5 Free Marketing Tools For Small Business Owners
Large corporations can invest a lot of money in tools that will make their marketing efforts easier, but when it comes to small businesses, owners have to pay attention to their budgets and find ways to develop their marketing programs without spending a lot of money on tools and to focus on investing the marketing budget in promoting the business. Fortunately, these days, small business owners can use a variety of tools that are available online for free.
Everybody knows about Hootsuite and the fact that this simple tool make social media management easier, but besides Hootsuite, there are other free tools that can make a small business’ marketing efforts easier. Most of them have paid subscriptions plans too so when small businesses need more than the free tool can offer, they can upgrade their plan without having to switch to a new provider and starting the learning process all over again.
Canva is an online tool that helps people to create visual content. With a free library of fonts templates, images and illustrations, Canva is great for creating flyers, brochures, social media images, infographics, presentations, business cards and other graphics in a simple way and without prior graphic design knowledge.
For a good marketing strategy, all businesses need research, but research agencies can be expensive so the best way for a small business to conduct market research is to do it in-house. Online research is very common these days, especially for businesses that sell their products and services online. Their target audience is active online and using an online survey tool is a very good idea. Survey Monkey provides a free tool that can be used by small businesses who want to find out information about their customers or to discover industry trends. The software is easy to use and it allows small business owners to create their surveys online and, after conducting the research, to analyze the results and adjust their marketing efforts accordingly.
Email marketing is an important tool for small businesses who want to build a successful and recognizable brand. Mailchimp is a great free tool that allows businesses to send personalized emails and newsletters to their subscribers or customers in a simple way. This free marketing tool is intuitive and easy to use even for those who have no prior experience with similar tools.
Small businesses who rely on web data can use this tool to gather contact information or competitor’s data in a simple. Scraper analyzes web pages and exports the data in Excel spreadsheets that can be used for competitors’ analyses or for creating cold-email lists. The cold-email lists created with Scraper can be easily imported in Mailchimp.
Evernote is a great free tool for those small businesses who rely on ideas and trends. Small business owners can have many good ideas during a day but without a little bit of organization those ideas can be forgotten and many business opportunities lost. Evernote provides a tool that allows people to write and prioritize notes on their laptops, tablets and even phones. This free marketing tool can be used for writing content ideas, brainstorming ideas and project lists.