One of the biggest perks of the modern digitized world is the level playing field it has created for businesses. This has prevented large corporations from leveraging their big budgets to dominate markets and gain unfair advantages in the digital space.
Recent advancements have made technological resources, especially in the marketing domain, much more affordable and accessible, allowing small- to medium-sized enterprises to expand their reach, build audiences, generate sales, and scale operations like never before.
In this article, we take you through the top free marketing tools that could help boost your marketing efforts and give your business a leg up in a competitive marketplace.
1. Google Trends
As an organization, you must stay on top of market trends. This is important for creating a winning content plan, developing a more customer-centric SEO strategy, and offering products and services attuned to changing market needs.
If you are wondering how to keep up with emerging hypes and trends, Google has just the solution for you. Remember, it has multiple platforms that have access to insightful user data. For instance, its search engine can monitor search queries. YouTube can identify the most-watched videos, and Google News can track interest and engagement based on its news stories.
Google Trends brings together all this data on a single platform to show you popular and trending topics in real time. You can also use this free tool to search for interest levels in topics related to your business and compare different terms and trends based on geographic and demographic criteria.
2. Canva
This is an easy-to-use design tool that can save you hours of work and substantial creative expenses.
For hands-on business owners and marketing teams, Canva provides over 250,000 templates together with a drag-and-drop editor to create professional-looking designs. In addition, Canva Free comes with more than 1 million graphics and photos, 5GB of cloud storage, and advanced AI tools.
But what can it help you design? Canva has templates for logos, flyers, brochures, social media posts, wallpapers, graphs, infographics, reports, presentations, and even videos.
Everything you create on this platform is shareable, so team members can edit, generate new document versions, or leave comments. You can download what you design as a printable document or save it in JPG, PNG, and several other formats. Canva also allows you to integrate your favorite apps, from Google Drive and SharePoint to Instagram and YouTube, for a seamless design experience.
3. WordPress
WordPress is an excellent platform to turn to when you need a simple website or landing page. It provides stunning themes and a block editor to create web pages with zero coding.
That’s not all. With WordPress, you can obtain a relevant subdomain, create unlimited pages, add multiple users, integrate brute-force and spam protection, and set up various front-end web features, including newsletters, RSS feeds, payment buttons, and contact forms.
Content creation, uploading, and updating are easy on WordPress with its in-built content management system. You also get access to plenty of plugins to improve your site’s usability.
4. Buffer
Social media management can be a costly affair, especially when you want to maintain an active presence on several platforms. Buffer helps simplify this process at no cost to your business.
It allows you to integrate different social media accounts and plan and organize your content strategy on a single interface. Buffer’s AI Assistant makes content creation faster by rewriting posts, generating ideas, and even translating what you write into different languages.
Once the posts are done, you can collaborate with your team on the platform to review, edit, and approve the content. After that, it is a matter of scheduling your posts so Buffer can take care of the rest.
5. Leadar
Generating high-quality leads is one of the toughest challenges every sales and marketing team grapples with. This is where Leadar can help you.
It is a sales intelligence platform with over 110 million US contacts covering more than 193 million companies, 25 million mobile numbers, and 62 million email addresses.
The platform uses AI technology, proprietary algorithms, and human verifications to maintain the accuracy of the data it collects. This ensures verified and up-to-date information for you to effortlessly build lead lists and update existing databases for marketing campaigns and cold outreach.
6. Pixabay
This is one of the best resources available to find free photos, illustrations, and vectors for your marketing needs. In addition to high-quality images, the site has a collection of videos, music, sound effects, and GIFs that can be useful when developing engaging content formats for your business.
According to Pixabay, its library consists of over 4.2 million material created and uploaded by its community of users. The site has three main sections for easy browsing—Editor’s Choice, Latest, and Trending. You can also search it based on keywords and save or download the images you like.
Each piece of content in its library comes with licensing and attribution details. This allows you to review terms based on your purpose of use before downloading.
7. SurveyMonkey
Gathering customer sentiments is critical for devising marketing programs, evaluating campaign effectiveness, introducing new products and services, enhancing the customer experience, and boosting repeat purchases and customer loyalty.
SurveyMonkey is a free survey tool for gathering valuable market data and improving business decisions. It helps design effective surveys, distribute them through a variety of channels, and collect responses with a few simple steps.
8. Google Analytics
To ensure your website delivers on its goals, you must track its performance with real-time data. Google Analytics is designed to do just that.
With a Google account, you can connect your website or app to this platform, analyze web traffic and user behavior, and identify key insights to improve your customer engagement strategy.
In addition, you can integrate your Google Ads campaign to get a more complete view of your customer interactions.
Wrapping Up
A range of free resources are available today for businesses of all shapes and sizes to boost their marketing efficiency and drive business growth while keeping their expenses low.
The tools we have listed in this article are must-haves for your tech stack if you want to make the best of your marketing resources and maximize results.
