The Ten Best Digital Marketing Tools for 2022

Posted by Stephen Taylor on November 18th, 2021

The Year 2022 calls for a new amazing digital marketing strategy with the selection of the right mix of tools to support it. Brands have been designing incredible products or service concepts, and have plenty of affordable and user-friendly digital tools to market them. The challenge lies with the selection of the right set of tools catering to their specific needs.

Pre-COVID, brands were already digitally engaging customers with digital media all day every day. COVID-19 has further amplified the need to engage them digitally. The pandemic has accelerated the speed at which brands are “going digital” and new-age digital marketing tools have given new power to them. Never before have they been so dependent on Google Trends or moLotus to simply understand or reach new customers. This dependency is going to increase further.  

Gone are the days when a multimillion-dollar marketing budget is necessary to stay ahead of competitors. New-age digital marketing tools offer a high ROI whether businesses are investing funds to do search engine optimization or advertise via mobile or transform customer processes. Beyond the potential of great returns for small budgets, the new-age digital marketing tools like moLotus can take some of the workloads off the shoulders of digital marketers in 2022. 

Here are the ten best digital marketing tools that can enhance the marketing for businesses from good to great in 2022 :

1. Ahrefs

While old-school SEO was all about building backlinks, modern SEO practices are focused on understanding the search intent of keywords brands can actually rank for, and building relevant and organic backlinks from authority sites.

Ahrefs is the gold standard when it comes to search engine optimization in 2022. When it is brainstorming keyword ideas and opportunities to rank the tool comes top of the chart for businesses. The platform provides a unique site explorer that lets marketers check any URL’s top organic keywords, while also estimating how much traffic a competitor receives for any given search term. Marketers can easily identify their site’s top-performing content and sources of backlinks.

Precisely, Ahrefs is a fantastic SEO tool for brands not only for competitive analysis but it also ensures that the brands\\' existing content is up to snuff for search. However, there is a downside to the usability of the tools. The tool comes at huge investments in comparison with its counterparts making it unaffordable for small businesses.

2. Google Trends

Google Trends is an analytical tool that Google offers for free. It equips businesses with the search and comparison of trends. It is a powerful tool that many businesses can utilize to discover the ins and outs of trends that matters to them for every unique situation. In 2022 it is perceived to be one of the best tools to discover trends much earlier when they swing up or know when to get out of business when the trends turn down.

Google Trends however only gives relative numbers and there is no way to get absolute numbers. Therefore, a compared search needs to be done to get results that can be compared. People who might be affected the most by some of the phenomena might not have internet access. The context of the search is not clear.

3. moLotus

moLotus is an innovative and disruptive next-generation mobile video interaction platform that is fast replacing in-person experiences and campaign redesigns to acknowledge the new normal. With its rich media content, moLotus renders on all kinds of handsets without spamming. The best part is that the platform doesn’t require any app download or data connection. It integrates videos, images, text, and links into one message and delivers directly to consumers’ mobile inboxes. moLotus is able to deliver millions of hyper-personalized and customized messages per day for clients across industries and geographies for a variety of marketing uses. 

moLotus has introduced new revenue models for advertisers. It not only provides video delivery and interaction but also assists in exposure & awareness, customer acquisition, retention, rewards & loyalty, upselling, cross-selling, lead generation, direct sales, and more leading to better marketing ROI for advertisers. The platform is capable of scaling revenue and performance for advertisers through easy campaign creation and management, response management, data reports & analytics, transformation, and automation API.

moLotus gives the advertiser an opportunity to achieve extraordinary success by transforming and automating customer processes. The ad campaigns ensure high brand visibility & response rate. They improve customer loyalty and earn better ROI.

The breakthrough tech and platform is targeting a USD 1.7 Billion Direct Marketing opportunity. (Source: Statista). In addition, the platform also targets the emerging USD 1.3 Trillion Digitalization opportunities together with 5G plus Transformation. (Source: Ericsson & Arthur D. Little)

The platform has come to the rescue of Telcos challenged by OTT entrants which have been cannibalizing the telco services. With moLotus has come the unique subscriber data monetization opportunity for the telecom operators leading to the maximization of top-line and bottom-line revenues. It is significantly cutting down headcounts in call center processes; saving training, compliance, printing and distribution costs. For operators, moLotus is providing a unique way to tap into the global direct marketing spend while leveraging their existing infrastructure together with enterprise and mobility assets. 

The globally scalable ad platform has attracted marquee brands in a wide variety of markets namely in banking, finance, insurance, retail, automotive, consumer and even in the government sectors.

4. Hotjar

Hotjar emerges as a powerful tool in 2022 that reflects the online behavior and voice of business users. By combining both analysis and feedback tools, Hotjar gives brands the ‘big picture of how they can improve their business website\\'s user experience and performance.

The tool measures and observes user behavior. It enables brands to \\"hear\\" what their potential customers have to say. They can easily understand what the users want, care about, and do on their business website by visually representing their clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior - which are the strongest indicators of prospective customers’ motivation and desire. By seeing the user\\'s clicks, taps, and mouse movements brand marketers can identify usability issues on the ?y. The feedback feature of Hotjar allows brands to get instant visual feedback for websites. It allows brands to see what prospective customers love and hate, identify issues, and find opportunities for growth. Brands should use Hotjar ideally together with web analytics solutions like Google Analytics.

Unfortunately, Hotjar lacks integrations, predictive analytics, no ROI tracking, and no customer segmentation.

5. Hootsuite

Brands need to maintain a presence on social media to remain competitive in the marketplace. Social media can be a huge time sink for brands, even if they are using it purely for marketing purposes rather than endlessly scrolling.

In 2022, they have digital marketing tools like Hootsuite in their kitty, available to cut down on this time inefficiency. Hootsuite provides a central management platform for all your social media channels and allows brands to schedule posts in advance so they can get all their social media content for the coming weeks or months ready in one session. Hootsuite offers advanced reporting tools to see which of their social media campaigns are working most effectively and use this data to calculate ROI.

Brand marketers can also track mentions of their brand and manage responses, all in one dashboard. Hootsuite also offers tools for promoting their social media posts through the platform now as well. 

Downside of this tool is that its pricing is very confusing and complicated. Its dashboard is out of date with no ability to pause bulk posts. 

6. Canva

Brands need visuals to keep their customers engaged. They use quality graphics to visualize complex data with colorful graphs and create highly engaging infographics. The need for such quality graphics is ever increasing with tools like Canva being sorted more in 2022. It is an awesome tool that helps brands create original, visually appealing content in just a few minutes! Canva keeps evolving, offering more graphic design tools and templates all the time: social media, infographics, eBooks, and anything else digital marketers could possibly need.

Canva offers free as well as paid templates which brands can use. Small businesses can use the already featured templates on the site, upload and polish up their own images, or even create brand new ones. Most importantly, they do not require any graphic designer to create high-quality graphics via Canva. 

Canva lacks basic fonts from its database, which serves as a barrier for brands sticking to brand guidelines. Also creating their own template from scratch can have its hiccups from brands.

7. Yoast

The Yoast plugin for WordPress is a free tool, with paid premium plans based on the number of sites brands need. Yoast has been a very popular plugin that works with both Gutenberg and the Classic editor in WordPress. Yoast is an excellent tool to look for in 2022 helping brands optimize their web content for search engines.

Yoast helps brands to choose cornerstone content, focus keywords to help them rank, individual content URLs, and internal links for an additional boost. The plugin also evaluates web page readability. The web pages are updated according to changes in Google\\'s algorithm every two weeks. 

Yoast SEO is a great tool to operate a website and improve its rank, but there are some cons associated with the tool. Yoast is not good at understanding web visitor’s intents or actions.

8. HubSpot

HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM designed to help align sales and marketing teams, foster sales enablement, boost ROI and optimize your inbound marketing strategy to generate more, qualified leads. HubSpot is a software platform designed to help businesses market and sell more effectively.

HubSpot works to help brands market better. Everything from blogging to social media posting to email marketing is combined on one single platform that can be accessed from anywhere. It is an all-in-one platform for marketing, sales, and customer support, all in one place. At a glance, what HubSpot offers might look affordable. However, if you’re a smaller business or otherwise working on a tighter budget, that’s where the good news ends. HubSpot offers very limited features in its free version. Using HubSpot email templates can be a bit complex to modify without knowledge of CSS.

9. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a cloud-based platform that helps brands discover the best customer engagement, content, and outreach opportunities across social and search. They can discover new keywords, trending stories, customer questions, and content success, all while monitoring what\\'s most important to their brand.

They can easily know what their prospective buyers are talking about. Searching across multiple social sites, Buzzsumo gathers information on what topics are gaining the most attention. It analyzes where certain topics are being discussed and how much attention these topics are getting. Buzzsumo allows brands to set up keyword alerts, so they are updated when content is posted or updated. Brand marketers are able to know who posted and where, and this allows them to know what their next step should be in regards to their own marketing efforts. Knowing what their competitors are doing, and what is working or not working for them, goes a long way in helping them. It helps marketers avoid things that are not very effective and gives them insights into what works best, and where their brand stands in comparison to competitors.

If they want to enjoy the full benefits of BuzzSumo, it is going to cost them a lot. Some of the data is not entirely accurate. Buzzsumo’s interface needs improvement for convenience.

10. Unbounce

Creation of perfect landing pages is considered key to marketing success in 2022. Unbounce is an amazing marketing tool to look forward to in 2022 for quickly building, tweaking, and publishing new landing pages. Built-in A/B testing and variant analytics can answer directly which creatives, calls-to-action, and additional page elements are working.

Brands can conveniently use Unbounce’s proven landing page templates as a jumping-off point and then modify them to fit their style. The platform’s analytics spell out clearly which landing page variants are top performers.

Managing lots of landing pages can be difficult using Unbounce. Integrations with other systems are challenging. The traffic analyzer/optimizer is only available to higher-priced tiers. 

Conclusion

It is quite intimidating to select the best tools. Close scrutiny of the above tools highlights the fact that most of the platforms have their pros and cons. However, their pros outweigh their cons. For instance, a tool like moLotus bypasses the need for Internet connectivity. This gives it an edge and superiority. The above tools when included in the digital marketing mix would significantly add to the revenues and profitability for brands in 2022.