Essential digital marketing tools

A free download giving our recommendations on tools for audience insight and managing digital marketing

How will this guide help me and my business?

This guide gives Free members a preview of the 30 categories of digital marketing tools you should be using for your marketing. We offer a full (200+ page) Marketing Technology Selection Tools Guide for Business members, however, this free guide will give you a taster of the 30 categories and 150 tools which are most popular.

Who is this guide for?

This guide has been made for marketers of all levels, from managers and major stakeholders who need to find big-picture solutions and improve internal processes to marketing executives who will be using the tools on a daily basis.

How is the guide structured?

This guide presents the tools we recommend you use, it contains our updated Essential Tools wheel. This is a sample of our Marketing Technology Selection Guide which contains hundreds of recommendations across more than 30 categories, with full breakdowns on cost, features and much more.

Rather than simply categorising tools, we have also 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.

Business members of Smart Insights can view the full 200+ page guide here.  The full guide:

• Explains the 30 categories
• Gives recommendations on the top 5 tools in each category
• Provides a separate tool for auditing your martech stack
• Recommends a process of martech selection

Latest updates

This guide is reviewed and updated on an annual basis. Its most recent update was March 2020 and includes both new tools and revised ranking across many categories.

Resource Details

About the author

The Smart Insights Marketing team have produced this guide. Thanks to Dave Chaffey, Pat Kelly, Robert Jones, Robert Allen, Kim Greenop-Gadsby, Jessica Wade, and James Story.