With 2020, and its various challenges, now almost behind us, it’s high time that we start thinking about 2021, and how to optimize your marketing approach for the year ahead.

One of the main reasons that I love our industry so much is that we have so many creative developers and entrepreneurs that keep coming up with new tools. The amount of innovation in digital marketing is astounding, and you get to experiment with new tools and processes every year.

And you probably should experiment, if you want to stay ahead of competition. In our industry, innovation and creativity always win over big budgets.

With that in mind, here are five innovative tools that you can try next year:

Visual content is key in social media marketing, with every brand now posting a combination of colorful images and videos to keep their feed fresh and engaging.

But if everybody’s doing it, how can you stand out from the crowd and get your brand seen?

Try some new and innovative apps.

Beatleap was launched this year, so it’s something new to play with. The app offers a new approach to video creation – using audio to create video content.

Beatleap enables you to create and edit videos by automatically matching songs with your video clips in seconds. Add your footage, select your music, then add effects, and the app will create an amazing clip that syncs perfectly to the cadence of the music. It’s perfect for TikTok, but you can use it for any social platform.

Beatleap uses artificial intelligence to help you speed up the video creation process, while still enabling you to create something professional and awesome.

The app includes 1,000 professional songs to sync with your videos.

Do you know what most brands are missing these days? Visual consistency.

Most brands just publish visual content without ever giving it a second thought, yet the power of building visual associations should not be underestimated. People’s minds are visual – we forget names but we remember colors and visual concepts.

That’s why maintaining a consistent visual identity (colors, logo elements, fonts, etc.) is so important in establishing and building a recognizable presence.

Venngage has a “Brand Kit” feature which saves all of your brand identity elements, and ensures that your content and visual creators use the same color scheme and visual identity elements in their work.

I’ve always been a huge advocate of social media listening, and I’ve always said that it’s so much more than just spotting and helping unhappy customers. It’s amazing to finally find a brand that’s with me on that.

SentiOne uses artificial intelligence to take social listening to a whole new level – the tool helps you:

* Collect online context for your brand (and help you to never miss what’s really important by prioritizing certain messages)

* Help your customer support team to reply to social media messages faster by using AI-driven assistant

In other words, it collects, sorts and prioritizes data, as well as helping you (and your team) act upon that information by driving your response and outreach strategies.

Getting your CTAs right is key to maximizing your digital marketing success, and with Finteza, you can A/B test your CTAs to identify those that generate the most clicks and conversions.

The nice thing about the platform is that you’re unlikely to require any tech help to set it up. It’s very easy to create several remarketing campaigns and compare their performance.

Creating new content that truly helps and engages is always a challenge, be it for your blog or a social media feed you are creating that content for.

I use a variety of tricks and tools to avoid (or overcome) writer’s burnout, but Text Optimizer is the one that works most of the time.

The tool uses semantic analysis to generate a list of related concepts and questions on any topic you provide.

And in most cases it’s an eye-opener – I run it each time I’m looking a quick update for my Facebook Page as it suggests related questions, and those always work well for triggering comments and discussions from my audience.

I love playing with new tools because they always offer you a new perspective on how to approach your target customers. When I’m stuck, I always turn to an alternative tool. When I need content ideas, I use tools.

Don’t underestimate the power of tools. Not all of them will stick and stay with you for months or years, but it’s still beneficial to try out new options on a regular basis.