If you aren’t taking advantage of these free marketing tools, you’re missing out.

You can go a long way with a simple toolkit. If you play your cards right, it can give your business a competitive edge, save you time, and provide valuable insights into your target audience you’ve never known about.

Digital marketing has levelled the playing field for small businesses and entrepreneurs alike. With the internet, you no longer have to be drowned out by marketing campaigns of multi-million dollar companies.

So use these tools to your advantage. Fill up your toolkit. And start getting your brand voice out there.

General Marketing Tools

MailChimp

MailChimp, also known as the email giant, is an all-in-one marketing platform that prides itself on putting your audience first. They’re a popular choice for managing your email list, creating campaigns, and getting subscribers onboard.

We use MailChimp’s exit-intent pop-ups that prompt a reader to sign up whenever they’re about to leave our website. It’s a nifty feature that lets us get our message across without interrupting their reading time.

 

Google My Business

According to Hubspot, one in two people who conduct a local search visit a store on the same day. If your business is local and if you don’t have a Google My Business account, those people won’t be able to find you, and you’ll be missing out on a lot of SEO benefits.

Your Google My Business account lists important information on your Google profile such as your address, hours, number, website, and reviews. It gives your business credibility. Without it, you won’t appear on Google Maps.

 

HubSpot

Famous for their concept of inbound marketing, Hubspot has been working hard to create a growth platform that reflects their message on how “good for the business” should also mean “good for the customer.” Along with a marketing, sales, and service hub, they offer a free CRM tool.

A cool feature we use from Hubspot is their AI chatbox. This sits at the corner of their website, and if a visitor has a quick question or wants to talk to a representative, they can get an answer at a click of a button.

Tools For Your Website

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is arguably the best digital analytics tool available for free. If your website isn’t using it, you’re missing out on some good stuff. Google Analytics helps you understand your website traffic with powerful insights summarized in easy-to-understand reports. You get to see what marketing channels are working, what demographic of people are visiting, and how well your site is converting, to name a few.

 

Hotjar

Do you know what happens when a visitor comes to your website? Do their eyes light up at a specific passage? Do they get uninterested halfway through and click off? If you’re in the dark on why your website is performing the way it is, Hotjar can shine a light on that. Hotjar tracks how users are interacting with your website — where they click, how far they scroll, where they’re dropping off, etc. They even record a video of someone’s screen when they visit your website.

 

Google Search Console

If you’re striving for that golden spot on the first page of Google search results, you’ll need Google Search Console. This tool makes it easy to optimize your content to rank as high as it can on search engines. It helps you identify crawl errors, index new web pages, and see where you show up on the search results page. Additionally, it can alert you if there’s a security issue on your website.

 

GTmetrix and Pingdom

Website speed can make or break your audience’s interest, so you don’t want to have a slow website. In addition, it gives you a full report and recommendations on how you can get up to speed. For example, it might tell you to make fewer HTTP requests, or leverage browser caching. GTMetrix and Pingdom are free tools that check how long it takes for your website to load in different browsers and locations. We also have our very own website assessment tool you can check out right here.

Social Media Tools

Facebook Business Manager

Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms out there, and if you’re looking to use it to reach your target audience, Facebook Business Manager can make it easier to do so. It lets you manage your pages, ad accounts, and who has permission to them.

We use Business Manager to target our ads to specific audiences using pixels. A pixel is a piece of code you put on your website that collects data on who visits and tracks conversions from Facebook ads.

Conclusion

In the end, it’s not the tools that dictate our marketing outcomes. They’re only a compass, pointing us in a general right direction.

From social media to website analytics, these 9 free tools can arm you with a wealth of invaluable information. Use it to light your path. It’ll show you the blind spots in your map, what’s working and what’s isn’t. And who knows? Maybe someday your compass will lead you to unexplored territory, and it’ll be worth it.