10 Best Free Digital Marketing Tools That Work Great
As we all know, Digital Marketing is the backbone of any industry/business in the present age. It is impossible to underplay the role of Digital Marketing in today’s web-connected world. Online presence is vital for any industry/business to survive and succeed. This presence can be achieved by having a proper digital marketing strategy in place. Digital Marketing Tools are the tools that help manifest this strategy into a desirable outcome.
Need For Digital Marketing Tools
The ultimate goal of a digital marketer is to have a high rank on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This requires good traffic and conversion rate.
For any strategy to be a success, it involves planning, research, implementation, and follow-up. Likewise, digital marketing strategy too follows the same format and requires tools to help achieve and execute this. There are a plethora of digital marketing tools online.
While the paid ones have more benefits, there is no dearth of free digital marketing tools online that are very beneficial as well. From the creation of a website, blog posts, checking trends, verification for duplication, monitoring competitor’s sites, analyzing customer behavior, checking website speed, following feedback on social media handles, to reviewing the data collected to improve businesses further, there are digital marketing tools for every aspect.
It would be quite impossible to create curated content or analyze what works and what does not and make a plan without the help of digital marketing tools, especially considering the information explosion online today.
As the information available increases, so do the difficulty level of understanding what to do with all this information. Here come the Digital Marketing Tools which analyze all the available data and provide meaningful insights at a click.
The Free Digital Marketing Tools help not only established businesses but also startups and small businesses to make their presence felt online.
The free digital marketing tools further reduce the cost factor involved in marketing, which is already less when done digitally as opposed to the traditional setup.
Since digital marketing in itself is dynamic, digital marketing tools to keep changing/updating. What works today might be obsolete tomorrow. Nonetheless, there are some tried and tested digital marketing tools that ensure success. We will discuss some of the Free Digital Marketing Tools that work Great!
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WordPress is one of the basic free digital marketing tools that are widely used all over the world. It is a free software used for Content Management Systems (CMS). Its ease of use and flexibility is what make it popular.
Even people with no programming background can install and use WordPress. You do not have to be a web designer or web developer to understand and use WordPress. It initially started as a blogging platform. Subsequently, with advanced features, it is now used to manage entire websites.
WordPress has preinstalled themes that can be completely customized and personalized to suit our needs. There are options that allow us to customize the colors, the logo, create sliders, etc.
It has features that make it mobile-friendly. This is of great advantage in an age where most internet users access the web through their smartphones.
WordPress has various plugins that can be installed and activated. Plugins are akin to apps that add functionality to a smartphone. These may be free or paid.
WordPress is deemed to be a secure and safe platform. For example, the Sucuri plugin ensures the safety of content and prevents malware attacks. There are plugins to alleviate any and all worries. Security, backup, adding contact forms, reducing file size, deleting cache to improve website speed, etc.
It is not just used to write content. Different media types such as audio, video, and images can be incorporated.
WordPress is SEO-effective (search engine optimization). Even without learning SEO, a non-tech-savvy person can include content as per SEO guidelines. This is achieved utilizing the Yoast SEO plugin
Yoast SEO It is one of the most invaluable plugins that can be considered a digital marketing tool in itself. It enables writing content and optimizing it in accordance with SEO. It gives an insight into features like readability, SEO compliance, keyword usage, and meta description amongst others.
Thus, WordPress is the basic free digital marketing tool that is used worldwide and is popular for all the above reasons.
Ubersuggest
Created by an Italian developer, Ubersuggest is one of the most awesome free digital marketing tools. It used for keyword research. It has been re-launched and revamped by Neil Patel to give more relevant data for free. Since being re-launched, it has gained immense popularity.
Relevant keywords are critical to any content. Ubersuggest gives real-time data. All the data is aggregated from Google suggest.
Ubersuggest can deliver many long-tail keywords in an instant. It gives results as per the country and language selected.
It is a free digital marketing tool that indicates parameters such as search volume, SEO difficulty level, Cost per click, paid difficulty, etc.
This free digital marketing tool even indicates the sites that rank in the top 100 for the particular keyword. Besides, each site ranked is also information about the number of estimated visits, social shares, domain score, etc. The social shares as understood, give an insight into the popularity of the site.
The domain score gives an insight into how hard it will be to beat a particular competitor’s website. The domain overview gives information about organic keywords, organic traffic, etc. It gives backlink data as well.
In short, the Ubersuggest is popular for all the right reasons and truly works great as a free digital marketing tool. It has an easy-to-use interface. The results generated are easy to interpret and not overwhelmingly complicated.
Canva:
These days, graphics are essential to make any content engaging. The more vibrant and catchy the graphics are, the better is the attention span of the reader.
Graphics are more than just using pictures. It is an art of communicating what you want through pictures. Most often than not, visual communication through graphics has a longer-lasting impression than mere words.
Since graphic designing is an important element of digital marketing, a tool for the same is always in demand. Here comes Canva to the rescue. Canva is one of the most worthwhile Free Digital Marketing Tools founded in 2012.
With its drag-and-drop feature, it is amazingly easy to use the tool. It has photographs, graphics, fonts, vector images, etc.
Its multiple features help in creating fun and vibrant images. It is used to create logos, Instagram story, or even invitations. You do not have to be a graphic design expert to use Canva.
Its ease of use is its salient feature, it is used widely the world over. There are inbuilt templates and diverse themes. It is used even for photo editing. There are useful tutorials to guide which is definitely a bonus for the non-tech savvy people out there.
The cherry on the cake is the fact that it has sufficient features in the free version. Of course, for additional features, there is a subscription but even the free features work great.
Canva users are aplenty and are not limited to web designing. Invitations, collage, motivational quotes, and humorous memes; you name it and it is there on Canva. Hence, Canva is one of the indispensable Free Digital Marketing Tools.
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Google Trends
Google Trends is essentially a free digital marketing tool that caters to SEO research and content marketing. It is by far one of the best available tools revealing gainful insights.
Google Trends is a Google-powered free tool. In terms of SEO, it is used in keyword research, planning PPC campaigns, investigating and analyzing traffic, etc.
For keyword research, it helps identify potential long-tail keywords which are of utmost importance for SEO with more and more people using voice search. It is also used to predict a potential niche.
Google Trends is used not just to get statistics of what is trending but also when it is trending. It gives a fairly good overview of the right time to launch a service/product based on demand. Thus it helps in predicting the rise or decline of a trend.
Coming to the PPC campaigns, the seasonal insights provide a platform for when to launch such campaigns. The peak time is the right time to target PPC campaigns for them to be most effective. It has options to break down the broad geographic data (country) into further precise segments (states and cities).
The different search filters available on Google Trends include region, time, categories, and search options such as web search, YouTube search, news search, or Google shopping.
The trending topics can easily be topics for fresh content thus aiding in fresh content creation as well. It also aids in the comparison of keywords or even competitors.
In terms of Google Shopping, it gives insights into the right time to release ad campaigns and be more aggressive with sales.
All that is needed is a little exploration around the website to get meaningful insights.
GTmetrix
GTmetrix is a free digital marketing tool that is used to check website speed. It is an established fact that good site speed is a prerequisite to a better ranking on the SERP.
A site with great content but bad load speed loses out on being ranked. This is because no one waits for a page that takes more time to load. The instant reaction is to skip that site and move onto the next search result on-page. Hence a site speed test tool becomes utmost important among all other digital marketing tools available.
It was developed by GT.net, a Canadian-based company, for its customers to check the performance of their sites. Again, its ease of use is what makes it more well-known than other speed test tools.
The basic version is absolutely free and just requires a sign-up. It is as simple as putting in the URL, choosing the location, browser, and device in use. At a click, it reveals parameters of performance scores and page details.
The page details reveal the fully loaded time, total page size, and requests on the website. While the performance scores reveal the page speed score and the YSlow score.
The waterfall chart is what gives details of the loading behaviour of a website, covering every aspect. The detailed analysis gives helps explore the potential reasons that slow down the page. This information is then used as an opportunity to optimize.
This tool also gives insights into how a website page loads on different devices, using the device filter. The location filter helps analyze how the page loads across different places. Thee informative graphs help track performance. There are monitor and alert features as well for tracking on a regular basis.
Alexa
In today’s fiercely competitive digital marketing world, constantly analyzing where you stand with respect to your competitors is crucial.
There are free digital marketing tools that help analyze a competitor’s website too. Alexa is one such powerful competitor analysis tool. It is an Amazon.com company.
These free digital marketing tools for competitor analysis give insights into ranking, keyphrases, advertising, authority, traffic, social media, technology, etc.
Alexa offers sagacious competitive metrics for competitor site analysis. It literally puts everything laid out for you to analyze and make your next move.
It is perhaps the only competitor analysis tool that evaluates data such as bounce rate, time spent on site, etc. It even provides demographics of gender, education levels, etc.
The free version offers unlimited reports of site information. There is a free trial period for those who want to opt for the paid version.
The free version has tools such as website traffic statistics, find similar sites and top sites. While the paid version has premium tools including check backlinks, keyword research, competitive website analysis, SEO analysis, target audience analysis, and API.
It helps identify SEO keywords that drive traffic at a competitor’s website. It enables identifying content ideas. It provides competitive benchmarking comparing factors like keywords and backlinks.
It also provides audience insights, Alexa ranking, engagement metrics, traffic metrics, site metrics, and more. All these factors definitely help improve one’s own strategy and website.
Mailchimp
Once the content is written and published after various stages of SEO compliance, it is time for organizing the audience. It is time to get the content delivered to the right audience and increase traffic. With the MailChimp, the task is pretty easy. It is a free digital marketing tool that helps with Email Management.
MailChimp is a vital tool that helps a great deal with campaigns. The audience data insights guide the campaigns.
Some of the fantastic features that Mailchimp offers are prebuilt segments, predicted demographics, address finder, personalization, automation, signup forms, tags, and segments amongst others.
It takes automation to a completely different level. This, in turn, saves a lot of time that can be spent on other digital marketing strategies. It is in fact considered to be the All-In-One Digital Marketing Platform.
Email marketing can never go out of vogue. A well-worded Email has great impact on customers. Connecting with a larger audience via Email only helps increase sales and promoting the business.
Welcoming new customers onboard, notifying the existing customers of a sale, or even plain wishing the customers on birthdays, there are templates for any and every occasion.
As per statistics, Email Marketing has been delivering the highest return on investment for the past decade. Email generates a whopping $38 as a return on investment for every $1 spent. Is that not enormous?
For the newbie, Mailchimp offers access and world-class support 24/7 for the first 30 days to help you get accustomed. They even offer fun tips and recommendations on how to interpret the data. There are in-depth step-by-step tutorials to walk you through the process and familiarize you.
All-in-all, Mailchimp is the best free digital marketing tool for email marketing.
Social Mention
Digital marketing is incomplete without the use of Social Media. In the present day scenario, people are hooked onto social media platforms. Social media indeed seems to be the best way to reach out to a larger audience.
Most people if not all have social media accounts and use them on a daily basis. Some have accounts across many platforms. So targeting the social media platforms individually can be a cumbersome process.
Enter Social Mention, the free digital marketing tool that helps monitor and tracks all social media content in one place. Like most digital marketing tools, Social Mention too has free and paid versions.
The target phrases on Social Mention are data in terms of Strength, Sentiment, Passion, and Reach.
Strength refers to the percentage of people likely discussing the term searched. Sentiment reveals the ratio of positive to negative emotions. Passion is about frequency. Reach refers to the maximum potential reach.
Value addition with Social Mention is that display of top keywords. These keywords are most frequently used across social handles and relate to the search term. The results on Social Mention can be customized using various filters such as media source, type of social media platform, either specific or all, images, and so on.
An RSS (really simple syndication) feed is yet another positive feature. The RSS feed allows automatically monitors the search term across different networks. You can even create alerts sent to your email.
Social media monitoring is also often called social media listening. The Social Mention platform helps aggregate data across all social platforms under one umbrella.
Again, a time-saving free digital marketing tool! It is not only free but also real-time monitoring.
Buffer
Creating a different post for different social media platforms and then monitoring them individually is now passé. Buffer is a free digital marketing tool that integrates seamlessly activities across all social media platforms in one place, much like Social Mention.
Buffer is a software application designed in San Francisco by a group of European ex-pats, notably Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich. It was founded in 2010.
It is a medium to grow your brand presence across social media through meaningful engagement.
Buffer helps to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google +, and Linkedin.
It is a streamlined and intuitive platform trusted by 4 million registered users (as updated in October 2018) across the world. The number speaks for itself!
Website: https://buffer.com
Google Analytics
Content created and published, distributed via email marketing, and even managed on organized social platforms. Next what? What about analyzing all the traffic that a website gets and interpreting that data into meaningful wisdom?
Here comes Google Analytics. This is a Google-based web analytics service. It has various parameters of tracking and analyzing the website traffic. A good digital marketing team understands how to translate all the data given by Google Analytics into fruitful action.
Google Analytics displays extensive website traffic details such as audience behavior, time spent on site, bounce rate, peak traffic, and more. Knowing what the customer does significantly helps, whether it is a blog or an eCommerce site. It is usually linked with the Google account.
Some good reasons to be using Google Analytics are:
- It is free.
- Data collection is automated.
- The building of custom reports.
- It is easily integrated with other tools/platforms.
- Internal site search.
- Bounce rate.
- Consumer gender, age, interest, country, city, device, etc.
- It helps in understanding better content creation. Tracking via goals.
In short, though there are many analytical tools out there online, Google Analytics is the undisputable King. It is absolutely free and has a host of features to delve into, making the otherwise boring analysis quite engaging.
To conclude, in the world of digital marketing, few things are as significant and consequential as are the tools used to get the job done.
Considering that marketing these days is extensive and spans across many channels, having tools to deal with the diversity and yet make it a simplified and time-saving process is achieved only by meaningful tools. Adding to the value is the fact that all the above-mentioned digital marketing tools are free.
