Alan Draper
Are you a modern day marketer trying to make the most out of WordPress?
With so much in hand, from content creation and optimization to social sharing, is managing all your responsibilities getting a bit hard?
Don’t sweat, there is a reason marketers around the globe trust WordPress. Apart from its SEO friendliness and flexibility, they love it because of the plethora(49,000) of plugins that are available in its directory that are ready to take its top-notch functionality to the next level.
And combined with the power of these plugins, achieving your goals becomes a lot easier. Be it increasing sales, traffic, measuring performance or customer engagement, these free plugins can turn every website into a powerhouse.
Powering 27% of the entire Internet, WordPress is without doubt the most popular content management system(CMS) in existence. With the likes of Facebook, Linkedin, Techcrunch, Trello, Mashable and 16 million (including ours) other websites already using WordPress, it would not bum me out if your site runs on WordPress as well.
With so many plugins available for WordPress, it’s tough to figure out the best ones to use. So, in this post, we have hand-picked some of the best WordPress plugins for marketers that will reduce your overall marketing efforts to half(maybe even less).
Here are the certain aspects of marketing these plugins will take care of-
* Impactful Content Writing
* Effective Search Engine Optimization
* Social Media Marketing
* Meaningful Customer Engagement
* Precise Performance Measurement
Let’s begin with the first step-
Content Writing
As a marketer, you just know how important Content Writing is. I know it has been said a thousand times but words can literally make or break your brand.
Here are the top WordPress plugins that will help you with Content Writing-
Active Downloads — 1000+
Rating — 5/5
Author — Greg Ross
WordPress’ Distraction-Free Writing Mode(DFWM) is good, but DFWM combined with Just Writing is better. You can add as much functionality as you want. You can add one button or you can add them all, It’s totally up to you.
Before Installing Just Writing
After Installing Just Write. See the difference?
When you combine distraction free writing mode with a personalized layout, there is a greater possibility of creating quality content. Also, to help bloggers focus on their words without having to constantly drop out of DFWM to implement basic formatting, this plugin includes important features like spellcheck and custom paragraph styling.
You will forget about the standard editing mode of WordPress after installing this plugin.
Active Downloads — 1000+
Rating — 4.5/5
Author — Jason Funk
Are your titles attractive enough to make readers instantly click on it?
According to a Copyblogger research, 80% of visitors will read just the headlines on your blog, and only 20% will read the article to the finish.
So, it’s a no-brainer that you absolutely need to test the effectiveness of your headlines. But how do you find out which title is going to work best for you? That’s where this awesome plugin comes into the picture. Install Title Experiment and you can easily A/B test various variations of titles used on your pages as well as posts and select the best headline based on its performance.
If you want more options, I recently published a blog post focusing just on how to create the best headlines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines send a LOT of traffic. You need to make sure that your content and site is optimized for search engines to reap its benefits. SEO is hard, if you sit down to completely understand it from the ground up, you will have a full grown beard till you finish.
Hopefully, you will not have to grow a beard to better understand SEO.
There are plugins that can make SEO a piece of cake for you-
Active Downloads — 1,000,000+
Rating — 4.8/5
Author — Joost De Valk
Included in the most downloaded plugins of all time, Yoast plugin is a must have WordPress plugin for SEO purposes. It keeps 360-degree care of almost all your major SEO requirements….well-optimized keywords, custom meta tags, search engine friendly permalinks, error free XML sitemaps and on-page analysis, it does it all.
Yoast SEO and All-In-One SEO Pack are neck on neck on functionality and easiness. Personally, I prefer Yoast more than the All-in-One SEO Pack. Try them both out and do let me know your personal favorite.
Active Downloads — 50,000+
Rating — 4.4/5
According to Search Engine Land, search results with better descriptive rich snippet get 30% more clicks. In the constant changes of google algorithms, rich answer snippets have always been on the rise since 2015 and adding a rich snippet today comes under the category of ‘Advanced SEO Techniques’, if you want to do it manually.
Today, adding rich snippets to your search results is important, there’s no denying that and All-In-One Schema plugin helps you to create interesting rich snippets/schema/markup for your website.
Yoast and All-in-one Schema plugin are all you need to complete your overall SEO needs on WordPress. If you think something is missing out that can help increase SEO by a considerable margin. Do let me know in the comments.
Social Media Marketing
It is important to know where your users mostly spend their virtual time to get the most out of your marketing efforts.
Do you know where your users hang out? Among all the different answers you may think of, some platforms may repeat themselves in every answer. Those being the social media giants like Facebook, twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest and the likes.
So, it’s important to give your users a chance to share your stuff where they hang out the most. Here are the plugins that will help you do that-
Active Downloads — 100,000+
Rating — 4.4/5
Sumo Me is an absolute must have. It is better known as the swiss army knife for internet marketers. It offers social sharing buttons of almost every major social media platform, heatmaps, content reading measurement (see how far down people read your pages or blog posts), and a ton of ways to grow your email list including a welcome mat, pop-ups, hellobar and more.
Active Downloads — 3000+
Rating — 5/5
Click to Tweet enables marketers to create tweetable moments directly within their blog posts to increase engagement and drive more traffic to the content. All it takes is a single click to add a Click to Tweet box after a noteworthy quote or statistic.
Click to tweet is really accessible for your readers as its main focus is encouraging impulsive sharing by giving them an option to tweet your awesome content with just a single click.
Customer Engagement
Giving your readers a chance to engage with you can go a long way.
As we talked about it in our recently published blog, Customer Engagement leads to Customer Success — which should be the top metric to aim for every marketer. Not only it brings repetitive sales, it builds trust and empowers your brand as well.
Engagement can come in any form — comments, feedback, query, suggestion, livechat, helpdesk ticket, email…the list can go on. So, here are some of the best plugins to spark engagement with your readers and visitors on WordPress-
Active Downloads — 1,000,000+
Rating — 4.6/5
Author — Takayuki Miyoshi
Speaking of forms, one of the most important forms on your website is undeniably the contact or feedback form. Making it easy for customers to get ahold of you and your staff is a great way to provide superior customer service.
With Contact Form 7, you can easily manage multiple contact forms; plus, customize the forms and the mail contents using simple markup. You won’t ever miss an opportunity to connect with consumers with this powerful managing plugin.
Active Downloads — 80,000+
Rating — 4.3/5
Sometimes customers don’t want to send an email and wait for a reply or pick up their mobile and call a company for answers, they want quick solution to their problems which means giving a quick reply to their query as well.
The next best thing is live chatting with a sales rep or customer services representative. Zendesk Chat lets your WordPress site do that and more.
Active Downloads — 1000+
Rating — 5/5
So, we have already established that Contact forms and Live-chat is important for driving customer engagement. But there is so much more to it than just providing quick replies.
Then there is the problem of adding too much plugins which may slow your site down. What if you could provide them with a feedback form, LiveChat accessibility, onboarding emails, web notifications, FAQ page and more from just a single plugin.
Interakt does just that, minimizing the risk of slowing your whole site down.
Performance Measurement
Measuring your marketing efforts is vital. What if you keep going on a strategy that is not delivering results? Who is going to inform you that you are heading towards a dead end?
This ultimate plugin will-
Active Downloads — 90,000+
Rating — 4.5/5
Author — Alin Marcu
Google analytics has been the face of performance measurement in internet marketing. This powerful WordPress plugin is a member of the Google Analytics Technology Partners Program and enables users to access their Google Analytics data from their WordPress dashboard.
What’s more, Google Analytics WD provides custom reporting on several metrics and dimensions that aren’t regularly provided by Google Analytics. Track stats of specific logged in users, authors, post types, or categories and use this data to drive better more effective content.
This single plugin is all you need to take care of the performance measurement aspect of your marketing efforts.
Over….to you
Don’t risk the accessibility of your site in the pursuit of increasing its functionality by downloading too many useless plugins. Chances are high that once you start browsing through those 49,000 plugins directory you may feel the need to download everything (same thing happens to me when I go shopping at Target)
If you think there are other must-have plugins of any above mentioned aspect, feel free to recommend it in the comments :D
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alan Draper.
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