Published May 26th, 2020 by Editorial Team

10 Free Online Marketing Tools for Every “Hands-on” Marketer

How well has your online marketing efforts fared in comparison to competitors?

Did you know that you can achieve good results online without spending that much money?

Understanding and penetrating the market of your industry is hardly a simple task. Hence the need for a robust marketing strategy. Most online marketers are looking for the best means to keep their customers engaged and to track website activity.

Marketers want to measure how many impressions their marketing efforts are yielding per dollar. They want to know the percentage or fraction of visitors who visit their page in relation to those who make purchases. This is referred to as conversion rate.

You can explore the effectiveness and ease provided by many essential tools that will make online marketing much easier. A lot of these tools have been developed and deployed for several years.

A good number of tools have been modified or upgraded to match the evolving needs of the business world. It can sometimes be frustrating to push through the market competition and invite more visitors who will eventually generate more leads; and improve conversion rates.

The good news is that you're not alone in this seemingly difficult uphill climb. The world of digital marketing has evolved tremendously over the past few years. Therefore, there are lots of resources today, which every business should have in their domain.

Digital marketing tools help you increase sales, monitor your results, and boost your overall ROI. You can be sure of optimized marketing results when you begin to engage these tools.

Here in this article, we'll explore ten of such tools and how best to use them.

Google Analytics

This is a tool every marketer should have in their arsenal. This is a free service offered by Google. It helps marketers keep track of and report on what’s happening on their website. Some key metrics you will see here are:

Pageviews
Unique visitors
Top referring channels
Conversion rate
Average time on site
Bounce rates

Google Analytics offers businesses, both big and small, an automated system to collect and view vital statistics about their customers, including where they’re being referred from, their locations, and the types of devices they’re using to access your site.

In essence, the tool provides you with invaluable insight into your customers' or prospects' behavior online. Most importantly, it is easy to use and free.

Although Google Analytics serves more as a web traffic management tool, you can never go wrong by having it as part of your marketing strategy. With results from a particular campaign, you can make better decisions on how to deploy your resources best.

You’ll find more digital marketing agencies will implement Google analytics into their campaigns in order to track results and show positive progress of campaigns.

Hootsuite

Social media if managed properly can be a very effective way to nurture and brand your business towards conversions.

Hootsuite is a tool that comes handy in this aspect. It helps you manage your content strategy by scheduling your social media posts.

With tools such as Hootsuite, social media posting takes less time. Hootsuite can properly manage more than 25 different platforms simultaneously. What is nice about it is it offers a scheduling option where you can take one piece of content and schedule it out over a period of time. Ultimately any piece of content you want to promote can be scheduled out over all your social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube and others.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a top choice among new business owners. This all-in-one marketing tool is pricy but has a lot of marketing power if used properly.

Hubspot maximizes your marketing by assisting you with tasks such as blogging, SEO metrics, social media management, lead management, landing pages, calls-to-Action, marketing automation, and email. In simpler terms, HubSpot is all-encompassing.

MailChimp

MailChimp is a great tool when it comes to email marketing. A lot of companies now trust MailChimp for all their email marketing efforts. Another exciting thing is that it offers a free plan - which is permanently free. The free plan is best suited for just starting out looking to gain traction online.

The plan allows you to add up to 2,000 subscribers and send up to 12,000 emails per month. That is a lot for any business, not just startups. If you wish to add up more subscribers, the fees are $10-$199 per month.

A hands-on marketer needs an active and engaging email subscriber list for reaching out to clients, and MailChimp offers just that at no cost.

You can always hire a digital marketing agency to consult and manage all your email marketing efforts using these of tools. Here is a list of reviews of top digital agencies that can manage this type of work for you.

Sumo

With Sumo software, marketers have a software tool to improve their ROI. You want to know how your spending relates to the dividends you're reaping from your marketing strategy.

With this software, you can encourage customers and visitors to share your content with others. It has two other features that enhance what you get out of the software:

Welcome mats: for welcoming new visitors to your website.

Smart Bars: show promotions, coupon codes, and other special messages that encourage customers to make a purchase.

The Sumo tool offers users three solutions: growing your email list, social sharing, and analytics. You'll find that big names in content marketing rely on this tool to build traffic to their websites and keep track of visitors' activities.

BuzzSumo

This is another fantastic tool, similar to Google Analytics, in many ways. Countless companies utilize this smart software to build quality content, engage clients, and manage what is going on their website.

BuzzSumo is an excellent analytical tool that is recommended for every marketer. It's worth also knowing that BuzzSumo has an entirely free version that businesses can use as well as a free trial of the paid plans.

One of the most significant offerings of BuzzSumo is that it allows you to search for the most shared content in your industry or space, get to know what visitors are looking for, and find influencers to know what is trending each day. In short, if you want to learn more about your market and competition, BuzzSumo is the way to go.

SparkToro

This software is relatively new on the market. Rand Fishkin and Casey Henry designed SparkToro as an “Audience Intelligence” platform. It is designed to give marketers an in-depth understanding of the sites that an audience reads and who that audience follows on Twitter, YouTube, and other social platforms.

SparkToro is primarily designed to analyze your audience, and find out who the audience follows or where they hang out. If you're interested in Influencer Marketing, then you probably should explore SparkToro.

You could also guest post on a blog or website where your target audience is found. As with most online marketing software, SparkToro gives you an insight into your target audience's behavior online.

There is a lot to understand about SEO (search engine optimization) that this tool helps out with. Here is a good resource if you are interested in growing your SEO.

All In One SEO Pack

This is a plugin provided by WordPress and is chiefly designed with SEO in mind. As you know, content is as essential as marketing is. With that in mind, some degree of strategy and thoughtfulness should go into your content.

All in One SEO Pack is designed to help you maximize SEO with your content. It is easy to use and also has a free version. The free version of All in One SEO comes with no support, but the Pack Pro version is advert free and comes with one year of professional support.

It features SEO modules that are designed for various types of users. Also, it offers advanced options for Google Analytics tracking.

Answer the Public

If you're looking for free tools for generating traffic and generating SEO inclined keywords, then Answer the public should be in your arsenal.

It's a software designed for marketers and content creators to optimize websites for search engines. If it gives you an array of relevant keywords in your industry that you can use to drive traffic to your website and convert visitors.

As the name implies, it provides you with updated information on the things people want to know without necessarily throwing up irrelevant junks.

You simply input the keywords you're interested in, and you get a long list of your audience's things. This way, you can create content that will bring people to you.

If you need help creating a content strategy, here is a list of good content marketing agencies to help you out.

Canva

Last but the least, Canva is a fantastic tool that marketers will find handy. Whether you intend to write blog posts, post content to social media pages, or build an infographic, you’ll benefit from the feature-set of Canva.

You have a myriad of cool templates to choose from. Without little or no graphic skill, you can incorporate it into your content strategy tools. Canva also has a seamless user experience interface, and so allows for easy usage.

Features on Canva include: