Free Digital Marketing Tools

Free digital marketing tools can be defined as software that offers free service to get the best possible presence on the internet. These are different from low-cost digital marketing tools. This is because low-cost tools always have a cost but free digital marketing tools do not require payments at all. They may be difficult to access in exchange for the many benefits they offer in terms of free promotional services in their social media channels or in their websites.

The research tool for free digital marketing tools is here. Using the information, learn more about this list of free digital marketing tools.

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.

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!

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.

MailChimp

Email marketing provides one of the highest ROIs (return on investment) of all other digital marketing efforts, simply because collecting email addresses from customers is so simple. With powerful and free tools like MailChimp, it’s also extremely cost-effective.

MailChimp provides more than just campaign building functions, however. Their Forever Free plan is completely free for up to 2,000 list subscribers and up to 12,000 emails a month. It includes:

Easy-to-use email design and image upload functions
Media storage
Email design templates
List management with easy segmenting options
Sign-up forms
Autoresponders
Drip campaigns
A/B testing
Analytics revealing CTRs, clicks, opens and more
Subscriber data based on engagement rates
Optimal send time calculations
Third party app integrations like Google Analytics and social media

Answer the Public

Blogs serve the important purpose of helping your website appear in organic, or non-paid, rankings in search engines, which is an important source of website traffic.

In order to accomplish this successfully, however, you need to know what topics your prospective customers are searching for in relation to your business. Answer the Public is a dynamic tool that helps to discover the perfect blog topics based on the language, or keywords, your customers use.

It works similar to a search engine. Simply type in a keyword in relation to a topic your customers might search for, like “running shoes.” The tool generates trees of topics based on real search queries and trending questions commonly searched in relation to your keyword.

Voila! You have a list of potential blog topics you can use, and the confidence that your blog is answering a relevant question.

Moz Local

Designed for getting your business listed correctly and consistently on the main local data aggregator websites, from Google to Yelp and beyond, Moz Local is the free digital marketing tool for entrepreneurs looking to boost their online competitiveness in their immediate market.

Get critical highlights and data insights about how your business appears across the internet. All in one place, you can see whether your business is listed incorrectly on a website, or if there are duplicate listings.

All available for free, Moz Local also provides you:

Recommendations for on and off page SEO
Competitive analysis
Website crawls
Organic rank tracking
Keyword value and competitiveness
A report of all inbound and outbound links to your website

This free digital marketing tool provides a suite of functionalities for beginners, as well as advanced SEO research, which is incredibly helpful in giving you the competitive edge you need.

Perhaps our best time-saving tip for social media marketing is scheduling posts ahead of time for your social profiles. You can batch the social media marketing process: Do all your curating and composing all in one go, then spread those updates out across the next day or week.

How we use Buffer: The forever free plan at Buffer lets you connect a profile from each network (one from Facebook, one from Twitter, etc.) and to schedule ahead 10 posts for each network. If you share three posts per day, that means you can stay three days ahead all the time.

We’ve found a lot of value in the hand-picked content suggestions (thanks to Courtney who finds all that great content!), which are easy to read then add.

Canva

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Photoshop, InDesign

Over 2 million people trust Canva to help with creating images for social media, blog posts, and practically any other use you can imagine.

How we use Canva: The optimized sizes and built-in templates make it fast and easy to create tall pictures for Pinterest, rectangular ones for Twitter, square for Facebook or Instagram, and any size in between. We find Pablo (another free alternative) to be great for Twitter-sized images of 1,024 pixels by 512 pixels, and Canva to work really well for all else.

Google Analytics

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Chartbeat

Google Analytics does pretty much everything in terms of tracking the traffic to your website. It’s a huge, monstrous amount of info, generously given away for free.

How we use Google Analytics: As a social media marketing team, we appreciate the ease with which we can see traffic from the different networks (Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals). We can check the engaged reading time by looking at Time on Page. And for the real-time stats of who’s on our site right now, we can simply click on Real-Time > Overview.

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.

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.

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.

Conclusion

The list of best free digital marketing tools is continuously updated with the help of successful digital marketers and SEO specialists. Marketing is a full-time job these days, which is why we created a list of relevant free digital marketing tools for you to choose from.

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Sprout Social, MeetEdgar