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Here at SpotDev we love uncovering a great new tool to help us deliver top class digital marketing for our clients. If that tool happens to be free, even better!
There’s a lot to think about and even more to organise when it comes to marketing your business online, which is why we’ve put together this list of seven excellent tools that will make your life a lot easier — and won’t cost you a penny.
HubSpot CRM
We’re official HubSpot partners, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that we’d be recommending a HubSpot tool in this list.
What is surprising is that their excellent customer relationship management platform is completely free.
HubSpot CRM provides a real-time view of your entire sales funnel, including the progress of deals and leads, what appointments and calls have been had or scheduled, as well as how your sales teams are performing.
It may not boast all of the functionality of Salesforce, but considering the price difference this should be the easy choice for many organisations.
Chrome Extensions
There are a myriad of brilliant marketing Chrome extensions that cost nothing, but here are three of our favourites…
FATRANK
Want to know where your website ranks for the most important search terms but don’t want to have to scroll through the SERPs looking for it? FATRANK makes checking your rankings easier.
You can even export the results into a handy PDF, ideal for showing to clients or senior stakeholders.
Keywords Everywhere
You can’t conduct SEO without knowing which keywords you should be targeting, and to identify the best opportunities you need to know search volumes.
This can be done for free using Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner, but the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension provides the data right there in the SERPs.
Once the extension is installed, specify which country you want to check volumes for and search for your keyphrase. Monthly volume, average CPC and competition will be displayed below the search bar.
Scroll down and you’ll also see the same metrics for related searches. What’s more, you can star the best candidates. This will save them so you can review the list later and export it if you wish.
Awesome Screenshot
Being able to take screenshots quickly and easily is incredibly useful — at least for me. As you can see I’ve already used four screenshots in this blog post.
You’re probably familiar with the Snipping Tool (Windows) and the Command+Fn+SHIFT+4 function (Mac), but they are both somewhat limited. Awesome Screenshot allows you to capture a selected area and the whole screen, but also:
- the visible part of a webpage;
- an entire webpage (beyond what is visible); and
- a delayed capture (three seconds).
AS also has some basic image editing functionality, but its best feature is allowing you to record your screen. This is great for easily creating video content, and can be much more effective for explaining how to do something. In fact, the GIF above was created from a video recorded using Awesome Screenshot.
The free version limits you to 30 second videos, but there is no limit to how many you can record.
Pixlr
Adobe Photoshop is a very powerful too in the right hands, but it is also quite expensive.
If your marketing budget doesn’t stretch to as many licenses as you need then Pixlr makes for a fine free alternative.
You can’t do as much, but it’s a tool that’s improving all the time.
Google Analytics
The web’s most powerful analytics platform is still completely free, and is an absolute must for any organisation hoping to demonstrate ROI from marketing activities.
Discover which of your webpages are driving the most traffic, where people are exiting the buyer’s journey before converting, understand which marketing channels are performing best and so much more.
Google Campaign URL Builder
Another great free tool from Google, and one that complements Analytics, is their Campaign URL Builder.
This adds UTM parameters onto a link — essentially a tag that shows up in Google Analytics. This allows you to find out where your traffic is coming from more specifically, right down to individual tweets and guest posts if you want it to.
The above shows the UTM parameters I added onto the internal link pointing to our Beginner’s Guide to Photoshop blog above. This means that I will be able to see exactly how many page views on the Photoshop blog have come from this blog.
QuickBooks Invoicing Template
An important element of any digital marketing project is being able to invoice for it — and this free invoicing template from QuickBooks is a great little tool to keep bookmarked.
They offer low cost accounting software too which is well worth checking out if you're an SME or start-up that hasn't got this particular aspect of your business nailed yet.
These are just a selection of the best free tools available to digital marketers. Which ones do you rely on to do the job? Let us know in the comments below.
