15 Proven Marketing Tools Used by Industry Leaders in 2024

The marketing world is changing daily. 

New trends and technologies are emerging, and marketers are constantly looking for the next big thing to promote their products.

But from the sea of marketing tools and trends, which ones will help you replicate the results of industry leaders?

As the leading direct mail automation platform, we spend a lot of time analyzing what tools industry leaders use to achieve outstanding results

And here’s our guide that will help you get ahead this year.

What is a Marketing Tool?

A marketing tool helps marketers and businesses to create and improve their sales campaigns and promote their products and services. This eventually helps businesses effectively target leads and impact sales and revenue.

These marketing tools help businesses in four major ways:

• Frees up time: Marketers can focus on high-value activities like idea generation and creation of campaigns rather than on marketing tasks that can be automated with marketing tools.
• Improves lead quality: Marketing tools such as SEO tools, direct marketing tools, and lead generation tools help you target a relevant audience and improve your lead quality.
• Better collaboration: By using tools such as CRM, your entire team can stay updated on important customer details and the chances of miscommunication decrease.
• Build customer trust: By providing consistent messaging throughout the buyer’s journey with these tools, you can build trust among your clients.

15 Proven Marketing Tools Used by Industry Leaders

Great marketers work with great tools and know how to combine them to increase their effectiveness, generate more leads, and keep old customers coming back for more.

Here are 15 proven marketing tools industry leaders use to stay on top of their game:

#1 Direct Mail Automation Tools

Running a direct mail campaign on the right platform can give you many targeting options. You can adjust messages and create a personalized campaign that can be creative and engaging.

Because it is tangible, these campaigns get great results, and it helps you build brand loyalty and recall. Many customers even consider direct mail more trustworthy and credible than online ads and other marketing strategies.

In fact, 62% of consumers say that direct mail has inspired them to make a purchase.

You can even merge these direct mail campaigns with email campaigns to nurture your leads and encourage them to purchase.

Featured Direct Mail Marketing Tool: Postalytics

Postalytics is a marketing software that helps you create integrated direct mail campaigns in several minutes. 

 It allows users to design postcards and letters, upload a mailing list, and automate the printing and mailing process. The platform also includes tracking and analytics features, allowing users to track their mail delivery and response rates in real-time.

You can leverage Postalytics to generate more leads, increase sales, and retain customers. 

#2 CRM Tools

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool helps businesses manage and track customer relationships.

If you often find your team asking questions like, “Did anybody follow up with that lead yesterday?”, “Did we send that customer a demo?” or “Who contacted that customer to resolve their problem?” then it’s time that you adopt a CRM for your business.

This software helps your team stay on the same page and track different customer touchpoints throughout their journey.

Instead of having your customer data piled in spreadsheets and emails where access and accountability get tossed frequently, get a unified tool that can manage it, a.k.a CRM.

Featured CRM Tool: Salesforce

Salesforce was one of the first SaaS companies that introduced the power of CRM to businesses. They call their CRM platform Customer 360, and they are serving about 150,000 companies today.

It provides powerful automation, real-time hyper-scale data to personalize every customer experience, and a shared view of your customers that helps showcase important data.

#3 Social Media Management Tools

Social media marketing tools allow marketers to schedule posts, track and manage paid social marketing campaigns, analyze metrics and insights of your posts, discover branded mentions, and a lot more.

You can even establish your workflows, check what’s working for your competitors on social media, discover influencers in your niche, and participate in social communities to increase brand awareness.

For businesses that know the power of social media, these tools can come in handy for four major reasons:

– Manage all your social accounts through a single platform and automate posting across these platforms

– Reply to social mentions from the software itself

– Save brand assets and social media posts for later use

– Analyze social media performance and create reports

Featured Social Media Management Tool: Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers a platform where businesses can collate their social media accounts, plan and schedule posts with ease, manage incoming messages from social channels, advertise content, and analyze results.

With over 18 million customers, they also offer many helpful resources to help them ace their social media game.

#4 Email Marketing Tools

50% of people buy from marketing emails at least once a month. Email marketing can be a great way to nurture your leads and build lasting relationships with existing customers.

There are many email campaigns that you can run, like promotional campaigns, survey campaigns, newsletter campaigns, re-engagement campaigns, and more.

Email marketing tools help you create these campaigns and automate them. For example, you could automate a “welcome email” campaign when a user subscribes to your product or makes an account.

Similarly, these tools are great when it comes to personalizing your emails. You can easily create segments and send relevant emails to relevant people at the right time.

Featured Email Marketing Tool: Mailchimp

Mailchimp calls itself the #1 email marketing and automation brand that helps you get more opens, clicks, and sales. With Mailchimp, you get a lot of email templates, targeting tools for segmentation, marketing automation to create drip sequences, and analytics and AI to see which email content performs the best.

Mailchimp caters to more than 14 million active customers and has also added a range of other marketing tools to explore.

#5 SEO Tools

Who doesn’t want to rank on the first page of Google?

With SEO becoming immensely competitive over the last few decades, this software category has become an essential part of your marketing technology stack.

These search marketing tools help you with keyword research, checking your current page rankings and how you rank on relevant keywords, finding link-building opportunities, optimizing your content for search engines, and conducting competitor research to see what kind of SEO strategies they are using.

Featured SEO Tool: Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the best marketing software that helps you conduct keyword research, run a site audit, track your rank, research content ideas, and run a competitor audit. The site also has many helpful resources you can check out and apply for your SEO strategy.

#6 Content Creation and Design Tools

Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional outbound marketing initiatives but generates 3X as many leads.

But for your inbound marketing efforts to bring such results, you must create stellar content.

To help you create this content and design it for your blog or social media activities, you can use tools that help you with eye-catching graphics, easy image/infographic builder, stunning webpages, and so on.

Featured Content Creation and Design Tool: Canva

Canva provides readymade designs and templates that even non-designers can easily use to create stellar content for the graphics on your blog or posts on social media. You can even invite your team and work together on design assets. Canva also allows you to schedule posts on your social profiles from the tool itself.

Canva has over 100 million users on its platform as of October, 2024.

#7 Video Marketing Tools

82% of the global internet traffic in 2024 came from video. With the advent of video formats like reels and the popularity of videos on YouTube, brands have started to jump on the bandwagon of video marketing. 

With video marketing tools, you can create a range of video clips and longer-form videos for your marketing campaigns. For example, you can create demos or short videos for individual features. You can even create YouTube videos for your articles that you can embed in blog posts.

But what if an ad starts playing in the middle of the YouTube video on your landing page?

This tool has a solution for that!

Featured Video Marketing Tool: Wistia

Wistia is a video marketing tool that allows you to host videos on your website without any ads. On top of that, you can use the tool to create and edit videos, generate leads with in-video contact capture forms and CTAs, and analyze your video marketing campaigns.

#8 Online Advertising Tools

Running strategically made online ads can bring a lot of targeted leads for your business. But if you do not have a dedicated PPC team and you’re running ads on different platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, tracking all of them can be a struggle.

On top of that, you’ll also need to monitor their results periodically to check if the investment is paying off.

In such a scenario, online advertising tools can save the day. They help you create ads, manage them from a single dashboard, and monitor the results easily.

Featured Online Advertising Tool: TapClicks

With TapClicks, you can automate and optimize daily PPC-related tasks like day-parting ads, analyze and share insights on various ad campaigns with your team or clients, get all cross-channel ad data in Google sheets, and ship ad data to your preferred destination.

#9 Event Marketing Tools

Your business may hold monthly events like conferences, occasional community outreach parties and events, prospect events, seminars, and so on. 

These in-person events are great for forming relationships with potential customers and creating an experience that your community will always remember.

But to manage all of this, you need an event marketing tool that manages the logistics of these events, promotes the event, sets up ticketing and payment, and so on.

Featured Event Marketing Tool: Event Farm

Event Farm is a marketing tool that has a plethora of event engagement tools that help promote your events and engage targeted audiences at virtual, in-person, and hybrid events. You can even create engaging invitation emails and event registration landing pages through the platform.

Apart from that, the tool helps you manage registration, check-in, event safety, COVID testing, etc.

#10 Lead Capture and Conversion Tool

Lead management is an important part of any business. To capture the leads that show interest in your product or those who might convert in the later stages, you need a lead-capturing tool to store all important information like the action they took, their email address, demographic or psychographic details, and so on.

Equally important is a lead conversion tool that converts these visitors into paying customers for your brand.

Featured Lead Capture and Conversion Tool: OptinMonster

OptinMonster helps you monetize your website traffic by helping you generate leads and increase sales with their conversion optimization toolkit. You can even target and personalize your offers with behavior automation. 

You can create engaging lead capture forms, get access to exit intent technology, inculcate onsite retargeting and personalization, see which kind of content generates the most leads, and so on.

#11 Website Analytics Tools

Do you want to keep track of your website visitors and what kind of actions they perform on different pages? Or do you want to check which marketing channels and campaigns bring the most website visits?

Website analytics tools help you with the same. They provide you with valuable insights to help you figure out what’s working and how you can make improvements in your customer and marketing experience.

Featured Website Analytics Tool: Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides many free tools that help you analyze business data, like understanding your site and app users, checking the performance of your content, accessing insights and machine learning capabilities, combining advertising analytics, and so on.

Over 25 million websites currently use Google Analytics, and it can be one of the most powerful tools in your marketing stack that helps improve your online website experience.

#12 Lead Generation Tools

Every business wants to generate more leads and have them enter the sales funnel. To do this, you need lead-generation tools that capture anonymous website visitors into valuable contacts.

These lead-generation tools also help you generate data from the different marketing campaigns you run, like social media campaigns, email campaigns, and other online marketing activities.

The main part of these lead generation tools is that they help you create effective landing pages to capture information.

Featured Lead Generation Tool: Unbounce

Unbounce is a lead-generation tool that helps you build powerful landing pages. You can even create popup forms that you can embed on your blogs or other pages to help engage visitors and ask for information such as email addresses. 

The platform also has easy-to-use builders and personalized recommendations for non-design-savvy people to help optimize the process each step of the way.

#13 Digital Asset Management

A marketing team deals with many files and resources. Sometimes, it may happen that because of inaccessibility, a lot of work may get delayed. For example, without access to the content outline, your content writer may be unable to take things forward.

To deal with such problems, you need digital asset management software. These tools make it easy for your team to collaborate with each other as everything is stored on the cloud, and you can even set permissions so that your team members can see all the required files.

Featured Digital Asset Management Software: Google Drive

Google Drive helps you store all your files in one place and collaborate on them from multiple devices like computers, tablets, and mobile. It also has built-in protections against spam, malware, and ransomware.

It also integrates with Google Sheets, Docs, slides, and other native collaboration apps that help you collaborate in real time.

#14 Team Communications and Collaboration

Our workdays would be really frustrating and long if we didn’t have an internal communications tool to stay updated on work and discuss things with our colleagues. Especially when it comes to our marketing teams, we have a lot to discuss, and team communication needs to be strong.

With team communication and collaboration software, you can always stay updated with work progress, and you can even integrate it with other tools so that everything works in tandem.

Featured Team Communications and Collaboration Tool: Slack

Slack is one of the most famous tools for team communication. It’s a powerful messaging platform that helps you connect with your teammates without the hassle of back-and-forth emails. 

With over 12 million daily active users, Slack integrates with many tools, and you can even create different channels in it, like “marketing ideas” or “content inspiration,” to make sharing and searching for information easier.

#15 Project Management Tool

You might be taking care of many marketing projects or campaigns simultaneously. Or you may have to create content consistently. To make this management easier, a project management tool can help you track different campaigns and monitor them easily.

This also helps with discovering problems or hurdles early on and proactively solving them. You also don’t need to send unnecessary emails to check for progress, as most tools come with automated check-ins and notifications.

Featured Project Management Tool: SmartTask

SmartTask is an online project management tool that comes with all the essential project management features like task management, portfolio, dashboards, milestones, and reporting functionalities.

It even integrates with other tools, and you can attach your files and images to tasks to make things easier.

How to choose the right marketing tool?

With so many options, how do you select the right marketing software category that would be useful for your team?

You can consider these six factors before making a choice:

1. Goals: What goals are you trying to achieve with the software? How long will it take? What benefit will it have on your bottom-line metrics?

2. Budget: What is your budget for your marketing tools? Which software categories can you include in that budget? How will you prioritize?

3. Use cases: What are the use cases of each tool? Can you find a tool that provides multiple use cases?

4. Case studies: Every software business has case studies on its website. Go through them and figure out if you can solve your core problems.

5. Reviews: Go through review sites like G2 and Capterra to understand what the users are talking about each tool and if you should invest in them.

6. Trial: Do they offer a free trial so you can test the tool first?

Final Thoughts

Having marketing tools that help you do your tasks efficiently and save time can do wonders for your business. 

You can even find unique insights that you’d otherwise miss out on. While it may take some time to find the right tools, the returns on your investment  would be worth the deed.

If you need help with direct mail marketing and a tool that can help you automate the entire process, get your free Postalytics account today.