Essential Digital Marketing tools 2017 [Infographic]

Use our new digital marketing tools infographic to manage how you use marketing technology

As marketers today, we’re fortunate to have a huge number of free and low-cost tools to give us insight about our customers, competitors and market. They also help us compete by delivering automated relevant, real-time communications integrated across desktop and mobile and digital plus traditional marketing channels.

To help highlight the range of great options available, our infographic and free Digital Marketing Tools and Services 2017 download recommends 30 categories of marketing technology and our pick of the most popular 5 in each category. We’ve grouped them across the Smart Insights RACE Planning framework for managing digital marketing so you can review where you could make better use of the tools across the customer lifecycle.

What inspired us to create this infographic and guide?

We use many types of digital marketing services and insights tools to run and improve SmartInsights.com and because of this we love to try out new tools when they are suggested to us.

We were inspired by Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology landscape which does an excellent job of defining ‘enterprise’ tools for managing digital marketing, but can be difficult to read because of the sheer number of tools. Also, we wanted to include more low-cost and free ‘hands-on’ insight tools which are important for managing activities like Search, Social media and conversion rate optimisation. These don’t tend to be included on Scott’s landscape. We also wanted to highlight the most popular, well-regarded services, particularly those which can be used across all sizes of businesses rather than being affordable only by the biggest brands.

If you were doubting the number of tools available and how it can be a problem to select and manage them, just look at the growth in the number of marketing technology applications over the last few years. For Scott Brinker's Maketing Technology landscape -it's tripled since 2014, and grown tenfold since 2012!

Clearly a huge challenge is the sheer number of tools which vary enormously in cost and quality. To further complicate the landscape. New challenger tools can often do a better job than the established tools.

The infographic helps to break down the tools into different categories of use and shows you which products you should be considering for different marketing activities. If you're interested in learning more about the differences between individual tools then you'll want to download our free digital tools guide, which contains reviews and information on key features for all of the tools on the infographic, that's 150 tools in total!