When it comes to marketing on a budget, you can’t beat free tools. This list of free marketing tools for small business will help you get more leads, increase conversions and sell more products online. Take a look and be sure and let us know of any we missed!
Creating a website for your small business is an important first step. With so many tools available to help you build your business, managing them can become overwhelming. This list of free marketing tools will simplify your marketing strategy and make it easier for you to make money online.
Siteliner
Content marketing is a powerful free marketing technique. Siteliner improves your content marketing by helping you discover things that are holding your site and content back from performing better, including identifying duplicate content, broken links and more.
Siteliner is from the company behind Copyscape, the plagiarism checker. Copyscape is another excellent free marketing tool, useful say if you want to double check whether that freelance article you commissioned is original and not plagiarized.
“Emotional Value” Headline Analyzer
This Headline Analyzer assumes you already have a headline crafted. Then it helps you determine how much emotional value is in the headline. The FAQs for this marketing tool claim “the key to communication is being able to reach the client at an emotional level.”
Optimize Book
With Optimize Book you get two awesome marketing spreadsheets. And the price is zero. They cover:
- Editorial calendar – With this template you can create an editorial calendar to bring an organized approach to content marketing, including topics, target audiences, days to schedule, and more.
- Keyword glossary – Helps you manage keywords to keep content marketing on track and make sure you don’t get too keyword heavy or light.
YouTube
Did you know that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine? One of the most popular types of searches on YouTube is anything “how to.” If your business is not yet active on YouTube, it’s time to get some video marketing content up.
WordPress
Finding it hard or expensive to update the content on your website? Or maybe you are a startup entrepreneur who doesn’t have a website yet? You could seriously be missing out on customers. Create a site with WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system. Use of the software is free. Just pay for hosting.
Hello Bar
Ever notice those banners containing a special message that look like thin slices across the top of websites? An easy way to get one of those on your website is through Hello Bar. Create banners to draw attention to special offers, sign up for your newsletter or take a similar action.
SumoMe
Generate more effective button shares, trace web traffic through heat maps and attract more customers to your mailing list with SumoMe and its suite of online marketing tools.
Yoast SEO
If you have a WordPress website and want to optimize pages for search engines, the Yoast plugin is the gold standard. It makes on-page optimization easy. An added plus: by following the tool’s guidance, beginners can actually learn about SEO (search engine optimization).
Keyword Surfer
This is an extension for the Chrome browser. As you are “surfing” in Google search results it will analyze those results, such as by layering in search volume data and insights about the pages that already rank so you can see it right there on the page. The Keyword Surfer is free.
Wix
Wix offers a free tool to build a website. However, it will have a Wix ad on it. If you want to remove that ad and have your site look more professional, a premium upgrade will be necessary.
Buffer
You know you need to be active on social media, but posting regularly can be very time-consuming. That’s why the right social media scheduler can be a lifesaver. Thanks to Buffer and its forever-free plan, you can use social media to your advantage in a time-effective manner.
This plan allows you to add three separate social media channels to your account. For instance, you may choose to add Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. From there, you can schedule up to 10 posts per week.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that helps small businesses track website activity and engagement. It can help you evaluate how well your SEO strategy works and give you in-depth information about customer demographics.
Google Analytics can also help you determine what’s working in your current marketing strategy. For instance, you can see how you’re currently acquiring most of your traffic and what website pages visitors find the most engaging.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the best free marketing tools available for businesses. You can sign up to receive alerts anytime your company is mentioned online. You can also sign up to monitor your competitors’ mentions, so it’s a creative way to engage in competitor research.
Help a Reporter Out
If you’re hoping to gain publicity for your business, Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is an invaluable resource that connects journalists to qualified sources. You can use HARO to land free publicity when you get someone in your business quoted as a source in a well-known publication. Plus, you can use it to generate backlinks to your website, which will help you show up higher in Google searches.
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.
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.
Canva
You need visuals to keep your audience engaged.
For example, you could use quality photos to keep your readers interested, come up with motivating quote graphics, visualize complex data with colorful graphs, and create highly engaging infographics.
Now, what if I told you that there is an awesome tool that will help you create original, visually appealing content in just a few minutes? Of course, I’m talking about Canva!
Canva keeps evolving, offering more graphic design tools and templates all the time: social media, infographics, marketing posters, business cards, eBooks, and anything else you could possibly need.
And Canva’s free templates (and entire freemium version) are actually useful too!
Use photos already featured on the site, upload and polish up your own images, or even create brand new ones.
Most importantly, you don’t need to have any graphic design experience to create high-quality graphics. With its easy-to-use drag and drop features, Canva arms you with a wide range of photo editing options, color palettes, font combinations, effects, and custom image sizes.
Conclusion
A lot of people wonder how to promote their business for free and to reduce the costs, while getting more leads and sales. There are ways to get more visibility and presence in this digital world using online marketing techniques. Successful online business owners and entrepreneurs use different marketing strategies to bring attention and traffic to their services or products. You can follow their footsteps and use different tools or platforms available to boost your brand.