The Essential Digital Marketing Tools infographic from Smart Insights is a cleaner approach to a landscape design style, and only covers their top 5 picks in each of 30 different categories.

As marketers today, we’re fortunate to have a huge number of free and low-cost tools to give us insight about our customers, competitors and market. They also help us compete by delivering automated relevant, real-time communications integrated across desktop and mobile and digital plus traditional marketing channels.

To help highlight the range of great options available, our infographic and free Digital Marketing Tools and Services 2016 download recommends 30 categories of marketing technology and our pick of the most popular 5 in each category. We’ve grouped them across the Smart Insights RACE Planning framework for managing digital marketing so you can review where you could make better use of the tools across the customer lifecycle.

What inspired us to create this infographic and guide?

We were inspired by Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology landscape which does an excellent job of defining ‘enterprise’ tools for managing digital marketing, but can be difficult to read because of the sheer number of tools. Also, we wanted to include more low-cost and free ‘hands-on’ insight tools which are important for managing activities like Search, Social media and conversion rate optimisation. These don’t tend to be included on Scott’s landscape. We also wanted to highlight the most popular, well-regarded services, particularly those which can be used across all sizes of businesses rather than being affordable only by the biggest brands.

I'm generally not a fan of these complex landscape designs. They're cluttered, complex, and don't help readers understand the information very effectively. I think the Smart Insights design helps readers significantly by choosing a limited number to include, and the circular format makes for an improved reading experience.

I also like the use of this infographic as content to draw in readers for their larger report on these marketing tools. As I wrote in my article "Marketing FAIL: Infographics Hidden Behind Registration Walls"

My personal belief is that they were also inspired by The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and JESS3, which I also think is a good landscape design style.