Are you a small business owner struggling to keep up with the ever-changing world of online marketing?
In today’s digital age, there are countless free online marketing tools available that can help take your business to the next level.
And the best part?
They won’t cost you a dime!
From social media management to email marketing and everything in between, we’ve done the hard work for you and compiled a list of the top free online marketing tools that will help boost your brand’s visibility, engage with customers, and ultimately drive more sales.
So get ready to take notes because these tools are sure to revolutionize your small business‘s digital strategy!
Social Media Marketing Tools
Hootsuite
It’s undeniable that social media is essential for businesses to stay competitive in the market.
However, it’s no secret that social media can take up a significant amount of time, even if you’re solely using it for marketing purposes and not for aimless scrolling.
Fortunately, social marketing tools such as Hootsuite are available to help alleviate this time inefficiency.
Hootsuite serves as a centralized management platform for all your social media channels, enabling you to schedule your posts in advance.
This allows you to prepare all your social media content for the upcoming weeks or months in one sitting.
In addition to this, Hootsuite also offers advanced reporting tools that allow you to track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
You can utilize this data to calculate your ROI.
Furthermore, Hootsuite provides the ability to track mentions of your brand and manage responses, all within one dashboard.
Hootsuite also offers tools to promote your social media posts through the platform.
Canva
As per Hubspot’s survey, nearly half of all marketers (49%) consider visual marketing as an integral part of their overall marketing strategy.
However, over 23% of marketers admit that design and visual marketing pose significant challenges to them.
The good news is that Canva simplifies the task of image creation by providing an array of templates and optimized sizes.
With the free plan, you can choose from over 250,000 templates, more than 100 design types, and thousands of stock photos.
Email Marketing Tools
Mailchimp
Incorporating email marketing into your business strategy, regardless of its size, can have a significant impact.
When a customer subscribes to your mailing list, they are giving you direct access to their inbox, resulting in email marketing generating a higher ROI than any other marketing activity.
To initiate email marketing, you require a service that can help you collect email addresses, manage your mailing lists, automate or schedule email delivery, and analyze engagement.
Mailchimp is an excellent option if you are starting out or operating a small business.
With Mailchimp’s free basic service, you can manage your email marketing without complexity until your list reaches 2,000 subscribers.
Additionally, Mailchimp provides several features and digital marketing tools (some under paid plans) such as segmentation and personalization, landing and form page builders, audience insights, CRM tools, and predictive insights.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
KWFinder
Online marketing depends heavily on SEO, making it crucial to execute it correctly.
Apart from ensuring that your website is structured well and optimized for mobile devices, producing relevant content containing suitable keywords is equally important to rank high in search results.
To discover such relevant keywords and initiate your search, you need a specialized digital marketing tool.
From the free Google Keyword Planner to more intricate toolkits like SECockpit, there are several options available.
However, the more advanced digital marketing tools come with high monthly subscription fees, starting at $100 or more.
But for small businesses, KWFinder provides affordable, precise, and practical insights at a perfect price point.
KWFinder allows you to input a seed keyword and receive hundreds of suggestions, search volume data, trends, and a ranking difficulty score for each word or phrase.
Mangools, the brand that offers KWFinder, has plans for individual tools or its full suite, which includes a backlink tool, website analysis, SERP watchers, and more – along with a convenient browser extension.
Yoast
While Yoast’s top-tier services come at a cost, the company does provide certain services for free.
Among these is a complimentary version of their SEO tool. By using Yoast, you can optimize your website to its fullest potential.
From access to SEO software to aid with crafting meta descriptions, Yoast equips you with the necessary tools to enhance your website.
SEMRush
If you’re looking to gather statistics or SEO data for any website on the web, SemRush is the go-to platform.
Their services provide access to a plethora of information about any public facing website, including the number of backlinks, overall traffic trends, top performing pages, ranked keywords, and recent changes to their backlinks.
At a cost of $99.95 per month, SemRush is an ideal option for small to medium-sized businesses.
While SemRush does have some minor UX quirks to navigate, such as list management, users can quickly adapt to the platform’s interface.
Content Marketing Tools
BuzzSumo
If you want your content strategy to be successful, you can’t just guess what your audience will like.
That’s why it’s important to have a documented strategy, like 60% of B2B brands with successful content marketing do.
Only 21% of brands with unsuccessful content marketing have a documented strategy.
To do content marketing right, you need to conduct thorough research.
This is where BuzzSumo comes in as one of my top content marketing tools. It shows you the most popular content on social media based on your searched topics.
Analyzing the results will give you an idea of what makes them so appealing, and help you come up with new subjects to write about.
BuzzSumo has expanded beyond just researching viral posts.
It now offers a variety of digital marketing tools, like keyword research, influencer search, topic-based social media feeds, content analysis, crisis management, and brand monitoring.
Analytics Tools
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a valuable and completely free software that can provide you with valuable insights into your website’s visitors and their engagement.
It works best when paired with Google Search Console, another free digital marketing tool that can help you identify problems on your site and optimize it for traffic.
With Google Analytics, you can access a range of data points, including the number of visitors to your site by day, week, month, or any time period you choose.
You can also see where these visitors are coming from, such as referrals from other websites, organic search, ads, social media, or direct traffic.
Additionally, you can find out the specific keywords people are using in Google to find your site, as well as the demographics and interests of your users.
You can also see how long each user spends on your site and which pages they visit.
While this information is interesting, it is also essential knowledge that can help you optimize your website and marketing campaigns while keeping your SEO efforts low cost.
For example, if you notice that you are getting a lot of traffic from a keyword that you lack content covering, you can use this insight to write a blog post optimized for that keyword and watch your traffic and engagement levels increase.
Similarly, if you are getting loads of visitors from Facebook but none from Twitter, it may be a sign that you should focus your marketing efforts on your main channel.
In short, it’s all about the insights, not just the analytics.
Google Analytics provides you with valuable information that can help you improve your website and marketing efforts, and it’s completely free to use.
Hotjar
Curious about how your website visitors are engaging with your site?
Wondering where they’re clicking, how far they’re scrolling, and more?
Hotjar can give you valuable insights into visitor behavior through heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and visitor recordings.
Not only that, but Hotjar also offers funnel analysis and the ability to add messages and surveys to your site.
Though this platform, you track how visitors interact with your blog posts and gain valuable insights into their reading habits.
How much of the post are they actually reading? Where do they pause and reflect? What are they clicking on?
Armed with this information, you can optimize your blog posts to make them more engaging and effective.
CRM Tools
HubSpot
Managing multiple marketing campaigns across various channels can be a daunting task.
It’s not only a challenge to manage them all, but it’s also crucial to identify what’s working and where improvements need to be made.
Luckily, HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software solution that brings all your different marketing channels together.
With this tool, you can optimize for more traffic, higher conversion rates, and better ROI.
The platform includes optimized templates that are perfect for creating landing pages. Additionally, it comes with live chat and user action events that enhance engagement and convert more visitors into customers.
HubSpot also offers other useful features, such as content optimization tools, email templates, marketing automation, lead management, analytics, and social media management.
While the full version of HubSpot may have a hefty price tag, small businesses with lower budgets can still get started with their free or basic package.
It’s worth noting that HubSpot has evolved from an inbound marketing tool to a complete CRM platform. It now offers free and paid sales hubs, customer service hubs, and content management (in addition to the free/paid marketing hub). However, the complete content management platform is only available in paid versions.
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