The digital marketing software market is valued at $60.3 billion. And it’s expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15.5% over the next decade.

With a plethora of digital marketing tools in the market, choosing the right ones can be a daunting task.

However, it’s essential to invest in the best tools to enhance your digital marketing efforts and help you stand above the inevitable competition from your peers.Competition is a significant challenge for 27.1% of digital marketers today, as revealed in a survey conducted by Influencer Marketing Hub.

So which tools should you use to get an edge? 

You don’t need to spend time researching the best tools. In this article, I’ll introduce you to five digital marketing tools that can boost your efforts and give you an edge over the competition.

5 Digital Marketing Tools to Drive Better Results

Here are five digital marketing tools that address different areas of digital marketing. 

They range from tools that enhance website speed to ones for improving landing pages and enhancing overall user experience.

1. TinyImage

TinyImage is one of the digital marketing tools you need to invest in. It’s an image compression tool that reduces the size of your PNG and JPG images online by over 75%.

You don’t have to worry about the security of sensitive image files as well. TinyImage uses a secure 256-bit encrypted SSL connection. It also deletes your images within a few hours of uploading them.

How can TinyImage improve your digital marketing ROI? 

Larger-sized images take up a lot of bandwidth, which slows down loading times for your visitors.

Research by Digital.com shows 21% of online shoppers are dissatisfied by slow-loading pages. Half will abandon their shopping cart if a page fails to load fast enough.  

This app is most helpful for agencies that provide custom app development services. It helps them to compress images in a few seconds and convert apps into fast loading for their clients.

Use TinyImage to:

• Compress images without losing image quality
• Compare the file size of the compressed images to ensure you have the optimal file size
• Save time by compressing multiple images at a go

Price

• Free

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one of the best social media marketing tools in the market. It helps you manage all aspects of your social presence.

You can analyze the performance of your posts and Reels to find the best Instagram Reels to embed on your website. Also, you can also monitor your competitors, manage conversations with your audience, and plenty more.

Sprout Social boosts your social media marketing efforts. And according to research, effective social media marketing results in higher sales for 55% of businesses.

What you can do with Sprout Social:

• Analyze the performance of your campaigns and get insights into areas of improvement
• Uncover current trends and opportunities to engage with your target audience through social listening
• Schedule and publish posts across multiple platforms

Price

• Standard: $249 per month
• Professional: $399 per month
• Advanced: $499 per month

Enterprise: Custom

3. Zendesk

Customer support plays a crucial role in creating a better customer experience for your e-commerce store and optimizing your digital marketing efforts.

And Zendesk is one of the best tools you can use to ensure provide personalized customer support.

It’s AI-powered AI chatbot, live chat, help desk ticketing system, and other solutions help you provide instant and right customer support.

Why is it one of the best digital marketing tools to boost your ROI? 

Zendesk has helped generate numerous leads, sales, and signups for its customers with its low-cost ownership offers.

How Zendesk can help your business achieve better marketing results:

• It offers an AI-powered chatbot and live chat that answers instantly to customers’ questions.
• It offers the right reporting and analytics software that help you get real-time insights for your business.

Price

• Free: $0
• Starting: $19 per month
• Suite Team: $55 per month
• Suite Growth: $89 per month
• Suite Professional: $115 per month

Suite Enterprise: Reach out to them

4. Ahrefs

Keyword research tools are important for any digital marketing strategy. And Ahrefs is one of the best there is. It’ll help boost your SEO strategies to improve your website’s visibility and ranking in SERPs.

It’s not just a keyword research tool, but an all-in-one SEO toolset that analyzes the ranking difficulty of keywords, simplifies backlinking, and more.

You can use it to scan your website for technical and on-page SEO problems that may be holding back your ranking.

Ahrefs also lets you keep tabs on keywords your competitors are ranking for and get insights into the SEO strategies they are implementing. 

Additionally, you can use it to get content ideas that have the potential to draw traffic to your site and find link prospects from a database of over 14 billion web pages.

Ahrefs also provides access to other free digital marketing tools like a backlink checker and AI writing tools

What you can do with Ahrefs to boost your digital marketing ROI

• Find keywords for YouTube, Amazon, and Bing and generate additional keyword ideas using AI to reach a wider audience
• Find backlink prospects to increase your SERP ranking and enhance your credibility
• Visualize your SEO progress using interactive graphs

Price

• Lite: $99 per month
• Standard: $199 per month
• Advanced: $399 per month

Enterprise: $999 per month

5. Hotjar

Google has clearly stated that it rewards content that provides a good page experience. Hotjar is one of the best digital marketing tools you can use to gain insights on ways to improve user experience and also optimize your store for conversions.

It provides heat maps that you can use to see your website visitors’ activities and identify friction points. The heatmaps show you how your visitors move, click, and scroll.

You can also compare user behavior across different devices using Hotjar to identify opportunities to increase conversions.

And if you serve video ads on your website or any other type of ad, you can conduct surveys and collect feedback from your customers to learn how they’re affecting their user experience.

What you can do with Hotjar to improve your ROI:

• Watch full recordings of your visitors’ journey on your site to find and fix user experience issues
• Access all user data from a single dashboard, including feedback, metrics, and session recordings
• Automatically generate relevant surveys using AI and get automated summary reports of the responses

Price:

• Basic: Free
• Plus: $39 per month
• Business: $99 per month
• Scale: $213 per month

Start Leveraging the Best Digital Marketing Tools Today

Leveraging digital marketing tools is crucial if you want to enhance your ROI. And these are the 5 best tools available in the market that you can use.

They all serve different aspects of digital marketing but with similar goals—improving audience engagement, driving conversions, and maximizing your marketing efforts.

Go ahead and give them a shot to take your digital marketing efforts to the next level and boost your ROI.

The post 5 Must-Have Digital Marketing Tools for 2024 to Skyrocket Your ROI appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Search engine optimization (SEO) gets a bad reputation as being one of the hardest parts of marketing to succeed in.

We’re not going to say SEO is easy. It isn’t. But we also don’t want you to think that it is impossible to improve website rank. Boosting your SEO rankings isn’t out of reach, even if you do all the work yourself.

When it comes to SEO strategy, you should have a long-term strategy to land you as the first search result for a keyword or keyword phrase. The long-term strategy will be fairly complex. You’ll do an SEO audit, conduct keyword research, create internal links, do some external link building, build-out relevant content for related keywords, and dive into the world of technical SEO. Google Analytics will become your best friend and worst enemy.

Then, you should have a short-term search engine optimization strategy that helps generally boost your search ranking. It doesn’t have to be overly complex and most of it can be done in a few hours of work.

We’re going to focus on the latter in this article. We’ll show you the small ways that you can boost your search ranking. These are all tasks that you can fit into a few hours of work and can make a big difference in the future.

Quick tip:

Update your content marketing strategy to start using these tips on your new content. If you start now, you won’t have to go back and add them in later.

Here are 5 small ways to boost your SEO rankings.

#1: Structure Your Content For Readability

Part of a website page’s SEO ranking factor is page duration. This is a measure of how long the visitor spent on a certain page. There are a few ways to make sure that visitors don’t bounce off of your page. A bounce is anytime someone visits one page of your website and exits. We’ll talk about more about those later.

One of the top ways to reduce bounce rate is to make your content reader-friendly.

For example, you’ll notice in all of our DigitalMarketer articles that we have descriptive headers, bolded text, italicized text, emojis, images, and bullet points.

The goal is to make you want to read our content, not see a wall of text and run the other way.

Here’s an example from our article, [Case Study] How DigitalMarketer Cut Our Cost Per Conversion By Over 50% In Less Than 7 days

To make content reader-friendly, use:

• H2, H3, and H4 headers
• Bold and italicize text to break up longer paragraphs of text or to highlight a particular sentence
• Emojis to bring some color and familiarity to our content
• Images so website visitors can see what you’re talking about instead of just reading about it
• Bullet points to help show your point without adding unnecessary filler words

All of this helps website visitors when they come to an article, sales page, or landing page. Structuring key pages like this allows visitors to skim it over to see if it’s the content they were looking for. If the answer is yes, they’ll stay a while and read more of what you have to say.

On top of making our content easier for humans to read, it also helps the search engines determine SEO rankings.

When you use keywords in headers, the search engines see the title tag and read the words in the heading. If relevant keywords show up on key pages of your site, your site authority increases. To win the keyword you want to rank for, create quality content that answers your customer’s questions, first. Then make sure the search engines understand what you’re talking about by including keywords in headings.

This shouldn’t be confused with stuffing your headers with keywords. If you do that, it will make sure your content feel unnatural and salesy. That will immediately turn off customers. Even if the search engines love it, if customers don’t, you’re still not winning.

Use this article as a blueprint for your own articles. You can also take a look at our sales page and landing page to see how we’ve structured those to be human and Google search bot friendly.

#2: Fix Your Broken Links

Part of any search engine optimization strategy is a periodic review of internal links and external links. This may not sound like a huge deal but it is. If your content is full of broken links that lead to 404 pages, your readers and Google are going to be disappointed in you.

Consider User Experience

Let’s say you land on a website you find interesting. You see a hyperlink to another piece of content that looks like it could give you a better understanding of your problem. When you click the link, the web page you land on says 404 Page not found.

You would be frustrated, right? You most likely wouldn’t hit the “back” button. And you would likely make a mental note not to visit that business website again.

If a website visitor is new to your brand, when they land on your website, they are in the Engage stage of the Customer Value Journey. At this stage, your customer is looking for valuable content. They’re also subconsciously deciding whether you or your business are trustworthy. 404 pages do not tell them that.

Search Engines and Broken Links

Now consider a broken link from the perspective of a Google search bot. A redirect web page shows the bots that your site isn’t offering quality content to visitors. When that happens, the algorithm deducts points from your domain authority and you lose rank.

Instead of putting your page in the Google SERP (search engine results page), your competitors will show up instead.

There are 2 types of broken backlinks that you want to fix:

1. Internal backlinks from one page of your website to another page on your website
2. Outbound backlinks from your website to another website

#3: Don’t Skip Out On Your Meta Description

The meta description doesn’t have to do with your SEO ranking in terms of the content that you put into it. It does, however, affect whether people click on your content or not. You can boost your SEO ranking by having a killer meta description that makes people feel like it’s IMPOSSIBLE not to click on your article.

Your meta description is the excerpt that goes underneath the title of your page or post when it shows up in Google SERP. For example, here’s the meta description for the website for the annual Traffic & Conversion Summit.

The meta description is the section below the title that reads, “The Premier Gathering of Digital Marketers on Planet Earth!”

The goal of this meta description is to create curiosity in the person who landed on the search result. You want the visitor to click and learn more. What does a premier gathering of digital marketers look like? Well, they have to click to find out.

A meta description can be applied to a landing or sales page of your website. It could also be for a blog post. If you’re writing a meta description for a blog post, make sure that you highlight what the reader will learn by reading the blog post. Plant a seed that makes them want to click and learn more.

For example, here’s an example of a meta description from our article, How To Attract Your Ideal Client:

“Attracting your ideal client doesn’t have to be mind-boggling. With the help of 1 tool, you’ll be able to successfully attract and convert your dream clients.’

The title of the article and the first sentence in the meta description must be compelling. Here, they tell the reader they’re going to learn how to attract their ideal client and that it’s not going to be as hard as they thought.

The second sentence mentions “1 tool” that will help them. This plants a seed of curiosity that helps them choose our article over the one mentioned below it in the search results.

Use your meta description to grab extra attention and motivate searchers to choose your content over the others.

#4: Update Older Content and Republish

Efficiency is key for every part of your marketing strategy (from WordPress SEO, to Google analytics, to social media).

If you have blog posts on your website already, you don’t necessarily need to write brand new content on a regular basis. What about that post from a year ago that did kind of well but it’s pageviews are going lower and lower each month?

Instead of leaving it in blog post purgatory, bring it back to the front lines.

Browse through old blog posts to see what you can add to them. Is there information that needs to be updated? Can you implement a better structure to improve how the article flows? Try adding more descriptive headings, bulleted lists, and images. When you’re done, republish the blog post under a new date.

We do this regularly at DigitalMarketer with our long-form “Everything You Need To Know About…” articles.

These are ultimate guides for content marketing , digital advertising , getting clients, etc. We’re in an industry where strategies change pretty fast. To stay on the first page in search ranking, we update articles often so our target audience (that’s you) gets value for the current moment.

By updating your best articles you make them super valuable to your readers. And by republishing them, you’re showing the search engines that you have fresh information for visitors to consume.

#5: Prioritize Your Content

What happens when you read an interesting headline, click the link to read more, and are immediately bombarded with:

• A drop-down ad
• An ad on the side of the content
• Ads spread out every few paragraphs of the article
• An ad coming up from the bottom of the page

You probably don’t think, “Wow, this is a great experience!” What typically happens is people click the “back” button on their web browser.

That website owner can say goodbye to page duration and hello to an increased bounce rate.

It can be tempting to put pop-ups, Google ads, or ads for your own products all over your website. But be warned. It’s a dangerous SEO game to play. You could end up losing more than you’re gaining by driving away customers. That loss will certainly surpass your Google ranking.

The high bounce rate from a poor user experience will have a negative effect on your ranking. More importantly, it will also have a negative effect on how website visitors view your brand.

When you’re focused on your digital marketing strategy, that means you’re optimizing the first 3-4 stages of the Customer Value Journey. These stages are:

• Aware
• Engage
• Subscribe
• Convert

Putting out quality content will get people to subscribe or even convert on your tripwire. That’s a win. But if somebody feels like your website is a digital billboard, they may worry that you’re just trying to get the sale, not actually help them solve their problem.

Guess what that does to your click-through rate? Yep, you guessed it. It declines fast!

Always prioritize your content so you’re building a trustworthy relationship with your new website visitor. This increases your page duration (and SEO ranking) and your chances of turning that visitor into a lead.

As promised, these are all fast ways that you can improve your SEO ranking without having to spend hours (or dollars) on getting the results you want.

And remember, these aren’t just tips that you can use on your current website. You can also use them when creating all of your future content so that you’re the most efficient SEO marketer possible.

And who doesn’t love the sound of that?

The post 5 Small Ways to Boost SEO Rankings appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Quick quiz: What’s the most dominant device for online activity?

Yes indeed, it’s the smartphone. And that’s been the case for 3 years now.

Second question: What device do shoppers prefer to use when spending their money?

It’s still the computer.

Mobile retail trends show mobile ecommerce will continue carving a slightly larger percentage of the pie each year.

However, a large gap still exists between the share of time spent on mobile, 69%, and the share of dollars spent, 20%.

Look closely at the donut charts and you’ll learn Comscore’s study reveals 5 reasons conversion on mobile suffers:

• Security concerns
• Cannot see product detail
• Navigating is difficult
• Can’t browse multiple screens/compare
• Too difficult to input details

Clearly, brands bound to thrive in a mobile-first world going forward will want to equip themselves to overcome these issues.

Let’s dive into 15 ways you can make the cash register ring more often with smart approaches to ecommerce mobile optimization.

(RELATED: 21 Lessons the World’s Largest Online Retailers Spent Millions to Learn)

1. Create a Speedy Site

It’s simple. Slow loading sites repel shoppers.

Remove any unnecessary images and compress the images you do present. Use automated mobile acceleration solutions and put your website to the test with Google’s free mobile-friendly testing tool.

2. Nix the Pop-Ups and Sidebars

Anything that distracts or annoys shoppers will backfire. Pop-ups, which are often difficult to close on mobile, are a common culprit. Also, if your pages still use a sidebar, it’s time to consider revisiting that strategy. 

3. Make Navigation Simple and Intuitive

Give customers the intuitive browsing experience they expect with a fixed navigation bar that stays on screen. Make it easy to find products with search and buy with some form of checkout or “add to cart” button.

“It’s official: mobile ecommerce on-site search experiences are abysmal,” writes BigCommerce in an article about the topic. However, it’s the preferred product-finding tactic of mobile shoppers. Make it visible, open, and easily accessible.

4. Create Finger-Friendly Buttons

In addition to considering the creative elements of your call to action button, consider its size and location. Fingers are larger than mouse pointers.

Make sure the button has adequate spacing and is wide enough so shoppers can easily click on it without having to change their hand position. Don’t make would-be buyers work hard.

Smashing Magazine gives an interesting lesson on the good and bad zones on mobile devices for those that use their thumbs or “cradlers” who click with their pointer finger. 

5. Make a Sticky Buy Button

Don’t make shoppers hunt for the buy button. Ensure the all-important button remains on screen regardless of where the shopper is on the page.

However you navigate around product pages on Apple’s mobile website, the buy button will remain on-screen.

6. Display great images

The success of image-based social networks reflects the mobile user’s preference for visual content. Engage your audience visually with compelling photos positioned strategically on the page. Offer different angles of the product and the ability to see close-ups when possible.

Warby Parker makes it easy to look at the frames the customer is considering from multiple angles.

67% of consumers say that the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product (compared to 54% who feel the same way about long product descriptions and 53% who give ratings and reviews the same credence).
Source: MDG Advertising.

7. Keep the Products Descriptions Concise

Product page design should factor in the limited display space and feature short and to-the-point copy. Add detail where you must, but when a product name, price, and call to action works, keep it simple.

8. Inject Personality

There’s no reason to be dry and predictable. Make shopping fun and personable with enticing descriptions that represent your brand’s voice and differentiates it. Too much text will take the emphasis off the product. Let your product photos do the rest of the work.

9. Present Thematic Product Browsing

As the name suggests, thematic product browsing allows users to browse by a theme, such as a season, occasion, style, etc. Thematic browsing can widen the users shopping experience. Consider creating features such as finders, assessments, or guides to help users find relevant products.

Target’s ecommerce mobile optimization is honed and perfected. The website offers “Bullseye’s Playground” where you can select thematic paths for décor, toys, education, classroom storage, and supplies.

10. Make it Easy to Save Orders

Understand your potential mobile customer may be on the move and is also likely to be multitasking. They may find the product they’re looking for but don’t have the time or availability to make the purchase there and then. Therefore, you want to make it easy for would-be buyers to easily save their orders to complete later. 

11. Design Friendly Forms

Obviously, making the sale requires that your checkout form doesn’t chase away the buyer. Remember, fields that are difficult to engage with will threaten your sales.

Build your forms more effectively with:

• Essential fields only
• Full-width fields
• Clearly labeled fields
• Legible type
• Marks to indicate required fields
• Immediate response to errors
• A call to action immediately below the form

12. Make Orders Easy to Edit

Some ecommerce checkout processes invite buyers to edit the choices they’ve made: colors, sizes, quantity, shipping options, etc. That’s fine, but it’s dangerous to send them backtracking.

Instead, make order editing easy. Think about introducing “edit” buttons beside each item that invoke a simple lightbox to the product variations. The idea is to give shoppers the ability to change their choices and save their changes without having to leave the page. 

13. Offer Multiple, Modern, Flexible Payment Options

Customers want it to be fast and easy to pay. You want it to be fast and easy to collect. Look into digital wallet options offered by advanced ecommerce software platforms that make it simple to offer Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, and PayPal into your sites—without taxing coding professionals.

A Bayrmard study shows a complicated checkout process is the third highest cause of cart abandonment.

“When we introduced Amazon Pay and an expedited checkout process in our BigCommerce store, we saw a significant lift in conversions—more than 10%—almost immediately,” said BigCommerce customer Rick Culleton, CEO of Discount Electronics, in a case study.

“It made our checkout process even simpler and faster for those customers who were ready to buy and didn’t want to wrestle with form fields or credit card data entry.”

14. Set Up SSL

If security tops the list of conversion killers, overcoming it must be a priority. Make sure your website is secured by SSL to display a lock sign in the address bar, which indicates your website employs advanced encryption.

The address bar on NastyGal.com shows a standard security lock indicating the mobile ecommerce website uses HTTPS for encryption and doubles down with an SSL secure site seal.

15. Display Trust Marks

Trust marks are symbols designed to indicate your information will be transmitted and stored safely. Consider trust marks such as Norton Security and other security software to assure customers your website is protected.

You may want to also consider partnering with highly trusted brands to include options such as “Login with Amazon” or a PayPal option.

NastyGal.com also offers customers a PayPal checkout option, which many buyers are bound to know and trust.

Make Mobile Optimization Easy

Even in a mobile-first world, mobile ecommerce sales have yet to eclipse desktop. To foster continued success for your ecommerce brand, you now need to evaluate the nuances of the customer experience, identify any factors that send shoppers packing, and optimize your mobile experience accordingly.

Raise your conversion rates by giving your mobile ecommerce website a once-over and look for opportunities to employ the tips and tactics presented here.

The post Mobile Ecommerce: 15 Ways to Optimize to Increase Conversions appeared first on DigitalMarketer.