Online Marketing can involve so many things like email marketing, social media marketing, content marketing and so much more. Tools can help marketing teams in promotions, analysis, content creation, and so many ways. But the problem with these marketing tools is that a number of them try to lure users with free trials. They are not free at all, and all the users get is a free trial that expires after a month of use. They eventually have to pay for it, and it involves subscribing to the tool and renewing it once the period is over.
So here are some free marketing tools that online marketers can use. They are free to use for indefinite periods, that is the best part about these tools. So here is a compilation of all the free marketing tools that small businesses can use.
1. Buffer – Free tool for social media scheduling
Buffer is great at scheduling social media posts. Social media marketing can be done so effectively with a tool like Buffer. The best part about Buffer is that it is free. What Buffer does is that it allows users to connect social media profiles from networks. It then lets them schedule 10 posts for each of these networks. All these for absolutely free. So, if you can share three posts per day, then you can stay ahead of your schedule.
Top reasons to use Buffer:
- Instant sharing with a free Buffer browser extension.
- Send tweets at an appropriate time.
- Clip text and images as you find them.
- View and track top-performing posts.
- Check and compare with the help of stats and metrics.
- Sort analytics and gain insight through exporting them.
- Integrate with mobile apps.
- Import RSS feeds.
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2. Google Analytics – Free tool for real-time analytics
When digital marketing teams use free tools like Google Analytics, they get access to a ton of free analytics data. The ton of information and data that digital marketing teams can access is worth so much. You can track traffic to your website, which network directs the maximum clicks, who is the most engaging segment of people etc. It is a real-time analysis that is free to use anytime, anywhere. There is no fee to be paid here.
Top reasons to use Google Analytics:
- Advanced reports and Visualization tools.
- Funnel Analysis.
- Tag Management.
- Goal Management.
- Deep data analysis and activation.
- Integration with Google products.
3. Microsoft Clarity – Free tool for heatmaps & session recordings
When we scrutinize what Microsoft Clarity offers with its free platform, we can appreciate what value it gives to digital marketers. A free tool that Microsoft offers to its users is best for doing complex web analysis and the detailed reports that it shows are just something that is unbelievably true.
You can see heatmaps, and session recordings, and determine the activity of visitors to your website. You can know about the time that visitors have stayed on your website, which links have received the maximum clicks etc. Microsoft Clarity can be such a boon if digital marketers use it correctly. For example, it gives the flexibility to insert messages and survey forms.
Top reasons to use Microsoft Clarity:
- Ability to export Heatmap analytics data.
- Analyze user behavior based on their feedback.
- Gives a visual map of user behavior and product insights.
4. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools – Best companion of Google Search Console
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is so vital when it comes to assessing your SEO scores. Use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools along with Google Search Console to improve its power and efficiency. You get so much valuable info about SEO health, website rankings, and link building, which is also for free. You get backlink data, SEO issues that may be dragging the website down in the search rankings, and get to know high-performing keywords. The detailed reports will guide you and give you deeper insights into the working of your website.
Top reasons to use Ahrefs Webmaster Tools:
- SEO metrics about page rankings.
- Detailed reports about inbound and outbound links.
- Get metrics about traffic, search volume, and keyword difficulty.
- Automated alerts about SEO rankings, keyword rankings, and backlinks.
5. Unsplash – Free stock images
Images are what attract viewers when they see a social media post. Using royalty-free images has become so much essential to give a visual appeal to your website. There are tools such as Unsplash that bring all the free images that are free to download.
These images are both professional and are free to download without having to pay anything for them. Plus, they can be downloaded in any number of resolutions also. Digital marketers, bloggers, and online marketing rely heavily on stock images that can be downloaded without watermarks or licenses. All experienced marketers know how to use stock photos in their marketing strategy. This is a quite handy tool you will use most of the time.
Top features to use Unsplash:
- Free access to over one million photos.
- Photos are sharable and free to download.
- Download photos in multiple image sizes and resolutions.
- Submit photos.
- Multiple collections of photos in different categories.
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6. Canva – Free designing tool
Canva has fast emerged as a reliable and free tool for digital marketers for designing social media videos, presentations, and graphic tools for online promotion. This is essentially a graphic design platform that digital marketing teams can use to create graphic posters and content for social media and websites.
Canva is great for Instagram marketing as well. Canva is already proving to be one of the great free tools that bloggers use for their digital marketing purposes. The free templates are best if you want to create social media posts within a very short time without taking help from graphic designers.
Top reasons to use Canva:
- Drag and drop features.
- Tons of free templates.
- Create many types of content like infographics, newsletters, websites, e-book covers, presentations, resumes, logos, social media posts, wallpapers, etc.
- Easy photo-editing tools.
- Free access to stock images, icons, fonts, backgrounds, etc.
7. Link Explorer – Free SEO backlink checker tool
When it comes to SEO, online marketers rely on some paid tools. But Link Explorer is a free tool that they can use for tracking links to a website to prepare reports about links, competition, and keywords. Moz brings its powerful Link Explorer tool to give deep insights into links and how they function in a website.
Link Explorer can help website developers with indexing issues, link building, and tracking down broken links. It gives detailed reports about Top Pages, Link Comparison, Domain Authority, etc. You just key in the website address, and it shows the statistics. You can also see a report about which page has gained the maximum visits or which link has received the maximum clicks.
Top reasons to use Link Explorer:
- Helps with Indexing issues.
- Compares backlink profiles of competitors.
- Shows page authority (PA) and domain authority (DA) of a website.
- Shows inbound links to a website.
- Insights about the social media popularity of a website.
- Shows top pages with the highest page authority.
- Shows a spam score.
- Discovered links and lost links.
8. Blog Ideas Generator – Find your next blog topic
When it comes to blogging, digital marketing, SEO, and website generation, content is the most important aspect of all of these. But content does not always come easy. There comes a time when you have to rely on free content marketing tools such as Blog Ideas Generator to generate and suggest content. You can use it to generate blog titles and generate better titles for search engine optimization. Blog Ideas Generator is free to use, particularly for bloggers who want to feature on top of Google rankings.
Top reasons to use Blog Ideas Generator:
- Generate creative headlines in minutes.
- Change subjects or ideas as per need.
9. Website Grader – Analyze your website
Another free tool that you can use to measure the performance of a website is Website Grader. This tool is free to use, and grades or measures a website based on several criteria like page size, page requests, speed of a page, security, mobile-friendly, etc. It views page titles, headings, meta descriptions, sitemaps, and other such criteria to come to a website and its search engine rankings. It is one of the great free marketing tools that digital marketers can use to make an SEO-friendly website appear in search engine results.
Top reasons to use Website Grader:
- Measures website performance.
- Evaluates it based on SEO criteria.
- Evaluates website security and mobile friendliness.
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10. MailChimp – Start your first email marketing campaign
Online marketing needs tools that can collect emails and use them to push their products to prospective customers. MailChimp is one of the best free tools that digital marketing teams use to reach out to promising clients. It is an email automation software tool that uses advanced algorithms to target and segment customers, set up autoresponder emails, identify key subscribers, test email campaigns, and so much more.
It has dozens of free email designing templates that are available for free. Small businesses and enterprises use MailChimp as an essential marketing tool.
Top reasons to use MailChimp:
- Design emails with free email templates.
- Make custom forms.
- A/B Testing.
- Visual reports with graphs.
- Integration with Google Analytics.
- Automated email delivery.
- Email blasts & Targeted emails.
- Analytics about email campaigns.
11. BeFunky – Photo editor for everyone
Photo retouching, adjusting the size of the photo, and photo editing gets very easy with BeFunky. Photo editing need not be done on Photoshop alone. When you have to do it online, nothing gives you the flexibility and choice of tools that BeFunky gives you. You can do so much here, and the best part about it is that it is free to use. You need to crop the photo for a blog post or reduce the resolution of a big resolution photo, you can do it in BeFunky. Graphic design becomes very easy with BeFunky.
Top reasons to use BeFunky:
- Dozens of photo effects.
- Background remover.
- Basic photo-editing tools are easy to use.
- Edit photos online without any payment.
- Photo touch-up tools.
- Text editor tool.
- Banner maker.
- Social media templates.
- Facebook Cover Photos.
- YouTube Channel art.
12. Wistia – Host your first video
Digital marketers can use free video marketing tools like Wistia to their videos more effective. Wistia comes as a boon with its free video hosting. What makes it even more special is its ad-free video viewing experience. What makes Wistia tick for digital marketers is its analytics and ability to capture trends in video viewing. You can add or edit videos to include CTA buttons or an email form. You can make the video more customizable and even do A/B testing before uploading the video.
Top reasons to use Wistia:
- Ability to customize video player.
- Ad-free video hosting platform.
- Add chapters to the video for easy navigation.
- Collects emails from videos.
- Insert links in videos and CTA buttons.
- Video analytics for tracking the performance of videos.
- A/B testing.
13. Medium – A free platform for blogging
The Medium might look quite different from other blogging tools like Blogger or WordPress. You can even skip it if you are new to blogging. But young entrepreneurs love the freedom and flexibility that Medium gives. Medium is best if you want to capture the attention of your readers. It has networking tools that can reach out to a bigger and more targeted audience. You can reach out to your viewers with the help of an email newsletter.
Top reasons to use Medium:
- Embed a video, tweets, Instagram photos, SoundCloud recordings, and Kickstarter campaigns.
- Link images.
- Include tags to categorize posts.
- Share drafts.
- Share posts on social media.
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14. Hemingway Editor – Improve your writing
Hemingway Editor is one of the best free content marketing tools to write effective and grammatically correct content. This editor can highlight content, rephrase paragraphs, and analyze content to make it simple can clear to understand. Hemingway makes content readable and is an editor that organizes content.
Top reasons to use Hemingway:
- Easy to use editor interface.
- Handles lengthy documents.
- Edit content online or in desktop software.
- Helpful color-coding that makes suggestions.
- No need for logging in with email or phone numbers.
- Readability score & Word Count.
15. AnswerThePublic – Find what people are asking
Keyword research tools like AnswerThePublic can make it easy to find the right keywords for blog posts. You can use AnswerThePublic for both SEO and SEM purposes. You can find long-tail keywords and suggestions which are shown through a visual report. Use these keywords for free in your blog posts and get ideas about what blogs to write.
Top reasons to use AnswerThePublic:
- Unlimited daily searches.
- Shows keywords arranged in a visual format.
- Export results in CSV format.
- Compare data over some time.
- Organize your search by creating folders.
- Get alerts for new suggestions.
16. Mangools SERP Simulator – A free SERP snippet preview tool
Visualizing titles and meta descriptions can be so much tedious. But Mangools SERP Simulator is a free tool that digital marketing managers can use to see a sort of preview of how their title and meta description will look on the Google search result page. It is a simulator that simulates how the real thing will show.
Top reasons to use Mangools SERP Simulator:
- Shows a visual preview of the title and description.
- Fetches title and description data and improves them.
- Checks the ideal length of title and description.
17. Karooya Responsive Search Ad Preview Tool
This free tool will show a visual preview of how an ad will show on Google. Karooya Responsive Search Ad Preview Tool is an ad planning tool that is free to use. You can keep the length of an online ad to the optimum length and also add extensions like site links and call out. With this free tool, you can build your ad and even share it.
Top reasons to use Karooya Responsive Search Ad Preview Tool:
- Free ad preview.
- Optimize your ad to fit into its ideal length and characters.
- Add ad extensions.
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18. FileZilla – An open-source FTP tool
FileZilla is free software to transfer files from remote computers to a web server. It uses FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to transfer files. Users can upload website files to build a website. This is an open-source software tool that is best for developing a website.
Top reasons to use FileZilla:
- Supports a wide range of protocols to transfer files from computer to server.
- Runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
- Support transfer of large files with a size greater than 4 GB.
- Easy user interface.
- Runs multiple servers.
- Supports Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and Amazon S3.
- Files can be edited remotely.
- Connect with a VPN.
- Transfers large files with fast speed.
19. WordCounter – A free word counter and writing correction tool
WordCounter is one of the great free tools for content writing and content marketing. This tool shows the words of a blog or a webpage. You simply have to input the URL and WordCounter will show how many words are there on the webpage. It is a great SEO tool and is best for content marketing and content writing.
Top reasons to use WordCounter:
- Count words and does spell check and grammar of documents.
- Evaluates reading level, reading time, characters, spellings, paragraphs, and words.
- Tracks keyword density.
- Thesaurus, spell check, grammar, proofreading tools.
20. Headline Analyzer – Write headlines that search engines love
Headlines matter when writing content for web pages and it also is very crucial for SEO. Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule is one of the best free marketing tools that digital marketers can use to determine the best matching headline for their web pages, blogs, and social media posts.
The tool comes free with a browser extension and powerful features. You can make headlines readable, and ideal for SEO. Determine the reading level of the headline, maintain word balance, character count, and clarity of your headline.
Top reasons to use Headline Analyzer:
- Suggests headlines that are SEO-friendly.
- Built-in thesaurus, grammar check, readability score, word banks.
- Optimizes headlines to make them readable, SEO compatible, and engaging to the target audience.
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Conclusion
With the help of these free digital marketing tools, you can save the trouble of paying for such tools. They are freely available online and are free to use with tons of basic and premium features. You can also use them to make your digital marketing campaigns effective. These free tools can deliver the same results that you may get by buying paid marketing tools. You only have to repay them again after the expiry.
Web Developer & SEO Specialist with 15+ years of experience in Open Source Web Development specialized in Joomla & WordPress development. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions".