Marketers, you are not alone! To plan, stay in the know on insights, and organize reporting for all your digital activity there are plenty of available platforms to help.

Gathering our “go-to” platforms that should be at the top of the list of considerations, we’ve listed here a few great options to be aware of.

Social Media

• Sprout Social
• Hootsuite

Schedule and implement all your social activity, custom reporting, social listening…all-in one platforms like Sprout Social and Hootsuite are great for social media managers or general marketers looking for consolidation in a management tool.

SEO & UX

Two great platforms our Anvil SEO experts use on the daily to deep dive on site optimizations:

• Semrush
• MOZ

Semrush is a mega platform with built in tools to facilitate research on a multitude of areas. Anvil leverages its tools such as keyword research for organic and PPC campaign optimization, website link building, and competitor analysis just to start.

Moz can facilitate more technical site issues discovery, items that can impact ranking factors and on-site performance. Keeping websites clear of issues such as broken links, missing title tags and alt text can benefit greatly and this would be a platform to sort out a quick report on where to optimize.

• Microsoft Clarity

How important is knowing the way valued customers are interacting with your website and getting to the important conversion points? Are there spots on your homepage that don’t have a click through that other wise should, and getting “rage clicks”? UX optimization is crucial for any business website to provide the most efficient experience for site visitors…enter heat mapping! Microsoft provides a free setup to record and report heat maps on the real-time user interactions occurring across your website pages.

Insights, Analytics, & Reporting

Keeping it simple here, Google has a long list of great free platforms to help gather up data and keep up to date with reporting needs! A few of the main recommended platforms to setup and leverage are the following:

• Google Trends
  • Top level insight on tracked search term volume and activity (i.e. great for seasonal search volume trends)
• Google Alerts
  • Stay “alert” on important mentions and reviews, competitor activity, topics of interest important to your industry and business
• Google Analytics
  • Website traffic data, provides detailed overview on site visitor activity such as traffic sources, time spent & bounce rates, audience demographics & devices and more.
• Google Data Studio
  • Create custom reporting dashboards, pulling data from your website to media platforms. Note: this is free for Google analytics and media properties, there is a paid extension to connect external platforms.

These tools provide a great place to start if you are relatively new to the digital marketing world. We recommend familiarizing yourself with all of them, and taking advantage of their free trial options to learn what each one offers and determine what combination will best serve your needs.

If you are interested in having all of these tools at your disposal, contact Anvil Media today to learn how we can put these tools and our team of exerts to work in order to achieve your marketing goals!