7 Marketing Tools to Use on Your WordPress Site

Attempting to climb Mount Everest without using proper equipment would pretty much a suicide mission, right?

Well, in today’s highly-competitive environment, turning your WordPress site into a growth engine to power your goals is your Mount Everest.

And, in a way, marketing tools are your climbing gear. They help make the ascent easier.

With the right tools to support your efforts, ain’t no mountain high enough to keep you from achieving great success.

So let’s get straight to it, and go over seven essential marketing tools that you need to start using for your WordPress site right away.

You need these to work more efficiently, optimize your marketing and achieve better results – faster.

1. Google Analytics

All good marketing tactics are rooted in data.

And Google Analytics is a go-to source for all things stats. It’s an extremely complex platform that offers in-depth information about what people do on your website.

Here are just some of the insights you can leverage, courtesy of Google Analytics.

• total number of users in a given period,
• page views,
• sessions and pages per session,
• bounce rates,
• session durations,
• most popular posts/pages
• conversions
• audience demographics
• and a bunch of other metrics that you need to have a clear overview of your site’s performance.

As a WordPress site owner, you need this data so that you can gauge the effectiveness of your current marketing strategy and make informed decisions about how to improve it.

Otherwise, you’re just stumbling around in the dark.

Using it is even more important if you’re working together with other people in a marketing team. Each member of the team needs access to data, in order to make solid contributions.

Price: The Standard version of Google Analytics is free.

2. SendinBlue

Email is still one of the most efficient channels for informing, engaging and converting your site visitors.

But email marketing is only as successful as the planning you’ve put behind the campaign.

The good news is there are a plenty of email automation marketing tools that can help you launch and manage a successful email marketing campaign.

And if you are looking for an alternative to popular email marketing services like let’s say Mail Chimp, you should look into SendinBlue.

Here’s how this tool promises to make your job easier:

• Design emails. A big plus is that you can design your emails by using a Drag and Drop option and a Template Gallery. So you’ll most likely be able to come up with a good-looking design even if you don’t have experience as a designer.

 

• Campaign management and audience segmentation. SendinBlue allows you to keep all your email drafts and user lists using a pretty intuitive and straightforward dashboard.

 

• Measure and optimize the campaigns you create. A big upside to using SendinBlue is the fact that you get to see detailed reports and stats after you send an email. Open rates, click rates, the number of unsubscribers, this is data you can use to figure out what worked and what didn’t and tweak your strategy accordingly.

Price: They offer 5 placing plans, including a free one that lets you send up 9,000 emails/mo and offers minimum features.

3. Squirrly Social

Are you still doing your social media sharing manually?

Social media automation can help you save a lot of time when promoting your articles and pages across all of your social media channels.

More importantly, it gives you the chance to reach a broader audience, increase traffic to your site and grow your social media presence.

Squirrly Social is the best WordPress solution that lets you automatically share your content to multiple accounts on each of the supported social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram via Buffer, Pinterest via Buffer).

After connecting your WordPress Site to the platform,  Squirrly Social will share messages of the latest post you publish. It can also help you by automatically adding hashtags and emoji to any post you create.

It’s important to mention that Squirrly Social works independently of the themes you are using. So you can use it even for non-Wordpress sites.

Price: Offers 3 plans, starting at $14.99/month (you can share for on up to 360 Accounts on the large plan).

4. CTA Button Styler

When it comes to creating a great user experience on your site that will enhance your marketing strategy, it’s often the seemingly little things that can make a huge difference.

CTA’s are one of the most important elements on any site, so it’s important to make them clickable. And in addition to great copy, you also need visually-appealing buttons that stand out.

The good news is that there are several WordPress plugins that can help you create CTA buttons that look clickable.

The most notable benefits of using the CTA Button Styler is that it allows easy styling of buttons.

You can customize colors, button size, hover styles and other styling options. This way, the CTA buttons integrate nicely with the design of your site and pages.

The plugin doesn’t offer more complex features yet (like A/B testing and image button), but the developers are working on this for future version releases.

But considering the service is free, it’s worth giving a try.

Price: free

5. OptinMonster

When done right, displaying popups and opt-in email signup forms on your WordPress site can be an excellent customer acquisition and lead generation tactic.

Whether your goal is to gain more newsletter subscribers, increase your email list, get people to sign up for an event, or simply get more leads, a tool like OptinMonster can really come in handy.

Here’s what this tool brings to the table:

• Form Types. Depending on the pricing plan you choose, OptinMonster offers up to eight form types: lightbox popup, after post/in-line, floating bar (can be placed at the top or bottom of the screen), fly-in/slide-in, mobile optimised, sidebar widget, canvas (custom content), and fullscreen.

 

• Customization options. It’s important to ensure you’re not affecting the visitors’ experience by displaying forms and popups that are too big or too many. That’s why it’s great that OpinMonster’s popups and forms are easy to customize.

 

• Form Triggers. Good timing is essential in marketing. Triggers are important because they let you control when forms will be displayed. Among others, OptinMonster offers an exit intent trigger and a time-based trigger, as well as a scrolling-based trigger.

 

• A/B Testing. OptinMonster allows you to try different content, headlines, layouts, and styles to help you figure out what converts best on your site.

You can check out this video for more in-depth information:

Price: Offers 3 plans at different price points. Their basic plan is $9/mo.

6. Testimonial Widget

Displaying testimonials on your site helps generate social proof that helps your brand seem more trustworthy.

So, the entire point of using testimonial is to build trust and enhance credibility among site visitors. But that implies more than just randomly copy-pasting your testimonials on a page on your site.

Think testimonial design, placement, and layout.

A tool like Testimonial Widget can help you in this regard because it provides a pretty simple way to display your testimonials in a way that is both visually-appealing and credible.

Here’s a look at the main features and benefits it provides:

• Each testimonial can incorporate videos as well as images and text
• It allows you to add categories and tags
• You can choose from a pretty generous selection of transition effects, such as carousel, fade, or slide
• Filter slideshow content by WordPress’ categories, tags, or post ID
• Slide Image – Responsive image slideshow
• Slide mixed content – responsively slide images, text, and video together
• Slide text – helpful for rotating testimonials
• Slide videos – video slideshow.

As a Bonus, you can also use this plugin to display portfolio projects and reviews. 

Price: free.

7. Social Share Buttons

If you want your content to be seen across the Internet, gain more traffic and increase interaction on your site, you have to make it really easy for site visitors to share your content.

Social Share Buttons helps you with that, as it provides an effortless way to add social sharing buttons to your posts without sacrificing site speed.

Here are a few things you should know about it:

• Supported social media share networks. The basic plan only includes 4 networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest) while the premium version offers 7 more (LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Reddit, VK, Yummly, WhatsApp, and Em
• Placement. With Social Share Buttons, you can place the buttons before your content, after your content, or both.  You can also have them follow your site visitors as they scroll up and down the page (in the form of a social media floating sidebar).

• Style. The premium version lets you have custom Button Colors and Hover Colors so that your share buttons better match the design of your site.
• Triggers. Trigger a pop-up with the social buttons when a site visitors perform a certain action (only available in the premium version).
• Share Counts and Total Share Counts. The tool can display social media share counts for all the social networks it supports.

Price: Offers a free version as well as premium features.

Start Climbing Your Way to the Top with These Marketing Tools

As a WordPress site owner, you’ll need various tools for different purposes.

Use the marketing tools featured in this article to revive your strategy and step up your marketing game, and you’ll be climbing in no time.

Hope this information will help you turn your WordPress-powered website into an even more powerful marketing asset.

What other tools that you’ve used do you think should have made it onto our list? Make sure to share your thoughts in the comment section down below.