As a recent grad of an esteemed marketing program (Butler University’s College of Business was recently ranked the 2nd best business school in the Midwest Region, Go Dawgs!) I spent four years learning from passionate professors the importance of good marketing practices. With that being said, and as much as it pains me to say this, marketing is often put on the backburner for many companies because of cost, time, and resources.
These 9 Cheap, and Free, Marketing Tools will help you bring your marketing efforts to the frontline without taking a chunk out of your budget.
Portent’s Content Idea Generator
- PRICE: Free
- In a world where “content is king”, the need to create relevant and interesting content has never been greater. If you are ever experiencing a serious case of bloggers-block, enlist the help of this Idea Generator. As an example, I typed in “content marketing” and got results like:
- Why the Next 10 Years of Content Marketing Will Smash the Last 10
- Why Content Marketing is the 51st Shade of Grey
- How to Cheat at Content Marketing and Get Away with it
- PRICE: Free
- If you don’t already have Google Analytics, go get it NOW. Google Analytics helps you analyze visitor traffic to understand what your customer really comes to your site searching for and better understand which digital marketing strategies perform best.
- PRICE: Free
- Hemingway app helps make your writing bold and clear. You can paste a draft of your blog post in the app and it will give you suggestions on how you can make the post more reader-friendly!
- PRICE: Free
- Mail Chimp is my favorite free email list service. It is very simple and user friendly. Anything up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month is completely free of charge.
- PRICE: Free
- This free offering by SproutSocial provides you with insight on your response rate and average response time to engaged customers via social media channels. It is not enough to just push out content, you must engage with your audience!
- PRICE: Free
- Canva is like Adobe Illustratr for dummies. It is amazingly simple and you can create professional-grade designs. They have a brilliant 23 second how-to video to help you get started.
- PRICE: First user free, $3 per user per month
- Sigstr allows the marketer to improve brand consistency and streamline content distribution via the employee email signature.
- PRICE: Free for one user
- Charlie combs through your calendar and provides you with one-pagers on everyone you’re going to meet with before you see them! Charlie automatically sends you research before your meetings so that you are never unprepared again.
- PRICE: Multiple pricing plans. There is a free plan but for unlimited access the price jumps to $9 per month.
- MixMax is an extension that integrates with Gmail that allows you to do all kinds of crazy things in your emails. You can attach one-click calendar meetings, polls and surveys, link previews and even see when people are viewing your emails.
