What Applications Are Used for Marketing Today? Top Free and Paid Apps

How mobile-tailored is your marketing campaign, content, and overall strategy? Or are you still focused on the desktop? Mobile use and marketing apps were once just a trend, but today they’re a way of life. 72% of people worldwide will be using smartphones as the major way of accessing the internet by the year 2025.

With this in view, the revenues created by subscriptions and in-app purchases broke the record in 2020 and continue to rise as consumers prefer the convenience that comes with social media marketing apps. As of 2022 global in-app purchases surpassed the $380 billion barrier.

This new way of life means consumers simply can’t imagine life without marketing apps. The best marketing apps are not just hype, they’re all about agility. With the heightened competition all over the web, you need to be consistently re-strategizing your campaigns to be able to be heard by your target audience. And the best marketing apps are just what you need for a leg-up.

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How Can Marketing Apps Help Your Brand?

There are many ways your brand can benefit when you use the best marketing apps in the best way while observing best practices. Here are the main ways you will benefit:

  • Manage social media content.
  • Create social media content.
  • Grow your audience or following.
  • Share your content in the most effective way with your target audience.
  • Collaborate with marketing teams.
  • Manage campaigns and projects.
  • Enhance engagement and customer relations.
  • Generally, grow your brand.

Here are the best social media marketing apps in various categories depending on what you need out of them:

Content Creation Marketing Apps

It’s easier for people to recall content that’s accompanied by visuals, and this is why marketers are using more visuals today. However, this strategy may not be an easy task for many people, but this is where social media marketing apps come in. They are so easy to use you’ll do it all on your smartphone.

From images to videos, here are the best marketing apps in 2023 that can help you create high-level content:

Canva

This is one of the most popular content creation marketing apps thanks to its wide variety of templates that allows even novices to create stunning graphics and visuals to uplevel their content. It’s very easy to use and it offers a free version. A premium version is available with even more templates.

They offer a huge library of images and graphics that you can use and it’s possible to share to social media platforms directly from the app.

Canva is available both on Google Play and App Store.

Adobe Photoshop Express

Express your creativity with the help of hundreds of themes and effects that you can easily apply to your content. This marketing app allows you to edit, crop, filter, dehaze, and use borders, backgrounds, and much more. It’s a more advanced photo editing marketing app.

When you upgrade to premium, you gain access to furthermore advanced features and tools to do more complex tasks and it also creates automatically scrapbooks of your favorite work.

It’s free and available on both the App Store and Google Play.

Inshot

This is one of the best marketing apps for small businesses because it has all the video editing solutions in one place. Inshot, a feature-rich app allows you to filter, apply effects or stickers, trim, add music, combine multiple videos with blank canvases, and so on, all in one place.

Thus, instead of investing in many apps and paying for premium subscriptions for all of them, Inshot makes it easy and cheap for you because it’s free!

It’s available on iOS and Android and gives you a subscription option if you want to access some premium features. Alternatively, you can buy the additional features without necessarily having to subscribe, but the subscription offers more and therefore cheaper. The subscription also removes ads and watermarks.

Content Distribution and Social Media Management Apps

Creating great content must be followed by an effective distribution strategy that ensures it appears to the right people at the right time.

The following are some of the best apps for advertising on social media that make this a breezy process for you:

Buffer

It is an intuitive app that manages all your social media platforms in one place. It helps you schedule your posts and publishes them at the ideal time for maximum engagement. It also enables you to share content you find online directly to your schedule by using their browser extension.

Available on iOS and Android, Buffer comes with a free plan as well as a subscription plan. The free plan allows for up to three social media accounts with up to 10 posts each. While the subscription plan allows for more social media accounts and offers analytics as well as team collaboration among other features.

It’s a great marketing app for small businesses as well as for larger ones.

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Hootsuite

If you’re looking for an app that does more than social media management, then this is it. This app helps you create your brand’s social media profiles, allows you to manage multiple accounts on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter all in one dashboard.

Besides being able to schedule your posts, it also monitors your brand name on Facebook and Twitter. And will notify you each time you get a mention and generate click-through stats that you can track simply from your smartphone.

This social media marketing app has a free plan allowing you to manage up to three accounts and schedule a maximum of 30 posts at a time. And a payment plan that allows for more accounts and has a feature where you can add team members to ease workflow.

It’s available on both iOS and Android.

Sprout Social

This is another pretender to the best marketing apps out there with more features to offer. You can schedule, publish, analyze and track your social media accounts from a single point.  

Sprout Social app has been created in such a way that there’s zero parity between its desktop features and mobile features. It, therefore, means that you as the user will enjoy a seamless switch in managing your social media platforms no matter where you are.

Another thing that makes this one of the best apps for advertising on social media is the asset library feature. You can access remotely your images, artwork, and messages. In addition, it allows you to add new assets such as images and all your team members can access them immediately.

It’s available on both iOS and Android and has a 30-day free trial.

Social Listening

Besides being able to effectively deliver your marketing content to your audience, it’s important to know what they are saying about your brand. This will keep you informed on your KPIs, what’s trending, and what needs immediate action.  Here are the best social media marketing apps that will help you stay informed:

Mention

Keep a real-time track of what’s being said about your brand. This app sends you notifications showing your mentions as they happen. It monitors your social media platforms, news sites, and blogs and will give you an alert each time you’re mentioned. Allowing you to respond to real-time questions, and comments or simply show appreciation.

It can also give you hints about your competition. It has a feature that allows you to retweet a mention or share a mention on Facebook.

The alerts contain what’s being said, the date and who said what. All you need to do is link it to your social media accounts and customize the kind of statistics you want to receive with an option of filtering what is relevant and what’s not.

You can create alerts linked to your brand name, your competitors, and anything related to your market that would be of interest to your marketing strategy.

This app is available on Google Play as well as on the App Store. They have a free plan and several paid options tailored for businesses of different sizes.

Best marketing apps Mention

Buzzsumo

One of the most intelligent social media marketing apps has to be Buzzsumo. It does more than just listen. It offers great analytics and can be considered a curation tool. This is one of the best marketing apps because it searches for relevant content based on web search queries and analyses it according to the backlinks, the rate of social engagement, and an evergreen score.

It has an advanced search engine that identifies the social’s most shared content for a specific topic and allows you to view the kind of content that performs best. It’s for this reason that’s considered a curation tool. You can also keep an eye on your competition, the key influencers in your niche, and more.

Available on the App Store as well as Google Play, it has a 30-day free trial.

Agorapulse

This is another app that helps with centralized management of all your social media platforms and more. It offers insightful analytics and a unified inbox to handle all your messages from one place. It has the Boolean feature to help you search important parameters for YouTube and Twitter.

It allows you to sort out your tasks by labeling them to enable quick retrieval of what you need. If you need statistics in analytical order, it will do that for Instagram and Facebook.

It allows you to follow the key metrics to gauge your campaign and provides real-time insights.

Agorapulse has a free plan and various paid plans to suit your brand. It’s available on iOS and Android.

Communication Marketing Apps

When you need to communicate with your team, what are the best marketing apps that integrate it well?

Slack

This is one of the best apps for marketing communication. It enhances teamwork by allowing a smooth and open flow of communication either as a group or individually. You can share files, images, videos, edit documents, and generally have better team organization. You can also view previous communication threads if you need to reconfirm any details.

It integrates with social media platforms and other tools such as Dropbox and Google Drive, Asana, and more.

This communication app has a free version and a paid plan. It’s available on iOS as well as Android.

Google Hangouts

This is one of the most popular communication apps for both iOS and Android users and is popular for video conferences of up to 10 members, phone calls, text messages, etc. And this can be done via your smartphone no matter your location.

This app is taken more seriously and professionally compared to others such as Whatsapp or Facebook Messenger.

It’s a free app and is available on Google Play and the App Store.

Trello

Trello is another great communication marketing app for teams as well as individuals. It’s an intuitive team and project management app with drop-and-drag features and an interface that makes it possible for everyone to follow the progress of tasks as they happen. It has cards that represent various tasks and members can rearrange, edit or add to the tasks.

Members can tag each other on various tasks to ensure clarity of work responsibilities.

The app is made to function exactly like the desktop app and this makes your marketing tasks smooth.

It has a free plan and a paid plan which offers more features. It’s available on iOS as well as Android.

Trello

General Management Marketing Apps

These are tools to help any marketer ease their workload and increase their output. Which are these?

Google Analytics

How about staying on top of your marketing analytics via your smartphone? This is one of the simplest yet vital marketing apps out there. It gives you your brand’s analytics in simple graphs.

You can use it to track your marketing campaigns, traffic, engagement, and so forth. It’s a free app that’s available on iOS and Android.

Shopify App

If your business is active in the eCommerce arena, then run it wherever you are. Because Shopify, one of the most popular marketing apps out there, enables you to communicate with your buyers, process payments, track your stock and update your listings among other features.

It also lets you upload product photos, add pricing, track web traffic as well as sales, and much more.

It’s available on both iOS and Android and it offers a 15-day trial.

WordPress

You don’t have to get home or the office to pen down those brilliant ideas. As one of the best marketing apps in 2023, WordPress gives you the power to create, publish and share your content instantly from wherever you are.

Besides these, you can check your statistics and keep updated on how your blog is doing. This app lets you manage your website content even without an internet connection.

It’s available on iOS and Android and has a free and paid plan.

Podcast Marketing Apps

One marketing strategy that is slowly gaining popularity, especially among B2B is podcasting. If you have any interest in this, here are some of the best podcast marketing apps you can leverage to maximize the reach, engagement, and basic growth of your channel.

Play

This app will easily generate a real speech from text incorporating text-to-speech voices from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and IBM. It uses an AI voice generator to convert text to audio. You can use this to create relevant content that will drive traffic and engagement.

You can pick from over 60 languages and 570 voices to use depending on what’s a fit for your audience. You can also easily publish your audio files on Google Podcasts using RSS feeds, iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud, and so on.

They offer a free trial and various payment plans. You can get it on both iOS and Android stores.

Social media marketing apps Play

Anchor

Brought to you by Spotify, Anchor is one of the best marketing apps when you want to start podcasting. It has very simple features that make it easy even for a newbie to get started. It also offers uncomplicated statistics to help you know how your content is doing.

Anchor also comes with easy-to-use one-touch distribution features with unlimited podcast hosting all for free.

It’s available on both the App Store and Google Play.

Transistor

Here is another easy marketing tool you can use in podcasting. It only requires you to upload your audio, and it will enable you to distribute it to Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

It will also offer you analytics for the required period of time that you will set. This app has a free trial and is available on both iOS and Android.

Content Discovery Marketing Apps

Feedly

This app is among the best marketing apps for discovering news and new content that may be relevant to your marketing plans. It’s a smart reader application that enables you to gather and share relevant web content on your social media platforms to boost engagement. And also, to get a reaction from your audience as a way to discover more insights.

It’s a useful marketing app for monitoring your brand mentions, your keywords, or competitor activities. As a matter of fact, when linked to Google Alerts, it can give you an alert each time content that features your keywords is identified.

As a marketer, this is one of those very important marketing apps needed on your smartphone. It will offer you vital insights without you having to read everything on the internet.

It’s available on both iOS and Android. It has a 30-day free trial and other paid options.

Scoop.It

One way to build a professional brand that’s also a thought leader is to share well-curated content with your audience. Scoop.It helps you gather and organize your industry reports and relevant news from which you can curate them to your audience.

It integrates WordPress, Drupal, Tumbler, and more. Can monitor views and clicks and also allows sharing on various social media platforms, emails, websites, and blogs.

It has a free plan as well as several paid options. Their app is available on iOS and Android.

Reddit

This may come as a surprise, but Reddit is really a goldmine of discovery for marketing apps. It generates interesting content all for free. With this app, you can see the kind of content that’s ranking, and you can leverage its search engine feature to discover what’s happening in the thematic communities.

You can narrow it down to see what people are saying on niche topics and the keywords and phrases that are carrying the day.

Reddit is a free app and is available on both iOS and Android.

Top Social Media Marketing Apps

Facebook

This is the largest social network with the most advanced platform for organic and social marketing. Besides its social aspect, Facebook is used by brands to maintain a digital social presence. Marketers also use it as a source of data that offers great insights about the niche, products, and such related data. It prides itself on over 2.8 billion active monthly users.

Marketers also use this platform to gain new customers, offer customer service, and sell.

Facebook is available on both iOS and Android and it’s also free.

YouTube

It’s the second-largest search engine in the world, which makes it a mighty fertile spot for organic marketing. 8 out of 10 digital marketers find YouTube as the most effective video marketing platform.  Google also found that 90% of people discover new products on YouTube.  This means there are consumers ready to buy and waiting to find your products.

That and many such relevant statistics make this easy-to-use platform a perfect place to market. It’s a free app that’s available on both iOS and Android.

Instagram

This app started as a simple photo-sharing app and has morphed into an enormous social commerce site. Instagram is a full virtual shopping mall with over 1.22 billion active users. And it’s for this reason that they have added features to just make that more real and also simpler for both the user and the marketer. Most notable are the shoppable posts and stories.

The rise of ephemeral content has also shifted how brands present themselves. It has added to more creativity and the humanization of brands. As one of the most popular marketing apps, Instagram makes business more fun and vibrant.

The app is free and available on both iOS and Android.

Other high-ranking social media marketing apps include LinkedIn with 756 million users and Twitter with over 350 million active users.

Conclusion

The best marketing apps can be considered the tools that will propel your marketing efforts by giving you deeper insights and guiding you on your marketing campaign plans. By helping you create better visuals, stellar content and implement great marketing strategies.

An effective marketing campaign must have a method of balancing varying types of marketing mix for promotion as well as distribution. The above list of best marketing apps offers you the first step to having an advantage over your competition. You only need to know the right tools for the right task.

Reach your audience through the right channels, offering the right message in a way that they understand. And the demand for more of your service or product will keep going up. In the mobile world, all that matters is creativity, flexibility, and agility and all these marketing apps can get you there.

The Best Marketing Apps for Small and Growing Businesses Today digital marketing apps social media #marketingapps
Article by Lorraine Pavel

Article by Lorraine Pavel

SEO and Content Strategy Expert

As Marketing Strategist and SEO expert, Lorraine provides creative solutions that mix strategy and know-how. Focusing on content marketing and SEO, her activity is reinforced by HubSpot and Google certifications and almost two decades of marketing experience collaborating with businesses across the globe.

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