The Best Chrome Extensions for Digital Marketers in 2021!

A day in the life of a growth hacker involves Chrome extensions.

But, here’s what.

There are just soooo many of them.

And yes, we’ll be frank with you.

An unbelievable amount of them are just complete garbage.

As we enter the new normal this 2021, we’re taking a look at the only Chrome extensions you’ll ever need to put your company in a position for growth.

We’ll give you a list of the best Chrome extensions compiled by a growth hacker, not just some content marketer.

Extensions that can make a difference in your productivity, your organization, and more importantly, your growth this 2021!

SEO and Web Analysis Extensions

Keyword Surfer

Do you want to check out search volume right from Google?

How about a list of similar keywords along with their search volumes and similarity scores?

And, how about throwing some correlation charts while you’re at it?

Well, you can do all of that with Keyword Surfer.

The reason we highly recommend this particular Chrome extension is that it is unobtrusive and easily integrates with your searches on Google.

You don’t have to fumble any longer with a separate third-party application and you get all the data you’ll need right from your search bar.

It’s helpful when you want to look for what’s trending or just do a quick analysis of the keyword that you have in mind.

SimilarWeb – Traffic Rank & Website Analysis

A growth hacker needs to be able to do website analysis on the fly, especially if they’re in sales calls.

SimilarWeb gives you clear-cut analysis while skipping all the complicated stuff. It’s great if you want a quick overview of a website.

Now there are a lot of extensions focused on getting your website data on the fly. However, they’re either too cluttered with features you don’t currently need or are just junk rip-offs of other extensions.

We found our middle ground with SimilarWeb.

You can check everything from the geography of visits to traffic composition.

It’s pretty good if you’re on the phone with a client and you want to check something out real quick.

Wappalyzer

This is a great tool to find out what software a website is using. It can show everything from what analytics tool and content management system is being run.

You can use this if you’re curious about the functionality of a website or if you want to implement something new on yours.

SEO META in 1 CLICK

This is one of those Chrome extensions that doesn’t look like it’s the slickest but it can do a lot of damage if used correctly.

A quick click will allow you to check out the HTML summary of the page that you’re on.

You can also check out the headers, images, links, and socials of any given page online.

Why is this important?

Well, first of all, you can use it to examine your own pages and check for on-page optimization – which all growth hackers know is essential for good SEO.

And, it’s critical if you want to assess how a competitor is doing compared to your own progress.

You can even use it with your own clients to assess if they’re doing a good job with their on-page.

Screen Capture Extensions

Loom

Loom has been on our list for years.

Why?

Because it just works so well.

I found Loom when I wanted to create a tutorial for our Facebook Group, Badass Marketers & Founders. I wanted something easier than the video editing software Camtasia and Screenflow.

What I found was a Chrome extension that enabled me to share videos instantly.

And, over the years, I found that no one could really duplicate what Loom could do.

To this date, we still use Loom to power up regular communications within our team at BAMF.

With Loom, you can capture your screen, record your front-facing camera, and narrate your video all at once — no switching apps or upload required.

Whether it’s training new teammates or replying to a customer inquiry, Loom enhances the way people communicate.

Loom makes it easier to communicate with your team, give out instructions. film tutorials for content, and go all out with screen sharing, you can do all of this while using a simple interface built into the extension.

Nimbus Screenshot & Screen Video Recorder

I found Nimbus Screenshot when I wanted to create more how-to blog post tutorials.

It’s the everything screenshot tool.

Here are our favorite features:

• Edit screenshots
• Record screencasts – record video from your screen
• Create your own drawing or model from scratch on your screenshot
• You can draw on video recordings as well
• Paste different patterns and text boxes to your screenshot
• Resize and crop your screenshot
• Add arrows and stickers to your screenshot
• Highlight text on your screenshot
• Comment on your screenshots and screencasts

Say you want to take a screen capture of an entire webpage; you don’t have to scroll down and take a photo in each section any longer. All you have to do is click on the extension and select “Entire Page.”

They have a lot more of these intuitive functions that you can utilize if you want just a few sections.

But there’s more.

Once you’ve picked an option that you want, you can set it to automatically open your screen capture in a new tab where you have robust editing functionality.

It’s no Photoshop, but if you’re writing a guide for your audience, it’s more than enough.

Plus, they also have a screen recorder option. However, we’d still recommend loom for that.

Messaging and Calendar Extensions

Mixmax

Mixmax saves us hours in email management every week. If you’re in sales, customer success, or a busy founder spending their day in email, then this tool is for you.

Favorite features:

• Track opens, clicks, and downloads with read receipts
• Know exactly who opens your message and when, even in group messages
• Schedule meetings instantly
• Share availability and set up meetings painlessly with Google calendar integration
• Write faster and better with templates
• Create and save templates to reuse again and again
• We’ll also show analytics for opens, clicks, downloads, and replies so that you know how well your templates perform
• Personalize bulk emails instantly with mail merge
• Send hundreds of personalized emails in minutes with mail merge. Send directly from Gmail, so emails end up in recipients’ Primary tab.
• Snooze and set reminders
• Write faster and better with templates
• Create and save templates to reuse again and again
• We’ll also show analytics for opens, clicks, downloads, and replies so that you know how well your templates perform
• Personalize bulk emails instantly with mail merge
• Send hundreds of personalized emails in minutes with mail merge. Send directly from Gmail, so emails end up in recipients’ Primary tab.
• Snooze and set reminders

One of its most useful features is the ability to track emails that have been opened and downloaded, and this applies even in group emails that you send out. It will tell you when your email has been opened.

It can synchronize with your Google calendar so you can even schedule your meetings with it.

If you find yourself writing a lot of emails with the same content, it can store these templates for you and of course, help you track which emails work better. You can use it to help personalize bulk emails and give you a bunch of embed options, too.

Trust us; it’s the tool you needed for your email yesterday.

Calendly

Mixmax can feel a bit overwhelming.

This is especially true if you need something simple to schedule appointments.

If you’re busy with only meetings, then you might just need a simple link to have people select a time on your calendar.

This is my go-to tool for that purpose. I discovered Calendly when someone had sent me a link to book a time on their calendar via Facebook chat.

Curious about the technology, I went ahead and Googled it.

Favorite features:

• Invitees schedule individual slots
• Allow multiple invitees to schedule the same slot
• Meetings are automatically distributed among multiple team members
• Display your entire company/department’s availability on one convenient page
• Allow your customers to schedule directly from your website by embedding your Calendly page

• Works with your Google, Outlook, Office 365 or iCloud calendar so you’re never double booked
• Integrate with Salesforce, GoToMeeting, join.me, Zapier, Slack, and Mailchimp

Clearbit Connect – Supercharge Gmail™

I found Clearbit when I wanted to reach out to event speakers at scale.

Clearbit enables you to find email addresses for any company and displays useful contextual data for anyone who emails you.

Here’s what.

Directly within Gmail’s window, simply select the Clearbit icon and you have 100 credits to get anyone’s email you want.

Another great thing about this extension is that you can use it to find out about people who are emailing you. Pretty neat if you get unwanted solicitations on a regular basis.

Hunter.io

This is another extension that you can use to look for emails on the fly. Unlike Clearbit Connect which sort of lives in your Gmail inbox, Hunter.io allows you to search for emails based on websites and the like.

You can also use their email enrichment services.

All you have to do is to hit the extension wherever website you’re in, and it will start pulling emails with that domain.

Share any email via secure URL link

Say you want to share an email with someone, but you do not want to take a screen capture, or you don’t want to forward the email, what do you do?

This is where this extension comes in handy. If you want to share emails securely, this is a top choice.

LinkedIn Extensions

Disclaimer: We do not officially endorse the use of any third-party tools to enhance or automate parts of the LinkedIn audience-building & outreach process, as this violates their terms of service. Failure to heed this warning could result in permanent suspension from the platform.

We no longer use chrome extensions for LinkedIn automation as it’s been linked to accounts getting banned. Use these tools with caution.

Dux-Soup

I found Dux-Soup when I wanted to get LinkedIn Profile URLs at scale, then have a virtual assistant run through them to collect profile data. If you remember LinkedIn Helper now rebranded and improved as LinkedIn Heper 2, you’ll find this to be a lighter version.

Now we like Dux-Soup because of the amount of stuff that you can do with it.

For example, it can help with auto-connecting and visiting profiles, it can automate custom intro messages to people that you want to connect with, and it even has a dashboard for you to track stuff.

The free version won’t offer a lot of tools and you need to get on the paid version if you really want to use its extensive feature set.

Oh, and did we tell you?

You can also use it to find emails.

Disclaimer: We do not officially endorse the use of any third-party tools to enhance or automate parts of the LinkedIn audience-building & outreach process, as this violates their terms of service. Failure to heed this warning could result in permanent suspension from the platform.
We no longer use chrome extensions for LinkedIn automation as it’s been linked to accounts getting banned. Use this tool with caution.

lempod

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know that we’ve studied virality on LinkedIn and determined that one of the best ways to go viral is to build momentum.

Now the best way to build momentum is to get as many engagements on your post while it’s still fresh.

The reason this works is that it sends a signal to the LinkedIn algorithm that a post is starting to trend, and it should prioritize the post on other people’s feeds.

But, what do you do if you still need that extra boost?

You elicit the help of a pod.

A pod is basically a group of people who are willing to give “valuable” engagement for your posts.

Now you could build your own pod if you wanted to, but the best way to get into an already working pod is to use lempod.

lempod is an extension that gives you access to a variety of pods that are related to your industry.

Notice that we used the word “valuable” a while ago?

You still need to get good engagement for a post to seem to have organic traffic. It would make more sense for people who are interested in your industry to engage with your post, than someone from the opposite end of the spectrum.

It won’t be natural.

You can easily search for a pod that you want to post in to create a new one.

The pods are also secure because they feature access tokens that you have to get.

However, this is a paid tool so you have to shell out a couple of bucks to get its full functionality.

Social Media Extensions

Toolkit for Facebook

There are other toolkits around, but this one deserves mention. Basically, it automates bulk tasks on Facebook.

It’s so feature-rich that it can perform tasks ranging from liking everyone’s posts to posting a status update on every group that you are a part of.

The best part of this is that most of the features are free.

However, this tool comes with a caveat; you have to use it carefully because Facebook is getting smart at recognizing bots, make sure you space out the time it takes to post in between groups for instance.

Facebook Pixel Helper

Facebook Pixel Helper identifies whether you’re getting retargeted by Facebook ads (ensures your pixel is working, too).

A number will appear on the Facebook Pixel Helper icon to indicate the number of pixel events. When clicked, a panel will expand to show a detailed overview of the page’s pixels, including warnings, errors, and successes:

When you click it, you can find out how many pixels are being run at the moment. It also includes a detailed overview.

Buffer

Buffer makes sharing or scheduling social media posts from any web page easy.

When you click the Buffer icon, Buffer will automatically pull the title of the article or any highlighted text into the post, shorten your link and show a preview of the image that will accompany the post.

You can edit the post as you wish with any relevant hashtags, images or handles, then post to selected channels immediately or add it to your queue.

This is a great way to handle scheduling posts on the fly.

News Feed Eradicator for Facebook

How often have we found ourselves lost in Facebook for hours, simply because we were distracted by an interesting news item or an update. You’re not alone. In my case, it happens every time I log in to manage our BAMF community.

We love this particular Chrome extension because it makes your Facebook news feed disappear and you can replace it with quotes.

What if we decided to stray from the often trodden path and simply eradicate all these news items? Imagine how productive we can be!

Luckily for us, we have an extension for that. With News Feed Eradicator, not only can you replace your entire news feed with an inspiring quote, you can even customize it with your own.

Blogging Tools

Grammarly

Grammarly has been in our list for quite some time now and for good reason.

It works by integrating itself whenever it detects text boxes active on your browser.

Whether you’re writing ad copy, complaining about an info page, or writing an office memo, you’ve got to have Grammarly.

It checks your spelling and your grammar as you type.

Pretty useful if you ask me.

It even has settings depending on your writing purpose; which you can access by clicking on “New Document” in the extension. For example, you can set it to correct based on how formal you want your writing.

Google Dictionary (by Google)

Need to Google the meaning of a word in a hurry?

Then, you need the Google Dictionary (by Google).

There’s not a lot to explain with this particular Chrome extension. It’s basically a dictionary that lives in your browser window.

All you have to do is click on it and you can easily search terms that you’re not familiar with.

No matter how good of a writer you are, having a dictionary handy is always great when you’re writing or even when you’re reading.

Power up your blog posts today with this handy extension.

UTM Tools

Effin A/B Test Calculator

If you’re a marketer that needs to add tracking parameters to your links frequently, then you’ll save a ton of time using the Effin Amazing UTM Builder.

Whatever page you need to create a UTM, simply click the Effin Amazing UTM Builder icon, fill in your source, medium, campaign, click copy, and voilà! You have your beautiful, trackable link ready to go!

If you don’t feel like having to manually calculate your testing every single time, this tool is for you.

UTM.io – Google Analytics URL Builder

This is a potent extension that allows you to track your UTMs. All you have to do is input the URL, campaign name, medium, and source, and you’re pretty much good to go!

No more visiting third-party sites – or Google’s for that matter – to get the job done.

Oh, did we mention it syncs with Google Sheets? You can even bulk create links!

Imagine being able to create tracking links all from an extension.

Effin Amazing UTM Builder

Here’s another entry from Effin Amazing and it’s their UTM builder.

Whatever page you need to create a UTM, simply click the Effin Amazing UTM Builder icon, fill in your source, medium, campaign, click copy, and voilà!

You have your beautiful, trackable link ready to go! Plus, it syncs with Google Sheets. Every link you create will get automatically inputted into a specified sheet, so you never lose it.

It also has the option to connect with bit.ly to get your links shortened out.

(You can also track click-through rate with bit.ly by the way.)

Other Extensions

Extensions Manager

We just went through a lot of Chrome extensions, why not add in an extension that can help you manage all of them?

Enter Extensions Manager.

The reason we like this extension is very simple.

It helps us keep ourselves organized.

You can choose to hide all your Chrome extensions and just elect to use its search functionality so you don’t have clutter on your browser.

Truth be told, many growth hackers keep a lot of extensions, and not everything on this list is applicable to you.

Plus, Google Chrome doesn’t really make looking at your extensions the easiest thing in the world.

This little tool also helps keep track of what you already have saved in your browser and allows you to disable, enable, delete, and check what’s currently active.

Share emails via secure URL link by cloudHQ

Ever needed to share an email with a colleague or a client but don’t want to bother with a BCC or forward?

The guys over at cloudHQ have a solution for you.

You can use these links to share and reference emails on Slack, Skype, GitHub, etc. 

Sharing an email becomes as easy as generating a link and pasting it into a chatbox.

LastPass

LastPass saves your passwords and gives you secure access from every computer and mobile device.

It works just like other password manager tools, all you need is a master password and it will automatically generate and store passwords for all your sites automatically.

Once you log in to LastPass, it will enable all your other logins, so you never have to remember anything any longer.

Another useful feature we love about the app is the ability to share passwords across the organizations without having to type anything down in an email or chatbox.

You’ll also find that a lot of your clients use the app so sharing passwords becomes even easier with larger projects and tighter deadlines.

Rebrandly

Rebrandly is the fastest way to create branded links when sharing any URL. This helps make your links more memorable and pronounceable.

For example, rather than using Meetup’s ridiculously long links in my email to promote an event, I can rebrand it under “growth.chat/meetup”.

Momentum

Sometimes it’s easy to get distracted even by just opening a tab; this is where Momentum comes in handy.

Once installed, every new tab that you open turns into a beautiful background with a quote and a message reminding you of your priority for the day. It’s a relatively simple extension that’s done wonders for a lot.

It shows you the time and weather, too.

GPZ LinkedIn Tools

GPZ LinkedIn Tools gives you the power to auto-connect to individuals based on search queries with a personalized message.

The tool also enables you to send messages with a custom input of the first name to your LinkedIn connection and bypass captcha. Similar to Dux-Soup, you can also view profiles, too. Better yet, you can endorse them!

Here’s a peek into the tool’s LinkedIn messaging feature:

AdBlock

We like AdBlock because it blocks most ads, and you can even use it to prevent the ones on YouTube and Facebook. This is one of the most popular Chrome extensions ever built.

However, some websites do exist because of ads, so if you’re into that, you can disable it on some.

Tweepi

The Tweepi Chrome extension allows you to bulk unfollow and block people to clean up your engagement on Twitter.

And, it has a lot of other functions you can use to amplify your Twitter presence.

Search by Image

Want to quickly find similar images to the one you seek?

This extension allows you to initiate a Google search using any image on the web.

Researchers and marketers should know just HOW useful this is for finding the right pages, products, competitors, and a ton lot more.

To use this extension, right-click on an image on the web and select “Search Google with this image.”

Blocksite

Blocks any website hurting your productivity and have it re-direct to a project you should be working on.

There’s also an Active Days & Time feature which allows you to access the blocked websites when needed.

Key Takeaways

You don’t have to download everything just because it’s on this list.

Just download what you need and keep your browser clutter-free. You’ll find that it’s easier to work with fewer tools.

If you need to keep a tool in for a rainy day, make sure you have an extension manager handy to help you focus on the tools you use on a daily basis.

This helps you concentrate on the tasks that you need to do.

Also, take time to familiarize yourself with your newfound Chrome extensions. Remember a tool is only as good as who’s using it!

Are you ready for growth this 2021?

Join us as we hack our way into the new normal!

Don’t forget to check our roundup of the best Mailchimp alternatives in 2021!