When it comes to tools that we actually use as a digital marketing agency, we are quite frugal… Why pay for software when you get a similar result for free? So this is a list of eleven free tools that we regularly use for ourselves and for our clients to be successful with our marketing.
11 Best Free Marketing Tools
1. MailerLite
Mailerlite allows you to create a few simple landing pages on their free-forever plan (this is no 14-day or 30-day trial.
Now other email service providers have free plans like Convertkit and Mailchimp but they don’t allow you to send automatic emails on their free plans- something which Mailerlite does allow.
2. Ubersuggest
The next free tool on our list is a keyword research tool. There are so many out there but after testing quite a few of them I’m not going to say that Ubersuggest gives you the best bang for your buck, especially when your buck is zero, i.e. when you’re not paying anything.
Unlike what it was in its initial days, they have actually started to gate some of the results inside of Ubersuggest.
However, if you just need some keyword ideas, you want to see some posts that are ranking for keywords you want to go after or you just want to see how a competitor’s website is performing, Ubersuggest gives you a lot of information that you don’t have to pay for.
3. Google Trends
If you still can’t figure out what you should be talking about Google trends is this little-known gem that you can actually type in different keywords and subjects and you’ll be able to see the current search volume trend.
This is great especially if you’re trying to make content that is relevant now and updated versus trying to make those really long blog posts or really long youtube videos that are more evergreen and going to rank forever. So you can get a lot of great ideas from google trends as well.
4. WordPress
Now when it comes to your blog itself- you can actually get started with WordPress for free. Now obviously there are lots of plugins, including many paid ones, there are lots of other things you could do if you decided to upgrade in the future. But if you go to wordpress.com (or .org if you want to host it separately on a server), and go to their pricing page you’ll actually see that you can get started creating a free site.
WordPress is one of the largest digital communities around, so you can basically get most of the features you can think of and get answers to most of the common questions just by a few Google searches. An absolute winner for all kinds of businesses.
5. Calendly
Next on our list is going to be Calendly. This is a calendar booking application so someone can set appointments with you ahead of time and as a part of an agency I can tell you that this is such a lifesaver because you never want to have the back and forth that you have to go through when it comes to scheduling… Especially if you’re in different time zones like I am where sometimes we are halfway across the world from our clients and so this just makes sure everyone understands what time they’re supposed to be meeting in their specific time zone, and it eliminates all of the back and forth emails.
6. Canva
The 6th one is going to be Canva. You’ve probably heard of Canva before and if you haven’t already this is an awesome tool for creating pretty much any graphic under the sun. In fact, all of the graphics that are created on our website are a combination of just ppt slides and Canva, I have no photoshop experience personally, and Canva really has a lot of great templates there whether you’re trying to make a lead magnet pdf or you’re just creating a business card for some reason.
7. Pdf escape
Now right next to Canva is something called pdf escape and this is where you can actually create editable fields inside of your pdf. So if you create a worksheet.
or a template or some sort of script inside of Canva you can actually upload it to pdf escape and you can start making drop-down menus and you can have places where people can actually type in their own information and save it themselves.
A lot of people who create pdfs just don’t do this extra step and pdf escape does allow you to do it for free, of course, you can always upgrade in the future if you want to save your work – that’s the downside of the free plan.
8. Google Optimize
And this next one is one of the most underrated marketing tools out there because it’s free, and a lot of software’s try and charge you a ton of money to do this when you can just do it for free… And best of all this actually can work with Mailerlite as well even if you’re using the free plan. The tool is Google Optimize.
And so long story short what this does is it allows you to split test your pages so say you’re driving traffic to a page on your website or landing page and you want to try changing the headline or changing the image to see if maybe the new headline gets more people to opt-in versus what you have now or maybe you’re going to get more social shares if you have this headline on your blog post versus the other one, well with google optimize you can do this.
So, you don’t have to pay for any fancy software to split test any page on your site: headlines, images, bullet points, body paragraphs, you name it, you can test it with Google Optimize.
You just have to install some code on your website and then you are good to go.
9. Google Analytics
The next one on the free marketing tools list is Google Analytics. I am quite sure it’s easily the most commonly used web analytics tool around. You can actually start to track the exact videos, blog posts, and ads that are driving relevant traffic and sales to your business through its tracking features, you don’t have to pay for any sort of fancy tool that will essentially do the same thing.
So you can have a tremendous amount of data collected for free using google analytics just using UTM parameters.
10. Google Page Speed
Now coming in on the home stretch we’re going to make sure our website loads fast because especially with some of the recent SEO updates for google, or I should say updates for their algorithm, the page speed affects your SEO rankings a lot. Page speed has become really really important not just for the users but for the algorithms for search engines.
And the good news is you can just use the google page speed tool, it’s under their developer tools and it will give you a score of how your website is performing… And if you’re using any sort of shared hostings like using a free WordPress plan as we talked about earlier, or maybe a page builder like Wix or Squarespace, then you’re going to see a lot of red.
Don’t freak out, that just means that until you decide to take hosting into your own hands you’re probably going to have a slower site and it’s going to be harder to rank which is one of the reasons we don’t really like recommending those page builders for a long period of time.
11. Trello
We use Trello for all kinds of things, but it’s quite handy for digital marketing things as well. For one, you can set up your notification emails for any new leads on your website to directly sync with Trello, and you can use a free CRM like CRMBLE for basic integrations if you have a small team. Trello is also very useful to set up repeat-card reminders for you to check specific dashboards (just create a repeating card to your to-do list on the appropriate frequency and put the dashboard link in the description).
Now, there are many other similar free marketing tools like asana and notion, but we personally love the simplicity of Trello.
So thank you so much for reading, sincerely hope you got some ideas and value out of these 11 different marketing tools that we use in our own digital agency.