The saying goes, “Nothing in life is free”. That’s not entirely true when it comes to online tools. Free online tools are great because they save you time and money. The term “tool” can be used broadly to describe many things therefore uses are generally interchangeable. Below are the various ways you can use free marketing tools to promote your business.
What if you could get free and cheap and even full access to some of the best online marketing tools in the world? I’m not talking about just a small handful, but many that aren’t just good but great. No catch, no fine print, just free and great marketing tools to help your business succeed. Now imagine you had a list of only the very best tools to use with tips on how to use it. Wouldn’t that be helpful? Well, we created such a list.
We’ve assembled a tried-and-true list of the best free digital marketing tools for entrepreneurs, covering all aspects of an online strategy. In our experience, these 10 free web tools protect your privacy without sacrificing quality. Plus, they’re easy-to-use with minimal technical skill required.
Let’s dive in.
1. Project management and collaboration — Trello
Communicating and setting expectations for deliverables, achievable milestones, and meeting deadlines for yourself, your team, or your stakeholders is essential to your success, on or offline.
In the past, project management efforts happened mostly through email. Email platforms are very limited, however, and simply were not built to accomplish the dynamic and fast-paced tasks digital marketing activities demand.
Trello is one of many free digital marketing tools for easy project management. Displaying each project like a “board” containing “cards” with checklists, the user interface is easy to navigate and understand.
Like most collaboration software platforms, there are upgradeable, paid features, but their free basic service includes the important and most essential core features:
- Easy organization of project tasks, milestones and deadlines
- One third party app integration per “card”
- Customizable task categorization or status tags and labels
- Drag and drop functionality
- Checklists with progress charts
- Data filtering
- Deadline reminders
- Easy file/attachment uploads
- Email notifications
- Activity log
- SSL data encryption (security)
For most startups, Trello is a simple and powerful way to organize and plan digital marketing projects.
2. Website performance monitoring — Smylelytics
Unless you’re a statistician, gauging your website traffic can be exhausting. It involves analyzing multiple key performance indicators in to order to reveal insights into how your visitors interact with your website. With this gold mine of performance data, you can better optimize the content on your website to achieve your online goals.
An extremely user-friendly tool, Smylelytics sends you a bi-monthly report of your website’s traffic data, making the process a breeze. By translating your website’s numerical data into fun, personalized photos, you can see at a glance if your site is improving, holding steady or requires your attention.
No more logging into Google Analytics and digging through confusing charts and graphs of statistical data. Smylelytics includes:
- Google Analytics data translation for key performance indicators including: bounce rate, new visits, visits, pages per session, goal conversion rate and time on site
- At-a-glance images depicting good, neutral and poor website performance for each indicator
- Enjoyable, easy-to-read email reports twice a month
- Eight fun, free themes you can choose from for email personalization
All you need to get started is your website’s URL, the email address that is tied to your Google Analytics account (you’ll need to have Google Analytics installed), and an email address for your reports to go to. That’s it!
Related: What Startups Need to Include in Their Digital Marketing Strategy
3. Customer relationship management — HubSpot CRM
Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you manage your relationship with your customers. From sales process tracking to searchable data storage and information organization, keeping track of your customers and prospects is much easier with a CRM tool that does all the heavy lifting for you.
Mainly used to manage a business-customer relationship, some CRM free digital marketing tools also help you manage business contacts, employees, clients, prospects, contract wins, sales leads and more.
With HubSpot’s CRM tool, you get access to all the core features for free:
- Customizable views
- Deal boards
- Task boards
- Drag and drop communicator
- Extensive integration capabilities
- Prospect and customer database
- Email connections
- Templates, tracking and scheduling
The tool’s interface is easy to use and offers a guided walk through to familiarize you with the layout. You can also import and export contacts into your custom databases for prospects or current customers, minimizing busy work and time spent keeping your lists updated.
4. Website optimization: Hotjar
Great, paid options if you can swing it: KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg
Let’s say you’re curious how your visitors are actually using your website—where they click, how far they scroll, etc. Tools like Hotjar can show you exactly what your visitors are doing, via heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and visitor recordings. Hotjar also has options to analyze your funnel and to insert messages and surveys to your visitors.
How we use Hotjar: User research can be incredibly powerful stuff. I find great value in seeing how someone interacts with blog posts. How much of the post do they read? Where do they pause? What do they click? Seeing all this information helps me design my posts in a clearer way.
Also free:
- Inspectlet (free for 100 recorded sessions)
- SumoMe Content Analytics
5. Reports: Simply Measured
Great, paid option if you can swing it: SumAll Reports
Simply Measured offers enterprise-level analytics and management for big brands and their social efforts. It has a wide array of free tools for the rest of us, too.
Among Simply Measured’s reports are these:
- Twitter Follower Report
- Twitter Customer Service Analysis
- Facebook Fan Page Report
- Facebook Content Analysis
- Facebook Competitive Analysis
- Facebook Insights Report
- Instagram User Report
- Social Traffic Report
- Traffic Source Report
- Google+ Page Report
- Vine Analysis
Phew! That’s a lot of reports!
How to use Simply Measured: Each of these reports costs no money, although Simply Measured will ask for a Twitter follow or a Facebook mention in exchange for the free report. You can save loads of time in pulling reports from this one location as you seek to gain insight on where your social media efforts have been going lately. They’ve got all six major social networks covered: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Also free:
6. SEO: Open Site Explorer
Great, paid option if you can swing it: Moz Pro
is a great free tool for checking your domain and page authority and also for checking how many links you are getting and from which source. You can also check your competition. But the free version only gives you 3 reports per day. Signing up offers unlimited reporting on all your links, keywords and competitors.
How to use Open Site Explorer: Plug your blog’s URL into Open Site Explorer to see the high-level stats like page authority and incoming links. You can also click over to the Just-Discovered tab to see recent links and Top Pages to see which pages on your site get the most links.
Also free:
7. CRM: Charlie
Great, paid option if you can swing it: SalesForce
A lot of the best CRM tools (Customer Relationship Management) help you stay abreast of your current and future customers. Think of a futuristic address book. The best ones are loaded with features and information. Charlie is a bit of a quick-and-easy hack to get to know a person really well.
How to use Charlie: Intended as a tool to help you prep for meeting new people, Charlie gives you a full run-down of a person—social media profiles, biography, interests, big news, etc.—by looking at your upcoming calendar or running an email address. If you’re wanting info on a single person ad-hoc, simply enter their email address into Charlie, and they’ll tell you everything.
Also free:
Zest
Zest.is is another download that’s particularly useful for digital marketing, it’s a Google Chrome extension that collects suggested content from users
- 2. Managing social media updates
Hootsuite and Buffer
I’ve used Hootsuite for posting updates to social networks and reviewing what others are saying for nearly five years now. Hootsuite and Buffer are comfortably the most popular free tools for posting and reviewing social media updates, you probably use them.
But Hootsuite is great as a way of keeping tabs on competitors and influencers too. If you use Twitter lists you can have a stream for each of these which is more practical than following everyone.
- 3. Finding influencers
There is no single free tool that works well for this. Often using Google or LinkedIn manually are the best way.
A long while ago you could use reputation tools like Klout, Kred or Peerindex, but these have faded. I find that the use of Twitter auto-follow means that this often skews the results.
LinkedIn sector skills used to be the best source for finding business influencers because of grouping by narrower topics – but LinkedIn killed this – monetization again. LinkedIn advanced search is probably the best replacement.
Conclusions
There are a lot of great tools available online for free. These tools can help you increase your online presence, create better connections with your audience, and make it easier to reach out to people who matter. In this article, I’m going to list 93 tools for marketing pros and show you how each one can make a significant impact on your growth initiatives.