The world of marketing is ever-expanding, and we are here to help you navigate it.
We provide a range of services that can help you reach your audience more effectively, whether you’re looking for a new website, an improved marketing strategy, or content creation to build out your brand. We also offer tools that give you the flexibility to work with us when it fits into your schedule.
We’re always working to learn more about the changing landscape of marketing and how to best help our clients. That’s why we’ve compiled this resource guide to the best free marketing tools online. You’ll find a mix of tools from many different categories, including content creation, social media, web development, and more. Feel free to take what works for you and ignore the rest—and check back often, because this list will be growing!
Best Free Marketing Tools Online
1. Use Due to track time spent on marketing projects for budgeting, invoicing, and payments.
Due is a free tool for marketers that offers a time-tracking app to assess how much time is spent on each marketing project. This helps your organization budget time appropriately and increase productivity. Along with the time tracking tool’s capability to help you calculate billing time, it also offers an invoicing and payments platform, which is an ideal way for freelance marketing talent to bill clients for their work.
Related: Top 10 Best Chatbot Platform Tools to Build Chatbots for Your Business
2. Use Buffer for social media management.
Buffer is a social media management tool that will help you streamline your social posting efforts. We already know how powerful social media is for your marketing initiatives, but leveraging a tool like Buffer will help you increase your followers; engage your audience; and build your brand.
The benefit of Buffer is its ability to let you connect multiple accounts to one dashboard; schedule posts; create drip campaigns; and analyze the success of your posts. Buffer’s free plan is perfect for new businesses looking to grow their social presence, but to unleash the full power of the software, you might want to consider one of their upgraded plans.
3. Or use Hootsuite for social media management.
I’d be remiss to put Buffer on this list and not include Hootsuite. While Buffer is a great tool for scheduling posts, Hootsuite really taps into the central social management platform.
Its free plan allows you to sync three social media profiles, which is a great place to start for most entrepreneurs. The benefit of Hootsuite is its ability to let you quickly respond and post across all your social profiles in one easy-to-use dashboard.
4. Build a logo with Spaces’ free logo maker.
Branding is one of the most critical steps when marketing your business, and the logo is arguably the most important part of your branding. Fortunately, with tools like Spaces’ free logo maker, you no longer have to waste resources on hiring a designer to interpret your vision of the perfect logo.
Using its library, filled with hundreds of icons, frames and font classes, you can create a stunning logo that expresses your brand identity without any design training and without spending any money.
5. Use Canva for easy designing.
Visual content is becoming an increasingly popular form of marketing collateral. From custom illustrations and infographics to fully-designed sales proposals, visual content is a fantastic way for new businesses to gain credibility and build a professional appearance.
There are several free graphic design tools on the market, but one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use is Canva. Its free library of fonts, illustrations, templates and images give you a pool of graphics that you can easily drag-and-drop. From flyers and brochures to social media images and infographics, you can create it all for free in Canva.
6. Use Evernote for organization.
When it comes to marketing your business, organization is critical. Ideas may come to you at any hour of the day. If you’re not able to organize and prioritize your notes, you may not be able to capitalize on opportunities.
Evernote will help you capture ideas, inspiration and trends, all while storing it in one easily accessible location. You can access it on your phone, laptop or tablet, making it the perfect tool for finding and storing content ideas, market research, brainstorming and competitive analyses.
7. Use SurveyMonkey to secure customer feedback.
SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular free online survey tools. Surveys are a good way to collect consumer information, engage customers, uncover trends and secure tangible insights on your business. SurveyMonkey’s software is incredibly simple. In just a few minutes, you can design, create and publish your own business survey. Additionally, you’ll be able to analyze the results in the backend.
8. Use Mailchimp for email marketing.
Email marketing is imperative to the success of most businesses. While building a brand on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are important, you’re limited to the constraints of those channels. This makes it particularly difficult to move consumers through a funnel and provides you with relatively little control.
However, email provides a more intimate interaction between brand and consumer by offering you the tools you need to control effectively nurture leads. Mailchimp is an excellent free email marketing tool and one of the easiest for newbies to learn.
Related: Top 5 Small Business Tools
9. Use Sniply for growth hacking.
When you’re using social media regularly, you should also be sharing content from other, reputable experts in your industry. Sharing other influencers’ content will help you build trust with your audience, supplement your content, and also help build rapport with those relevant industry experts.
Sniply is a powerful tool that allows you to attach a call-to-action on every piece of content you share. Because the content you are sharing lives on a website that you don’t control, there is very little chance that the user will visit your site after reading the article. However, Sniply allows you to put a inbound button or CTA into a frame that the article sits inside. Thus, giving you some control of the platform and perpetuating traffic from the non-affiliated content that you share.
Related: Top 10 Tools for Reputation Marketing
10. Use Scraper to extract content from web pages.
Scraper lets you easily pull content from a web page and export it into an Excel spreadsheet. It’s a perfect way to extract contact information or competitor’s data. Once you have this data, you can use it to create cold-email lists, content topics, and other data-driven marketing tactics.
free marketing tools for small business
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is completely free software that provides valuable insights into who is visiting your website and how they engage with it.
It’s best paired with Google Search Console – another free digital marketing tool that helps you to identify any problems on your site and optimize it for traffic.
Some of the data points that Google Analytics makes available to you include:
- The number of visitors to your site by day, week, month, or any time period you choose
- Where these visitors are coming from – referrals from other website, organic search, ads, social, or direct
- The keywords people are using in Google to find your site
- The demographics and interests of your users
- How long each user spends on your site and which pages they visit
All this information is interesting, but it’s also vital knowledge that can help you to optimize your website and marketing campaigns (while keeping your SEO efforts low cost).
For example, you might notice through Search Console or Analytics that you’re getting a lot of traffic from a keyword that you lack content covering. Write a blog post optimized for that keyword and watch your traffic and engagement levels rocket.
Getting loads of visitors from Facebook but none from Twitter? Maybe this is a sign you should concentrate your marketing efforts on your main channel.
It’s all about the insights – not just the analytics.
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp
No matter how large or small your business is, email marketing should definitely be a part of your overall strategy.
When a customer signs up to your mailing list, they’re inviting you straight into their inbox. That’s why email marketing on average offers a higher ROI than any other marketing activity.
To get started with email marketing, you need a service that will enable you to capture emails, manage your lists, send out emails automatically or on a schedule, and analyze engagement.
Mailchimp is an ideal choice if you’re just starting out or if you are running a small business. Mailchimp’s basic service is free until your list hits 2,000 subscribers. It offers the main functionality you need without making managing your email marketing too complex.
Plus, Mailchimp now offers a slew of features and digital marketing tools (some under paid plans):
- Segmentation and personalization
- Landing page builders
- Form builders
- Audience insights
- CRM tools
- Predictive insights
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite
There’s no question. You must maintain a presence on social media to remain competitive in the marketplace. You also probably already know that social media can be a huge time sink, even if you’re using it purely for marketing purposes rather than endlessly scrolling.
Luckily, you have digital marketing tools available to cut down on this time inefficiency, like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite provides a central management platform for all your social media channels and allows you to schedule posts in advance so you can get all your social media content for the coming weeks or months ready in one session.
You also get advanced reporting tools to see which of your social media campaigns are working most effectively and use this data to calculate ROI.
You can also track mentions of your brand and manage responses, all in one dashboard.
Hootsuite also offers tools for promoting your social media posts through the platform now as well.
4. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo
Your content strategy shouldn’t consist of wild stabs in the dark as you cover topics you think your audience will engage with.
That’s why 60% of B2B brands with the most successful content marketing have a documented strategy. Meanwhile, only 21% of the brands with the least successful content say they have a documented strategy.
To be successful in content marketing, you need to do your research properly, and this is why BuzzSumo is one of my favorite content marketing tools.
BuzzSumo shows content that is trending across social media based on searched topics. Following your search, you can analyze the results that are returned to see what’s so appealing about them and to get ideas of subjects to write about.
But BuzzSumo is moving beyond just basic content research and viral posts. Today, BuzzSumo offers tons of digital marketing tools like:
- Keyword research
- Influencer search
- Topic-based social media feeds
- Content analysis
- Crisis management
- Brand monitoring tools
5. KWFinder
KWFinder
SEO is a fundamental of online marketing and it’s important to get right. Not only should you make sure your site is structured properly and optimized for mobile, the content you produce must also contain relevant keywords that you have a good chance of ranking for in search results.
You need a special digital marketing tool to find those relevant keywords and start your search. You have several options available from the free Google Keyword Planner, to more complex suites of tools like SECockpit.
The more advanced digital marketing tools get quite expensive, with monthly subscription fees starting at $100 or more. However, options like KWFinder offer affordable, accurate, and useful insights at a perfect price point for small businesses.
Just put in a seed keyword and the tool will come back with hundreds of suggestions, search volume data, trends, and a ranking difficulty score for each word or phrase.
Mangools, the brand behind KWFinder, offers plans for individual tools or its full suite which includes a backlink tool, website analysis, SERP watchers, and more inside each one – along with a nice browser extension.
Conclusion
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