In today’s marketing landscape, data-driven decision-making is key to driving digital marketing strategies that work. However, that’s only half the battle. You have the data, but what do you do with it? As a CMO, you’re responsible for the strategy behind your marketing efforts, but in order to create a good strategy, you’ll need insights from the right digital marketing tools. By assigning some of the tools below to the members of your team, you’ll deliver more value as a Fractional CMO.
Social media, design, SEO, and content development don’t happen overnight; they require research, planning, and the right tools to make them effective. Below, we’ll discuss the tools and software every CMO should have their team use to create content that converts and successful strategies.
Why you need CMO software & tools
As a CMO, it’s your job to solve bigger problems for your business or client. To do that, you need to use the proper tools to make the most of your campaigns and communicate with your team effectively. Some of the best tools at your disposal are Slack, Zoom, and email. No matter which you use, they are all effective at maintaining constant communication with your team and essential for ensuring your team stays on task. Our list of tools below is some of the best digital marketing tools that your team should be using.
In your role as CMO, your leadership is necessary for the effectiveness of your team. This includes having the tools and metrics in place to do effective research, capture leads, create engaging content, promote that content, and measure your traffic. Using these tools, and others like them, are an essential step at being an effective CMO.
Below, we’ll break down some of our favorite CMO & digital marketing tools by function.
Content marketing tools
1. Buzzsumo
Research and strategy are essential for effective digital marketing campaigns. BuzzSumo has four aspects to it that allow you to discover new content ideas that drive interactions, do keyword research on what will convert, identify influencers to boost your campaigns, and monitor it all to enable you to analyze your content. As a CMO, it’s important for you to stay up to date with current trends, so BuzzSumo shows you trending social media content relevant to your searches.
2. Conductor
Conductor is a helpful tool for creating effective organic content. It’s a great tool for CMOs because it includes tools for keyword research, optimizing your website’s health, measuring your campaign performance, and comparing your efforts with your competitors. This helps you measure the effectiveness of your team and their efforts in achieving your marketing goals. In addition, it’ll support your SEO efforts by providing the insights you need to create organic content that converts.
SEO tools
1. Moz
Moz is an SEO’s best friend. This service allows you to do everything from keyword analysis to rank tracking and everything in between. Moz has a robust system for managing keyword research, analysis, and difficulty scores with the ability to compare your keyword research with what your competitors are using. As a CMO, proper SEO and keywords make a significant impact on the effectiveness of your campaigns, so having a good platform that also manages link research, rank tracking, and audits all in one place.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a utility belt for all things SEO. The tools Ahrefs provide gives you a comprehensive way to work on your keywords, backlinks, site audits, rankings, website analysis, and so much more. It has one of the largest backlink indexes to allow you to get a great grasp on where you stand in relation to your competitors.
3. Majestic
Majestic is a powerful SEO tool that specializes in link building. In addition, it’s great for on-page SEO, site audits, keyword research, and much more. The best part about Majestic though is their focus on backlinks. Majestic also boasts one of the largest archives of backlink data available. This allows you to inspect everything from domain ratings, the neighborhood for a site, referral domains, link context, and so much more. If you’re looking for a comprehensive way to audit and understand the backlinks of your site and your competitor’s, Majestic is a solid option.
CMO software for data visualization
1. A good dashboard or scorecard
If you’ve seen our other blog post about CMO essentials & metrics you need to be an effective CMO, you know that a good CMO dashboard can go a long way. In addition to that, we have an in-depth CMO scorecard you can use to collect all of your data in one place. It’s customizable depending on your client’s needs and is a great place to start to create a dashboard that works best for you.
An effective dashboard or scorecard is one of the most effective tools for data visualization and helps you solve the bigger problems your clients face. It’s an essential tool for any CMO because it drives your decision-making, and ultimately the success of your marketing efforts and strategies.
2. Google data studio
Google Data Studio streamlines collecting all of your data in one place to create custom reports. This includes everything from Google Analytics and Google Ads too, so the potential is limitless. There are custom templates available that easily input data from your data inputs, and the charts and tables are easily configurable to highly the metrics you want to show. In addition, since it’s part of the Google Suite, it’s easy to collaborate and delegate reports to other members of your team.
3. Hotjar
Hotjar allows you to see how users are interacting, experiencing, and behaving on your website. As a CMO, an effective way to know how to optimize your content and site is by using data, and Hotjar’s features use recordings, heatmaps, surveys, and feedback questionnaires to gather data on your website’s users.
Tools for social media management
1. HootSuite
HootSuite is a comprehensive way to manage all of your social media channels from one location. This allows you to have greater control over the planning involved in social media strategy by giving you the ability to schedule your posts in advance. One of the multiple useful features this tool provides is the ability to collaborate with others on your marketing team. It also allows you to track your client or organization’s mentions, responses and create content your follows will want.
2. Buzzstream
BuzzStream is outreach simplified. If your strategy involves a heavy hand of digital PR, then BuzzStream helps by creating qualified lists of potential prospects and trusted past promoters with ease. You’ll organize and optimize your outreach efforts with this tool, especially to influencers. It’ll also give you the ability to track metrics like open rate, reply rate, and placements while monitoring your links.
3. Slideshare
Slideshare makes it easy to create and share presentations, infographics, and documents. As a CMO, this is a great tool for creating presentations for your clients or business and can be used to share these presentations and documents with your marketing team. In addition, it can be a great place to learn from others’ shared presentations.
Software for design
1. Canva
Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design software that simplifies the process of creating unique and attractive images, infographics, and other forms of data visualization. As a CMO, design will ultimately be part of your marketing campaigns, so having an easy way to communicate your data, create appealing social media ads, and engaging infographics will be extremely beneficial for you. Canva has intuitive and simple-to-use templates for your data and allows you to edit them to fit your needs.
2. Piktochart
Another great way to visualize your data is using Piktochart. Piktochart is an effective tool for creating professional infographics, presentations, posters, reports, flyers, and content for social media.
3. Unbounce
Landing pages matter, especially for converting potential customers into buyers; that’s where Unbounce comes in. Unbounce helps you streamline the process of creating landing pages for your products or services using machine learning, AI, and templates. The service even helps with copywriting too, using an AI that helps brainstorm ideas for new content and revamp current content. Unbounce’s smart traffic feature also helps with conversions by sending users to the landing page, where they’ll be most likely to convert.
How CMOx helps you become a Fractional CMO
If you’re looking to become a fractional CMO, CMOx can help you get started on the right foot. We recommend downloading our CMO scorecard to start; it’ll give you a significant amount of value as a CMO as you develop a dashboard that works best for you. After that, we’re ready to talk to you about how CMOx can help you become an effective fractional CMO with our support. To learn more about the CMO services we offer at CMOx, contact us today for a free consultation at (219) 804-0797 or fill out a contact request form here.
