Top 7 Free Marketing Tools for Small Business

With the ongoing digital explosion and virtually every consumer using the internet, your options with digital marketing are infinite. Marketing tools for small businesses used to be limited, and that was mostly due to budget -- but not anymore.

These free online marketing tools open the door to so many possibilities for small businesses by allowing you to effectively and efficiently reach a larger audience than ever before.

Free Marketing Tools for Small Business

Here are some free marketing tools that you along with every other small business owner can use to grow your company:

HubSpot (Marketing and CRM)

Price: Free - $3,200 per month for enterprise, depending on your plan

HubSpot is a great option for businesses that are looking to incorporate automation and launch effective email marketing campaigns for lead generation. HubSpot has a pop-up tool that collects email addresses from your website and delivers important data points you can use to provide targeted information to customers. Hubspot will also help your business with conversion rate optimization by providing tools to track traffic and conversion analytics.

Screaming Frog

Price: Free (basic plan)

SEO is a powerful tool and a critical component of online marketing, so it’s imperative that your brand does it right. In order to have have improve your brand's SEO, you have to make sure your site is structured properly, mobile-first, and filled with evergreen content that contains the relevant keywords. If this is done correctly,  you will be able to increase your ranking in relevant searches by your target audience. 

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a website crawler that is designed to help identify your SEO weaknesses in URLs and web pages. It will analyze your website, identify issues, and fix the problems. Solutions include but are not limited to:

• Fixing broken links
• Discovering duplicate content
• Auditing redirects
• Crawling websites
• Analyzing page titles
• Examining metadata

In other words, you can use Screaming Frog to effectively analyze and fix the technical aspects of your website to make sure your business is optimized for search engines and can get found online.

Google Analytics

Price: Free (for the standard version)

Google Analytics is 100% free software that provides businesses with valuable insights into website traffic and activity. You are able to identify who is visiting your site and what they are doing once they arrive. Google Analytics helps businesses improve traffic to their site and overall consumer engagement.

With Google Analytics, you will be able to identity:

• Number of visitors to your site (day, week, month -- any time period you choose);
• Where these visitors are coming from (referrals from other websites, organic search, paid ads, social media, or direct);
• Keywords consumers are using in Google search to find your web page;
• Consumer data (demographics and interests of your users); and
• Duration of time the consumer spends on your site and which pages they visit.

MailChimp

Price: Free-$199 per month

Email marketing is essential to every business -- regardless of size. This is why businesses need a marketing tool to launch and manage email marketing campaigns.

Mailchimp is an excellent free email marketing tool and one of the easiest platforms to learn. It offers a variety of essential features including:

• Website traffic tracking
• Email templates
• Drip campaign design
• Software integrations

MailChimp also automates your emails and streamlines design to make for a smooth campaign.

Buffer

Price: Free - $199 per month

Buffer is a free social media management tool that will help you streamline your social posting efforts. It allows you to automate and optimize your social media strategy. Buffer also allows you to schedule posts in advance with their social post schedule and increase your traffic with social media share widgets for websites.

Canva

Price: Free - $12.95 per month (custom prices for enterprise)

In addition to written marketing materials, it’s always a good idea to complement it with eye-catching visuals. This can be in the form of infographics, designs, images -- really what works best for your business.

Canva is a great tool to use for design and visuals. It's a subscription service for small businesses that need graphic design. Canva is an intuitive and easy to learn tool with its drag-and-drop features. It allows you to create customized shapes, logos, charts, graphs, and presentations with your personalized fonts and colors.

Survey Monkey

Price: Free

Survey Monkey has streamlined the survey creation process by allowing you to build your own surveys and tailor them to your company’s specific needs. SurveyMonkey’s software is simple and easy to use. With Survey Monkey, you can design, create, and publish your company's survey in just a few minutes. On top of that, you have the ability to analyze the results of your surveys.

Succeed with Free Marketing Tools for Small Business

If you want your small business to thrive and remain relevant in today’s increasingly competitive landscape, you need to take advantage of all the free marketing tools available to you.

The good news is that small businesses no longer have to remain in the dark. With so many free marketing resources available at your fingertips, you can increase brand awareness and make a name for yourself without breaking the bank.

We can all agree that in order for you to grow, consumers need to be able to find your business on and offline. And the best way to do that is by establishing an effective and affordable marketing strategy using the available tools necessary for your business to succeed. These tools will help you kickstart your marketing initiatives, while also saving you time and money along the way.