Don’t you just love it when you don’t have to pay extra for tools in your online marketing campaign? In growth hack speak, we call these ‘Freemiums’. Yes, it is better to have access to all the bells and whistles, but believe me, you don’t need them especially if you are just starting out in your marketing venture and learning the ropes, or you wish to save every dime of your budget for other marketing spend. It is best you leverage first these top 15 free online marketing tools.
SE Ranking
SE Ranking is a cloud-based SEO platform that is great for all your SEO traffic, rankings and keywords research. One of the features in their SEO Tool that is on point is the organic keywords ranking of your site. Although they offer paid features in their premium plans, but they also provide a free tool for you to check your website’s organic and paid traffic, and perform keyword and suggestion research.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a small SEO desktop application that analyzes and crawls your website’s page URLs, images, metadata, and all key elements and gives you the whole SEO structure and perspective of your website. Screaming From is very useful in finding website programming errors, website issues that affect SEO, quickly reviews SEO-related elements, scrape specific pieces of content, and linking opportunities.
MozBar
MozBar is a SEO browser extension toolbar by Moz and it allows you to view metrics and insights instantly while viewing websites and web pages. It is really useful when you are looking for websites and blogs that have high domain and page authority score where you can build backlinks to. MozBar is one of the most convenient and quick SEO tools that allow a user to investigate client, competitor, and link prospect websites for critical on-page elements and inbound link metrics.
Yoast SEO
Yoast is one of the most popular and widely used WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to structure your web pages metadata; page title, description and focus keyword. Using Yoast plugin you will be able to see your page’s SEO and Readability score. Other features includes setting up your website analytics, social and editing tools.
Ubersuggest
Acquired by renowned digital marketer Neil Patel, Ubersuggest is a free to use SEO tool where you can research domain overview, top SEO pages, keyword suggestions, content ideas, and backlinks data. This is a great alternative to SEMrush and Ahrefs. The main functionality of the tool is to users quickly brainstorm and find keywords in your target niche. Other than that, it has additional features, such as domain overview, top SEO pages of your competitors, and check backlinks.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is one of the most competitive intelligence tools in the market that provides users with insights on their competitors’ website traffic, the traffic sources, keyword analysis, and ranking. It is also helpful in terms of website engagement metrics, like bounce rate, page views, and the time spent by visitors on-site, etc. This website and the market intelligence solution offer analytics services. It also analyzes websites instantly giving you global and country rank, traffic, referral data, and more. If you’re new to online marketing, this tool will help you understand your website’s ranking and what it lacks. Besides, it is also available in Chrome extension where you can see website traffic and several key metrics.
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot is a 100% free and easy-to-use CRM software that will give you an up to date view of your sales funnels, tracking and detailed reports of your team’s sales activity, productivity, and performance. HubSpot CRM is essentially built to be a platform that allows sales teams to get started quickly without making much of a change in their existing workflow. It is a solution that is ideal for companies that are still starting to recognize the value of CRM and want to try it out or for enterprises that are not using their existing CRM systems to their fullest potential. Users enjoy features like reporting dashboards, company insights, deal tracking, pipeline management, and many more.
MailChimp
MailChimp is a great marketing automation tool that offers paid features but is also available for free. Known for its email marketing service, MailChimp allows you to create your email list, design template, send automated emails to your subscribers or leads. You can also create and launch a sequence of emails or a drip campaign. What makes it more amazing is that it is available as a plugin and you can integrate it into your WordPress website. The approach to marketing is to focus on healthy contact management practices, beautifully designed campaigns, and powerful data analysis.
ManyChat
Manychat is one of the best service providers in the business in chatbots. It is an awesome Facebook Messenger marketing service where you can create chatbots that send automated messages to your audience, broadcast to them and set up opt-in flow sequences for your marketing, sales and customer service. More importantly, it allows you to grow your subscriber in Messenger. It is easy to use and available for free. The platform’s key selling point is its ease of use. It is an easy 2 minutes set up and no coding is required. Another advanced feature is to completely automate your Messenger marketing, and integrating to several CRM’s.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of many tools referred to as a “Social Media Management System” or tool today. This tool will allow you to manage your social media pages and accounts in one intuitive user interface. Under their free account, you can add up to 3 profiles, schedule 30 messages, and 1 user. Reply to messages in one place, track and monitor your page performance effortlessly. It can enable you to monitor what people are saying about your brand and help you respond instantly. You can view streams from multiple networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and post updates or reply directly.
Slack
Slack is a workplace communication tool for teams, “a single place for messaging, tools and files.” This means Slack is an instant messaging system with lots of add-ins for other workplace tools. This instant messaging application has been re-purposed by many marketers as a powerful marketing tool and as a distribution channel. Not only you can create your slack channels, invite members but you can join slack communities and other channels where you can find your target customers and start conversing with them in real-time. Isn’t it great?
Canva
Canva is an Australian-based graphic design tool for non-designers and marketers. Canva is a simplified graphic-design tool that uses a drag-and-drop format. It provides access to photographs, vector images, graphics, and fonts. It is used by non-designers as well as professionals. Using Canva, you can easily create and download your Facebook and Instagram posts, cover photos, and Infographics using their beautifully designed templates. This means that you no longer need to pay someone to design your marketing collaterals for you.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is probably the all-time favorite of most online marketers out there. This web analytics by Google allows you to track and monitor reports and key metrics of your website’s traffic. Through Google Analytics you will find users and sessions, acquisitions, behavior, and conversion data to help you make a smart decision on how to improve or grow your website’s traffic. Whatever industry it is that needs analysis, Google Analytics will always be the best tool to use. It is easy to understand how your site and app users are engaging with your content, so you know what’s working and what’s not. See how people are interacting with your sites and apps and the role that different channels play by viewing reports and dashboards.
PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is one of the most internationally used page speed measurement tools. This is another free tool by Google where you can measure your website’s performance in terms of loading speed, mobile, and desktop versions of your page. Today, it is really important to have a fast and highly optimized website that loads instantly on both desktop and mobile. Google regards it as a strong metric in the ranking and it has been the front line of web performance optimization and tooling.
Google Optimize
Well, having a large amount of traffic going to your website won’t make a great difference if it doesn’t convert into leads and customers. That is why your SEO should walk hand in hand with CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization. Now, this free tool by Google lets you run A/B testing on your landing pages and see how you can improve your conversion.
It’s not just you, but almost everybody is doing it…
Just in case you have that fear of missing out — don’t be — a lot of small business owners, and professional marketers included, are practically leveraging freemiums to save costs. And you know what? They are doing great by using these free tools. The most important thing is that you act on the actionable items and intelligence that these tools has given you. By doing that you’ll realize and appreciate the fact that you were able to save thousands of dollars from online marketing tools. Now, that’s wise marketing.
