One of the best ways to learn how to advertise your business online is by finding out what is the best tool for it. If you own a small business and you want to advertise your business online, here is a guide on how to do so. This guide is based on free online marketing tools for small businesses. It will tell you about what you can do and what tool you can use.
Advertising online nowadays is becoming more and more popular. You can get a lot of different approaches to advertising your business and it might be hard to get the right one. Marketing your small business online is a necessity in order to be competitive and profitable. It’s not easy trying to figure out what free advertising tools are the best. To help you decide what advertising and marketing utilities, apps, and utilities you need for your business we’ve put together a list of our recommendations for online business promotion.
In this article I am going to tell you about the best online advertising tools for small business which help you get your message out there.
UnBounce:
If you want to create landing pages without having to work with a web designer or engineers, start with UnBounce. They have an excellent template library that you can customize to meet your needs.
Beyond the templates, UnBounce will help you A/B test different designs and marketing copy so you can fine-tune your landing pages and optimize conversion rates.
MailChimp:
I never hesitate to recommend MailChimp to anyone that needs to send email newsletters. The interface is great, the out-of-the-box templates look professional, and you can start for free.
And, as you grow, MailChimp has more sophisticated features that help you automate your marketing, without the complexity of other similar systems. Prices are fair and email tech support is excellent.
Buffer:
Schedule and manage all of your social posting from one place with Buffer. They make it easy to get your content out to all of your social platforms with very little hassle.
You can also share social posting responsibility with your team if you have multiple people helping to manage your social profiles.
HubSpot
Price: Free, or up to $3,200 per month for enterprise, depending on your plan
HubSpot is a full-stack growth software that includes marketing, sales, and customer service tools to improve all facets of your business. With HubSpot, you’ll have everything you need to grow your business and increase conversion rates.
Several of HubSpot’s products start out free. You can set up lead capture forms, send kickback emails, and get basic analytics reports for free. Additionally, you can track emails, schedule sales meetings, and live chat with visitors. You can even set up a help desk and ticketing system on the freemium plan, and then pipe everything into the free CRM to get a full view of your customer.
Of course, things get more sophisticated from there with Starter, Professional, and Enterprise tiers. And if you work with other marketing technology products (such as others in this list), it’s highly likely you’ll be able to integrate and use them with HubSpot.
Google Analytics
Price: Free for the standard version, $150,000 for Google Analytics 360
Analytics is a free service offered by Google that allows you to track and analyze customer data. It’s the most ubiquitous analytics tool on the web, and for good reason — it’s simple to use, but it’s also powerful and highly customizable.
While all it takes to get started is a simple javascript snippet (best implemented via Google Tag Manager), what you can do with the tool is really only limited by your imagination (and possibly your developer’s time). I don’t know many marketers who don’t have at least a very basic understanding of Google Analytics traffic reports.
Canva
Price: Plans start free, $12.95 per month for teams, or custom pricing for enterprise
Canva is a subscription service for people who need web design to be easy and might not have the budget for a full-time graphic designer. Optimized for mobile, Canva makes design easy for amateurs with its visually appealing drag-and-drop features.
You can create shapes, logos, charts, graphs, and your own presentations with custom fonts using the design tools available in Canva. If you’re an employer, you can also check on the status of projects assigned to your employees on a deadline.
It has millions of images in its library and access to them is right at your fingertips.
Piktochart:
If you want to present data visually or build an infographic, take a look at Piktochart. You won’t need to hire a designer to great excellent visuals; all you need to bring is your data and the story you want to tell.
Headline Analyzer:
It’s really all about the “hook” when you’re writing online, and great headlines are key to your success. CoSchedule’s free headline analysis tool helps you experiment with headlines, so you find a great one that will grab your readers’ attention.
HotJar
Price: Starts free and moves up from there based on traffic and data collection needs
HotJar is a world-class customer experience analytics platform. They offer several features to help you understand your website visitors’ behavior better, including:
- Heatmaps
- Session replays
- Form analytics
- On-site polls
- Surveys
I like the product because it’s simple to install — all you need is a simple script to set up all the features across your site. Plus, it’s incredibly affordable, and might even be free, depending on your needs.
If you’re doing any sort of conversion optimization, it’s a powerful research tool.
Best Tools to Advertise your Business
Not only does WordStream have a phenomenal team and company culture, but they’re absolute bosses when it comes to all things PPC and paid advertising. Their free AdWords grader is a surefire way to know where your small business can make improvements.
Yoast is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. The tool works easily to optimize your content and landing pages to make sure your site is set up for success. With features like a readability checker and keyword optimizer, Yoast will make sure your content is optimized for the right eyes.
Google AdWords may seem intimidating to small businesses, but the easy-to-use platform is incredibly important. They offer search, display and video advertising to help you reach your customers where they’re searching. AdWords will require an investment to be successful, but it’s worth it for your business to drive more traffic to your website.
Not only does Moz have an amazing blog (including Whiteboard Fridays, which rocks), they help with SEO optimization, keyword research and backlink research. They also offer local search help to make your business more visible in your area.
Google Trends pulls data from Google Search to show you how often search-terms are entered in different areas of the world. With the help of Google Trends, you can find out what’s trending in your area and among your customer base.
AdEspresso integrates with Hootsuite – with both tools you can manage your social ad campaigns inside the Hootsuite dashboard to make sure your marketing efforts are streamlined.
SpyFu literally allows you to spy on your competitors. The platform allows you to search for any domain and see every place they’ve shown up on Google. You can also see a list of every keyword your competition bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every ad variation in the last 10 years. Now that’s good detective work.
SEM Rush is another competitor research tool that can have a huge impact on your business. They offer the ability to compare your domain to your competitors, pull information on your competitors keywords AND help you discover new competitors in your space organically.
Like Buffer, Hootsuite is an incredibly robust tool that can save you time in your social media efforts. Our favorite features? The amazing reporting and the filters that allow you to monitor mentions of your brand across social. Pricing starts at $15/month for one user (but you’ll need to upgrade for the real deal analytics).
Agorapulse is a cross between a social media monitoring/scheduling tool and a social media CRM. This tool focuses more specifically on Facebook engagement, and pricing starts at $49/month for one user.
Bitly is the most popular link management available. Users can shorten, manage and measure shared links across the web giving greater insight into engagement. Best news? Bitly is free (unless you want branded links and an enterprise account).
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social CRM, scheduling tool, engagement monitor and collaboration platform. While it’s a more robust tool than most small businesses need, the effectiveness is undeniable. It’ll cost you a pretty penny though. The intro package starts at $99/month per user.
Oktopost is a social media lead generation tool. While social media dashboards like Hootsuite help businesses schedule content, Oktopost is designed to help you make money through your social media efforts.
Hatchbuck is an all-in-one CRM and marketing automation tool created specifically for small businesses. Our easy-to-use platform helps you to organize your contacts, automate marketing activities and drive higher response rates and sales through personalized prospect communication every step of the way.
IFTTT is a powerful automation tool that’s incredibly easy to use. You create or pick ‘Applets’ (formerly ‘recipes’) to automate specific tasks on Facebook, Twitter, and any other business app imaginable. Remember to share the wealth, IFTTT can also help your non-marketing team members.
Zapier is the easiest way to automate time consuming administrative tasks so you can focus on running your business. The tool allows you to connect your web apps for easier automation that will optimize your processes and keep your small business running smoothly.
If you’re an email marketing guru, Litmus is the tool for you. They offer tools for testing your code and emails across different platforms before sending them out so you’ll never have broken images again. They also have an absolutely rockstar blog with tons of valuable email marketing info.
If you code your own emails, like we do, it’s an absolute-must to make sure that they look great in every inbox. Email on Acid’s easy tool allows you to test emails across the most popular email clients, apps and devices so you can fix problems before you hit send.
Conclusion
When your mind is consumed with running a business, it’s easy to forget the importance of advertising your business. Don’t neglect your brand. Use the tools above to advertise online using free online marketing tools for small business.
If you’re looking to get up and running with a simple but effective stack, these tools will help you get there. Ultimately, these are my favorite online marketing tools essential for small businesses. From lead capture to SEO research to analytics, these tools are capable of helping you create a fully integrated and successful long-term marketing strategy.