When it comes to marketing tools for small businesses, this is one of the key factors that determine whether a business will succeed or fail. It’s true that many smaller businesses can afford to pay for a large in house marketing team, who cover each aspect of their brand.
This is why free online marketing is the best strategy for smaller businesses that want to make an impact, but don’t have the time or resources. It can be an incredibly effective tool when it comes to reaching large audiences, but paid marketing tools can prove to be expensive.
This is where free marketing tools come in handy. They’re completely cost free, and are an effective way to grow your business. To find out more about the best free marketing tools out there, simply keep reading, as we take a look below.
1. Google Analytics
When it comes to free marketing tools, Google Analytics is a must have for every small business. It’s completely free, and it is an effective way of monitoring your audience.
Google analytics can help to tell you who is engaging with your website, and tracks who is interested in your business. By monitoring your business analytics, you are able to witness a whole host of helpful insights.
One of the key benefits that Google Analytics provides is that it shows you how many visitors you are getting to your website, on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
As well as this, it also shows you the keywords that people have typed in before finding your business. Keeping track of these keywords will be important for ensuring more frequent visits from larger audiences.
Google Analytics also shows you how people have stumbled across your website. These range from typing in keywords, clicking on ads from different websites, referrals from other websites etc. This will help to show you what is currently working and what isn’t.
In addition, you’ll get a closer insight into who is visiting your website, and get a clearer picture of your demographics. This can help your marketing strategies in the future, as you’re able to fine tune your audience.
Finally, you’ll be able to see which pages and products your audience spend the most time looking at. This can help to show you the things that they’re particularly interested in.
2. Canva
When people get started out with a business, they often don’t quite fully grasp how important visuals are when it comes to marketing. Choosing the correct image can be detrimental when attempting to gain a wider audience.
This is where Canva comes in. Canva is a great tool for small businesses, as it provides users with a wealth of different templates, images and designs for their website.
It contains lots of interesting features, including posters, Ebooks, websites, and logo templates. You’ll honestly be spoilt for choice when it comes to Canva’s wealth of visual marketing options.
There are lots of free templates on the website, which you don’t have to pay to use, but if you want some of their more premium features, you will need to pay a fee.
In addition, you don’t need to have any particular talents for graphic design in order to use Canva. It’s incredibly easy to use, and their features do all of the work for you/
3. Mailchimp
For those who have been running a business for a while, you’ll recognize the importance of email marketing.
Frequently emailing your customers about new products can exponentially increase your sales. Having a marketing tool that can help you to send out these emails to your customers is incredibly important.
Mailchimp offers a whole host of different email marketing features. Some of these include managing your emails, sending out emails automatically without any action from you, as well as seeing how many people are engaging with your emails.
This final feature can help to give you more insight about your customers, which is integral when building a small business.
It has been proven that the more email engagement you have with your customers, the more likely your business is to grow. Setting up automatic email notifications that detail order confirmations, shipment notices, and basket reminders all help to build a rapport with your customers.
4. Typeform
When it comes to making sure that your business is as successful as possible, customer satisfaction is one of the most important things. Typeform allows you to create tools that help you to engage with your customers, primarily when it comes to receiving feedback.
You can create a whole host of different things that can help you to receive direct feedback from the people most interested in your business. This includes things like surveys, quizzes, and forms. Not only are these incredibly practical and beneficial tools, they’re also visually striking.
You can choose from a whole range of different templates that are stunning to look at, and will be incredibly visually appealing for potential customers.
With the free version, you can get up to 100 engagements per month, which is great for smaller businesses that are just getting started out. With the paid version, you can increase the volume of responses that you receive.
5. Pikwizard
Choosing images for your blog or website can be incredibly difficult, especially when it comes to issues of copyright. This can make it super tricky to find visually striking, and appropriate images for your website.
This is where Pikwizard comes in handy. It has millions of images that are completely royalty free to choose from. This means that you’re absolutely guaranteed to find something suitable for your website.
The search feature makes it incredibly easy to use too, allowing you to find images that are as vague or specific as you like.
In addition, it will save you a lot of time and effort, as some businesses opt to hire photographers to capture images for their website. By using Pikwizard, you’re cutting out the middleman, which can help your business to run far more efficiently.
6. Yoast
All small business owners will recognize how difficult it can be to research topics and keywords. This is one of the most time consuming aspects of running a business, and can be draining if it's you doing all the labor.
Yoast can be a massive help when it comes to this aspect of business, as it can help to tell you all of the mistakes that you’re making in terms of keywords.
As well as this, it can also teach you how to improve your readability, and where to put your keywords. That’s right, Yoast is incredibly precise, and can help you to fine tune your marketing strategies to get more visits and interactions with your visits.
If you want to get even more out of the website, you can upgrade to a paid version, although this is not completely necessary. The paid version allows you to search for semantic keywords, giving you more insight.
7. HubSpot
Another must have marketing tool for small businesses is HubSpot. HubSpot allows you to essentially run an entire marketing campaign across multiple channels. It offers several different templates that are suitable for a whole host of different websites and formats.
In addition to this, it has lots of fun features that can attract audience engagement, such as live chats that pop up when somebody clicks on your website. This way, you can engage directly with your audience, and give them a more personalized experience.
You can download their free version, which is packed full of features that will benefit your business. After this, if you’re sold on their marketing tools, you can go ahead and opt for a subscription.
8. Flipsnack
Sometimes, PDF’s just aren’t great when it comes to demonstrating your products and services. They can be incredibly cumbersome to read, as you have to scroll through each page, oftentimes losing your place.
This is where Flipsnack comes in. If you want to present your products and services to your customers in the most professional and engaging manner, you simply have to download this program.
It allows you to create incredibly sleek and stylish flipbooks, that your customers can glance through leisurely. You can choose from lots of different designs that allow you to customize the flip book to your own personal liking.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, there are lots of free marketing tools out there that you can utilize for your website. From graphic design, to analytics tools, to email marketing, to flip books, there’s something out there for each of the different aspects of your business. Simply take a look at our list above and get started today.