Inbound Marketing is a marketing strategy designed for businesses to pull in potential customers and clients to a product or service. This is done using different tools and approaches to gain quality engagement that can lead to advances for a business. There are many ways to execute inbound marketing plans, and most of them require the right tool for the job. With different marketing tools that focus on different aspects of engagement, sales, relationship management and public outreach among metrics, it’s important to research each one to utilize the right tool.
Top 24 Inbound Marketing Tools
-
Gather content | Content Management
An important piece to business interaction with customers is the content produced. Gather content is a tool that helps organize forms of content from blogs, electronic books, website descriptions, and podcasts. As companies grow, it becomes difficult to manage all types of past, present, and figure content.
Starting at $99/month for smaller teams, Gather content provides workflow management for teams ready to scale their business and manage all forms of content.
-
HubSpot | Marketing Automation
As one of the leaders and innovators of inbound marketing, they are one of the most popular tools used by companies. They are a jack of all trades tool that helps with the creation, optimization, and promotion of content and generating lead funnels. Their ability to report performances from the beginning of a marketing campaign to its end result is also key to their value as an inbound marketing tool. It is available to start using for free.
HubSpot starts at $40/month for paid services.
-
HubSpot CRM | Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are valuable to companies to help work with maintaining and gaining clients to a business. For this reason, HubSpot has its own dedicated CRM tool to help manage visitors, customers and potential clients. The data HubSpot collects includes interactions between these customers and a website, product or service at any time. It also tracks leads and potential interactions for the same people.
HubSpot CRM prices at $400/month for a Professional upgrade.
-
Beacon | Eguide Design
Electronic content such as eBooks and eGuides have gained popularity as many businesses have begun using a digital approach. As many companies take a step in that direction, Beacon uses their design prowess and expertise to help businesses produce digital content on a professional level. With dedicated electronic content design tools such as templates and layouts, Beacon helps provide companies expert and professional eBooks and eGuides without the need for expertise from the company side.
A Professional paid service starts at $49/month.
-
JotForm | Form Builder
Electronic forms are incredibly important to company metrics and output, so JotForm helps mitigate those responsibilities. From sales reports, customer support requests, to the process of downloading free content, the form itself is important to keep clients engaged. With the dedicated structure and design templates and layouts, JotForm helps create form content that is easy for companies to adopt into their systems.
JotForm can be used as a free service and starts at $24/month for paid features.
-
HubSpot Sales | Email Productivity
HubSpot is a master at inbound marketing tools, having a vast amount of expertise in multiple areas. Their sales focus helps with email marketing, sales conversions and meeting scheduling to help stay on top of CRM, general marketing, and sales. By using creative and unique personalized content, HubSpot sales makes sure to boost productivity while providing support for the overall tools that HubSpot provides also.
HubSpot Sales at an Enterprise level starts at $1,200/month.
-
VWO | Conversion Optimization
VWO or Visual Website Optimizer is a visual conversion tool to help all companies and businesses achieve success through visual expertise. Using features such as heatmaps, data graphs, live recordings, visual conversion charts, and reporting, VWO helps elevate the experience of employees to bring an even better experience to their clients.
Starting at $299/month, businesses can elevate their visual games.
-
Hotjar | User Experience Analysis
Keeping up with a positive and engaging user experience is important and that data can help shape how recurring and potential customers interact with a website, product or service. The detail that goes into user experience is becoming more and more precise and any and all information regarding it is valuable to companies. Hotjar provides user experience insights and data that relate to even the smallest of details that convert into results that are worth their price.
After a limited-time free trial, Hotjar starts paid services at $89/month.
-
Drift | Live Chat
Personal and live interactions with customers are always important and live chat helps bring that to life. A quicker and effective form of customer support, live chat features help customer support teams engage in support issues on a new level. This can lead from chatbots to interacting live with customer support agents. By excelling in turning interactions into sales, Drift’s free services help companies manage their customer relationships in a unique way.
Paid services start at $500/month.
-
Unbounce | Landing Pages
First impressions are important and Unbounce knows this value like the back of their hand. A landing page for a website can make or break potential clients as engagement matters. Turning visitors into leads into customers is where Unbounce thrives. By providing data related to landing pages, using proven layouts to engage with potential clients, and being a leader in landing page engagement, Unbounce is an effective tool for first impressions.
Launching Unbounce starts at $80/month.
-
Sumo | Content Upgrades
When it comes to potential clients and current customers, email marketing is always an effective way to engage with an audience. Sumo is an industry leader in engagement with customers and grabbing visitor attention. Sumo helps businesses maintain, grow, and engage with an extending email list. As sites scale, Sumo helps manage this list.
A starting paid service begins at $60/month.
-
Onesignal | Push Notifications
Everyone can stay up to date with their processes, however a gentle reminder is always a welcome feature. Onesignal focuses on push notifications whenever something happens regarding a company. This can be a new blog post, social media content post, or enhance the experience of visitors by placing them on an email list. This can be done with many different features and can help with engagement on multiple channels.
Onesignal starts at $99/month at the Starter level.
-
Wistia | Video Marketing
With visual content becoming a popular and important part of marketing, Wistia emphasizes the use of videos in their strategy. As a growing trend, Wistia uses its expertise in video hosting, video marketing, and full inbound marketing to strategize for companies.
After a free version, Pro plans start at $99/month.
-
Mailchimp | Email Marketing
As an industry-leading and popular email marketing resource, Mailchimp provides the best standalone tool for companies. By emphasizing email marketing, companies can trust in Mailchimp to deliver personal, effective, and developed email marketing strategies to all customers in order to deliver a successful campaign.
Mailchimp starts at $9.99/month once upgraded from its free version.
-
Buffer | Social Media Management
Social Media data, engagement and conversion has become so important to business success recently; it’s virtually invaluable. Buffer helps create the best combination between personalized and automated social media management while saving the company time. The balance of time management with social media helps the company worry less about the social media numbers and more on other aspects of the business, while knowing that their content is performing at a top level and is managed by Buffer.
Pro plans start at just $15/month.
-
Uberconference | Interviews & Meetings
Having unique and personable communication between teams, clients and other business partners is important and essential, so Uberconference comes in to help automate this and make it easier. Providing voice, video call/voice, and other media tools and services, Uberconference has an incredible setup to allow businesses to focus on marketing tools.
Uberconference can be set up with a $0 free account or $15 in order to start organizing.
-
Speechpad | Call Transcription
As phone calls become more prominent in today’s world, having Speechpad there to decipher the words can greatly impact a company’s performance. Once a conversion with a client is over, having Speechpad there to look at notes can prove invaluable information. Their video and writing abilities are top of the industry and have always rivaled the top dogs in inbound marketing.
Speechpad can do $1/minute all the way up to $3 per 24 hours per word.
-
Slack | Communication
One of the industry leaders in internal communications, Slack allows for amazing communication between teammates while working on campaigns together with other teams. With multiple channels and different ways to organize information and data, Slack is the perfect communication tool as teams scale their companies.
Their Standard package is $6.67/month.
-
Ahrefs | Search Engine Analysis
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is an important metric that businesses follow and Ahrefs emphasizes their workforce into inbound marketing and search engine analysis. With unique metrics and innovative features, Ahrefs crunches the numbers, provides the data and finds solutions to team problems.
A lite version of Ahrefs can be found at $99/month.
-
Zendesk | Delighting Customers
Engaging with customers in a quick and efficient way can help with management and retainment, so Zendesk helps to make sure that every interaction count. By focusing on every detail, Zendesk can help teams respond to customers in a timely manner and give them a way to organize all the data and requests.
Paid pricing for services can range from $5 – $199/month, with additional features such as chat support adding more to those numbers.
-
Outbrain | Paid Promotion
As a tool that focuses on paid promotion, Outbrain thrives as a tool to help the content get in the view of the right people. They push content out to a wide variety of people and then use that information to analyze and set better parameters for a campaign.
The minimum budget to start using Outbrain is $10/day or $300/month.
-
Google Analytics | Website Analysis
When analyzing campaigns, budget, and customer interaction, the numbers don’t lie and neither does Google Analytics. Data is taken from all channels, whether it’s a shop, search, social media interactions, direct purchases, audience push, or demographics. Although complex, it’s a tool that can help see where an area is succeeding and where needs improvement.
Google Analytics is a free application, however, Google Analytics 360 costs $150,000 a year.
-
Leadfeeder | Lead Generation
As marketing campaigns focus on reaching cold or warm leads, Leadfeeder is a great inbound marketing tool that helps organize this information. By looking at this data, it’s easier for marketing teams to determine what converts visitors and how best to reach out to potential clients. By accessing this data, it’s easier down the road to see what works for previous and similar campaigns.
A beginning package starts at $53/month.
-
Canva | Graphic Design
An easy to use tool for content creation, Canva is the perfect entry-level tool for graphic designers. Even without graphic design experience, teams can create stunning visuals for any type of content, ranging from logos, graphics, social media images, profile banners, or any other custom designs.
Canva starts off as a free tool and the Pro version starts at $9.95/month.
Final Thoughts
In order to have successful marketing campaigns, companies need to utilize the right marketing tools to get the job done. By working through the systems of different tools, this frees up resources for other projects, other sides of projects, and helps provide support for teams that need it. This can ultimately free up time and efforts to grow the business in other ways.
