Top 7 Free Marketing Tools
Published: 2020-05-06 09:46:55

here are certain essential marketing tools.  The effectiveness of a marketing team is determined not only by the talent of its components but also by their productivity and is achieved using the best marketing tools and if they are free, better.

It is useless to have on the team if you do not have the best marketing tools

In this article I want to share the 7 best essentials for the marketing department and their free alternatives.


## All-in-one Marketing Tools

All-in-one solutions , as far as marketing is concerned, are platforms that allow you to manage and automate various phases of marketing from the same interface. Thanks to these tools we have much of the information necessary for our business centralized in one place and we do not have to jump between platforms.

Many of these tools help in tasks such as lead management, scheduling email chains, analytics, content creation or even social media management . Their main strength is that they allow us to have an overview of how our marketing strategy is working without losing a detailed view of user interactions with our content. Many of these tools incorporate adapted versions of typical sales CRMs, making it easy to track users individually.

Of all these all-in-one tools , my favorite is Hubspot . Surely this does not catch you by surprise since Hubspot is right now the benchmark in this sector. Hubspot's problem is its price: although it has a free version for entrepreneurs. There are alternatives to Hubspot, but those that are at the same level also have high prices although if you have few users they may be worth it like Infusionsoft or Sales Manago . There are free options like Mautic and it has improved a lot.


## Marketing tools for web analytics

Despite the fact that platforms like Hubspot and Marketo have very interesting analytical tools, none is as powerful as Google Analytics.

Analytics is a tool that many people use but very few people know how to use. Anyone is able to enter Analytics and see the basic data that it provides us, but few are able to squeeze all the juice that this Google tool can give.

Analytics offers hundreds of interesting metrics based on the interactions that users have with our website or our App. But in most cases, these metrics are not as interesting on their own as in combination with other metrics. In addition, the possibility of adding objectives, views, filters and integrations with other of our platforms, make this tool an indispensable part of the marketing department.

Google Analytics can be scary, but learning to control this tool at the highest level is something worth investing our time in, as the results will make up for it. 


## Task management tool

It is fortunate that one of the best task management tools for a marketing team is free. I'm talking about Trello , a web platform that allows you to organize all the tasks of your team through its structure of boards, columns and cards.

Trello's possibilities are almost endless. So much so that its use has transcended from the workplace to a personal level - it is very easy to organize your day with Trello and once you start using it, you will not be able to stop . Although it is difficult to explain the full potential of Trello in a few lines, I am going to try to summarize how we use it in my marketing team.

Several examples for you to organize your Marketing Tasks
In the table of contents we have several columns through which the tasks circulate: Column of ideas for articles, column of articles to do, column of articles under construction, column of articles under review, column of articles made and column of published articles . The objective of each of the editors is to assign themselves a card from the first column (each card contains a topic), and manage to move it through the different columns (phases) until the article is done and published. It is a very orderly way of working on the content, especially considering that there is a calendar view that allows us to see when each article should be published. For us it is a kind of editorial calendar but with superpowers.
On the PR board we have the following columns: Means to contact, contacted, with accepted proposal, with article sent, with article published. Basically we use this board to work relationships with blogs, newspapers and magazines in our sector. Our goal is to get them to publish articles about our content or product. To do this, we work on them phase by phase and moving the cards from column to column as we go. In addition, if we see that a blog or page becomes a regular collaborator, we add the corresponding tag to take it into account in future collaborations. If a blog refuses to work with us, we put another label that indicates that we should not spend too much time with it.


## Team communication tools

Another important aspect to improve the productivity of the marketing team is internal communication. There are many communication tools and that is precisely one of the problems; With so many channels, with so many topics to discuss and with several members on the team, communications can become a káos.

The queen today for this purpose is Slack which is also free, although you can use Telegram perfectly for this purpose or WhatsApp but the latter I do not recommend.

In our case, we have a marketing conversation with the rest of the team members that has the following topic structure:

KPIs: In this topic we share all the essential metric information for our department.
Contents: Here we discuss the development of eBooks, guides and infographics and share ideas for articles that improve our content strategy.
Campaign X: For each specific campaign we launch we create a theme. In these topics we are talking about the development of the campaign. Once it ends successfully we archive the topic.
Off-Topic: To talk about everything that has nothing to do with the previous topics. If an overly large topic pops up all the conversations on Off-Topic, we create a specific topic to release Off-Topic.
Another very interesting aspect of Slack is that it favors asynchronous communication. That is, the communication in which the interlocutors do not need to be active at the same time or in the same place. You can use it whenever and wherever you want, either through its web version or its mobile application. This type of communication avoids many unnecessary interruptions since it allows you to participate in a conversation only when you have availability.


## SEO tool

Another tool necessary for any marketing team is one that helps guide SEO efforts and measure results. There are many references on the market that perform these tasks: Semrush , Ahrefs or Moz are just some of them. But the best without a doubt and cheaper is Screming Frog .

If I had to choose one taking into account the value for [money with online loans](https://www.creditosrapidos10min.com), that would be SEMrush. The SEMrush functionalities are very advanced, just to name a few of them:

Positioning tracking : allows you to keep track of the positions in which our website is located for certain keywords.
Web audit: analyzes the "health" of our website taking into account the best practices in SEO and guides us to make the pertinent modifications that help improve it.
Analysis of keywords, domains, pages: they allow us to analyze any of these three elements and their behavior in Google rankings. You can analyze your own page or any other of the competition. It is really useful to know where the traffic is coming from to your competitors, get ideas for your SEO strategy and play with a little advantage.
SEM analysis: SEM analysis allows us to know the strategies that our competitors follow in Adwords. See the keywords you bid on, the type of ad you use, and the positions of these ads in google search results.
Keyword Difficulty : a very interesting tool that helps us determine the difficulty of a keyword if we want to try to position ourselves with it.


## Lead capture tool

If one of the objectives as a marketing department is to capture leads, a tool that improves the methods of capturing your page or blog will be very helpful.

One of the most popular alternatives to achieve this is Sumome , a suite of widgets that allows you, among other things, to launch popups to your visitors, show them forms or bars with different CTAs. I have seen increases of up to 45% in the number of conversions after configuring some of these widgets in 5 minutes.


## Social media management tool

Finally we will need a tool that helps us manage our social profiles by automating posts.

There are very interesting alternatives such as Hootsuite or Buffer , all of them paid, although they really are not very expensive compared to other tools focused on marketing. They are tools that in the case of having to manage several social profiles, they are worth it.