During our practical digital marketing workshops, it has been shown that the tools we recommend to assist marketers are always popular, especially the free ones. There are various free tools available in the market, which is undoubtedly one of the favorable aspects of today's work in digital marketing. Here, we bring you the best and most commonly used free tools for digital marketing.
As an entrepreneur utilizing the Internet in your business, you're well aware of the fierce competition. The online world is a true jungle, with hundreds of sellers trying to obtain the same customers. Moreover, engaging in digital marketing demands a fair amount of work, from keyword research and customer analysis to social media marketing and sending targeted e-mail campaigns.
The good side of delving into digital marketing is that you have access to technology with the best tools and techniques for digital marketing. With the right tools, you can automate tasks, gather a wealth of valuable data, and streamline your business processes. This not only presents an opportunity to showcase your technological prowess but also means you can save time and resources.
However, what has proven to be a problem? The problem lies in the fact that digital marketing tools come in all shapes and sizes, each offering a completely unique set of features.
So, how will you know which one is what you need? Simply put, you need a tool that aligns with your business goals.
Keep in mind that your chosen tools can either enhance or hinder you. More importantly, with the right tool selection, you can achieve higher profits and maintain an edge over your competitors.
But before you decide to invest in any marketing tool, you must examine what each of them offers and how it can benefit your business.
Below, we present you the top 10 free digital marketing tools for small entrepreneurs.
Based on our experience, these 10 free tools are easy to use and require minimal technical skills.
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Communication and goal-setting for individual projects, meeting deadlines for yourself and your team, are crucial for your success, whether online or offline.
In small business projects, tasks are mostly coordinated and tracked through email. However, e-mail platforms are very limited and simply not built to handle dynamic and fast-paced tasks required by digital marketing activities.
Trello is one of the many free digital marketing tools for easy project management. It presents each project as a "board" containing "cards" with checklists and has a user interface that is easy to navigate and understand.
Like most team collaboration software platforms, there are upgradable, paid features, but its free basic service includes essential core features such as simple organization of project tasks and deadlines, progress chart checklists, data filtering, deadline reminders, easy file/attachment uploads, email notifications, and more.
For most small businesses, Trello is a simple and powerful way to organize and plan digital marketing projects.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software assists you in communicating with your customers. From tracking the sales process to searching and organizing data, managing your customers and potential clients is much easier with CRM tools.
Companies that recognize that the customer is at the heart of their business understand that excellent CRM software is the most powerful tool for quality customer relationships. Moreover, they also realize that placing CRM at the center of their customer-focused activities - sales, marketing, and support systems - makes perfect sense. This is what HubSpot effectively does with its tightly integrated CRMs, marketing, sales, and customer support platforms.
The tool's interface is user-friendly and provides guidance to help you familiarize yourself with its appearance and functionality. You can also import and export contacts into your customized databases for potential clients or current customers.
E-mail marketing indeed offers one of the highest ROI (Return on Investment) among all digital marketing efforts, mainly because collecting customer email addresses is relatively straightforward. Furthermore, with powerful and free tools like MailChimp, it's also highly cost-effective.
MailChimp, however, goes beyond mere email campaign-building features. Their Forever Free plan is entirely cost-free for up to 2,000 subscribers on your list and allows for sending up to 10,000 emails per month. It includes user-friendly email design features, image uploading, media storage, email design templates, audience list management with easy segmentation options, signup forms, and more.
Another valuable feature is the ability to integrate third-party applications like Google Analytics and social media platforms, enhancing your email marketing efforts by providing insights and expanding your reach to potential customers.
Spreading the word about your business doesn't have to be expensive. Here's one (still) free place to start expanding your brand's digital visibility. The world's most commonly used search engine offers businesses a free business profile to help you connect with your customers. Your company's profile is Google's term for your entry on the Google search engine. Business profiles appear on Google Maps and in local Google search results.
Use Google My Business to publish information about your hours of operation, location, and pricing, share photos, and even offer a virtual tour of your establishment - all of which will be displayed to the audience in Google search results.
Bonus: If you have a complete profile on Google My Business, it can also help with the overall SEO ranking of your website.
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Facebook is arguably the most important online profile you can create for your business, with approximately 1.70 billion globally active users every day. You can create a free business profile, share business information, promote products and services, send messages to users, and run paid advertisements.
To maximize the benefits of Facebook, business owners should understand what sets it apart from other social networks. When they were first launched, social networks focused on individual expression, but Facebook prioritized building relationships.
Businesses can connect with their customers and target audience to share various information, such as updates on business hours, sales and promotions, new product offerings, product images, and much more.
Bonus: Facebook's advertising platform allows businesses to create and place ads on both Facebook and Instagram simultaneously, providing a powerful way to reach a wider audience.
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful platforms for professional networking. Small businesses can create a profile, share updates, join business groups, and connect with other professionals.
Furthermore, LinkedIn offers networking opportunities every day. Through LinkedIn, you can expand your professional connections much more effectively than using Facebook or Twitter.
It's important to understand that on LinkedIn, there are personal profiles and business profiles. On your personal profile, members of your network are not called friends or followers; instead, they are considered connections. You have different levels of connections: the closer you are connected to someone, the more ways you can communicate with them. For example, you cannot send a private message to someone who is not a first-degree connection.
There are various benefits you can derive for your business using LinkedIn, from finding new employees to connecting with potential business partners.
If your business is present on multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you're no stranger to the immense amount of time and coordination required for researching, brainstorming, writing, reviewing, posting, and scheduling your social media posts. On top of all that, you also need to engage with fans and followers.
Hootsuite is a free digital marketing tool that integrates with most social media platforms, allowing you to do all these tasks in one place. It guides you through the steps to get acquainted with the schedule so you can easily get to work within the platform in no time.
With HootSuite Free, you'll be able to manage multiple social networks, schedule posts, and communicate with your followers. You'll also be able to track how many followers you have on each of your social networks and monitor which posts generate the most clicks. If your business is growing, you can upgrade to one of the three premium plans that provide access to additional profiles, analytics, and more users.
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Google Alerts is a free tool that sends e-mail notifications to small businesses when content related to their brand or specific topics they want to track is published on the Internet.
The latest news articles or other web content containing the search term are included in the Google Alert. Users can set up alerts to come daily, weekly, or monthly.
With Google Alerts, you can find out when your company name is mentioned and on which website. It can be useful to include common spelling errors as well. You can also learn what is being said about your company's products or services and who is talking about them.
It can be beneficial to know when the CEO or leadership of the company is mentioned because the reputation of the CEO can affect the company's reputation, so it's good to know when they are mentioned in new content.
Monitoring competitors is another practical use of Google Alerts: Receive information about competitors' activities and news.
Canva is a free graphic editing software. Small businesses can use Canva to create stunning social media images, eye-catching illustrations for articles, and other digital marketing assets.
Canva is very user-friendly and intuitive, and we highly recommend using this tool for creating digital marketing content.
In Canva, you have access to a plethora of pre-made templates where you can customize colors, graphics, or text to create unique visuals for your business.
If you're not a grammar guru or if you don't have a proofreader checking everything you write online, Grammarly is a free tool you should sign up for right away.
Grammarly has a dashboard that works similarly to Google Docs, and the tool's interface is very simple and clean. To start your writing, open a new document on the dashboard and type or copy and paste your content into it, and Grammarly will immediately begin checking spelling and grammar. You can also save documents in the tool if you need them for later use.
You can also install the tool as a browser extension - we recommend Grammarly for Chrome. Once installed, Grammarly automatically proofreads everything you type online without the need to access the tool's dashboard.
While there are paid upgraded versions of this tool, the basic function can be a lifesaver for content, including blogs, emails, social media posts, proposals, and much more.
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Google Analytics is an unavoidable free tool for tracking search data for small businesses. It is also a tool for tracking and evaluating various SEO initiatives. Measure on-site engagement, referral sources, unique visitors, among other data, with this powerful resource.
Google Analytics allows you to track your digital marketing efforts and understand which activities are paying off to what extent, and which ones you should abandon. What good are even the best online ads if you don't know how much benefit you've gained from them?
Narrowing down the list of essential digital marketing tools begins with creating a digital marketing strategy that includes a combination of the tools mentioned above that suit your business.
Regardless of your goals, these proven, powerful, and free digital marketing tools for entrepreneurs will undoubtedly help take your business to the next level.
If you want to learn more about how to use specific tools for your business purposes, contact us and arrange targeted one-on-one online workshops where you will learn which mix of tools is best for your business.