10 Best Inbound Marketing Tools in 2023

Inbound marketing is usually seen as the best long-term marketing strategy. While outbound marketing (going to your leads) is effective, and not a waste of time, inbound marketing is the best way to snowball your marketing efforts and build a predictable stream of leads and revenue over the long term.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing involves growing your company by creating valuable content and experiences that attract customers. Outbound marketing pushes content to an audience (e.g., a cold email campaign). Mario Quintana once said, “Don’t waste your time chasing butterflies. Mend your garden, and the butterflies will come.” This quote perfectly summarizes the principle of inbound marketing.

What are inbound marketing tools?

Inbound marketing tools enable you to create digital assets that market themselves without your presence. These digital assets (such as a blog post or YouTube video) continue to bring in organic traffic long after they are published, leading to increased brand awareness, leads, and revenue for your business.

Here are 10 of the best inbound marketing tools.

1. Writing Studio 

Writing Studio is a content writing company. For inbound marketing to work well, you need to create high-quality content that provides value to your customers and ranks well in search engines. With Writing Studio, you can have a range of different content types created, including blog articles, press releases, and ebooks.

Writing Studio is a fully managed content writing service, meaning everything is “done for you.” All content is thoroughly researched, written by experts, edited, proofread, SEO optimized, and even formatted for your CMS. One of the best parts about outsourcing content writing to Writing Studio is that you can save time and spend that on other higher-level priority tasks within your business.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot is a marketing, sales, and service platform that provides a range of inbound marketing solutions. As the company that coined the term “inbound marketing,” all of their products are built around this marketing philosophy.

HubSpot’s products help you “attract,” “engage,” “delight” your customers. From comprehensive client relationship management (CRM) tools to chatbots and blog idea generator tools, HubSpot has a range of inbound marketing tools that will help you attract more qualified leads to your business.

3. Canva 

Canva is a graphic design tool with thousands of templates that helps you create beautiful graphics for social media and your website.

When creating content experiences for your target audience, it’s typically not enough to just write text. It’s important to make your content visually appealing to help keep users more engaged with and enjoy experiencing your content more. Canva helps you easily create graphics to use on your website, even if you’re not an experienced designer.

4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that helps you schedule and manage your social media all in one place. With Hootsuite, you can create social media campaigns and track the analytics and engagement all within the platform. It helps you consistently publish social media content to bring more attention to your content and brand without having to manually publish your content.

5. Semrush 

Semrush is an “online visibility platform.” It’s known for its range of SEO tools used for keyword research, backlink, and competitor analysis, but it also has a range of other tools that you can use to manage your social media, PPC, and content marketing tasks. Semrush helps you understand the data behind your marketing decisions, making your results a little more predictable.

If you’re creating a variety of content assets you want to perform well in search engines, a tool like Semrush helps you understand the exact terms people are searching for and how competitive they are. Understanding this information helps you create the most compelling and relevant content for your business and customers.

6. Grammarly 

Grammarly is an AI writing assistant. It’s often used as a browser extension that follows you around wherever you’re typing, providing you with suggestions and corrections to improve your writing and ensure it’s error-free.

Publishing polished and error-free content provides your users with a better user experience, and it also maintains a high-quality perception of your brand. Grammarly can help you improve the quality of your content which is overall a positive thing for your marketing efforts.

7. Intercom 

Intercom is a business messenger tool for automating customer service. Intercom helps you interact with your customers on your website when you’re not there. Intercom can answer customer questions like “what’s your pricing?” or “I haven’t received my order,” It provides people with the best course of action for their needs, whether that’s being redirected to a live operator or a specific FAQ page. Intercom is a great way to engage customers on your website without having to hire more people than necessary.

8. HotJar 

Hotjar is a behavior analytics tool. It integrates with Google Analytics and helps you visually understand how users are interacting with your website. What you see are “heatmaps” of your page showing where people are clicking and dwelling. Hotjar helps you understand how to best design your website to provide users with the best user experience.

Numbers alone can’t really tell you what users are doing on your site, so by using Hotjar, you can make your content and call to action easy and accessible to attract and engage the most people.

9. Google Analytics 

Google Analytics provides you with every data point imaginable with regard to how people interact with your website. It shows you how many users you have, how many page views, what countries they’re visiting from, how they interact with your website, what time they visit, acquisition channels, and the list goes on.

If you’re serious about creating a great inbound marketing experience, Google Analytics will show you what’s working and how you can improve your marketing strategy.

10. Google Search Console

Google Search Console provides you with a range of tools and reports that help you measure your website’s performance in organic search results. It also helps you identify technical issues with your website to improve SEO.

An SEO-friendly website will attract visitors without actively seeking them out, so this is a great tool to track your content’s impressions, clicks, click-through rates. It will also show you rankings for different pages, queries, and countries to help you best understand how you can improve your online visibility. 

The bottom line

Inbound marketing is an important strategy to focus on for long-term success. Hopefully, these tools gave you a broad range of options to work with, ranging from the creative, creation, and analytical sides of the inbound methodology.

If you want to outsource inbound marketing, consider working with an agency that offers inbound marketing services.