Tips & Guides — 27 Feb 2023
Tools to boost your brand growth
The advertising spend is predicted to reach $873bn by 2024 against $634bn in 2019. With rapidly increasing marketing costs, scaling a business and achieving the desired ROI becomes more challenging. Marketers have to build multi-channel strategies, expand customer acquisition, improve conversion rates, run experiments, and track performance.
But what does this mean for brands? It’s now more important than ever to rely on the proper marketing and analytics tools to achieve their goals. Marketing software today can help you effectively manage all of your brand activities. It allows you to automate routine tasks, gain meaningful insights and present the results of your marketing efforts.
This article will explore paid and free tools that help brands scale their business and develop efficient marketing across different channels. Also, we’ll explain why each software is worth trying. Let’s dive in.
Table of content
1 – SimilarWeb for market research
2 – AdPlexity for competitors’ ads analysis
3 – Affise Reach for partnership marketing
4 – Ahrefs for search engine optimization
5 – BuzzSumo for strong content marketing
6 – Buffer for social media marketing
7 – Hubspot for marketing management
8 – Semrush for marketing management…again
9 – MailChimp for email marketing
10 – SimilarTech for customer acquisition
11 – VWO for A/B testing
12 – Unbounce for building landing pages
13 – Hotjar for conversion rate optimizat
14 – Vista Social for social media management for small to mid-sized businesses and agencies
Similarweb allows brands of all sizes to check and analyze traffic for any website or mobile app, which makes this tool perfect for researching your brand market niche. One example of an activity you can perform with Similarweb is the audience and customer analysis. With advanced demographics, you may see who your potential customers are and what audience segments you should target. Behavioral analytics helps understand consumers’ interests and see what drives them to purchase.
With a robust dataset of about 100 mln websites, Similarweb has more than enough information to help you with other marketing tasks and activities, such as keyword and referral research, traffic and engagement benchmarking for advertising campaigns, and more.
For brands: SimilarWeb makes it possible to spot the industry trends in real-time, benchmark your business with other market players, and get insights on competitors’ performance and traffic sources. Armed with these insights, you can identify gaps to develop more robust strategies for growing your online presence and customer acquisition.
Pricing:
SimilarWeb offers a free plan, which gives you limited access to historical data and allows you to add one user. It is a perfect opportunity to test the platform. However, businesses need to utilize the paid plan to start actual work. The price depends on the goals and features you need.
AdPlexity is a data-driven solution enabling you to watch after your rivals’ desktop and mobile advertising campaigns. One more tool to help you dive into your competitors’ marketing strategies and get valuable information.
Thanks to AdPlexity, you can spot the most beneficial types of ads by relying on specific keywords or advertisers. This data helps you understand what campaigns and creatives resonate with your target audience and bring desired results to your rivals.
For brands: With AdPlexity, business owners can track advertising campaigns on various traffic sources, including native advertising, push notifications, and more. There is also a dedicated solution for eCommerce, helping spot the most profitable products and channels competitors use.
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Learn now →Pricing:
AdPlexity offers several packages for specific ad campaigns. Desktop and mobile plans are $199 per month for one user, native ads data – $249 per month, push notifications pack – $149 per month.
Depending on the industry, acquiring a lead with digital advertising costs businesses from $14.88 to $73.70. To cut these expenditures, marketers need new marketing channels, such as partnerships. Adopt Affise Reach to enter and manage partner marketing with no hustle.
Affise Reach is a new marketing platform by Affise designed primarily to connect brands like yours with influencers, content creators, and other potential partners. Thanks to it, you can enrich your marketing strategy with dozens of new channels without the need to build your presence on them from scratch.
For brands: Affise Reach allows business owners and marketers to build direct relationships with partners and get full ownership of their campaigns. This management tool offers easy-to-use UI and automation opportunities to remove the complexity of managing partner marketing.
In-depth analytics of the overall performance and each partner’s results allows brands of all sizes to see which channels and influencers contribute to your sales the most and allocate resources accordingly.
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Learn now →Pricing:
Affise Reach costs start from $500 a month. If you want to scale your business rapidly, consider the Growth plan for $800. It includes a dedicated manager and live chat support, which speeds up the onboarding and troubleshooting, pre-build CRM integrations, customizable reporting, CR optimization options, multi-touch attribution, advanced tracking, and more.
Search engine optimization doesn’t drive immediate business growth. Still, letting it fall through the cracks is a mistake that can cost you a lot, as SEO is indispensable in the long run. To get to the top of the search engine results page, you need a strong optimization strategy powered by a reliable SEO tool, such as Ahrefs.
For brands: This tool has a powerful keyword research feature that provides a lot of data to help business owners and marketers to learn what your potential customers are looking for online and guide content creation. Content explorer will also enable you to see the top-performing content in your niche and get in-depth analytics. This feature is helpful if you want to learn how to outperform your competitors.
Moreover, it enables you to craft an effective backlink strategy with its backlink checker powered by the fullest base in the industry. The checker also shows the number of referring domains and the domain and URL rank.
Pricing:
Ahrefs provides four paid plans from $99 to $999 per month. The most popular plan for $199 includes a full range of basic SEO tools, advanced reports, data export options, automated audits, and a set of additional features.
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Learn now →BuzzSumo lets you monitor industry updates and brand mentions; these opportunities allow you to respond just in time or transform these mentions into backlinks.
Also, it is possible to see the list of journalists and bloggers who love to share your content across the web or have a genuine interest in your industry. It helps create the perfect base for your future promotional or PR campaigns.
For brands: As we know, smart content marketing has become essential to any growth strategy. To drive results with it, brands need the robust research technology at hand. BuzzSumo claims to help to get all the necessary insights to craft top-performing articles, posts, videos, and so on. This way, you can focus on more high content that will engage better with your target audience.
It is another essential tool that should be part of your set of solutions to help you make data-driven decisions about content marketing. It scans articles and social posts and provides insights about top formats and the content your competitors successfully employ.
Pricing:
BuzzSumo offers a free plan that lets customers conduct ten searches a month, add one user, run one content project, and access a limited number of features. For the same functionality and more users, searches, and content projects, BuzzSumo charges $99 a month. To unlock the complete set of tools, a business has to pay $299 monthly.
The first thing you’ll need is automation to help you schedule posts. Buffer lets you plan publications and adjust them for various platforms in a couple of clicks. Also, your team can efficiently collaborate on social media campaigns on this platform.
Another part of Buffer’s functionality is analytics, allowing you to see what content types and messaging resonates with your audience. To get the full picture of your performance across multiple accounts and social media platforms, you can use Buffer’s reports and statistics.
Buffer offers functionality to keep your followers engaged. You can see all the comments you get in one deck, receive highlights about the most important of them, and answer with one click.
For brands: If you want to employ social media marketing, you need a powerful social media management tool. Consider Buffer, an end-to-end solution allowing you to control and streamline all the processes, from getting ideas for social media posts to maintaining consistent communication with your followers.
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Read →Pricing:
Basic publishing tools and landing page builders are available for free. To add analytics and engagement tools, you’ll need to pay $5 a month per social channel. For full access to features and ten social channels, Buffer charges $100 monthly.
Every marketer has heard about Hubspot at least once. This CRM platform encompasses solutions for sales, service, operations, and other processes. But what we’re keen on the most is a selection of digital marketing tools Hubspot provides.
With this ecosystem, marketers can keep all their channels in one place. Hubspot enables you to run blogs and ad campaigns, manage social media platforms, add conversational marketing to your marketing strategy, and more. To help deliver your content, Hubspot offers tools for on-page SEO improvements.
Apart from hooking your prospects’ attention, built-in services allow you to convert them into paying customers. You can craft and tailor landing pages and subscription forms, create multi-purpose email marketing campaigns, build lead-nurturing flows, foster customer relationships, and get insights about each buyer.
For brands: In-depth analytics is one of the Hubspot Marketing hub’s biggest advantages. It lets you get the full picture and make data-driven decisions. Moreover, you can create custom reports and send them to your sales team thanks to the integration with Salesforce.
Pricing:
Hubspot has a free version, which includes emails, forms, landing pages, live chat, social ads, and contact management, and works great for testing the platform opportunities.
Also, Hubspot offers three paid plans starting from $45 a month. Probably, the best option for medium-sized and small businesses is the Professional pricing plan for $800 a month. It gives access to most Hubspot tools, including reporting and campaign management options.
Like Hubspot, Semrush is an all-in-one marketing platform with a focus on search engine optimization. The built-in SEO tools enable keyword research, webpages audit, local optimization, real-time tracking of SERP results, and backlinks reinforcement. Apart from it, Semrush lets you manage other lead acquisition channels thanks to 50+ tools.
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Learn now →For brands: Semrush content marketing services will help you develop a content strategy based on data, as well as create and distribute your articles, eBooks, or infographics. Additionally, the system offers recommendations on content optimization and helps measure content performance.
Apart from it, you can find options for managing search and social media paid advertising. The set includes paid keyword research and social listening tools to track competitors’ mentions and build your reputation.
Pricing:
You can utilize one of the three pricing plans. Small businesses and aspiring marketers get all they need for $119.95 a month. Fastly growing companies and marketing consultants may utilize additional tools for $229.95. Enterprises get full access to all platform features for $449.95.
Best-known as one the most reputable email marketing tools on the market, Mailchimp has significantly expanded the set of services it offers. Now, it helps beginners build a landing page or start an eCommerce business, run ad campaigns on search engines and social media, and even send postcards.
Yet, if you’re looking to grow your business with email marketing, Mailchimp still will be a great choice. Alongside a drag-and-drop email builder and pre-designed templates, Mailchimp offers an AI-based creative assistant to help you craft on-brand email campaigns in minutes. Another smart feature is the subject line helper, which assists a marketer in crafting more engaging subject lines.
For brands: To make the most of your email marketing efforts, you can employ target audience management features – segmentation, behavioral targeting, and predicted demographics. Mailchimp can also help you with email marketing automation. It allows building email flows based on customers’ actions, their buyer journey stage, or the time when they open emails.
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Learn now →Finally, Mailchimp offers a set of analytics tools to help you measure the performance of your email campaigns, run A/B tests, and optimize content.
Pricing:
Beginners can get their online marketing off the ground with a free plan. It includes email marketing for 2,000 contacts, CRM, creative assistant, website builder, subscription forms, landing pages, and Mailchimp domain.
Mailchimp offers three paid plans from $11 to $299 per month for those who need more features, more extensive subscriber lists, or advanced support.
SimilarTech positions itself as a sales insights platform helping customers spot trends, generate leads, research markets, and find prospects. Being a spin-off of SimilarWeb, SimilarTech has robust resources to gain data about various technologies and solutions.
For brands: You’ll gather all the insights about various marketing tools on one page. For instance, by searching for Shopify, you will find its main competitors, the top industries, and websites using this technology. So, by researching your competitors, you may get a huge list of their customers, who potentially may become yours.
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Learn now →Pricing:
SimilarTech is available for free with limited functionality and unlimited duration, which makes free accounts a good alternative to trial. You can unlock more features on paid plans. Starting price is $199 a month.
Split testing and other experiments are an essential part of growth marketing. Dedicated tools, such as Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), allow marketers to test the waters professionally and without technical knowledge. To reduce the workload of your development team, VWO offers an easy point-and-click editor to set up experiments.
With this Saas solution, you can set up simple A/B tests and more sophisticated experiments in minutes, manage the testing pipeline, and get clear insights on results. Apart from it, VWO lets you watch how users interact with your website or app and react to your experiments thanks to heatmaps, session replays, and surveys.
For brands: VWO allows you to spot conversion leaks and boost website performance with web push notifications and conversational marketing through Facebook Messenger. You can build reengagement, cart abandonment, and other types of campaigns.
Pricing:
VWO is a complex tool that involves profuse functionality. The best option to work with it is by fine-tuning the service according to your team’s needs. So, the pricing is custom and available only by request.
To test freely and achieve the best results, marketing teams need a robust and reliable landing page builder at their side. Unbounce is one of the best-known and trusted solutions in this niche. It enables you to create desktop and mobile landing pages, popups, sticky bars, and AMPs.
If you ever tried Photoshop, you’ll probably find working with Unbounce a breeze – both tools have a similar interface. Unbounce allows you to build a landing page from scratch or use one of its multiple templates.
This webpage builder also gives you nearly limitless customization opportunities. If you’re not pretty happy with them, you can expand the opportunities by using custom HTML, JS, or CSS code.
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Learn now →To help you reach your lead generation goals, Unbounce has a set of AI-driven features. The smart traffic feature automatically sends ad viewers to the landing page, which suits best to their attributes, such as location, type of device, or visitor behavior. The Dynamic Text Replacement function helps match your landing page with the PPC ad on the go.
For brands: Allows business owners and marketers to nurture leads, get a full view of your customer journey, and track your landing page performance through robust integrations. You can connect this page builder to Google Analytics, Slack, Zapier, and other 1000+ marketing services.
Pricing:
The service offers a 14-day free trial and three pricing plans with different conversion limits, number of visitors, and domains. All plans include unlimited landing pages, apps, popups, and sticky bars. The AI-driven Smart Traffic is available from $135 monthly.
Conversion rate optimization is one of the staples of rapid business growth. Thus, CR optimization tools should be a part of each growth marketer’s toolkit. If you’re in the market for such a solution, consider Hotjar.
Another Hotjar component is a selection of survey and analytics tools. You can request real-time feedback about individual parts of the page with popups and send surveys while users are still on your website. Hotjar provides insights for desktop, mobile, and tablet versions of your website. Thus, no bug or roadblock preventing your conversions will go unnoticed.
For brands: Hotjar helps get an in-depth view of how users interact with your website, which helps improve their on-site experience and your CR. The vast part of this service is its visualization opportunities. Thanks to heatmaps, scroll maps, and session recordings, you can get the complete picture of website visitors’ behavior.
Pricing:
The free version of Hotjar allows you to capture up to 35 daily sessions, get up to 1,050 recordings a month, and conduct three surveys & incoming feedback widgets.
Apart from it, Hotjar offers three paid plans. Growing companies may go for the Business plan starting from €79 a month, including up to 500 daily sessions, custom-built integrations, white-label dashboards, and advanced analytics features.
Vista Social made headlines this year by being the platform to offer a Tiktok content planner, trending audio tools, TikTok direct publishing, and Reels scheduling—allowing their customers to access the tools they need to grow their business without delay.
Their platform offers solutions for post creation, content planning, auto-publishing, engagement, analytics, review management, and social media listening. Most small to mid-sized businesses and agencies are required to pay a premium for high-level social media management and analytics features—but, all of this costs only $3/social profile with unlimited users, connected profiles, and post publishing.
Vista Social offers 14 social media integrations, including platforms such as OpenTable, TripAdvisor, Reddit, and Yelp—which aren’t always available in other SMM tools. Businesses can report on all social media performance through simple, customizable, and fully automated reports—including competitor analysis reporting.
Pricing:
Basic social media management features are available for free, including some analytics and engagement tools. After that, it’s only $3/social profile a month which includes unlimited users, connect profiles, and post scheduling.
Though the market has much more solutions to offer, the set above is enough to get you covered. These tools focus on activities and channels crucial when growing a business.
If you haven’t employed some of the marketing channels listed above yet, remember: there’s no need to build your brand presence there from scratch. You can pass all the groundwork to others by employing partner marketing.
Building partnerships requires expertise and effort, but Affise Reach takes the complexity out of it. This technology allows you to connect with partners of your choice, build and maintain direct relationships without wasting time on manual work, obtain all the data you need to track your marketing efficiency, and adjust your strategy to deliver the best results.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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