There are many tools that can help you with your digital marketing for free. Being a small business owner or marketing yourself, these tools can save you money.
Below you’ll find some of the best tools out there.
Sprout Social
Hey, you can’t blame us for putting ourselves on the top of the list!
That’s because Sprout Social is the ultimate control center for any business looking to translate its social presence into actual results.
As a social media management platform, Sprout helps businesses organize their content calendar and assets in one place. This allows you to publish and schedule your content across multiple platforms, all timed to perfection based on when your followers are most active.
Beyond social media management features, Sprout makes it easy to collaborate with colleagues and customers alike. Our Smart Inbox gives you a bird’s-eye view of all of your social messages so you can respond thoughtfully and in a timely manner.
Oh, and don’t forget about Sprout’s full suite of social analytics.
Optimizing your content’s performance doesn’t have to be a guessing game as Sprout identifies your top-performing posts and the success of your social campaigns. Coupled with robust social listening features, you can uncover trends, hashtags and opportunities to engage with new customers.
Loomly
Loomly’s self-described “brand success platform” is a tool that’s ideal for smaller social teams looking to organize and collaborate on content.
Built-in calendars, deadlines and workflows make both scheduling and brainstorming content a breeze. As an added bonus, Loomly actually curates fresh content ideas for users based on trending topics and Twitter conversations.
The clean, no-frills interface is easy to navigate and friendly to users who might not be the most tech-savvy. The affordability of the platform is enticing for solo businesses and smaller agencies looking to wrangle their social presence.
Audiense
We’ve talked time and time again about the importance of social listening for identifying trends and potential customers.
Tools like Audiense take listening to the next level by helping companies both identify and segment their social media audiences. Doing so makes it easier to run laser-targeted ad campaigns and likewise dive deeper into your customer personas. Digging into demographics, personality straights and beyond, you’d be surprised at what you can learn from social alone.
Audiense’s platform focuses primarily on Twitter, making it great for B2B brands interested in prospecting and B2C companies looking to understand more about their target audience.
Proof
Price: Tiered pricing based on the volume of your website traffic, starting at $24/month
Proof connects to your CRM or website and uses social proof to boost conversions on your site. They implement social proof messaging (i.e. “25 people are viewing this post right now”), reviews, and videos geared towards targeted customers once they visit your site.
The popular Live Visitor Count and Hot Streak notification features boost customers’ perception of your brand, and lets prospects get a look at how other people respond to your product. Additionally, it’s super easy to install — you just copy and paste their pixels into your site.
You can identify your visitors and examine their journey throughout your site, which can help optimize your site design for higher conversions. It integrates with an impressive amount of other software systems and is optimized for mobile.
Survey Anyplace
Price: Free trial available | Pricing starts from $33 per month
If you’re looking for a powerful lead generation tool, Survey Anyplace is a software your marketing team should consider.
With their ReportR pack, respondents can walk away with a personalized PDF report based on their answers immediately after completion. They also integrate smoothly with your existing marketing stack either via webhooks, Zapier or Integromat. So you can easily transport leads through to your CRM or email marketing tool and start building nurturing campaigns.
Yoast
Price: The Yoast plugin for WordPress is free, but the paid premium plans range based off the number of sites you need monitored
Yoast is a very popular plugin that works with both Gutenberg and the Classic editor in WordPress. Yoast is an excellent tool to help you optimize your content for search engines.
Yoast helps you choose cornerstone content, focus keywords to help you rank, individual content URLs, and internal links for an additional boost. The plugin also evaluates your page readability and gives it a Flesch Reading Ease score.
It’s updated to reflect Google’s algorithm every two weeks, so you can always stay up-to-date on your SEO.
Slack
Price: Free for small or medium companies, custom pricing for enterprises
Slack is one of the favored communication services in business today.
It operates in channels designated for certain information, so business conversations don’t get distracted or cut-off by tangents about where everyone wants to go for team lunch. It facilitates, de-silos, and focuses collaboration between employees and teams.
It’s an excellent tool for networking and meeting others in the digital marketing space, and gives you the freedom to join or leave channels as needed.
Because it’s such a popular communication channel, it has wide-ranging integrations with plenty of other tools. You can tack on a seemingly unlimited amount of integrations and Slack applications to make the tool even more powerful — for instance, many teams will pipe in A/B test results, analytics notifications, new customer or transaction notifications, or even sales or customer support bots. While undeniably powerful, Slack is easy to start using immediately.
Mixpanel
“It’s really easy to use and set up. It gives me deeper insights into my analytics than anything else.
It gives me a holistic view of how my marketing is performing in addition to Google Analytics. When I tag campaigns with UTMs, I can see the performance of it all the way through to purchase and retention.”
Sid Bharath, Saas Marketing Consultant @ Sidbharath.com
Hotjar
“One of my favorite digital marketing tools is Hotjar — it’s an analytics & feedback program that allows marketers to track user behavior on the site. The program helps you identify the information behind behavior by leveraging powerful tools like site heatmaps, screen recordings of your user and surveys/feedback polls. As a digital marketer, having a tool like this helps me measure the effectiveness of a website design while allowing me to build solutions that increase conversion of the site! I’ve been using it in our latest e-commerce launch of MSafe, a direct-to-consumer home safe brand.”
Dean DeCarlo, President @ Mission Disrupt
HubSpot Forms
“HubSpot Forms starts out free and is, for the most part, without any big limits on the free version
(you can make as many forms as you want with as many fields as you desire. As many leads as you want can pass through). It automatically syncs to HubSpot CRM (also free), but you can also integrate easily with other CRMs or email marketing tools. The best lead capture form out there.”
PersistIQ
“This tool allows you to load in a list of prospects and build campaigns to reach out to them by email and phone. It basically takes the act of writing a personal email and supercharges it while tracking results. It has automation features that save you a good deal of time while keeping everyone you reach out to organized in the system. You’re still sending personalized emails – but the path to doing so is fast-tracked and equipped with reporting. Best used for ABM (Account-Based Marketing) campaigns where there is a common theme among your prospects so you can send similar emails out.”
Pros: Time savings. Low cost. Fairly simply to learn how to use.
Cons: You’re still selling to people via email which will be an immediate turnoff for some. Prospecting and building your list of contacts still takes quite a bit of time.”
Colton DeVos, Marketing Specialist @ ResoluteTS
Marketo
“Marketo is one of our marketing team’s go-to tools with two simple goals: generating leads and staying top-of-mind for our clients. It was the best solution to help us scale our automated nurtures, landing pages, and ultimately, conversions.”
Jenna Weinerman, Marketing Director @ Updater
ActiveCampaign
“This program allows you to develop nurture tracks or sets of email responses based on actions they perform on your website. It saves you a TON of time especially if your website has a lot of visitors who download eBooks, sign up for webinars or free consults or typically fill out forms. You can also integrate it with your CRM so that there is a handoff from marketing to sales if the visitor reaches a certain point in the engagement.
Pros: Cuts down on time required to respond and follow up with every inquiry. Has a ton of features for A/B testing and contact scoring. Cons: It takes a bit of time to set up. There is a cost to this digital marketing tool but well worth it if you invest the time to use correctly.”
Colton DeVos, Marketing Specialist @ ResoluteTS
Mailerlite
“Mailerlite is a mass mailing platform that we use quite often to reach out to our customers. It’s easy to use and provides a lot of functionality for the price. Moreover, you can easily copy a previous email campaign and tweak it using the simple drag and drop functionality saving you a lot of time and effort.”
Zygimantas Jacikevicius, Marketing Manager @ Wiseteam
Unless
“We’ve all seen the power of personalizing the web experience of each visitor based on a set of actions, data and behaviours. Yet, for most SMBs it is still quite hard to implement basic personalization on a WordPress site.
Unless gives us an easy access to present different content based on a set of behavioral conditions such as behaviours, time, weather, location, etc.
One simple setup we often do for clients is to present a lot of trust elements to new visitors (client logos, testimonials, awards, number of clients, years in business, etc). But, for existing/browsing visitors this information becomes redundant. With this plugin, we can easily hide that info after a few pages. This almost always leads to an increase in conversion rate for returning visitors.”
Julien Raby, CEO @ Combustible
Conclusion
Your online presence is vital for your business. The more people you can reach, the more clients you can attract. You could find out everything about digital marketing tools that will let you grow your audience with relative ease.