11 Most Useful Websites Every Digital Marketer Must Know About

This year completes 10 years since I graduated from university. So you can say I’ve had a pretty good experience of the real world that everyone used to talk about back in school. If there’s one thing I’ve enjoyed quite a lot about real life (apart from having enough money to afford ice creams and fine foods anytime), it is the fact that I can ask for help, refer books and look up solutions online to any problems that I encounter at work.

Yes! Our school and university exams allowed us no such liberty and so it was something of an ‘either you know it or you don’t’ type of test of knowledge. In the real world, however, skills, knowledge and learning are all dynamic and never-ending. You don’t know what this means, look it up online, read articles, blogs, etc. and you could soon become an expert at that very thing. This process, in itself, can be considered a vital skill.

When it comes to Digital Marketing, a constantly evolving and changing field, this skill of looking things up and taking help from online sources is extremely vital. Let us now take a look at 11 of the most useful websites any digital marketer can use to great benefit.

1) Answer The Public

Marketing is all about knowing what your customer wants. That can often be extremely difficult to guess in traditional marketing. However, it is thankfully quite simple in our world of Digital Marketing. Why is it simple? Well, thanks to the magic word that is ‘data’.

We have millions of data points getting captured about each and every person and what they are looking for online. Answer the public is a super simple tool that aggregates autocomplete suggestions about any topic from search engines and provides this data in a neat and ready to use format. This data, is in essence, the voice of the customer and is super useful for us digital marketers to create content that solves users’ problems and answers their questions.

2) Klaviyo

One of the first things any expert digital marketer tells you when you ask for tips is ‘to build a list. The money is in the list!’. Well, you may have a huge list of emails, but if you don’t send them the right emails at the right time, you are wasting the huge potential of this email list.

This is the exact problem that Klaviyo addresses. Klaviyo is an email automation platform that allows you to segment your list based on various data points. In addition, you can also create what is called email flows, where certain emails get sent to certain people in your list based on a set of predefined conditions.

A good example would be a welcome email series. As and when each person signs up to your email list, you can send a series of welcome emails to talk about your brand and how you can help the customer. This would be a tedious manual task but thankfully, you can easily automate it using Klaviyo’s powerful flows engine.

3) Blackhatworld

Black Hat World started out as a purely black hat marketing forum. In case you didn’t know, black hat marketing is using immoral and forbidden practices to boost your online marketing.

However, over the years, the forum has cleaned up their game and become what is an amazon treasure trove of useful information for digital marketers. You can find valuable information on everything from SEO, SMM, PPC, and even Youtube!

You can even find some top names from the Digital Marketing industry posting regularly in the forums. Blackhat World even gives you the opportunity to direlty message any other member and learn from them.

They even have an amazing marketplace for content, social media management, virtual assistants and much more that are super useful for any digital marketer.

4) Hotjar

Website optimization is a key process that should never be ignored. Afterall, it is the website that brings in users and customers and thereby brings in all the revenue for our clients!

With a physical store, it can be very easy to identify customer pain points. All you need to do is observe the customers as they go about their shopping and you’ll be able to spot their problems and correct it instantly.

With websites, however, there wasn’t any reliable way to observe the customer. This is the problem that Hotjar solves. All you need to do is install the hotjar snippet onto the website and it gives you all the neat insights you need about customer behaviour and actions on your website.

Hotjar even provides a heatmap of all user interactions on your website. These include clicks, scrolls and mouse hovers.

This valuable information can also help you make important marketing decisions such as which plan to promote and help the business owner with data on how to price their product or service.

5) Hootsuite

For small teams and digital marketers like us, managing the social media handles of even a few clients can very quickly become very cumbersome and overwhelming. This is where Hootsuite comes into the picture.

Hootsuite is a social media scheduler, planner and management platform put together. It is a feature-packed and comes with super useful automation tools that make handling social media handles a breeze.

The best part? It connects with the social media platforms through API and automatically posts the content at the scheduled time! How cool is that?

6) HypeAuditor

As a digital marketer, you may have experienced the familiar frustration of having spent quite a hefty sum on an influencer to promote products for your client and seeing minimal results. The reason for this is often fake followers, likes, comments, etc. which can often bloat an influencer’s actual reach.

This is a constant problem for digital marketers who heavily rely on influencers for their clients. Thankfully, there’s a great solution for this problem that has been developed by HypeAuditor.

HypeAuditor basically analyzes the followers of any social media handle and gives us very accurate stats about the percentage of fake followers for their account.

In addition, the tool also gives us valuable statistics such as age range of followers, where they are from, which cities they live in and much more. These data points help you pick the best influencers who will help you promote to the right audience.

7) Rytr

As a digital marketer, we often find ourselves needing to come up with creative captions for tons of social media posts and content. This is an extremely daunting task and would require you to flex your brain quite a lot, often leaving you exhausted and tired.

Well, thankfully for us, AI has come to our rescue. Yes, you read that right. AI generated content is here and it’s really really good!

I presonally tried using Rytr.Me’s AI generated content and found it to be a lifesaver when it comes to the mind numbing task of writing captions and variations for social media posts.

A word of caution though, Google has announced that it would treat AI generated content similar to spam content and so it should not be used for any SEO content on blogs or websites.

8) Dall E

Staying on the topic of Artificial Intelligence, let us now take a look at Dall-E. Dall-E is a text based image generation AI that has improved leaps and bounds in the last year.

To generate any image, all you need to do is simply describe it in words. Be sure to be as descriptive as possible and include art styles too to get near accurate images.

This type of AI based image generation is extremely useful in content marketing where we often need specific images to pair with our content. In addition. It can also come in handy when we need some creative or funny images for Instagram or Twitter. Dall-E is definitely a great tool to have in your kitty as a digital marketer.

9) Trello

We all know how useful a to-do list can be. It’s a simple little tool that helps us be productive. However, to be really productive as a team, collaborating with multiple stake holders, you realy need a super-charged to do list. Trello is exactly that.

Trello allows you to create a kanban board with lists and cards. For example, you could create a team to-do list board where the lists could be To Do, In Progress and Done. Under each list, you can have cards describing any activity that needs to be done. The beauty of Trello lies in the fact that cards can be dragged and dropped into various lists as and when work gets done.

In addition, cards can have action owners, images, deadline, checklists, and more associated with the them. This helps create clear actionable items for each person in your team and allows members to collaborate with each other remotely.

Oh and I’ve saved the best part to the last, Trello can also integrate with other tools like Slack, Discord or even email to automatically send updates to stakeholders about cards they may be interested in. That way, they need not constantly keep checking the Trello board for updates about any particular task.

10) Find That Email

Remember the time before the internet and mobile phones? It would seem like the stone age to people in their 20s now but even back then marketing did happen and sales deals were completed. Even cold calling existed!

The ultimate tool that helped marketers and cold callers during those times was the amazing Yellow Pages book. It was truly amazing. It had the name, phone number and address of literally every single person or business in a particular town. It was literally a gold mine of information the marketers loved to use.

With the advent of internet and email, the importance of Yellow Pages has all but died away. However, with it, the ability to cold call people and businesses has also gone away since there is no reliable way to get people’s phone numbers or emails anymore.

This is exactly the problem that findthat.email tries to solve. And I have to say, it does solve it to a very large extent. They’ve developed an algorithm that crawls the depths of the internet and finds valid email ids of almost any person you are looking for.

Yes, its surprisingly accurate! With this single tool in hand, you can pretty much take your digital marketing efforts to a whole new level.

Let’s say you’re looking to start a facebook campaign targeting certain specific business owners. Without a good starting point of valid emails, it would take quite a lot of trial and error to dial down on the target audience. However, when you do have a good list of valid emails of specifc business owners, you can just feed it to the facebook algorithm and ask it to find people similar to them and voila, your marketing campaign is already up and running!

11) Neil Patel’s Blog

I know most of you might already know about Neil Patel and his insanely awesome blog but hey, in case you didn’t, you can thank me.

This is one of those rare blogs out there that doesn’t just spew out opinions about topics. Their team actually do the stuff they write about and back the content with all the necessary statistics and proofs too.

As a digital marketer, it is critical that you are always updated and in touch with the new tools, trends, topics, etc. and there’s no better place to do this than Neil Patel’s blog.

In addition to the latest news and updates from the industry, their educational content about all things digital marketing is exceptional as well. Irrespective of whether you are coming from a PPC background and want to learn SEO or someone who wants to understand the nuances of a specific platform like Tik Tok Ads, their blog has it all. Definitely a must-know for all digital marketers.

Well, that brings us to the end of this small list of super useful websites that every digital marketer must know about. What did you think? Anything awesome that I missed? Let me know in the comments below.