Top 18 Best Inbound Marketing Tools

When we talk about inbound marketing, we sometimes have the impression that it’s a subject that’s become ultra-specialized and reserved for experts: the truth is that there are a whole bunch of very accessible tools that can really help you boost your sales.

#1 Hubspot

Hubspot is part of the CRM marketing, i.e. marketing automation software. In a few words, a marketing automation tool allows you to automate all repetitive marketing tasks: omnichannel campaigns, email sending, permanent reporting and monitoring of your emails, click-through rate, A/B tests.

Based on this data, it also improves your marketing segmentation to boost your results.

Hubspot allows you to create highly efficient workflows and manage a large amount of data on your leads to ensure their follow-up in your pipeline and automate all operations concerning them.

Hubspot is the ideal software for small and medium-sized companies, from 10 to 200 employees.

Among the alternatives, we find Sendinblue, less complete but more accessible. You can also use ActiveCampaign, which offers a marketing automation tool from its lite version.

#2 Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the SEO tools that allow you to work on the 3 pillars of SEO: content (ideation tools, content optimization, etc.), authority (information on incoming & outgoing links of all sites on the web) and technical (technical audits, log analysis, etc.).

Ahrefs is (by far) the most accurate tool for estimating organic traffic and authority of a website. It offers valuable features such as the content gap to identify missing content compared to the competition, details of the referring domains of each website to identify backlink opportunities, etc.

Alternatively, you can use SEMrush, which is more complete – content optimization tools, technical audit – but less precise on backlinks, or Spyfu, which we like a lot for its ability to detect all the sites that have affiliate links (and therefore a commercial relationship) to a target site.

#3 Optinmonster

Optinmonster is a lead capture tool that allows you to capture emails or redirect your traffic to a high converting page with popups, banners, and other processes. The key to optimizing lead generation on existing traffic is to match the promotional message to the content.

Optinmonster is the leader in popup tools, and for good reason. The tool is very complete, and allows you to manage dozens of campaigns with a formidable simplicity.

As an alternative, we suggest Intercom or Drift: more complete (and therefore more expensive), these tools allow you to do conversational marketing and are quite similar to a marketing automation tool, but on significantly different channels: live chat, in-app messages, and the endless popups.

#4 Google analytics

Google Analytics is a web-analytics tool, which means that it allows you to measure your traffic, and especially to follow the performance of your traffic by landing page, by channel (search, social, referral) and by traffic source, in terms of conversion. When properly configured, these tools are at the heart of the analytics of an e-commerce site or more generally of an online activity.

These tools have made a lot of noise recently with the decision of the CNIL which would have banned Google Analytics. In fact, what is at issue is the individualized tracking of a user or visitor in his or her journey on the website. A feature used by very few users of the free Google solution.

Above all, we have the example of Google because it is Google, but in real life, it is a feature offered by most marketing automation software. Many of which are in the USA. On paper it is forbidden too – even more so, since an anonymous user-id is associated with an email address or even a customer record in this case.

In short, what counts in web analytics is above all flow analysis. As long as you don’t go into detail about the behavior of each individual user or visitor you are very much on the right side of the law.

As you can see, there are alternatives that perform the same functions as Google Analytics, such as Matomo or Mixpanel.

#5 Typeform

Typeform is one of the software that allows you to create forms a little more complex than a simple email field, with an interesting experience for the user.

Typeform has become an institution on the subject thanks to their self-rolling form format. The product is very complete, allows you to make forms that always convert very well and very easily, and it integrates with almost every possible tool.

In the alternatives, you can find Outgrow to create quizzes, calculators or games: it’s an interesting solution that we see more and more, designed around the gamification of the user experience.

#6 Unbounce

There are many landing page tools, which are mainly distinguished according to the following criteria: the ease of use of the builder and its flexibility (so as not to depend on a designer), but also the depth of the integrations – whether to customize it to the maximum (templates), or to integrate A/B tests, or your emailing and CRM tools.

The leader of the landing page for professional marketers, it is accessible to both the most advanced and novice entrepreneurs. It is one of the most complete tools on the market, with advanced customization and wide-ranging features, from the Google Adwords plugin to the A/B Testing module that automatically selects the best performing version.

A possible alternative is the Leadpages software, which is also quite complete.

#7 Answer the public

Answer the public is part of the curation tools, which allow you to find content ideas to know what to write.

Answer the public is a tool that leverages Google’s People Also Ask and tries thousands of keyword combinations based on a keyword to identify questions that people may have about a topic.

For example, if you type in marketing tools, the tool iterates over the prepositions what, can, who, why, where, when, which, how etc. to identify questions to answer. It’s a powerful tool for finding an original angle or knowing what to include in an article.

In other methods to find content ideas, you can use Quora (site:quora.com keyword to go fast, while linking to the article xray search), Reddit, or Tweet Hunter.

#8 Semji

Semji is a content marketing tool, which means that it allows you to find new content ideas, understand what generates traffic, research the specific interests of Internet users and see how to respond. There are several types of content marketing tools, from content optimization to content marketing reporting.

In our eyes, Semji is a bit of an all-in-one (at least in the promise) that goes from content planning, to semantic optimization, and even to reporting.

#9 Buffer

Buffer is a tool for scheduling posts on social networks. It is very useful and effective to systematize its publications and maintain a regular presence on certain social networks.

As an alternative, we suggest Edgar, which performs the same functions.

#10 Livestorm

Webinars remain one of the most effective ways to generate leads. There are dozens of them on the market, and they differ mainly in terms of the webinar experience (replay, sending confirmation emails, etc.) but also in the lead generation tools offered (CSV export, integration with your CRM) and finally, in the prices.

Livestorm is clearly our favorite: it is a very complete tool with a large number of features accessible from the free version. It’s the best on the lead enrichment & lead management part so if you’re doing webinars to make business it’s the ideal tool.

As an alternative, you can use Zoom, which is a bit cheap, or Webikeo, a French tool that has the advantage of offering emailing lists to its users.

#11 Anchor.fm

Anchor.fm is one of the podcasting tools – to create, edit, distribute, and even monetize (in some cases) podcasts.

We recommend Anchor.fm because it is the all-in-one tool for podcasting. It’s put together by Spotify for content creators, and it’s 100% free.

#12 Vidyard

Video hosting and management tools make it easy to create, edit, and host videos. This is pretty useful because if you want to add a custom video in an email, or even on your website today, most website creation tools or hosting companies aren’t really designed for it.

Vidyard is a tool that allows you to remain the owner of your content and solely responsible for its distribution (as opposed to platforms such as Youtube etc.) and to create your videos simply.

#13 Giphy capture

GIFs (for Graphics Interchange Format) are also a very efficient way to communicate ideas.

At Salesdorado we are quite fond of Giphy Capture to quickly and easily create GIFs or MP4 videos based on a Youtube or other video when we can’t find our happiness in the existing platforms.

If you are not convinced, you can also use Piñata farms.

#14 Fireflies

Among the content marketing tools that allow you to improve your content, there are marketing research tools: for this, some tools allow you to record live meetings and especially to transcribe them.

In this category, we recommend Fireflies, with a starting offer of $10 per month (with 3,000 free minutes), which allows you to quickly gather valuable information.

#15 Canva

A well-known tool: Canva. It helps content marketers create professional graphics. You can choose from a multitude of templates, whether it’s a Facebook post or a newsletter layout.

In addition, Canva now offers a free video editor that allows anyone to create a video for social media, even without video editing experience.

#16 Brand 24

Now you want to track the activity of your content on social networks long after it has been published: there are social network monitoring tools for this, like Brand24. With plans starting at $49 per month, it tells you when and where your content is being shared and what is being said about it.

Among the alternatives, we suggest Mention.

#17 Table

Inbound marketing tools should not be underestimated, as they allow you to easily and regularly monitor your KPIs, but also to analyze certain aspects of your performance in order to identify areas for optimization.

Tableau is one of the most comprehensive business intelligence tools, with ultra-accessible data analysis functions and excellent visualizations. Ideal for medium and large enterprises, it offers cloud or on-premise access, and access via software.

Special mention for the configuration of alerts and subscriptions for reports to be shared within the organization.

Some possible alternatives: Data studio, Big query (the Google tool), or Chart.io.

#18 Screely

We already talked about it in our article on Chrome extensions, but Screely is really our favorite at Salesdorado: it’s a plug-in that allows you to take beautiful screenshots (like the ones you’ve seen in this article), all clean, in one click. You save precious time, and it’s free.

We decided to put only one chrome extension for this selection, but we have plenty of them that we use every day. And because we like it, we made a dedicated article about it 👇