Top Branding and Marketing Tools for Businesses and Brands

Top Branding and Marketing Tools for Businesses and Brands

Getting a good handle on your business’s marketing and branding means you need to have the right tools for the job. It’s important to approach these sorts of challenges from multiple angles because, as you know, the world of business and marketing is infinitely complex.

With so many new applications and tracking solutions for analyzing every type of data point you could think of, it’s likely a tough decision on where you should allocate your time and budget. At the same time, it’s not just about knowing what metrics to track and improve upon but also which platforms are best to get the job done.

You’ll want to add these tools to your toolbox to get out in front of the right customers and present yourself in a desirable light.

Ubersuggest: Comprehensive SEO Tool

It doesn’t matter what kind of business you run at this point. If you want a presence on the internet, you need to take search engine optimization seriously. As more websites and blogs go live daily, the process for ranking on the first page of Google continues to get more competitive day after day.

With billion-dollar brands fighting for top placement and bidding top dollar for pay-per-click marketing, the days of ranking for high traffic and generic keywords might seem over. However, smaller sites and blogs continue to outrank the competition time and time again.

And while SEO can sound remarkably complex and confusing, you can wrap your head around it if you have a powerful and easy-to-understand tool, even if you’re new to space.

marketing and branding tools - Ubersuggest

And that tool is Ubersuggest. Compared to some of its competitors, Ubersuggest is easier for beginners to use. At the same time, it offers the same (if not even better) functionality with a wealth of data and information at your fingertips. Better still, because it operates on a freemium model, you can access many daily reports and analyses for free. You never have to upgrade to a paid plan if you don’t want to, and even if you do, it’s much more affordable than the competition.

Ubersuggest has three main sections:

  • The eponymous Ubersuggest is where you’ll conduct your keyword research. Start with your first query, and you’ll see the monthly volume and estimated difficulty, as well as several suggestions for keyword and content ideas. Uncover opportunities that you may have otherwise overlooked.
  • The Traffic Analyzer lets you look not only at your website but also at the websites of your competition. Peer into what organic keywords are bringing them traffic, their top pages overall, and what backlinks they’re getting and from where.
  • The SEO Analyzer makes it easy to complete a comprehensive site audit. It’ll crawl through up to 150 pages for free, uncovering what errors you have and what you need to fix it.

Beyond the free plan, premium plans at Ubersuggest start from $29 per month. The individual plan is perfect for entrepreneurs and small businesses managing up to three websites. You can run up to three projects, tracking up to 100 words per project and crawling up to 1,000 pages per weekly report.

Facebook Ads: Custom Audiences and Remarketing

Of the many different solutions and platforms in this list, seeing Facebook here won’t be a big surprise for many businesses or brands. However, the majority of advertisers using Facebook Ads, are often using it for its most basic features and not its full potential.

For example, how many brands and marketers do you know that are focused on how many fans they have on their Fan Pages or the number of likes they get on their latest posting? It’s probably a lot, and many advertisers are wasting time and money on Boost promotions or buying ad space to get more fans and followers.

The better solution is to focus on the pixel tracking, custom audiences, and remarketing features offered by Facebook Ads.

marketing and branding tools - FacebookAds

Through Facebook Ads, all their advertisers can start running campaigns with features and targeting that include pixel tracking, custom audiences, lookalike audiences, remarketing, and more. Each of these is unique in its way. Still, in short, they each allow you to create super-targeted and detailed ads targeted toward audiences that specifically have an interest in what you have to offer, are existing customers, or even recent visitors to your site.

If you’ve ever been on Facebook and started seeing ads for a site or brand you recently visited, then that advertiser was likely using one of the above-mentioned methods.

To learn more about each of the different ad campaign types and targeting methods offered by Facebook, we recommend you take a look at this user guide from Adespresso.

MediaScale: Run Your SEO, PR, and Content Campaigns at Scale

When your business is relatively small, you’re probably inclined to take a “do-it-yourself” approach to SEO, Public relations, and Content marketing.

Whether you do it yourself or you hire a freelancer or an agency to do it, you probably manage your campaigns on an individual basis.

marketing and branding tools - MediaScale

That’s where MediaScale can step in.

The platform allows all-in-one reporting and campaign management for your entire organic marketing efforts. The platform is suitable for freelancers and SEO and PR agencies engaging in search marketing campaigns or even as an in-house solution for a marketing director or head of SEO.

For agencies, the platform provides client PR and SEO reporting and competitor monitoring and empowers you to scale your organic coverage and handle multiple campaigns at the same time. You can improve your press and media outreach considerably, making it far easier to land the coverage you desire across as many outlets as possible.

For marketing and SEO practitioners, Mediascale will provide a holistic look at all the active PR and SEO campaigns your brand has, plus a detailed report and breakdown as to how your website is performing – all under one roof.

The platform provides API integrations with all the leading SEO platforms, unlimited link building and SEO reports, pitching, and outreach dashboard to manage PR campaigns, plagiarism checker, headline analyzer, finance dashboard, and much more.

Google Alerts: Reputation and Brand Mentions

No matter what type of business or brand you have, it’s a big deal when someone references your name or business online. With over a billion active websites and blogs on the internet today and more than three billion users spread across all of the major social networking platforms, the idea of being able to monitor your brand mentions seems impossible.

The good news is that Google has a free and useful tool to help individuals and organizations get direct notifications whenever a new page or article ranks in the search results for this name. This solution is called Google Alerts, and it’s extremely fast and easy to set up.

marketing and branding tools - google analytics

To get started, you must visit Google Alerts and enter the keyword, your personal name, or brand name that you would like to receive alerts on. You can set up multiple trigger words and even use the keyword and competitor analysis tool.

Should a new mention for your name or brand be found in Google, you will get an email with the trigger keyword in the title and a link to the article or site with your mention.

This is yet another free and simple tool offered by Google to its users but is also highly effective and useful for businesses and brands of all sizes.

EmailAnalytics: Track Team Productivity

Email is still one of the most effective ways to drive new leads, customers, and revenue to a business. It’s also one of the most personal ways to send immediate direct contact to someone in a way that text messaging or social media direct messaging simply can’t offer. And when it comes to customer support and selling through email, nurtured leads can support a 20% or greater increase in sales opportunities.

Email marketing and customer support are of the utmost importance for nearly all brands and businesses. Why aren’t they tracking performance from an email/inbox level?

For the most part, it’s probably because they didn’t know that such a solution existed. However, that is where Email Analytics comes into play.

marketing and branding tools - email marketing

Through the use of EmailAnalytics, users can track email performance and engagement rates from all of their team members.

The platform uses the Gmail API to ensure 100% privacy and security while having data access only for automated analysis, meaning none of your email content is stored on their servers. Email data is collected and reported in real-time, displayed through an easy-to-use dashboard area full of reporting features and options.

It is possible to segment team members into groups and compare their Gmail metrics and performance. It is ideal for identifying your top performers and those who might be falling behind.

EmailAnalytics requires no software to install, and no credit card is required for their 14-day free trial. After that, pricing plans start at $5 to $15 per month per user.

Branding and Marketing Solutions for Today’s Businesses

As the world continues to change and morph over time, so will the needs of your business. You need to keep up with the times, you need to move with your customers, and this means you need to position your business in the best way possible to get noticed. It’s getting harder and harder to stand out from the crowd, so you’ll need every advantage you can get.

These five tools approach the challenges of branding and marketing in different ways. Search engine optimization, keyword research, and site audits are critically important to getting your website in front of the right eyeballs.

Scaling your PR campaigns to attract your desired media attention takes your business to the next level. And ensuring that every user, regardless of ability or disability, can have the best experience possible speaks volumes about how the public (and Google!) perceives your brand. When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But, when you’ve got a complete toolkit, you can be sure to approach every task and challenge with the right instrument for the job. Marketing and branding work in the same way.