Top 5 Free Marketing Tools
A comprehensive marketing strategy sets out goals, the plans necessary to achieve them and the tools that’ll be used to deliver those plans.
Many marketing tools cost a significant amount of money. But marketing doesn’t have to cost a fortune. There are plenty of free tools out there to help your efforts.
Here’s our list of top marketing tools that won’t cost you anything.
Making things look visually appealing is becoming more important every day. Just look at how Instagram has over one billion active users and the popularity of influencers who do little more than show off their glamorous lifestyles or how clean their houses are.
If you’re putting together a lot of social media posts, making them more visual can help cut through the noise and get your firm seen. According to Buzzsumo, Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement, so it’s certainly worth looking into how Canva can help you produce more visual assets.
Canva also allows you to put together infographics, leaflets, presentation decks and other visual pieces of collateral. Canva can help with your online and offline marketing plans. Its templates ensure all your pieces look professional, even if your skills don’t lie in design.
Google offers a variety of free tools to advance your firm’s marketing. One of those is Keyword Planner, which integrates with Google Ads to offer you keyword suggestions. If you’re using PPC (pay per click advertising), you can use it to find out the best keywords to target.
You can also use it to identify keywords to target for organic traffic. It gives you a range of the number of searches for that term so you’ll be able to figure out which terms are most valuable.
There are other tools you can use for keyword research. UberSuggest is a free tool, while Moz and SEMrush offer free trials. You can also pop your keyword into Answer the Public and get a number of related suggestions.
The free plan from Hotjar allows you to see what your site visitors see. It records their journeys through your site so you can identify drop-off points and dead ends. You can see where users are clicking, scrolling and moving their mouses. The data is GDPR-compliant, so you don’t have to worry about the privacy aspect.
It also lets you send and store up to three surveys, which you can use to find out more about your visitors’ preferences, how they found you and what they like about your site or your offerings.
Hotjar’s heatmaps let you see how much of your pages are being viewed, letting you know if you need to change the way they’re structured. It’s useful if you’re conducting A/B testing on your site and want to see how changes affect user behaviour.
Moz’s Link Explorer lets you analyse the authority of your website and that of your competitors. The free version of the tool gives you three reports per day, which should be enough if you split out your competitor analysis over a week.
You just add your URL into the explorer and it show you Page and Domain Authority, the number of different sites linking to yours and the keywords you rank for. It also offers keyword suggestions and lets you directly compare your site’s stats to a competitor’s.
For a high-level oversight of your firm’s website and your competitors’ sites, you can do worse than using Link Explorer. Moz also offers a paid-for version, which gives you more reports, or you could use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
When managing multiple projects, an overview of what’s going on is always beneficial. Trello lets you set deadlines, organise projects and tasks and facilitate collaboration between colleagues and departments.
Third-party apps can be integrated with the program, so you can use it with tools like Slack and Dropbox. You can upload files and check tasks off as you go, so everyone knows the status of a project.
It offers templates used and provided by big businesses, including Buffer, so you have a starting point. Trello offers a paid-for version that gives you more features, but the free plan provides all the project management you’re likely to need.
You can’t look at marketing tools without looking at Google Analytics. But it’s not one of our top five recommendations – because you probably already have it set up.
It requires some setting up, but once that’s done, you have a massive amount of data ready for analysis. You can tell where your site’s visitors are coming form, what they’re looking for and how long they’re spending there.
If you spend a lot of time in Analytics, it’s worth taking a look at the Google Analytics Academy. It offers free courses on the tool, depending on your skill level and familiarity, which will allow to you really get the most out of your data.
