Get access to the same tools we’ve used to generate multi-six-figure incomes for our clients and our agency.
McKee Creative’s successful digital marketing for SMEs wouldn’t be possible without the best online marketing tools for set up, delivery and reporting of SEO, Email Marketing, Content Marketing, and Social Media Campaigns. Our team is intentionally small, and people often ask us how we manage to bring profitable results for our clients through so many different marketing channels. Here are our favourite 18 online marketing tools that help us make money for our clients.
Your business needs an online home that houses your content. Sure, use social channels as well, but you need to have a site that you own so that it isn’t subject to the changing rules of social media algorithms. Every marketing channel you use should lead people back to your site.
For service-based businesses, either Wordpress or Webflow are great options. We like the design freedom of Webflow (our agency site is on Webflow), however you might find that the templates of Wordpress allow you to get up and running, and maintain your site more easily.
Both have ecommerce features, (Wordpress integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce) but for fastest load speeds and ease of in-house use for ecomm businesses, we recommend Shopify.
If you are considering having a site built, talk to us first so that you can make sure it has the right elements in place to be traffic-ready. We can also build your website for you if you prefer.
If you’re on Webflow, we recommend you use their hosting for full functionality.
For all Wordpress sites, we recommend SiteGround. It’s not only fast, with great customer support, but the SiteGround Optimizer plugin is excellent. After trying a number of other hosting solutions, we like SiteGround so much that we have our own bulk hosting account for a bunch of in-house projects we have on the go.
Over the years we have experimented with Hubspot, Basecamp, Asana and Trello. But moving to monday.com was one of the happiest moments of our project-management lives :)
Nothing gets forgotten, we can see at a glance when a task was last updated, and the customer support is top-notch.
We organise each client’s board into sections for SEO, Email marketing, Content Publishing, and Paid Campaigns (some are still using Facebook, and we do Google Search, Google Display, YouTube, Tik Tok, LinkedIn and Taboola at the time of writing).
We also have a section for client requests which we can link directly to their email address so that it populates automatically, and a section at the top with a running total of the client’s monthly revenue - that way each team member can see at a glance whether we’re exceeding the revenue goal, on track, or whether there is work to do to get there.
The over-the-line feature that sold us on moving to monday.com was the ability to track time on each task, at the click of a button.
We pair our monday.com account with a simple setup in Google Drive for file storage, and each project runs like a dream.
Hands down, SEMRush has been a game-changer for us, for both on-page and technical SEO. SEMRush brings excellent customer support and the features just keep growing. Not only is it excellent for optimising site health, doing traffic and backlink analysis and discovering content opportunities, SEMRush also allows us to see what our clients’ competitors are doing, at the click of a button.
The neat thing many people don’t realise is that SEMRush also lets us evaluate Influencer/PR opportunities for our clients, instantly. Often our clients are approached by influencers’ teams, keen for perks. If we find the influencers’ own site stats don’t measure up, we can at least evaluate the request in terms of what will benefit our clients in other ways.
For training in writing content, we’ve appreciated Chris Von Wilpert’s Content Mavericks.
Three online marketing tools are used on heavy rotation for McKee Creative’s clients:
With Messenger Marketing being so effective for ecommerce and lead generation, we love the ease-of-use that Manychat provides. The messenger marketing flows we build are very successful no matter what demographic, and it’s fun being able to bring the brand’s personality right into potential customers’ inboxes.
We build Manychat flows for many different use cases:
Think of Manychat in a similar way to the old “Choose your own adventure” books that people (of a certain generation) read as kids ;)
Sure, there are a bunch of different plugins that help collect customer reviews and we’ve certainly seen inside many of them. Stamped.io wins our vote for ease of use, reliability, pricing and features.
If you haven’t caught on to the power of the Australian-born Canva yet, where have you honestly been? The Canva Pro subscription is peanuts compared to the benefits included, and we know there are thousands of businesses that never might have gotten off the ground at all if it wasn’t for Canva.
Along with powerful features under the hood, we’re also extremely impressed by how seriously Canva takes its corporate responsibility, both in-house and in the work being done to help fight land degradation.
ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo are our go-to platforms and we’re partners for both. We actually prefer the powerful automations of ActiveCampaign, but understand that many ecommerce businesses find Klaviyo a lower-cost entry point.
For examples of what our agency has achieved with our email marketing service, take a look at Chelsey Jean’s 41X ROI via ActiveCampaign here and Sarah Griffin’s extra $52,633 in 7 days via Klaviyo here.
For templates to build out your Flows/Automations, click through here.
Add on 1:1 coaching sessions with Jo McKee, whenever you need them:
For Facebook training, we wholeheartedly recommend Jody Milward’s ADVisory. The reason we can recommend Jody is that we did the same training years ago so we know how robust Jody’s approach is, and we regularly write ad copy for Jody and her students so we see the results of the campaigns (you’re welcome to order ad copy via our platform, Your Ads on Demand.)
Jody keeps things simple and clear, and misses nothing in terms of setup.
For all other platforms, we recommend AdSkills which our own team uses.
For price, platforms and features, we can’t go past OneUp.
Schedule for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (including a “first comments” feature for Instagram and LinkedIn
AND you can also schedule Google My Business updates right from the dashboard.
Once we discovered EIN Presswire we never looked back. The reach is formidable and the pricing packages are within reach of SMEs, which is a big factor for us. If you’re serious about organic growth, plan to run a press release at least each month to drive traffic to your site.
Whenever we encounter clients who have the ol’ “shiny object syndrome” we find they struggle to get the most profitable results for their business.
The reason is that there is a time cost involved in setting up every tool.
It is wise to look honestly at what is needed and only buy those tools. Then make sure you’re using them to their full potential, and that there is a genuine need to change, before spending hours switching over.
We have found that the above list of high-quality online marketing tools gives us everything we need to help our clients’ businesses grow.
Here’s the list in summary:
Foundation: build your website
Wordpress with SiteGround hosting (open your Siteground account and create the Wordpress site there).
Deliver
SEO and content marketing
Email marketing
Paid social campaigns
Organic social post scheduling
Press Release distribution
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