better alternative to Asana is Nutcache. I am very satisfied with the software's simplified approach to the project lifecycle, especially for our business where some of our clients are billed by the hour. It was originally designed as an accounting software but it has evolved into a highly reliable project management tool that has a robust platform to serve small, medium or large enterprises.

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Compiled by Emma Whiten, Editor of Marketing News Canada