#Startup tips: Best 10 free marketing tools startups and small companies cannot miss
Cutting through the clutter and making your brand stand out online is getting more and more difficult. You need the right strategy and tactics and just as important, the right software tools at your disposal.
But what if you are a startup or a small company that doesn’t have thousands of dollars to spend on digital marketing every month? If this sound familiar, then this article is for you.
We compiled a list of the 10 best free resources you can access today to get ahead of your competition. Most of the tools we listed offer both a free and paid option (everyone needs to make a living, right?), but we’ll show you what features you can use with a free plan.
SEO tools to help you increase organic traffic
Google Search Console is probably one of the most powerful SEO tools you have at hand, and it’s completely free. It gives you insights into how Google crawls your website, what pages are indexed and which keywords bring you traffic. You can test URLs that are not indexed and submit them to be indexed, submit your sitemap and view your website’s search performance.
Ubersuggest evolved from being a keyword research tool to a comprehensive SEO tool. You can run a site audit to check your website’s health and spot any glitches affecting your search visibility. The tool also gives you an overview of your backlink profile, as well as organic traffic and keywords and content suggestions. The free version has limitation for the number of keywords suggestions and pages crawled, but it’s still a pretty powerful tool for doing SEO on a budget.
Analytics tools to track website performance and user behaviour
Databox is an analytics platform that connects to several data sources and displays metrics in one simple and easy to follow dashboard. You can pull data from your Google Analytics, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, Facebook and LinkedIn Ads, ActiveCampaign, Google Ads and much more. Databox takes the hassle out of tracking website performance, funnels visualization and social media performance. The company promises a free-forever account, where you can connect up to 3 data sources and set up to 3 different dashboards.
Ever wondered how your visitors interact with your website, where they click or tap and how much they scroll down? Hotjar gives you this kind of insights, through heatmaps, video recordings of user sessions and conversation funnel visualization. The free plan allows collecting data from a maximum of 2,000 pageviews/day which can work just fine for a smaller website.
Automate your email campaigns and marketing activities
HubSpot is one of the most robust marketing platforms out there, and the free account they offer is packed with lots of functionalities to automate your marketing campaigns.
You can install a live chat on your website, create and publish forms to collect user information, run email marketing campaigns (with a limit of 2,000 sends per month), connect social profiles and schedule posts and track engagements, connect ad accounts (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google Ads). You can also monitor your website and marketing analytics. Bonus, the HubSpot CRM is free forever and you can use it to store and manage your clients, leads and subscribers contact data.
SendPulse multi-channel marketing platform enables you to set up a Facebook Messenger chatbot without coding, as well as deliver email campaigns and push browser notification. The mail marketing feature allows you to resend emails to those subscribers who didn’t previously open your email and to perform A/B test on emails.
With a free account, you can send up to 15,000 emails a month to a list of 500 subscribers, and up to 10,000 messages to an unlimited number of users via Facebook chatbot.
Design and video marketing
Canva is a great tool to use when you need to create visual assets such as blog banners, presentations or brochures without the help of a designer.
The free plan gives you access to over 8,000 templates, 100 design types and thousands of free photos.
Video is gaining more and more popularity and so is video marketing. With Vidyard you can record video tutorials, product demos and even sales pitches. Share your videos through a link and keep track of how many people viewed it. With the free-forever plan, you can share unlimited videos and embed up to 5 on your website or blog.
Improve your landing pages and conversion rates
Landing page analyzer is a free tool created by Unbounce, most known for their landing page builder. The tool audits a landing page and gives you an overall score as well as suggestions to improve your page’s conversion rate.
Google optimize is a free conversion rate optimization tool integrated with Google Analytics. It enables you to easily run three types of tests: A/B, multivariate, and redirect tests. You can test different versions of titles, call to action messages or design layouts and target your website audience based on behaviour, technology, URL sequences and much more.
I hope you find this list useful and feel inspired to start using any of the tools listed here to amplify your marketing efforts.
Bonus: if you are looking for discounts on your favourite marketing tools, AppSumo gathers the best deals so make sure you check out their website and discount campaigns.
The list of 10 free marketing tools was compiled for AdHugger by Elena Iordache-Stoica, Digital Marketing Strategist at STOICA.CO . Elena is a digital marketer with a background and passion for technology sales. Currently helping B2B companies grow faster online and navigate the complex world of digital marketing as part of STOICA.CO. She’s trying to be a better human, learn and grow every day and help others along the way.