Top 80 Tools for Digital and Data Marketing

Consider these digital tools that can help build a clearer picture of your customers' behaviors and actions.

Last month I outlined the seven steps to improving your data marketing fitness, and I promised a follow-up article on the tools of the trade.

It’s important to remember having more data often causes more problems, so make sure you filter out the noise, and the primary focus of data is to provide meaningful insight so you can make better decisions.

With that in mind, here are just some of the digital tools available that can help build a clearer picture of your customers’ behaviors and actions.

But don’t forget the ultimate technique for truly understanding the motivation and intent driving customer behaviors/actions is to talk directly to them through one-on-one interviews, contextual enquiry, and focus groups.

Web Analytics

These monitor user behavior on any website you control. Importantly it’s what they are doing, not necessarily what they want to do.

Adobe SiteCatalyst

ClickHeat

ClickTale

CrazyEgg

Google Analytics

Google Webmaster

IBM Unica

IBM Core Metrics

Tynt

Webtrends

Yahoo Web Analytics

Mobile App Analytics

Very similar to web analytics tools, however, they’re purposely built for monitoring mobile app usage. Some Web analytics tools provide average to good mobile app tracking functionality.

AppClix

Distimo

Flurry

Google Analytics

Localytics

Tag Management

As you become more sophisticated with tracking user behavior across properties, managing the tags becomes quite labor intensive. These tools take the hassle out of it and help organize things.

Adobe TagManager

Google Tag Manager

OpenTag

SuperTag

Tag Man

Tealium

Multivariate or A/B Testing (Optimization)

These automation tools let you run creative experiences to test variations of content, layout, and images on websites. They automatically monitor customer behavior and promote those tests that perform best. This concept is available in CRM/search/social and many other digital marketing platforms. What’s critical is the creation of the tests, which should be based on insight and data.

Adobe Test&Target

Genetify

Google Content Experiments (previously Website Optimizer)

Hubspot

Maxymiser

Optimizely

Unbounce

Vanity

Visual Website Optimizer

CRM/EDM

From basic targeted EDM tools to sophisticated single view CRM tools, these platforms often become the heart of your data system, as you monitor the behaviors of individual, identifiable customers and start communicating with them directly.

Campaign Monitor

Constant Contact

Eloqa

Exact Target

Microsoft Dynamics

Responsys

Sales Force

Silverpop

Sugar CRM

Search Marketing

Search is a core component of web marketing, and as a result of it being one of the biggest drivers of traffic around the web we can analyze search activity to better understands our users’ intentions and behaviors. Search activity has been used from predicting sales behavior to tracking the spread of disease.

Google AdWords

Google Insights (for search)

Google Webmaster

SEO Book

SEO Moz

SEO Tool Set

Online Survey/Customer Feedback

Surveying is a great way of getting a deeper understanding of your user customers’ behaviors or intentions. However, the quality of the data is highly dependent on the quality and structure of your questions.

Fluid Surveys

Get Satisfaction

iPerceptions

Kampyle

Opinion Lab

Qualaroo

Question Pro

Survey Gizmo

Survey Monkey

uservoice

Wufoo

Online Usability Testing

Experience tools let you monitor how easily people can complete tasks on digital properties and glean what the points of frustration are. These aren’t a replacement for face-to-face user testing, but useful for forming high-level hypothesis that then needs validation using face-to-face customer engagement.

Five Second Test

Loop 11

Open Hallway

try my UI

usabilla

User Testing.com

Userlytics

UserZoom

YouEye

Social Analytics/Monitoring

This category is almost infinite; I nearly didn’t include it because it’s so big. But here are a few that help you monitor what your customers are doing in the social universe. This space is changing very rapidly, as you can see the three big tools have been bought/closed down.

Alterian SM2

Feed Burner

Klout

Nielsen MyBuzz (being de-commissioned)

Post Rank (now in Google Analytics social)

Radian 6 (now Salesforce)

Topsy

Competitive Intelligence

Understanding how customers engage with your competitors can give you great insight into what works and what doesn’t, without having to try it yourself. Be careful of the data quality when using these tools, as they require a certain sample size to be statistically correct. So depending on the country, there is a chance you might fall flat.

Alexa

Compete

comScore

Hitwise

Data Modelling

These high-level data analysis tools do the hard job of bringing various large data sets together, so you can analyze them quickly and identify statistically meaningful patterns. You’ll need specialist skills when using them, but the value achieved can be huge.

bluekai

ClearSaleing

R Project

SAS

SPSS

VisualIQ

CMS in-built

Almost every mid-high end CMS has some form of data tool set. But in my experience when you dig deeper than their demos and nice screen shots, their capabilities pale in comparison to the specialized tools above. When considering a CMS’s capability in any of the areas don’t take it at face value; do a close review of its capability and stack it up against specialist tools.

So there you have it, 82 data marketing tools across 11 categories, I hope they help you improve your data marketing fitness.

  • 11 web analytics tools
  • 5 mobile app analytics tools
  • 11 online survey/customer feedback tools
  • 9 online usability testing tools
  • 6 tag management tools
  • 9 multivariate A/B testing tools
  • 6 social analytics/monitoring tools
  • 4 competitive intelligence tools
  • 9 CRM/EDM tools
  • 6 search marketing tools
  • 6 data modelling tools

By no means are these all the tools out there; these are just some of the more popular/common tools going around. Also, many of those tools cross categories; I’ve just grouped them by their primary/original specialization.

If you’ve had any good or bad experiences with data tools/platforms, please share them in the comments.

Remember, selecting the right tools and data is just one of the seven steps to effective data marketing. Here are all seven steps from my previous article, and I could write an article on how to do each of them well.

  1. Clear goals
  2. Quality over quantity
  3. People powered
  4. Technology
  5. Filter the noise
  6. Align goals
  7. Analyze, decide, act, monitor, and repeat

Image on home page via Shutterstock.

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