Freemium plans for marketing technology can seem too good to be true. And with fiddly free trials and limited functionality, they often are. Here, Kavita Singh shares the top 19 genuinely free and valuable marketing tools. Find out what you’ve been missing out on.
Social media and SEO:
Screaming Frog:
Used by the likes of Amazon, Disney and Google, the digital marketing agency, Screaming Frog, uses SEO to help businesses track their online presence. It taps website links, images, CSS, scripts and search engines to analyse the results of your website. Advanced features include, detecting broken links and duplicate content and generating XML sitemaps.
Hootsuite:
Investing in
Hootsuite
can keep your social media schedule both timely and organised. With a free account, you can manage up to three social profiles with the option of scheduling up to 30 messages at a time to post automatically throughout the day. It saves you having to set an alarm for every post and means you can schedule your socials all at the same time.
Serposcope:
Serposcope is 100% free and has loads of
SEO
features. The software automatically tracks websites for specific keywords, so you’ll be able to retrieve ranking history of a competitor at any time. The tool utilises geotargeting, which searches keywords based on the city and country if you’re looking to reach a specific region. While using Serposcope, you’ll be able to retrieve your competitors’ ranking history for every keyword you track.
Email management:
Putsmail:
Have you ever sent a mass email only to realise you forgot to include one tiny detail? This service allows testing of an HTML email before sending it to your contacts. You can enter up to 10 recipient addresses, your subject line and HTML. Alternatively, you can include a plain text version of your email. Now, you can avoid those awkward followup emails about your missing attachments or wrong subject line.
Mailchimp:
Mailchimp is one of the most well-known
email marketing
platforms. The tool allows users to create email campaigns, landing pages, and pop-up forms, as well as automate marketing emails, product recommendations and order notifications. Your plan is free just as long as you stay under 2000 contacts on your list.
Grammarly:
If you’re ever feeling tongue-tied with your email response, remember that Grammarly’s free plan has way more to offer than just correcting your spelling and punctuation. The marketing tool also detects your tone and how concise you are, ensuring professionalism in your emails.
Lead nuturing:
Hubspot CRM:
Hubspot
offers CRM, which is 100% free and includes an up-to-date view of your entire sales pipeline on a dashboard. You’ll be able to always keep track of your sales team with individual performance tracking. Unlike most platforms, you can enjoy unlimited data, unlimited users and up to one million contacts with no time limit or expiration date.
Mautic:
With
Mautic
, you’ll be able to catch potential clients, and unlike Hubspot, it’s an open source tool. Mautic automates the process of getting and nurturing leads generated from landing pages and forms, segments contacts, handles and sends workflow email, text messages, web notifications, social media monitoring. It can integrate with your CRM to make chopping and changing from platform to platform a thing of the past.
Flowlu:
Avoid writing lengthy invoices. With Flowlu, invoicing is directly implemented into customer accounts. Flowlu is the CRM tool to use if you need to keep track of revenue and expenses. This all-in-one business platform allows up to two users to utilise cloud CRM, records and lead management, and agile project management.
Crystal:
With Crystal, you can discover and predict relationships with clients instantly. Along with a free personality test, you can use its social media URL lookup tool to analyse and predict future relationships. You’ll be able to determine what comes naturally, energises, or drains someone, as well as how to speak to or meet with them.
Website creation:
WordPress:
WordPress is one of the top content management systems for a reason. Beginners can get a free domain name in five minutes. Users also have the freedom to see who visits their website and from what region of the world. You can also choose from a selection of customisable design templates to personalise your website. It’s a platform worth investing in if you want to start small and build from there.
Event promotion:
Eventbrite:
This US-based ticketing and event technology platform helps businesses organise and sell tickets to events online. Free events can be marketed for free on Eventbrite. From concerts to parties to conferences, the platform can be accessed online or via mobile apps, which scales from basic registration to a full-featured event.
Data analysis:
DataBox:
DataBox allows users to manage all their KPIs on one platform. Instead of spending time creating insights, you’ll be able to act on them right away. You can also mix and match metrics from different sources right on one data board to get a complete view of your performance at a glance.
Clicky:
Clicky has many of the same features as Google Analytics, but it’s much less intimidating with a friendlier interface. At one simple glance, you can see where visitors came from and what device they were using at the time. Clicky’s free features include real time data, basic segmentation, API access, and widgets for a single site with less than 3,000 page views.
Open web analytics:
It’s important to know who’s looking at your website, but don’t forget about the ‘how’. Open Web Analytics lets users analyse how people use their website and applications. It’s licensed under GPL and provides website owners easier ways to add web analytics on their sites. The system also comes with built-in-support for tracking websites made with popular CRMs.
Dasheroo:
It can get confusing numerous different applications at once. The all-in-one platform, Dasheroo, gives businesses access to monitor and analyse data in one place, and updates automatically. You can start with a pre-built dashboard and a curated set of updated insights. The site organises diagrams, schemes and graphs all in one place to make analysing data easier.
Inspectlet:
Eliminate the guesswork when analysing how users interact on your website. With its slogan, ‘Google Analytics tells you what, Inspectlet tells you why’ this marketing tool can check in with your audience like no other site. Inspectlet records videos of your site as if you’re sitting right next to your visitors. You’ll see every click and keypress with 1000 free recordings a month.
Project management:
Asana
: If you’re looking to avoid office burnout, Asana might be the platform for you. Manage tasks and personal to-do-lists
by collaborating
with up to 15 teammates by mapping out deadlines for yourself and your colleagues. Ease the stress of project management in one download of its free version.
Trello:
Among online reviewers, Trello is described as a crowd-pleasing project management tool. It stands out from its difficult-to-use competitors. Its free plan has virtually everything you’ll need for your project including an unlimited number of boards, lists, members and attachments. Users can attach files of up to 10 MB from their computer or from Google Drive, Box, Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive.
