I love Infographics. You will notice at least 30% of my blogs over the past 5 years are based on infographics thought leaders have created, of which I have shared with my community. This blog is no different and this is one very, very important infographic that all business owners need to look and, and use as their holy grail for a digital suite of tools.

In the infographic which you can see here, the tools are broken down into 6 main categories and 43 sub categories. Yes, this is a lot of information and thousands of tools that you don’t have time to use but, choosing one or two from each section will help you manage your business online. To help you with your decision, below are some of my favourite tools from each main category; Marketing Experiences, Marketing Operations, Middleware, Backbone Platforms, Infrastructure and Marketing Environment.

Marketing Experiences

The marketing experience tools are broken down into 18 sub categories, all of which you can see on the infographic. As this section is the most important when it comes to online marketing, I have listed 7 of my favourite marketing experience tools below.

1. Mailchimp (Email Marketing)
2. Hootsuite (Social Media Marketing)
3. Eventbrite (Events and Webinars)
4. Canva (Creative & Design)
5. Yoast (SEO)
6. Shortstack (Interactive Content)
7. Visual.ly (Content Marketing)

Marketing Operations

The marketing operation tools are broken down into 10 sub categories which can also be seen on the infographic. Below I have listed 5 of my favourite marketing operation tools from the infographic.

1. Google Analytics (Web & Mobile Analytics)
2. Trello (Team & Project Management)
3. Crunchbase (Vendor/Data Analysis)
4. GoSquared (Web & Mobile Analytics)
5. Social 123 (Audience & Market Data)

Middleware

The Middleware tools include data management platforms/customer data platforms, tag management, identity, cloud integrations/ESBs and API’s. See below for my list of 5 middleware tools.

1. Google (Tag Management)
2. PingIdentity (Identity)
3. SmartBear (API’S)
4. Scribe (Cloud Integration/EBSs)
5. Neustar (Data Management/Customer Data Platforms)

Backbone Platforms

The backbone platforms that you should be using for your business include CRMs, marketing automation, web content and E-Commerce. See my 5 favourite backbone platforms below.

1. Salesforce (Platform/Suite)
2. Nutshell (CRM)
3. WordPress (Web Content/Experience Management)
4. Sage (CRM)
5. Signpost (Marketing Automation)

Infrastructure

The infrastructure tools are broken down into 4 subcategories, all of which you can see on the infographic. I have listed 5 of my favourite Infrastructure tools below.

1. Clustrix (Database and Big Data)
2. Amazon (Cloud/IaaS/PaaS)
3. Citrix (Cloud?IaaS/PaaS)
4. Conduit (Mobile App Dev & Marketing)
5. Git Hub (Web Dev)
6. Google Chrome (Web Dev)

For the final, small section of tools on this visual infographic on the bottom right, take a look at all of the recognisable social networks, and also Slideshare and Foursquare.

See full infographic here.