Free Online Marketing Tools: the $0 marketing stack
Rebrandly manages all your links enabling you to brand, track and share short URLs using a custom domain name.
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Regardless of how bootstrapped you or your startup may feel, the $0 marketing stack gives you plenty of opportunities to grow your business with a number of powerful free online marketing tools. From Buffer to a specific app that tells you exactly what you need to know about a potential client you’re meeting with, you’ll be impressed by just how powerful completely free online marketing tools really are.
If you’re looking for some shortcuts, jump straight to:
- Social media
- Design
- SEO
- Conversion Rate Optimization
- Email Marketing
- Customer Relationship Management
- Analytics
- Video Marketing
- Content management
The $0 Marketing Stack
Social Media
Buffer – A great helper for professional social media scheduling and marketing, this tool works by first connecting your chosen profile(s) from each of the major social media networks. From there, you can schedule up to 10 separate posts for each network you wish to target. If you choose to post twice per day on each network, for example, you’ll only have to work within Buffer every five days to set up the perfect schedule and target the most valuable markets for your business.
Rebrandly – One of the more new free marketing tools is a quick and easy way to both shorten the links you share across the web, as well as brand them with your own custom domain name. A branded link, such as “brand.link/marketing” increases trust and raises CTR (Click Through Rate) by up to 34%. Rebrandly links are also SEO friendly, because they come from your own custom domain and not a shared domain.
Simply Measured – When it comes to social media management, nothing beats Simply Measured. In exchange for a Twitter follow or a Facebook mention, you can get a number of customized reports from these sites that will help you streamline your digital marketing efforts and ultimately get more conversions. They also offer reports for your LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest campaigns, thereby effectively covering all six of the major social media networks.
Socialinsider offers competitive benchmarking and social media analytics for digital agencies. They cover Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube analytics. They don’t have a free plan, but they do offer a free 7-day trial on any of their pricing tiers, as well as a completely free benchmarking section on their site.
LinkGallery is a free tool that lets you seamlessly manage one bio link for all your social platforms. This means that you get to direct your audience to all your other channels such as your website, blog and event page for example. And since this tool is developed by the link management platform, Rebrandly – any of the links you create are branded links. Therefore you are able to gather in-depth click analytics to better understand your audience.
Design
Adobe Spark enables you to tell stories and share ideas quickly and beautifully. Spark lets you create three types of content:
Use Page to create a story using text, images, and video. When you’re done we’ll present your story as a responsive web page that can be viewed in any web browser.
Use Post to create images optimized for social media; you provide images and text and we’ll help with the design. We’ll even help you create the right shape and size image for each social media platform.
Use Video to create, well, a video. Add videos from your computer or iOS camera roll, overlay text, add your voice and background music, and we’ll help turn your story into an amazing video to share with the world.
Canva – Manage your design and create fabulous images custom tailored for your needs. Social media graphics and presentations can be created by choosing from 1000’s of impressive layout options; you have the option of selecting from their collection containing millions of stock photographs or uploading your own personalized images. A number of photo filters can be used to “tweak” the look of a certain image; although a picture is worth a thousand words, you can still add your own text by choosing from the huge variety of fonts available, adding any icons and shapes you like as well.
With Placeit you can create high-quality branding and marketing assets so anyone from individuals to large companies can create amazing visuals from logos, mockups, videos and design templates for their brand regardless of technical or artistic skills. And while they don’t have a free plan tier, they have plenty of free resources available to use on their website.
SEO
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is a powerful and flexible site crawler, able to crawl both small and very large websites efficiently, while allowing you to analyse the results in real-time. It gathers key onsite data to allow SEOs to make informed decisions. The free version allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs, with some features locked until a licence is purchased.
MoZ Tools – For SEO optimization, two free MoZ tools will help you with your online marketing campaign. With Open Site Explorer, you simply plug your URL into the site to view a number of SEO related statistics by clicking on different tabs on the Open Site Explorer dashboard. Followerwonk is another one of MoZ’s free marketing tools, which is geared specifically for SEO targeting on Twitter, giving you the potential for a powerful online presence.
Conversion Rate Optimization:
OptiMonk is a conversion optimization tool that helps you turn your traffic into sales. It allows you to create user-friendly popups, side messages, notification bars and full screens, without coding. You can create as many messages as you wish, and target each visitor segment with fully customized messages that are more relevant and more likely to convert. OptiMonk includes 200+ beautiful templates, but you can also create a custom popup from scratch with the drag & drop editor. Their free plan offers unlimited campaigns and up to 5,000 page views.
Email Marketing:
MailerLite is an email marketing tool designed to help people of all skill levels create professional and personalized email campaigns using all the features you need like automation, segmentation, landing pages and pop-ups, to name a few. They offer 24/7 live customer support and a Forever Free plan. Every free plan also includes a 14-day all-access pass to the premium features so you can try them out.
Customer Relationship Management:
Charlie – You’ll never feel like you’re meeting a stranger again after using Charlie for your customer relationship management (CRM) needs. By searching through hundred’s of pages of social media profiles, blog posts, interests and more, Charlie will use your address book or a specifically entered email address to prepare a one page summary for each person with whom you plan to meet. Meetings are sure to go more smoothly when you arrive prepared and already have a good feel for what makes someone really “tick”!
Analytics:
Google Analytics – Google gives all of us in the digital marketing world an almost bizarrely powerful tool for all aspects of web page analytics, and they keep it totally free. Everything from real time views of where viewers are clicking, reading and scrolling to a full analysis of how the traffic on all your social media sites is flowing is readily available, along with page views per minute and second, number of conversions, and much more.
Google Trends – True to their pattern, Google gives us this powerful marketing research tool that can make all the difference in your startup marketing scheme. Maybe you’ve heard some new terms and you want to find out if others are searching for those same keywords. Or, perhaps you have an idea for a phrase that you believe could be great for your online marketing campaign. After spending some time on Google Trends, you’ll leave with a good handle on the direction market interests are headed.
Hotjar – Top notch for heat mapping and website optimization. Want to find out exactly how much of each webpage your viewers are reading before they click away? Where are the best spots to insert customer surveys or to add targeted messages? With Hotjar, you can find out the answers to all of those questions with zero capital outlay required. By the way, this tool is just as perfect for learning more about how your visitors spend their time on your mobile site or app.
Segment – A powerful tool for analytics; in many cases, Segment will be all that is needed to collect customer data from all of your third-party applications. This single API will gather information from all of your mobile sites, websites, and servers, then format the data so that it can be sent to any analytical tool on their platform, all for free. Other applications like MailChimp and Google Analytics are also easily connected to Segment via features on the dashboard, allowing you to utilize the customer data collected with whichever app suits you best.
Cyfe is an all-in-one business dashboard that enables you to monitor everything from sales, to web analytics, to infrastructure – all in one place. You can pull your CRM, Google Analytics, Reviews, and Social data into an integrated dashboard to see the whole picture and share those dashboards with management, clients, or shareholders. Benchmark progress against business objectives, and even receive alerts via email or SMS when certain conditions are met.Their free plan allows you to create 2 dashboards and includes one user seat.
Video Marketing:
Wistia – Instead of just defaulting to YouTube to upload your videos, you can use Wistia as your free video management tool and keep people on your own page or direct them to another more desirable location, essentially driving people through a custom created marketing funnel. You can also increase your ROI with their video analytics tools, allowing you to see how far people get through your videos before clicking, pausing, etc.
Content management:
ShareIt provides you with curated lists of content relevant to the keywords you search. It also helps you find popular sites and influencers that are relevant to your niche. You and I know the importance of finding and sharing good content – and ShareIt makes it easier for us and fellow marketers.
Word Press – Create a website and/or blog page just by using the “new page” option in Word Press. More than 50,000 new sites each day are created using Word Press, a fact attesting to its powerful yet straightforward nature. You’ll get great customer support in whatever form suits you best, be it email, chat, support pages, or forums, and best of all, the free version fits right into our $0 marketing stack.
Free Marketing Tools Level the Playing Field
If you are on a bootstrapped budget but are still looking for the best free marketing tools available today, the above free marketing stack can provide impressive results to anyone willing to put in some time. In the world of social media and online marketing, the $0 marketing stack has leveled the playing field, giving even the smallest of businesses an opportunity to compete with big brand names throughout the web.
Further Reading:
- Best Social Media Automation Tools
- 150+ Best Marketing Tools: The Ultimate List
- Why You Need to Add This Simple Tool to Your Marketing Stack
- Introduction to Online Marketing Types
This Article is About:
- Free marketing tools
- List of the Best Marketing Tools
- Free Online Marketing Tools
- Marketing Tools
Originally Posted: May 31st, 2016.
Post Updated: Nov 5, 2019.
