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As a small business owner striving to gain visibility in the internet marketing space, it sometimes feels overwhelming to get your desired result especially when you have a lot of competitors.
You don’t have to worry about this anymore because the internet is full of digital marketing tools for startup entrepreneurs like you.
With so many free digital marketing tools available, you can scale your small business to the next level and have an edge over your competitors.
In this post, I’m going to outline the best free digital marketing tools that will help you as a small business owner.
However, you might be familiar with some of these tools while some might be new to you. If you would love to learn more about these digital marketing tools, let’s dive in.
Free Digital Marketing Tools For Small Business Startups
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful, free and simple to use tool offered by Google.
It helps you by providing valuable insights into who is visiting your website and how they engage with your content.
This tool can be best used with the google search console which is also another type of digital marketing tool.
There are a lot of things you can do with google analytics and they include;
- Checking keywords people are using in Google to search your site
- The number of visitors your site brings
- The location of people visiting your site
- The number of times they visit or stay on your page
2. Mailchimp
No matter the size of your online business, you shouldn’t neglect the need for email marketing.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to build relationships with your audience who signs up to your email list.
It’s important to note that eight out of ten successful online entrepreneurs make use of email marketing tools.
To get started with email marketing, you need a service that will enable you to capture emails, manage your email lists, and send out emails automatically.
One of the most popular used email marketing services is MailChimp.
Mailchimp is a very easy and beginner-friendly digital marketing tool to use.
It offers basic service which is free until your list hits 2,000 subscribers.
3. Hubspot
Hubspot is a very unique digital marketing tool that shouldn’t be left out of this list.
It is an all-in-one marketing software solution that enables you to bring all your different marketing channels together, and optimize for more traffic and a higher conversion rate.
That is not all, here are some of the amazing things you can do with HubSpot to help you grow your small business;
- Lead capture forms
- Sending of kickback emails.
- Getting analytic reports for free
- Track your emails
- Schedule sales meetings and live chat.
This is to say that With HubSpot, you’ll have everything you need to grow your business and increase conversion rates
4. Canva
As a business owner who operates in the online space, you need to be able to create designs to help you communicate your services to your audience.
For example, you could use quality photos to keep your readers interested, come up with motivating designs, visualize complex data with colorful graphs, and create highly engaging infographics.
‘‘You might be wondering how will I be able to do it?’’
You don’t have to worry about that especially when you have a digital tool like Canva.
Canva is a graphic design platform that allows you to design ebooks, flyers, banners, and lots more.
The need for Canva is to help you design anything you want without hiring a professional graphic designer especially when you are on a budget.
5. Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo is a great digital marketing tool that shows you content that is trending across social media based on searched topics.
This tool is great for companies who are unsure of how to reach their target demographic.
The user can search the database of top influencers in their field of expertise, and then reach out to form affiliations.
BuzzSumo also gives you the ability to view past trending topics and mentions this is why it’s rated as one of the best content marketing tools.
Finally, you can also use the tool to analyze the most shared and referenced content, who is linking to it and sharing it, and what their follower counts look like.
6. Trello
Trello is an amazing digital marketing tool that is very helpful for creating your content calendar.
This doesn’t only help you manage your content well but also helps you save time.
It operates more as a content planner than a content scheduler, this means, you can create notecards for article topics, marketing campaigns, or other subjects your team may focus on.
7. Hootsuite
As a small business owner who is seeking to grow their business, incorporating social media in your marketing strategy should not be overstressed.
This is so because most of your target audience spend their time on social media and the best way to communicate with them is by providing valuable content that helps solves their problem.
Hootsuite is a very important digital marketing tool for scheduling your social media post.
It provides a central management platform for all your social media channels and allows you to schedule posts in advance so you can get all your social media content for the coming weeks or months ready in one session.
You also get advanced reporting tools to see which of your social media campaigns are working most effectively and use this data to calculate ROI.
8. Slack
Slack is a very powerful messaging app used for business purposes.
This tool is very helpful for team collaboration, sharing your new content with relevant, and powerful players in your industry.
However, you can think of slack as a chatroom shared among all the members of an organization to help communicate the interest and goals of the organization.
9. Crazyegg
Crazyegg is one of the best SEO tools on the market. This tool analyzes the technical components of your website to make sure you’re well-optimized for search engines.
It also helps you understand what your website visitors like and what they don’t like.
Crazyegg is awesome for finding broken links and website architecture.
10. Followerwonk
Social media is one of the best traffic sources that are very helpful for both big and small business owners.
It helps you build relationships and trust with your audience.
To ensure you make good use of social media to grow your online business, especially on Twitter, you need to make use of Followerwonk.
This digital marketing tool is designed to dig your Twitter Analytics, so if Twitter is one of your strongest platforms, this is likely a worthwhile investment.
You can find relevant Twitter accounts that you want to target, develop content and posting strategies, and figure out your followers’ demographics to make sure you’re delivering the right content for the right people.
However, one of the downsides of follower wonk is that it cant be used with other social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.
Final Insights
As a small business owner who is just starting out in the competitive industry of digital marketing, you need to be consistent and study what other successful entrepreneurs are doing.
Starting or growing a business isn’t always easy, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming, either.
However, the very first step toward building a successful business is by creating a digital marketing strategy.
Aside from this, you need to ensure that you know all the tips and tricks around email marketing, lead generation, SEO, and content marketing.
We have already highlighted a detailed post about SEO on our blog here.
To ensure that you grow your business online, incorporate at least four to six free digital marketing tools outlined here and you will see how your business grows to the next level.
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