500 web tools for your marketing and business needs – Mrbusiness is particularly interested in searching for the best web tools to help with your creative marketing ideas. Growing your business and social media efficiently requires the right tools. So without further ado, here is a list of some of the best tools I’ve discovered, and why.
Marketing tools
Uberflip
Instead of sending visitors away from your site, use Uberflip to share a curated list of your content on your website. With Uberflip you can create targeted calls to action inside your content to convert visitors into customers.
FullContact
Marketing is all about creating personal relationships. But that’s hard to do without lots of relevant data. Enter FullContact, which provides the real name, photo and social-profile links of every contact. Now any time someone signs up on your site, you can reach out with all the information you need to build a lasting relationship.
Person
Customer personas help you create targeted marketing campaigns. But what helps you create those customer personas? A little framework called Person, which helps you visualize your target customer by inputting their gender, likes, behaviors and goals in a simple-to-read layout. Person also lets you share your newly created customer personas, which makes it perfect for sharing with teams and other marketers.
BuzzSumo
To ensure you’re spending your content-marketing dollars wisely, use BuzzSumo to research the content your audience really wants. Just enter any keyword or backlink into BuzzSumo and you’ll get a detailed report showing how well previous content on that topic performed.
Mention
Want to keep track of what people are saying about you and your competitors? Mention helps you track key phrases and brand names, in real time, so you never miss out on a conversation with current and potential customers.
Autosend
If you want to personally reach out to each person that joins your website, you can with Autosend. Autosend helps you automatically send personalized, targeted email and text messages to every customer based on what they do on your website. So anytime a customer joins, makes a purchase or even looks at a particular FAQ question on your website, you can proactively send a personal message to them.
Ducksboard
Tracking how many people join your mailing list, subscribe to your service and buy your products each day can be exhausting — without the right tool. Stay on top of your most important analytics from every service you use in real time with an all-in-one dashboard such as Ducksboard.
ReferralSnip
A 2014 study showed that 85 percent of small businesses get customers through word of mouth. If you don’t want to miss out on lots of new business, create your own referral program with a tool such as ReferralSnip, which helps you set up a referral program in under a minute. You just enter a few company details, design your snippet and your customers can start referring new customers to your business online.
Oktopost
Managing your social media presence doesn’t have to be hard. With social-media tools such as Oktopost you can share your content, manage conversations and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns easily, in one place.
Picreel
Just because people visit your website doesn’t mean they actually convert. In fact, according to Bounce Exchange, 96 percent of all website visitors will never return. This is why it’s key to optimize your website with tools such as Picreel, which helps you capture visitors when they’re leaving with customizable exit offers.
VWO
VWO is an A/B testing tool that helps you determine what’s working on your website, and what’s not. You can use VWO to test things such as which headline, website design or website copy your visitors respond to best.
Tropical
What do tools such as your help desk, email-marketing software and customer-relationship management have in common? They all hold your customer’s data. If you want to bring all of that data together to create a full profile and timeline of each customer and their activities, use Tropical.
Socedo
Wish you could find and qualify leads on Twitter? You can with Socedo. Just enter keywords, hashtags or any other search criteria, and it’ll return a prospect list. Socedo even helps you automatically favorite tweets, follow prospects and send direct messages to start a conversation.
Canva
Fine, you’re no Photoshop pro. That doesn’t mean you can’t create beautiful marketing graphics in minutes with Canva, which helps even the most graphically-challenged create everything from social-media images to presentations, for free. You can use its templates, store everything online and even access stock images to include in your work.
Ope.nr
Ope.nr helps you add a call to action to any link you share on social media. Now everyone that visits the link you share can be redirected to your site with a unique call to action.
WordPress Plugins
NextScripts
Use NextScripts to publish WordPress blog posts automatically to your social media network (including LinkedIn and more than 17 others). Facebook, Twitter, Google+(Google Plus), Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, LiveJournal, Flipboard, DreamWidth, Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, Plurk, VKontakte(VK.com), YouTube, App.net, Scoop.It, The whole process is completely automated. Just write a new post and either entire post or it’s nicely formatted announcement with backlink will be published to all your configured social networks.
Digg Digg
Built by the team here at Buffer, the Digg Digg plugin adds a floating share bar to all of your posts so your readers can easily share to Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and almost 20 more sites. If a floating bar isn’t your style or doesn’t fit with your blog layout, customize the Digg Digg bar to appear fixed at the top or bottom of every post.
Flare
Built by the team at Digital Telepathy, Flare is a social share plugin for WordPress sites and part of an overall website-boosting suite of products delivered through the Filament plugin. Filament allows you to drag and drop your social share buttons wherever you’d like on your site. Find the place that makes the most sense for your share buttons—sidebar, header, footer, etc.—and fix it up easily.
Ivy
Another part of Digital Telepathy’s Filament plugin is Ivy, a simple tool that allows your website visitors to highlight any passage of text and share directly to Twitter, Facebook, or email. Ideally your visitors will be the ones putting this tool to use, but you can help them along with a little prodding to “highlight to share.”
“Pin It” Button for Images
Add a “Pin It” button to all the images on your blog with this free WordPress plugin. Each time a visitor hovers over an image, they’ll see a stylized “Pin It” button appear on the image and can share directly to Pinterest. If you are hoping to attract more Pinterest shares to your blog, the Pinterest button for images could be a real boon. It’s great for blogs with lots of highly visual content.
Social Media Management Tools
Hootsuite
Most of us are familiar with Hootsuite, a powerful social media management tool that manages multiple social networks, tracks brand mentions and schedules updates, among other tasks. There is a free plan for five social networks or less and two advanced plans that run $8.99 and up per month.
Sproutsocial
“Sprout makes it easy for our team to collaborate and publish across multiple social profiles and networks. Plus, Sprout’s detailed analytics help us track our progress to ensure we see return on our global efforts.” Sprout’s collaborative platform ensures smarter, faster and more efficient social communications. View full Twitter conversation histories, customize contact records and share notes across your team in order to build a more complete customer profile.
Draft, schedule, queue and post messages to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. Shorten links, attach photos and target specific audiences.
BIDIRECTIONAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEM – Zendesk, UserVoice, and Salesforce integrations enable sales, support and social teams to work together to provide the best customer experiences.
Visual Content Tools
Infogr.am
Infogr.am helps you build sparkling infographics by entering information right into the Infogram spreadsheets that are built right in to the editor. Standard features are there, too, like design templates and a full design editor. Visualize a monthly report for your business, and share this on social media. You’ll get the boost of visual content plus transparency.
Piktochart
Piktochart is a free-to-try infographic creator with a full editor and themes to turn your data into a work of art. The next time you have some overly complicated (or lengthy) numbers to share, try putting them into a visual design.
Visually
If you’d like an extra hand creating visual content like infographics and charts, you can hit the Visually marketplace and find professionals to do the work for you, at up to 1/5 the cost you’d incur going through an agency. Visually specializes in infographics, videos, interactives, and presentations. While the pricing is discounted, it’s still an investment (infographics start at $1,000, for instance.) Save your Visually needs for a rainy day, then make a big splash with a feature announcement video or a presentation for investors.
Canva
There is a lot to love about Canva. The graphic design app has an incredibly intuitive drag-and-drop interface, and the tooltips and templates make it ideal for beginner designers. Everything is free unless you choose to use something from Canva’s library of stock photos. One of Canva’s default templates is a Pinterest graphic, which comes premade with optimal size for a pin (735 pixels wide by 1102 pixels tall).
Compfight
A tool we use regularly here on the Buffer blog, Compfight is our source for creative commons images to accompany our content. For your social media posts, images like these can be great additions to a visual content strategy (just be sure to give credit where credit’s due—each compfight picture comes with attribution). Build a small library of free-to-use photos for upcoming social sharing. Sometimes you may come across a good image that just doesn’t quite fit your needs. Save it for later in your Dropbox or on a private WordPress page.
BeFunky
A good graphics program can be a boon to your social media marketing. BeFunky is one of the best—and easiest—ones around, with a complete suite of image editing tools like cropping, scaling, filters, text, and more. I’m sure you’ve seen inspirational quotes placed beautifully onto inspirational photos. Visual content like this is ideal for social networks, and you can pull this off easily with BeFunky.
LICEcap
Who doesn’t love GIFs? If your social media presence is strong on a place like Tumblr or Google+, then having GIF-making capabilities can come in handy. LICEcap is a downloadable program that creates GIFs from what you see on your screen. Create a GIF of your product or service in action so you can share with fans and potential customers.
Video Tools
Powtoon
Are videos part of your social media marketing plan? If you’re anxious to jump into video content, Powtoon can be a free way to test and see if it might work for you. With Powtoon, you can create and edit video clips and upload straight to YouTube.
GoAnimate
This tool allows you to make full-featured animated movies using characters and sets of your choosing. Animation can be a really powerful way to tell your story in a unique manner.
Magistro
This tool takes your raw footage and goes through and picks out what it thinks is the best of the best to create a short video. The tool then lets you add music and titles. Again, this is one that is awesome when it gets it right, but a little clunky with it doesn’t.
Sellamations
This service will create doodle videos where a hand draws out your story with a marker in high-speed capture. It’s not the cheapest route, but it’s certainly one of the best ways to create a one of a kind video that’s simply hard not to watch.
Common Craft
This is another really unique way to tell your story using video. Common Craft uses paper cutouts moved around or white boards to tell your story. This is probably one of the best ways to take a complex idea and really make it easy to understand. Again, hard not keep glued to this format.
ReelSEO
This one actually isn’t a tool, it’s just the best place to learn about tools like this as well as how to more effectively use video to build your business in general.
Prezi
This is a interesting take on the slide presentation as it allows you to create one giant and more easily connected idea and then use the tool to zoom, pan and fly all around the presentation to create a really dynamic feel. It’s not the easiest tool to master, but check out some of the incredible examples on the site to get inspiration.
YouTube Editor
I like this tool because it’s free, and because you’re using YouTube to host and stream your videos anyway, it gives you some nice editing capability right in YouTube. You can also add annotations and transcripts to your videos making them more SEO friendly.
Camtasia
This PC and Mac desktop software is the market leader in the screencapture video world. Screencast videos are a great way to demonstrate how something online works. Camtasia has some nice features that allow you to add focus to areas on your screen as well as annotations and URLs.
Animoto
This automatically produces beautifully orchestrated, completely unique video pieces from your photos, video clips and music. It takes a little trial and error to get right, but adds surprisingly professional touch when you do.
Stoome
This is a really unique tool as it adds a crowdsourced element. You upload video clips and borrow from other users. You can then work on your project alone or with others. This is an awesome tool for creating videos when you attend a big event or conference.
Social Media Analytics Tools
BrandChats
BrandChats is a leading solution in the area of Social Media monitoring and analysis. For more four years, it has been working with top-level brands, agencies and companies in different projects covering the most advanced cases of social media intelligence use, with a latest-generation platform, a methodology and a human team focused on obtaining value in the areas of brand monitoring, on-line reputation, social CRM, trend analysis, and on-line marketing.
Quintly
Quintly is a social media benchmarking and analytics solution that tracks and compares the performance of your social media marketing activities. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, or all of them, their tool visualizes and checks your social marketing success, benchmarking your numbers against your competitors or best practices.
Keyhole
Keyhole provides real-time social conversation tracking for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It helps you measure and amplify conversations around your brand and campaigns, enables you identify prospective clients and influencers talking about (or looking for) your services, and aids in driving engagement by finding and re-sharing relevant content.
Rival IQ
Ever wonder what your competition is up to? Rival IQ tracks a list of brands of your choosing and monitors their activity on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and even SEO. Your free 14-day trial gives you full access to competitor tracking and the dashboards for each of the different networks and search factors. Rival IQ can show you insight into your competition but also insight into your industry as a whole. For instance, learn from the Day of the Week chart to see when content from your industry is most likely to go viral.
Buzz Sumo
Curious what the most popular content is on any given topic or any particular website? Buzz Sumo has this covered with a search tool that tracks content and ranks according to shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest. With Buzz Sumo, you can use the insights to steer the content you create and share on social media, learning how to craft headlines and what types of content each network is most interested in.
Klout
Klout figures to be one of the more well-known tools on this list. It collects information on a person’s various social profiles to come up with a popularity score of 1 to 100 and then lets you follow your score over time as it ebbs and flows (ideally flowing upward). The site has added quite a bit of functionality beyond Klout score. You can now track topics, view content suggestions, and post straight to your connected social profiles.
SharedCount
There will be times when you’ll need/want to know how popular your content is (like in a weekly metrics report, perhaps). SharedCount shows you quickly, at a glance, how far and wide a piece of content spread. Click over to SharedCount’s multi-URL dashboard to see a table of multiple URLs for a week’s worth of content.
Google URL Builder
If you’re dabbling in advanced campaign tracking, you’ve likely read up on UTM tracking codes in links. A UTM code is basically extra characters at the end of a link that help flesh out your analytics reports, showing you where your traffic came from and what campaigns it’s all associated with. Google has a free tool to create these UTMs for you. Add a UTM tracking to all links that are associated with a single marketing push. That way you can better measure the impact and ROI from your particular event.
Pinterest Tools
ViralWoot
ViralWoot enables you to get more exposure for your Pinterest profile and your pins. You earn “seeds” (points) by following other users and re-pinning. It also helps with scheduling so your visibility is increased, and you can create alerts that let you know when other users are pinning your content.
Pinpuff
Pinpuff is where you can calculate your Pinfluence, a measure of your popularity on Pinterest and it also provides the value of your every pin. To get started with your analytics on Pinpuff, go to the website and fill in your email and your Pinterest username, then click on the button ‘Calculate your Pinfluence’. You will be redirected to your pinfluence page, where you will find your pinterest analytics.
In the score page, you will be presented with your total score at the right hand sidebar next to your Pinterest profile image. You will also get to know an estimation of your pin valuation as well as cost per click. Apart from that, you will see your reach score based on your follower and activity score.
Pin A Quote
Pin A Quote allows you to post a quote to Pinterest. Although this is just a small part of what you can get from Pinstamatic, Pin A Quote makes it easy with their bookmarklet – you can simply post a quote by highlighting a text on any website much like how you Pin an image from a site.
To grab the bookmarklet, visit the Pin A Quote homepage, drag the button ‘Pin A Quote’ to your browser’s bookmark bar, and it is ready for use.
PinAlerts
Get Altered About Your Brand Through Email
PinAlerts is like your Google Alerts for Pinterest! This Free tool sends you email notifications when people bookmark anything from your website or blog to their boards. It’s a way to track the interest your products or services are getting on Pinterest. PinAlerts is still in its beta version, and the creators have plans for more features which shall arrive soon. This tool is a great way to find out how people are making use of your content, and you can find a way to engage with them.
Tailwind
Analyze your reach
Tailwind app gives you a better understanding of where you stand on Pinterest and how well your content is doing. It allows businesses to measure their content on Pinterest to see what is bringing them success as well as what they need to improve with their marketing strategy. It allows businesses to look at their performance in detail by providing – engagement score, which measure likes and comments. It also tracks the growth of a profile. Reach is extremely important for a brand thus it shows your content is being exposed to a larger audience.
Piqora
Promotions and sweepstakes
Piqora is a great tool for marketers who want to run promotions and sweepstakes on their Pinterest page to increase their brand awareness and gain more followers. You can use it to start any promotions on Pinterest, to track your results with their analytics and then see how your promotions are being accepted by your followers and what effect it is creating for your brand. It is a great tool for hosting contest, which is deemed as the most effective way to gain followers.
Pinstamatic
creates images
On Pinterest the pictures do the talking and the text just highlights it. You have to make sure that the visual content you are sharing on Pinterest compliments with the product or service marketed by you and are effective enough to be liked and re-pinned. Pinstamatic offers 8 different templates you can use to turn your boring content into something catchy and fun. Each template is accessible by simply clicking on one of the icons at the top. Once you have the right image, click on Pin and you will be redirected to your Pinterest account where you can login and share the image in one of your boards.
Facebook Tools
LikeAlyzer
What should you be doing with your Facebook page? LikeAlyzer will flat-out tell you. The Facebook analysis tool comes up with stats and insights into your page and starts off every report with a list of recommendations. Keep track of where you stand compared to other pages by following the comparison of your page to average page rank, industry-specific page rank, and the rank of similar brands.
Fanpage Karma
Fanpage Karma shows all sorts of valuable info related to your Facebook page like growth, engagement, service and response time, and of course Karma (a weighted engagement value). FanKarma also does insight into Twitter and YouTube, the latter of which might be particularly valuable if you’re building up a video marketing strategy.
Wolfram Alpha Facebook Report
The knowledge engine of Wolfram Alpha has a neat tool to analyze your Facebook profile. Their Facebook report (a free feature with any Wolfram account) is incredibly detailed—everything from the content you share to the relationship status pie charts of your friends. See at-a-glance how your profile updates are being received. If you use your personal Facebook for marketing your business, you can optimize the type of content you share to your profile.
Facebook Custom Audiences
If you’re advertising on Facebook, you can use a handy, built-in tool to cater to a specific audience of your choosing by telling Facebook whom to target. Upload an Excel file or link directly to your MailChimp lists. Facebook will create a custom audience based on which of your contacts is on Facebook. This feature can be added by clicking on the Audiences link inside Facebook’s Ads Manager. Create custom campaigns that target a list of leads or customers. You can get extra specific with these ads since the demographic already has a familiarity with your brand. (Facebook recommends that audience sizes be at least 1,000 people so that your ad dollar is well spent.
Linkedin Tools
CardMunch
This free iOS app has you take a picture of a business card and then stores the information into your contacts and finds the person on LinkedIn. Great for expos and conferences. Scan the business cards of new contacts you meet and quickly see on LinkedIn which connections you have in common.
Sync.ME
Use Sync.ME to update your contact list in one smooth step. This app syncs with your LinkedIn and Facebook contacts and ensures that you have the most up to date information about them. You can view your contacts full screen pictures when they call, and you can choose how you appear in their phones, which gives you a business card.mobile
Management Tools
Cyfe
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard that helps you monitor and analyze data found across all your online services, including Google Analytics, Salesforce, AdSense, MailChimp, Amazon, Facebook, wordPress, Zendesk, and Twitter from one single location in real time. No more wasting countless hours tracking down your data from all over the Web every day!
SumAll
SumAll – Social media and web traffic, all in one dashboard. All for free. Helps guide your decision making by connecting all your key online marketing and e-commerce data in one interactive chart. Features include real-time data monitoring, goal tracking, viewing new vs. returning customers, and trendlines that project future performance.
SocialBro
A complete Twitter management tool (that also comes complete with Buffer integration), SocialBro can tell you everything you want to know about your Twitter account—community information, analytics on all your posts, and much, much more. There is a 15-day free trial to test out all the features. The community insights are fascinating, and there’s some real value to be gained from the tweet analytics (pictured above), which show you which posts got the most engagement and when.
Tweetcaster
Tweetcaster is a Twitter management tool for iOS and Android devices, and it provides the basics of what you’d expect from a Twitter dashboard plus a few fun extras: enhanced search and lists, hiding unwanted tweets, and photo effects for your pics.
Tweetdeck
Now owned by Twitter, Tweetdeck is one of the most popular tools for complete Twitter management. Tweetdeck lets you track, organize, and engage with your followers through a customizable dashboard where you can quickly see at-a-glance the activity from different lists, followers, hashtags, and more. What do you find yourself checking when you go to Twitter? Whatever it is, you can add it to your Tweetdeck dashboard and see everything in one view with nary an extra click. Could be a huge time saver.
Business CRM Tools
Act! Cloud
Act! Cloud, by Swiftpage, marries contact management with e-marketing to help you get organized, convert new customers and get more from existing customers. The software takes the guesswork out of choosing where to focus time and resources by offering you intelligent, prioritized recommendations based on the level of engagement of customers and prospects. cloud.act.com
AllProWebTool
If you’re looking for a simpler way to acquire leads and maintain customer relationships, AllProWebTools’ CRM software is a unique integrated solution. This CRM tool is part of a business suite that also includes email, Web and e-commerce hosting, marketing, task management, and timecards. Having all these tools available from one dashboard keeps you organized and saves you time. AllProWebTools.com
Apptivo CRM
Apptivo CRM combines contact and lead management with project management and marketing software to help your business connect better with customers. Apptivo CRM is part of Apptivo’s suite of business solutions. apptivo.com/crm
Avidian/Prophet
Use Outlook as your CRM software with Avidian. The company’s own Prophet CRM turns your inbox into a full-featured, mobile-friendly CRM solution. From contacts to emails, tasks, notes, appointments and meetings, Avidian also syncs all your data in a familiar platform you likely already use every day. avidian.com
Base
Called an “intelligent productivity platform,” Base is all about using data to help your business make wiser, more informed sales decisions. It closely monitors your sales pipeline, sales rep activities, goals and quotas to make sure your team is productive and succeeding. getbase.com
Bluenose
Bluenose combines big data analytics with powerful technology for customer-success management. Known as a “Customer Success” platform, the software empowers software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses to proactively manage and engage their customers through its insight-driven toolkit, built-in playbooks and more. bluenose.com
BoomTown!
Do you own a real estate business? BoomTown’s predictive CRM software is designed specifically for agents, teams, brokerage firms and other real estate professionals. Services include lead generation, a website builder, success management and the ability to manage multiple offices. boomtownroi.com
bpm’online
Get end-to-end process management, from lead generation to ordering to customer service. More than your traditional CRM software, bmp’online combines sales, marketing and help desk functions so you can be there for customers every step of the sales journey. bpmonline.com/crm
Bullhorn
Own a service-oriented business? Bullhorn CRM is specifically built to help service providers strengthen relationships with customers while improving sales productivity and driving growth. There are also dedicated CRM software offerings for niche businesses, such as staffing and recruitment firms and PR agencies. bullhorn.com/products/crm/
CampaignerCRM — Campaigner offers two types of CRM software. One is for businesses that deal with shorter, simpler sales processes, and the other combines CRM with sales-process management to help companies with longer, more complex sales processes. The latter option offers more advanced functionalities, such as reporting, customization, a sales process API and more. campaignercrm.com
Capsule
Capsule aims to make CRM as simple as possible by offering six core capabilities to help you run your business: managing relationships, managing the sales pipeline, organizing emails, saving contact histories, performing task management and completing customization. capsulecrm.com
Commence
Specifically designed for small to midsize businesses, Commence is a Web-based CRM software that’s both powerful and affordable. It’s also designed for fast deployment, meaning it’s easy to implement and you can get started right away. commence.com
Contactually
Contactually is all about getting the most out of your CRM investment. It is built to help businesses convert existing leads into closed sales, build relationships for long sales cycles, stay on top of revenue opportunities and get more prospects down the sales funnel. contactually.com
GoldMine
Need a premise-based CRM software? Unlike cloud-based CRM software, GoldMine is installed on your own servers and infrastructure to give you more control over your software. In addition to its many CRM features, the company also offers one of the best customer support systems, so you can get help right when you need it. goldmine.com
GreenRope
GreenRope combines the best of CRM with robust marketing automation to help you save time and dedicate more resources to closing sales. Additional features include project management, collaboration tools, e-commerce, event management and more. greenrope.com
Hatchbuck
One of our runner-ups, Hatchbuck is all-in-one sales and marketing tool built with small businesses in mind. It focuses on simplicity, ease of use and affordability, while giving you all the tools you need to organize data and automate marketing processes. hatchbuck.com
Highrise
Also a top contender on our list of best CRM software, Highrise focuses on helping you manage three key areas of your business: contacts, tasks and communications. You can maintain and share contacts with your team, create tasks and set reminders, and keep track of emails, notes and other forms of correspondence. highrisehq.com
Hubspot CRM
A popular inbound marketing and sales platform, Hubspot’s CRM software streamlines your sales process across multiple channels in your organization. It works in the background to save you from wasting time manually performing repetitive sales and marketing tasks. The software also specializes in automatically logging and syncing data from different sources of communication, such as your website, phone calls, emails, social media and more. hubspot.com/products/crm
Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is a favorite amongst small business owners we talked to, because of its ease of use and because it offers a comprehensive set of CRM tools at a small-business-friendly price. Users particularly liked its automation features, ability to nurture leads all the way to closing the sales and extras like email marketing, billing and project management. infusionsoft.com
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