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Instead of bombarding you with an endless list of tools, I have selected some of the best and the most useful digital marketing tools to manage every aspect of your marketing campaign. These free tools will allow you to scale your marketing initiatives and drive growth.
- Talkwalker Free Social Search
- Hootsuite
- SEMrush
- Google’s Keyword Planner
- HubSpot
- Crello
- Hotjar
- PageSpeed Insights
- Google Analytics
- Smart Ads Creator
- Powtoon
- VidIQ
- Talkwalker Alerts
Social media marketing
From creating and publishing content to analyzing and reporting, social media marketers have a long list of things to do. Thankfully, there are a bunch of resources and tools to make your life easy. These tools will help you streamline your workflow, save valuable time, and reach the right audience.
If you want your social media marketing to be effective, you need to constantly monitor your campaigns. Social media monitoring is essential as it helps you stay up to date with the latest trends and avoid any unforeseen crisis. If you want to try a free social media monitoring tool before investing marketing budgets, try Talkwalker Free Social Search. This free tool will allow you to:
- Track your online brand mentions (tagged and untagged) and respond of them
- Discover the most engaging hashtags and themes, and use what works best
- Find negative comments and respond before they go viral
- Identify influencers for your marketing campaigns
- Monitor your competitors on social media and beyond
You can read this article for more information on how to use your social media analytics data and how you can use analytics to maximize your ROI.
Use this social media search engine to track your brand, campaign, hashtag or event in real-time.
Social media marketers must manage content and campaigns on several accounts. Hootsuite makes social media account management super easy, by bringing them under one login and a unified dashboard. With Hootsuite you can see all your posts, comments, and mentions in one place. You can collaborate across teams, assign tasks, and schedule your posts. You can connect your Hootsuite account to 20+ social networks including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. With the free plan, you can manage 3 social accounts and schedule 30 posts.
Create a free Hootsuite account and manage 3 social media platforms
Content marketing & SEO
SEO is a long-term game and done well, will continue to bring traffic and customers over time. This means if you invest your time in content planning and SEO today, you will continue to reap benefits till much later.
Keyword research is an extremely important part of SEO and content marketing. If you target the right keyword you will be able to generate traffic and convert visitors to customers. Here are some tools that can help you with your keyword research and content marketing.
SEMrush is a complete SEO solution including backlink analysis, keyword research, traffic evaluations, competitor analysis and more.
Position tracking, a key feature of SEMrush, allows you to see your website’s top keywords, your position for a particular keyword, and how much traffic these keywords drive. It enables you to see which keywords bring the best results. You can use this information to create more content on topics that perform well.
In addition to this, you can use the keyword research feature to analyze various keywords - identify their search volume, ranking difficulty, competitive density, and the number of URLs currently ranking. This information is very useful for creating content as you can prioritize keywords that have a higher possibility to rank.
Use SEMrush for backlink analysis, keyword research, traffic evaluations, competitor analysis and more.
SEMrush offers a free plan which allows you to run one query per day, create one project, create one SEO content template, view traffic analytics samples, and set up one scheduled PDF report. If the free account is not enough, you can upgrade to the Pro pack for $99 per month.
If you are a start-up and you do not want to invest in this tool just yet, you can consider another option - Google Keyword Planner.
While the Keyword Planner is a part of Google’s AdWords platform, it is an excellent tool for organic search as well. Just as the name suggests, Keyword Planner helps with keyword research. It shows the monthly search volume and the competition level for a particular keyword. It also suggests keyword ideas. However, it does not provide traffic, competitor, or backlink analysis.
If you need a tool only for keyword and content planning, Keyword Planner can be the perfect solution for you. You can log into your AdWords account and access Keyword Planner through this link.
Use Google Keyword Planner for keyword research and content planning
Email marketing
Email continues to be one of the top marketing channels for both B2B and B2C companies. But designing and building an email from scratch can be a time-taking exercise. And without a well-constructed email, the campaign might not be able to achieve the desired outcome. An efficient email marketing tool is therefore a necessity for marketers.
You do not need a large marketing budget to implement an email marketing solution. Many of them have free versions and you can always upgrade if you need your tool to have more capabilities.
HubSpot is a marketing automation tool that comes with several advanced features like lead management, list segmentation, dynamic content, deliverability optimization, A/B testing, event-based triggers and more. HubSpot’s interface is extremely intuitive and easy-to-use. If your company does not have a dedicated marketing automation specialist, you will appreciate HubSpot’s interface.
From kickback or thank you emails to campaign promotion emails, HubSpot’s free version allows you to do it. It also has a drag-and-drop visual editor with ready-made templates to help you set up your emails in minutes.
Marketing automation and customer relationship management are intermeshed. Thus, CRM integration can be a critical factor while deciding on which platform to opt for. HubSpot has an in-built CRM; it also allows integration with systems like Salesforce.
Marketing automation tool - lead management, list segmentation, dynamic content, A/B testing, event-based triggers and more.
Crello
Who does not need professional looking images and animations on their emails? High quality graphics creates a visual journey and increases email click-through rates. If you need a quick way to create animations and graphics, you can try Crello. Crello has preset designs which will allow you to make your images in an easy way.
Easiest online design tool to create animations and graphics for social, web, email and more.
Website optimization
Website optimization is essential to improve performance and ranking on search engines. Your website is the face of your business and a discoverable and attractive website is the only way to increase sales. Here are some website optimization tools that will help you reach your customers in an effective way.
Hotjar
Hotjar is behavior analytics software that measures your visitor’s interactions with your website. You can use Hotjar to find and fix bugs, improve conversion rate by optimizing your page design and create a better user experience.
Once you integrate Hotjar’s code to your site, you will receive heatmaps and recordings. You can see what users do when they browse your website – their clicks, taps and scrolling behavior. This data can be very useful while designing and editing your website and placing your CTAs.
The individual plan, built for personal projects and sites with low traffic is free to use and it collects data from 2,000 pageviews per day.
Understand how users are experiencing your website with heatmaps and recordings.
PageSpeed Insights is a tool by Google that analyzes the content of a web page and generates suggestions to make that page faster. This tool gives reports on the performance of a webpage both on desktop and on mobile. It also gives prioritized suggestions on how to improve the page’s speed.
Check the performace of your landing page and make changes to improve speed
Web analytics
Web analytics tools provide an assessment of how your website is performing and how you can improve it further. It helps understand the source of your traffic, the user flow, interaction, time-spent, and more. This information can help you make data-driven decisions, adapt your marketing strategy, and grow your business.
When it comes to website analytics, many marketers think of Google Analytics and for good reason. It has a free version and offers a lot of information. It gives real-time data, custom reporting, advanced segmentation, flow visualization, mobile device & app tracking and more. Even though the information is dense, the clean layout helps to make sense of the data.
The standard version has some limitations in terms of capacity and customization. But you can always upgrade to Google Analytics 360 which promises 99.9% data accuracy.
Web analytics service by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.
Online advertising
Online advertising helps drive traffic to your website and build brand awareness. It gives you the ability to target and retarget the ideal lead. It is also a cost-effective channel to reach new customers.
As a marketer, you might be running display ad campaigns on Google and Google Display Network. This means that you will need to create one image in multiple dimensions and specifications. Smart Ads Creator is the perfect solution for creating effective HTML5 display ads in minutes.
Smart Ads Creator is a free design tool by WordStream that creates display ads by grabbing copy, colors, and images from a provided landing page. If you are not satisfied by the generated image, you can upload images, customize text, and change the positions of elements. The biggest advantage of using this tool is that it builds ads in 7 different sizes for Google Display Network. So you do not need to manually resize all your images.
Free design tool that creates display ads by grabbing copy, colors, and images from a provided landing page.
Video marketing
In recent years, video marketing has emerged not just as a tool for promotion but also as a tool for educating and influencing consumers. Videos are one of the best tools to engage with your customers and drive traffic and sales. With an ever changing social media landscape, we have seen a rise of different formats of video content. From short videos for reels on Instagram to tutorials and piece to camera on YouTube, you can leverage different types of video content to target different customer segments. To ensure that your videos look professional and personalized, you can use the following tools:
Powtoon is a platform that allows you to create professional and fully customized videos. You can use Powtoon to make explainer videos, infographics, presentations, corporate video, social and video ads. With hundreds of animated characters, templates, video backgrounds, soundtracks, and more, you can create great looking videos without possessing any technical or design skills. The basic features are free - which include creating a video, uploading it to YouTube, and sharing it with others. If you need a wider selection of characters, props, images, videos, and soundtracks, you can opt for the subscription plan.
Create professional videos without design skills with Powtoon
If you use YouTube as one of your primary channels for video promotions, you should consider using VidIQ. With this tool, you can boost your organic reach, keep track of your stats in real-time, gain audience insights, identify the most popular or low difficulty keywords, and a lot more.
While the basic free plan will allow you to access video scorecards and live stats, you will need to upgrade to the Pro plan to view historical data and access features like keyword research.
Make the most out of your video content on YouTube with VidIQ
Reputation management
Another important aspect of online marketing is reputation management. In the digital world, a small issue can become a full blown crisis if it is not addressed in a timely manner. The best way to ensure that you are aware of everything being said about your brand is by setting up Talkwalker Alerts.
Talkwalker Alerts is an online monitoring tool that can track every mention of your brand name and keyword across the internet, including news platforms, blogs, forums, websites and even Twitter. These mentions are consolidated and sent to you via email. You can set up the frequency of these email alerts as per your requirement.
You can read this article if you want to know how to prepare for and manage a social media crisis.
Monitors your brand mentions across the internet - including news platforms, blogs, forums, websites and even Twitter.
Selecting the right tool is essential for achieving your marketing goals and objectives. The best tools provide valuable insights and customer data. It will help you understand how customers engage with your communication and your platform. You can use this information to create targeted campaigns and increase conversions.
Most tools on this list have a free account or a trial version. You can try these tools before you decide to invest in them. Hope you find this list useful. Share your feedback by leaving a comment.
