Top 10 Chrome Extensions for Digital Marketers

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The internet is filled with a ton of software, apps, and browser extensions that can help you accomplish more with less effort and time!

While software and apps can be incredibly useful, they often flood you with more information than what’s needed at that very moment. Hence, for marketers who value efficiency without having to abandon the data-driven mindset, having the right browser extensions would allow you to enjoy the best of both worlds!

Here are 10 of the best Chrome extensions every digital marketer oughts to use!

Colourzilla

What it does: Identify Hex color codes

Why you’ll love it: Accurate sampling, time-saving

Who is it for: Content Marketer, Graphic Designer, Digital Marketer

ColourZilla is a colour sampling tool that allows content creators to accurately sample and identify colours of their choosing. With just one click, the beautiful colour you see on the page is being identified for you, eliminating the need for guesswork and saving you a ton of time!

Pocket

What it does: Save and compile useful resources into a easy-to-read format

Why you’ll love it: Clean aesthetics, convenience

Who is it for: Digital Marketers, Content Marketer, Social Media Marketer

Too many opened tabs is a productivity killer.

Often known as a “read it later” app or an “offline reading tool”, Pocket is an indispensable extension for individuals who are allergic to unused opened tabs. It allows you to save valuable resources and revisit them in a distraction-free space and format at a later time with relative ease. Compatible with most social media platforms and news sites, Pocket allows you to save anything from articles to videos.

When it comes to compiling a trove of great content ideas for inspiration, there is no better extension for the job than Pocket.

Page Analytics

What it does: Understand how visitors interact with your website

Why you’ll love it: Gain valuable insights on your audience’s behaviour, obtain data for website optimisation

Who is it for: Performance Marketer, Content Marketer

When it comes to your website, understanding what’s working and what isn’t is essential. Without this information, you will be leaving money on the table as you’ll have visitors bounce and dropping off your website without ever making a purchase.

Page Analytics allows you to understand how visitors navigate and interact with your website. This nifty browser extension is able to provide important data such as pageviews, bounce rate, and conversion attribution; arming you with all the information you need to determine test results and optimize your webpage, content, and digital strategy for better user experience.

Ubersuggest

What it does: Identifying the right keywords

Why you’ll love it: Affordably priced, multipurpose tool

Who is it for: Digital Marketer, SEO specialist

While keyword research is crucial for a large percentage of work you do as marketers, most free keyword research tools aren’t exactly useful.

The best alternative is to buy a comprehensive paid tool that would cost you a kidney.

Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest is the revolutionary browser extension that plugs the gap. The tool provides marketers with important information such as SEO keywords rankings and search volume estimates, allowing you to accurately identify relevant keywords your competitors are ranking for.

The tool also displays the top performing pages of every domain you visit, allowing you to gain insight into the content and products visitors are interested in.

BuiltWith

What it does: Lead Generation

Why you’ll love it: Access to a large amount of data, makes reporting easy

Who is it for: Digital Marketer

BuiltWith is a comprehensive lead generation tool that allows marketers to improve their campaign management strategies by granting them access to data from leads across the world.

What sets BuiltWith apart is it’s sophisticated filtering functions. You’ll be able to retrieve in-depth data about your target audience and turn them into highly-targeted reports with relative ease.

StayFocused

What it does: Helps you stay focused on your task

Why you’ll love it: Helps you stay productive at no cost

Who is it for: Anyone who needs a little nudge to stay on task!

With an infinite number of distractions just a few clicks away, StayFocused helps you stay on task and accomplish your goals as a worker in the digital age as you’ll plant a seed destined to grow into a mighty tree in 30 minutes if you manage to stay on task and refrain from visiting websites listed on your “Blacklist”.

In the case where you fail to resist the allure of Youtube or online shopping before time ends, the tree would wither away. Ultimately, users who’re determined to participate in the tree’s flourishment will no doubt find that the ones who have truly grown, are themselves.

Grammarly

What it does: Identify spelling and grammatical errors

Why you’ll love it: Time-saving and hassle-free

Who is it for: Everyone

Imagine spending hours coming up with the perfect blog post, just to have it ruined by a typo. For marketers and writers who’ve spent hours researching and creating quality content, proofreading is understandably the last thing on their minds.

The nifty Grammarly chrome extension acts as a reliable safeguard against embarrassing mistakes that may lead to catastrophic results.

Besides identifying existing typos and grammar mistakes, Grammarly also predicts and alerts users to potential errors before they are being committed. When it comes to proofreading and spell checks, this is one of our personal favourites and arguably the best of its kind in the market!

Buzzsumo

What it does: Discover your competitors’ best performing posts and what resonates best with your audience

Why you’ll love it: Arms you with the information to develop effective content strategies

Who is it for: Social Media Marketer, Content Marketer, Digital Strategist/Marketer

If you’re a digital marketer, it’s likely that your work involves monitoring the movements of your competitors and the content they push out. The Buzzsumo Chrome extension allows you to discover what resonates with your target audience by identifying your competitors’ best-performing content.

By displaying the pageviews, social media shares, and backlinks among other details, the Buzzsumo extension reduces tedious competitive analysis to a simple and straightforward process.

For content marketers finding themselves running out of fresh ideas, Buzzsumo would be a valuable addition to your creative arsenal.

Check My Links

What it does: Identify broken links on your website

Why you’ll love it: Simple to use

Who is it for: SEO Specialist

Broken links are a nightmare.

Just a few broken links are enough to derail all the hard work you put into making your webpage a valuable resource for your visitors. While broken links are more common than we hope, Check My Link is a quick solution that comes in the form of a browser extension that crawls through your webpage and highlights all broken links that are negatively impacting your SEO and user experience. After each completed crawl, the extension notifies the website’s administrators via email a list of links that require fixing. It’s that simple.

Similar Sites

What it does: Identify competitors and similar brands

Why you’ll love it: Time-saving

Who is it for: Digital Marketer, Content Marketer

Ever wondered if there exists a magic bullet to competitive analysis? Hoping for a tool that would grant you unfettered access to a secret list of major and minor competitors in your industry?

Similar Sites is the browser extension for the job! With just one click, it introduces you to a whole list of websites similar to yours. Allowing you to quickly discover competition, potential partners, and prospective customers that could be of tremendous value for your business and overall marketing strategy.

Top 5 Skills You Need to Land a Job in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is not a monolith.

On the contrary, the industry consists of a wide array of roles that require different skill sets to accomplish the tasks involved.

Becoming a T-Shaped Marketer

The skill sets required for a digital marketer can be broken down into 2 main categories: the analytical and the creative. To succeed in the field of digital marketing, one should strive to be a T-shaped Marketer.

A T-shaped Marketer is equipped with a wide breadth of basic knowledge across many overlapping disciplines while possessing deep knowledge, experience, and capability in one or a few fields.

For marketers who are starting out, having a combination of skills from each category will greatly increase one’s employability.

10 Most Important Digital Marketing Skills

A close examination of the top digital marketing roles on LinkedIn, can reveal the key skills needed to secure a role in the industry:

Hard Skills (Top 3 + 2 Hard Skills)

1. Excel, PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Sheets, Google Slides

2. Numerical Competency > Ability to calculate: ROI, CPA, CAC, CVR, CTR, CPC etc

3. Web know how > Understand how URLs and tracking work

4. Familiarity with Google Ads and Facebook Ads (plus)

5. Familiarity with Email Marketing such as MailChimp and Hubspot (plus)

Soft Skills (Top 3 + 2 Soft Skills)

1. Copywriting

2. Strong organization skills

3. Problem-solving skills

4. Inherit Creativity (plus)

5. A natural curiosity for everything digital (plus)

Types of Digital Marketers

Here is a breakdown of job scope and responsibilities for each type of digital marketers that are currently in demand.

• The performance Marketing Geek

PPC Advertising, Analytics and Excel, Media Planning and buying, Coding.

• Content Marketing Guru

Creative with social media, Copywriting, Content Writing, Project Management, Content and social media calendar. SEO and Photoshop and graphic, and UX.

• The Social Media Expert

Social media content development, create visual very quickly, fundamentals of copywriting, social media promotion, understand social analytics.

• The All-Rounder

Master project managers, basics of Media Planning and buying, basics of performance marketing and email marketing. Know how Google analytics and Google Ads work.

Bonus tip:

Tailor your CV to include specific keywords the industries of your interest tend to look out for.

Useful Resources

If you would like to fast track your growth as a marketer, check out our very own The Digital Marketer Next Door Podcast, where we invite industry experts to discuss the hottest topics that are setting the digital marketing world on fire!

For those who prefer reading, check out our recommended list of books and resources!

Omnichannel Marketing Explained

Though often used interchangeably, Omnichannel Marketing and Multichannel marketing aren’t the same thing.

Unlike Multichannel marketing that has several different channels working independently from one another, Omnichannel Marketing is a UNIFIED customer experience that seeks to deliver a consistent, personalized experience for users across all channels and devices.

The three main pillars of Omnichannel Marketing include consistent measurement, channel synergies, and personalized experience.

Pillar #1 Consistent Measurement

What to do: Move away from channel specific metrics

Instead of looking at your Paid and Organic media and the metrics in silos, evaluate each channel based on Business KPIs will allow you to have a holistic assessment of your marketing performance.

Eg. Organic Sessions, Direct Sessions, Add to Carts, Checkouts, Sales, Revenue, ROI.

a) Calculate your blended CPA (Cost-per-acquisition)

Your Paid media efforts will positively affect brand recognition, organic and direct traffic.

Whenever you put up an advertisement, besides having users clicking on your ad and landing on your website, you are creating brand recall and increasing brand awareness in your viewers. Therefore, a large percentage of your organic traffic can be attributed to the Paid Media efforts.

Instead of viewing your CPA for Organic and Paid media as separate and unrelated metrics, Omnichannel Marketing requires you to calculate your Blended CPA by looking at your total spending holistically.

b) Calculate ROI, not ROAS

Marketing is often not restricted to just ad spend. Innovative technological tools, creative agencies, and human capital that help boost the efficiency of your marketing efforts cost money.

By shifting the focus from ROAS to ROI, you get a more accurate picture of the total cost required in Omnichannel Marketing effort.

c) Single Measurement Tool

Tracking consistency via a single measurement tool is key in Omnichannel Marketing.

Different platforms may give you different results because every platform is attributing conversions differently.

Therefore, Google Analytics or equivalent can be utilized as tools for tracking overall performance via a unified and defined set of measurements.

Pillar #2 Channel Synergies

Ensure that your messaging is consistent across all Paid and Organic channels.

A common yet costly mistake is the inconsistency between what’s presented in your advertising message and what’s written on your landing page. Having clear objectives and messaging across all channels would not only result in more accurate measurements on your end, but clarity for your audience with regards to the next step you would like them to take in the customer journey.

Channel synergies also allow for more effective remarketing campaigns. With a deeper understanding of user behaviour via your single measurement tool, you will be able to create personalized and highly-targeted messages based on actions they have taken.

Pillar #3 Personalised experience

Use website and owned data to personalize your communication message.

This allows you to speak a personalized message to a specific audience (Abandoned Cart, visited Product Page but did not take action etc) across all channels. This would produce a far better result as compared to showing the same ad to your remarketing audience as you would your brand new audience.

Types of data you can leverage for remarketing campaigns

• Website Actions via Google Analytics and Facebook Pixels etc

• CRM Data to create email drip campaigns

• Social or Advertising Data to target users who took specific actions (Watched my Youtube Video etc)

Bonus tip: Optimize your Marketing Funnel

Look at your business in a unified way via the marketing funnel.

• Channel traffic: Am I driving quality traffic to my website?

• Key actions: What’s the drop-off rate?

• Purchase: Are purchases being made?

• Loyalty: Repeat purchases and positive reviews?

By asking these questions from an Omnichannel Marketing perspective you will be able to optimize your funnel and increase the profitability of your business.

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