Digital marketing can be a costly proposition for entrepreneurs building their businesses online. Reaching out to their target audience, creating campaigns with strong recall value and observing how their competitors are faring becomes a time, money and effort consuming affair. Making life easy for entrepreneurs are several free digital marketing tools available for use online that ease the task at hand. Entrepreneurs must know what these are and how to use them to their advantage. These free digital marketing tools are must needed for some essential digital marketing activities such as conversion rate optimization, marketing automation and personalization.
10 such free digital marketing tools for entrepreneurs have been written about below, their bifurcation done on the basis of the digital marketing analysis activities they help accomplish.
- Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Reviewing Brand Mentions and Latest Industry Developments
- Google Alerts: A majority of marketers still swear by Google Alerts. It helps them review mentions of their brand, campaign hashtags and competitor names via entering keywords. The main reason why it is not mentioned that widely on social media platforms is because its core use revolved around analysis of sites.
- Talkwalker: The social listening service Talkwalker offers the free Talkwalker Alerts service that helps monitor mentions of one’s brand, hashtags and social media competitors.
- Feedly: RSS was the rage 5 years ago at the very thought of ‘Feed’. Google Reader was found to be quite reliable till the search engine giant withdrew the service. Reader would help categorize sites and stay up-to-date with the latest digital developments. Cut to today, everyone prefers Feedly. So popular has it become, that the most popular posts can be seen through ‘voice of the crowd’. All these Feed readers are very helpful in helping scan through the latest news in different categories.
- Zest: This is again very useful for digital marketing. It is a Google Chrome extension programmed to collect suggested content from users.
- Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Managing Social Media Updates
- Hootsuite and Buffer: This becomes a no-brainer. These are the first two names that pop-up during conversations when the task is to post and review social media updates. These free digital marketing tools help keep tabs on competitors and influencers and in case you happen to use Twitter lists, you can also have a stream for each of these. An excellent SEO analysis tool, Hootsuite integrates most of the popular social media platforms and helps manage all social media accounts.
- Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Finding Influencers
- Followerwonk: Followerwonk is the most commonly spoken of free service meant to find influencers via their Twitter bio. Though it has shortcomings, it is far better than reputation tools such as Klout, Kred and Peerindex that have slowly and gradually faded away into oblivion.
- Right Relevance: Right Relevance helps identify both publishers as well as influencers, though it still is over-dependent on the text given out in the bio.
- Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Understanding Customer Search Behavior
- Google Keyword Planner, Google Webmaster Tools Integration: These still remain most reliable as far as driving the majority of visits, leads and sales for most online businesses are concerned. These offer best help to understand customer behavior when searching and formulating strategies and getting visibility, besides creating content and messages that help meet consumer demands.
- Ubersuggest: This is also useful to summarize the Suggest/Autocompete behavior in various countries and to check your covering the main behavior.
- io: A very viable alternative, it comes handy when trying to find out how local consumer behavior differs.
- Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Competitor Site Benchmarking
Google AdPlanner for the longest time was most trusted for comparing the size of an audience and dimensions as well. The latest avatar of this is the Google Campaign Planner, highly useful to find out the size and quality of audience for partner and media sites. Alongside, there is the Google Placement Targeting Tool that helps in research and remarketing. SIMILAR WEB, is the latest rage or benchmarking. It offers free stats on all the sites including referrers.
- Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Off-Page Backlink Analysis for SEO
- Majestic and Moz Open Site Explorer
These two names mentioned above are the most highly recommended ones for this particular digital marketing activity. As far as Non-SEO’s are concerned, the Backlink History works best for basic benchmarking of competitor success to gain backlinks, though link quality is not visible.
- Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for On-Page Markup Analysis for SEO
- Marketing Grader: This is most preferred to review on-page markup for SEO and is spoken of very highly within industry circles. It helps review headings and also mobile screen resizing. Other digital marketing activities that Marketing Grader helps out with include Competitive Benchmarking, Lead Generation, Mobile Marketing, Blogging and Overall Analysis. Entrepreneurs will have questions such as ‘is my marketing lesser than my competitor’s’, ‘will my marketing efforts result in leads’, ‘is my blog driving results’ and ‘what are the strong points of my marketing campaign’ answered.
- Best Free Digital Marketing Tools for Understanding Overall Online Marketing Effectiveness
- Google Analytics: This is one of the most critical digital marketing activities of all and warrants the use of a tool that is as high-profile as the task in hand is. Moreover, its Tracking Code Feature gives out an unbelievable number of metrics to the users. From the Google Analytics Hub, Google Analytics for Social Media Marketing works best to understand overall online marketing effectiveness.
Digital marketing has time and again tested the brilliance and acumen of entrepreneurs and activities such as digging through data and fine-tuning one’s social presence becomes a little hard to do without external help. This comes in the form of these free digital marketing tools that save entrepreneurs precious time and money. Entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes will benefit highly by using these free digital marketing tools for their marketing initiatives.
Author Bio– Shaun is the Director of Virtual Employee Private Limited, a remote staffing & tech MNC, and is responsible for leading a team of more than 1200 experts from domains like IT, Content Creation, Digital Marketing, Designing. A law graduate from Brunel University, Shaun has been instrumental in creating a business model which is increasingly being seen by industry peers as a model for new organizations in the tech outsourcing domain.