10 Free Marketing Tools Every Startup Must Use
Being a startup means to optimize all the resources, be it your time, money or energy, and extract the best possible output. For a startup it’s important to spend every cent carefully while maximizing the returns, as well as marketing and promoting the product at the right place and the right time.
Here is a curated list of 10 FREE tools that are an absolute must for startups to use in their early and growth stages.
1) Canva for designing
Canva is a simple tool for anyone to create beautiful marketing material and social media posts in a jiffy. The app gives lots of templates, free images, text styles, elements, icons and more. Simple drag, drop, type and resize!
In addition, if you need more free images, head to Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay and Startup Stocks for free stock photos.
2) Crowdfire for Twitter management
The tool is a great Twitter management software that allows you to read into your followers, bulk sort, filter, gather demographic insights and more. You can also look at the accounts that you are following but they are not following you back. The tool also recommends who you should follow, it also allows you to make a whitelist of accounts basis your preference. Crowdfire is great for your personal Twitter account too.
3) Open Site Explorer for link analysis
This is a link analysis tool which can play a crucial role in optimizing your SEO efforts while evaluating your own links and website strength. You can even do a competitive analysis with other websites to see the gaps and opportunities that you can fill. In simple words, this tool helps you ‘research backlinks, find link-building opportunities and discover potentially damaging links.’ The free version gives you upto 3 reports per day!
In addition, you can use www.seo-hero.tech to create a content strategy based on every single concept, entity and N-Gram related to your topic or keyword. The tools helps you move away from keyword-centric SEO and nudges you into search engine optimization.
4) Charlie for information about your customers / clients
Charlie helps you know more about a person before you meet them. It is best defined as an address book that stores a lot of information about that person, including their social media profiles, biography, interests, big news, etc. All you need is that person’s email id and voila! It’s great for entrepreneurs keen on closing business deals and sales deals. Knowing what the prospect might be interested in hearing always helps a sales pitch.
5) Inspectlet for web analytics
While Google Analytics is THE go-to tool for web analytics, Inspectlet helps you understand your website visitors’ intentions with even smarter analytics. In fact, Inspectlet is designed to work side by side with Google Analytics, Piwik, Mint, and other web analytics solutions. This is the best tool for real time web analytics. Google Analytics tracks all the traffic to your website and provides huge amount of data (for free) that can help you gauge what is working the best for you and which areas need improvement on your website. For startups, it’s is crucial to gather which online ads are yielding results and which are not. Through Google Analytics, you can track that and switch your strategy to maximize your RoI.
6) Flock for organizational communication
Connect your entire team with Flock, a a free instant messaging service for work and business environments. It is available for free for an unlimited number of users on Windows Desktop, Mac, Chrome, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. You can even add teams from your agencies, partners, etc to Flock so all can collaborate in real time and stay connected. Flock also has a ‘fake news detector’ hence preventing the flow of false information into the messaging app.
7) Medium for content marketing
Medium is more than just a blogging tool, it’s a social platform. It’s the easiest and quickest way to create an online presence with your content – it’s simple to operate and get going. Medium pushes your content to the right audience basis your content and their preference. By linking your Medium to your Twitter profile, you automatically get them to follow you on Medium as well.
8) Hubspot Free Marketing for email lead generation
Planning on generating email leads? This is your go-to tool! Hubspot Free Marketing allows you to create a free pop-up on your website to capture visitors’ email ids. The tool also provides key data points like employers, and visitor’s behavior along with some other key information. Hubspot also has HubSpot Signature Builder, a fun way to create professional email signatures.
9) Hotjar for user behaviour
Hotjar is a hot tool if you want to know what your website visitors are doing while browsing through your website. Hotjar grabs heatmaps, click maps, scroll maps and even visitor recordings. Hotjar is great for customer management and communication through various stages and insert messages and surveys for your visitors. It also helps you understand how well your content is faring – are users reading the post till the end or not, where are they pausing in between and where do they click in between. A great tool for startups if they are keen on constantly improvising their website and content.
10) Buffer for social media post scheduling
Buffer saves you time by allowing you to manage and schedule all your social media posts ahead of time. It’s an absolute must for startups who have limited human resource to manage their social media without investing too much time. Simply connect your social profiles to Buffer and schedule upto 10 posts each at one go!
Use these tools to save time while boosting your efficiency as you propel your startup towards growth. If you know of any other cool resources that you make use of, let us know in the comments and we will feature them on our blog!
Join the Startup League!
The goal of Startup League is to make it easier for startups to promote themselves at the most coveted startup fests through sponsorships. If you wish to exhibit your startup at a fest or tech event, Startup League can give you part or full sponsorship for your booth at the event along with marketing and PR support, social media shout outs and free branded booth goodies.
