Every business owner knows the importance of marketing, but it still tends to fall on the back burner. The most common reason for this is marketing is hard and time-consuming! The good news is you are not alone and with digitization, there are many options to choose from to get your marketing ball rolling. Here is a list of 11 great free marketing tools (in no particular order) that can help you kickstart your marketing efforts.
1. Manage your social media publishing with Buffer
Social media posting can be tough and time-consuming. If you are looking at streamlining your social posting efforts, Buffer is your go-to social media management tool. Buffer can help you in increasing your followers, engage your audience, and build your brand. In a single dashboard, you can be connected to multiple social media accounts, schedule posts, and analyze the success of your posts.
Use Buffer to plan your social media calendar and keep everyone informed about your progress.
2. Book calls quickly with Calendly
Calendly is great for scheduling meetings, appointments, and events. It is extremely efficient and helps eliminate back-and-forth emails. Some of its features include automatic reminders, follow-ups, calendar integration, custom notifications, easy rescheduling, and CRM integrations.
For most startups, the free version is good enough. However, if you are looking for advanced integrations and multiple meeting types the paid version is the way to go.
3. Create professional-looking graphics within seconds with Canva
Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design tool. It includes a huge library of fonts, illustrations, templates, and images to help you create customized designs based on your needs. You can use templates to create videos, collateral, images, gifs, and animations or create them from scratch. Most importantly, Canva has the ability for a team to work simultaneously on projects.
In addition to the above features, in Canva’s pro version you can also link it with your social media account and directly post content from Canva. It can prove to be especially useful for non-designers in designing flyers/brochures, social media images, infographics, and other visual content.
4. Get industry news and articles in your inbox with Google Alerts
With Google Alerts you can get a curated list of industry news and articles delivered right to your inbox. You can select how frequently you want to receive this information, be it daily, weekly, or monthly. Most importantly, Google alerts help you to track your marketing efforts based on the search terms you have configured by analyzing the places your business’s name is mentioned.
With alerts, you can stay on top of customer activities, keep track of your competitors, receive valuable insights from influencers, and stay updated on recent technologies. Alerts are free to use and easy to configure, making it perfect for startups.
5. Get Valuable insights about your business with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web-based analysis service provided by Google that can track website traffic and conversions. With better knowledge of how your business is performing, you can take the necessary steps to meet your business goals.
Google Analytics provides a holistic view of all your marketing efforts by integrating with Google ads, Google AdSense, Google Cloud, Search Console, Email Marketing tools, social media, and many other such apps.
To sum up, you can get a deeper understanding of the demographics and behavior of your audience by using Google Analytics. Moreover, this is free to use for websites that get less than 5 million impressions per month. If you do not have Google Analytics integrated yet, you are already missing out!
6. Managing your social media publishing and hearing with Hootsuite
Like Buffer, Hootsuite is a great tool for social media management. The main advantage of using Hootsuite is that you can create custom streams that monitor hashtags, keywords, or a combination of both. You can add your company’s name and look at what the world is saying about it. It makes social listening easy. Some of its features are that it provides a platform to curate useful content, schedule posts, efficiently manage team members and measure ROI.
Use Hootsuite to plan your social media calendar and inform yourself about your marketing efforts.
7. Manage your customer relations with HubSpot
Hubspot is a leading cloud-based CRM designed to help foster sales enablement, manage contacts, and optimize your marketing campaigns. This makes generating leads, nurturing them, and converting them to customers streamlined and effective.
Hubspot is a great software to manage your end-to-end customer journey. You can use features like landing pages, email marketing, lead management, and social media management for lead generation. Deal management and pipeline creation enable you to manage your sales efforts. Hubspot is a great all-in-one Marketing & Sales tool, and we highly recommend it for B2B startups.
8. Create advanced email marketing campaigns with Mailerlite
MailerLite is an exceedingly intuitive and budget-friendly platform for email marketing. Focused on just email marketing, it has unique features like auto resend, where unopened emails are re-sent with a different subject. Moreover, segmenting, grouping, tagging, scheduling & tracking can also be performed with ease. In addition to these features, once your email campaign goes live; you can even look at detailed reports to analyze interaction with your emails.
The best part about Mailerlite is the ability to easily create automation based on triggers in the free version. If you are a startup looking to get started with creating drip campaigns and newsletters Mailerlite is an excellent choice!
9. Create your multi-channel content strategy with Semrush
Semrush is a tool suite that helps in growing your online visibility on all key channels from just one platform. It has multiple features such as SEO, content marketing, market research, advertising, and social media. You can use Semrush to find national & local keywords, analyze any domain’s backlink profile, find content topics that resonate with your audience, and create SEO‑friendly content. Moreover, you can use Semrush to conduct content audits and improve your content based on real‑time metrics, start an advertising campaign, research your competitors, and track brand mentions and content reach.
The limited-free plan is a great starting point for startups to research and analyze their target market for content strategy.
10. Automate your email marketing with Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a platform that helps you manage all digital marketing in one place and lets you monitor the performance in real time. It provides functionalities related to email marketing, SMS marketing, chat, marketing automation, CRM, etc. You can create landing pages to capture leads and nurture them all in one place. Moreover, you can also enable it to run Facebook Ad campaigns to retarget contacts.
Sendinblue is a perfect all-in-one marketing platform for startups and small businesses. The limited-free plan is good for an organization just getting started with marketing.
11. Create surveys, quizzes, and polls for any audience with Survey Monkey
SurveyMonkey is simple software used to conduct surveys related to any business objective. You can get feedback, uncover trends, and secure tangible insights into your business. Above all, you can design, create, and publish a business survey in minutes and analyze the results later.
