Online marketing can be a great way to boost your sales. Estimates say over 70% of the world’s purchases are now made with an online engagement included in the customer’s journey.
However, for small to medium businesses - the tools that you need to achieve big online success can take some significant investment and upfront costs.
The good news is, there are some great online tools to help you get going that are completely free.
We’ve listed our most recommended free tools to help you get going with your digital marketing without breaking the bank!
1. Google Tools
We start with a big one. Google is well-known in the digital marketing space. Their search engine, and PPC ads, take up around 90% of the search market. What is lesser known is the suite of free tools that are available to help businesses get more out of their online marketing.
So, in no particular order:
Google Analytics
This powerful tool allows you to track website visitors, their behaviour when on your website, and how many of them took the key actions that you want them to take. It’s a very powerful tool and its latest version comes loaded with a huge amount of options. It can feel like a bit of a task to get anything out of it, but we recommended getting it set up and starting small with a couple of simple goals you want to keep a track of such as what online channels are bringing visitors to my website.
Google Search Engine Console
GSC is the platform you can use to see how your website is performing in Google’s organic (non-paid) search engine results. You can monitor what you are ranking for and identify the search terms that you want to improve on.
Although technical, a powerful part of GSC is the ability to monitor how your website measures up against Google’s Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals are the ingredients Google expects each website to contain so it can offer a good online experience. For example, working correctly on a mobile phone. Failure to get these rights can mean you risk going down in Google search rankings, so they’re worth getting right.
Google My Business
We mention this in our recent blog post on how businesses in the flooring industry can tackle their marketing challenges. Google My Business is a great way to boost your online presence locally. It allows you to build an online portfolio for your business and share crucial information such as your business locations and opening times with people who are searching for your services within your area. Highly recommended.
2. Canva
A good brand identity can help you to paint a picture of a professional business to your audience. Graphic design work is skilled work and the tools used by professionals in this space can be costly.
Canva is a great option to get you going without having to break the bank on expensive tools or outsourcing. Their free version offers a good bank of well-designed templates that you can use to create eye-catching graphics for your content efforts such as social media posts and email headers.
3. MailChimp
Email marketing remains a fantastic way to drive awareness of your business to a relevant audience. Many businesses have large buckets of email address both from paying customers and people who are interested, but not quite ready to buy.
Providing you’re meeting your data protection requirements, this can be a brilliant source of new business. While it has premium options, MailChimp’s free plan allows you to manage email campaigns, automate marketing, and track performance with basic analytics. They have a number of email templates set up, so you can quickly send relevant communications to your email audience.
4. Buffer
Ahh social media. The wonderful thing about social media is that it makes it all look easy. However, when you get to the point of managing several different accounts, creating content for each of these can begin to eat into your time quite quickly and it tends to become a costly endeavour trying to keep up.
We feel a great way to manage this better is by using a social media management tool. Buffer offers a good free account to let you manage a limited amount of different social media accounts in one place. Use it to schedule posts, monitor engagement and leverage AI for content management. The free version is limited, but it’s still a great resource to save you time and money.
5. UberSuggest
SEO is a big topic that we don’t recommend jumping feet first into. Start small by picking out the things you want to be searchable for and build from there. Ubersuggest is a fantastic way to collate useful ideas and suggestions for content based on what you want to be searchable for. The free version is limited, but it’s still great for improving your organic search strategy without any cost.
Which freebies do you use to help your digital marketing strategies? Let us know what we’ve missed, so we can share those as well.