Marketing is an essential part of building a business, but paying for tools and software can get pricey. If you’re trying to save money, here are 10 free marketing tools you can take advantage of.
[Read more: Marketing Refresh: 10 Simple Steps to Updating Your Marketing in 2021]
LinkedIn is a powerful free tool for businesses, especially for B2B companies. LinkedIn has over 722 million members and is the most trusted social media network in the U.S.
Over 55 million companies are currently on LinkedIn, so it’s a great tool to help grow your business. It’s easy to create a LinkedIn profile, begin networking with other professionals and start creating thought leadership content.
Buffer
You know you need to be active on social media, but posting regularly can be very time-consuming. That’s why the right social media scheduler can be a lifesaver. Thanks to Buffer and its forever-free plan, you can use social media to your advantage in a time-effective manner.
This plan allows you to add three separate social media channels to your account. For instance, you may choose to add Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. From there, you can schedule up to 10 posts per week.
Google My Business
If you rely heavily on local business, then you need to claim your Google My Business listing. That way, when customers go to Google and search for a business that’s similar to yours, you won’t get edged out by the competition.
Don’t just claim your listing and leave it at that. Optimize your listing by adding photos, updating information about your business and encouraging customers to leave reviews.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that helps small businesses track website activity and engagement. It can help you evaluate how well your SEO strategy works and give you in-depth information about customer demographics.
Google Analytics can also help you determine what’s working in your current marketing strategy. For instance, you can see how you’re currently acquiring most of your traffic and what website pages visitors find the most engaging.
[Read more: 7 Ways to Build an Effective Marketing Strategy on a Budget]
Social media is important, but you don’t truly own those followers. One thing you do have complete control over, though, is your email list.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the best free marketing tools available for businesses. You can sign up to receive alerts anytime your company is mentioned online. You can also sign up to monitor your competitors' mentions, so it’s a creative way to engage in competitor research.
Canva
According to Hubspot, 49% of marketers consider visual marketing a very important part of their overall marketing strategy; however, more than 23% of marketers also feel like design and visual marketing are some of their biggest challenges.
Fortunately, Canva makes the process of creating images much easier because it offers templates and optimized sizes. The free plan gives you access to over 250,000 templates, over 100 design types and thousands of stock photos.
Help a Reporter Out
If you’re hoping to gain publicity for your business, Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is an invaluable resource that connects journalists to qualified sources. You can use HARO to land free publicity when you get someone in your business quoted as a source in a well-known publication. Plus, you can use it to generate backlinks to your website, which will help you show up higher in Google searches.
MailChimp
Building a robust email list is one of the best things you can do for your small business. Social media is important, but you don’t truly own those followers. One thing you do have complete control over, though, is your email list.
MailChimp is one of the most popular email management services available, and it’s free for up to 2,000 subscribers. This makes it a desirable option for small businesses that are just getting started with email marketing. It lets you send surveys, create tags and do basic audience segmentation.
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
If you regularly publish blog posts on your website, then you want to make sure the headlines entice website visitors to actually read the posts. You can do that with the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer. This free tool will analyze the word balance, word count and overall clarity of your headlines.
Typeform
Receiving customer feedback is an essential part of growing your business and improving your products and services. Typeform makes this easy by allowing you to create beautiful forms, surveys and quizzes for your customers and website visitors. With the free plan, you can receive up to 100 responses per month.
Read more: Marketing vs. Branding, and Why You Should Know The Difference]
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