Being a startup entrepreneur, you know the significance of every dollar. While executing your core competency is a principal factor for business success, it is equally important to market your business effectively, and that’s where marketing tools come into the picture.

One of the key advantages startups are looking for is a competitive edge over their competitors. Getting some (free) help doing that always helps. As a startup there’s a lot you want to communicate and market, however, limited monies keep you from doing that. Here’s a list of marketing tools that are free alternatives to paid tools.

1. Buffer

One of the best time-saving tips for social media marketing is scheduling the posts in advance. You can block some time and create posts for your social platforms in one go and then by using Buffer, you can schedule them for the upcoming week or days.

Buffer is a free platform that lets you connect a profile from each social network and lets you schedule 10 posts for each network. This helps you always stay at least three days ahead.

2. Google Analytics

When it comes to tracking the traffic to your website, Google Analytics is one of the best marketing tools. It’s a huge and monstrous amount of information that Google shares with you for no charge. As someone who is new in the business, you would appreciate the ease with which you can see where the traffic is coming from. Also, with the ‘Time On Page’ feature (among many others), you can gauge how much time a user spends on the page and accordingly optimize your website.

3. Canva

Your images do most of the talking in your digital and social marketing strategy. Canva helps you create images for social media, blog posts, and any other purpose (online and offline) you would need an image for.

The optimized size and built-in templates let you create professional images for different platforms in a jiffy. It also has elements and free stock photos to make your experience of using the app better.

4. Peek

There are some fantastic paid options out there that tell you how people are using your website. This involves A/B testing, user testing—that sort of thing. These tools give some great, valuable insights. Then there’s Peek, a free tool from User Testing that lets you see and hear a five-minute video of a real person using your website.

For the first time insights, you can have an individual go through your website or blog from the home page. Following that, you can also get someone to test out a certain flow through your website by starting someone on a landing page. These take around 2-3 days to complete and Peek allows you to run 3 tests monthly.

5. Hotjar

As a marketer, you’re curious about how your visitors are using your website—how they scroll, where they click, etc. Marketing tools like Hotjar make this easy for you by showing you what exactly your visitors are doing, via scroll maps, click maps, heat maps, and visitor recordings. This tool also gives options to analyze your funnel and share surveys and messages to your visitors.

6. Open Site Explorer

This is a great marketing tool to check your domain authority and to check how many external links you’re getting and what are their sources. The tool also lets you check your competition. However, the free version allows for only 3 reports a day. Signing up for the tool offers unlimited reporting on all your keywords, competitors, and links.

It’s simple to use too. Plug in your site’s URL to get high-level statistics like incoming links, page authority, etc. The ‘Just Discovered’ tab on the tool shows recent links and top pages to gauge which pages on your website get the maximum links.

7. Charlie

With all the information available at our disposable, it would seem lazy if you didn’t do your homework before a meeting. Charlie is like a futuristic address book. This marketing tool is loaded with features and information, and it is a quick and efficient way to get to know a person.

As a startup, one of the activities you’ll indulge in is meeting prospective clients and venture capitalists. Knowing their likes and dislikes and having a little more than basic information about them can go a long way in building positive relationships. This marketing tool gives you a full rundown of the person—their interests, social profiles, biography, etc. Simply add their email address and Charlie will tell you everything.

8. HubSpot Marketing Free

HubSpot’s free marketing tool allows marketers to generate email leads from their websites with the free pop-up tool. This marketing tool is great to gain massive information about your leads from HubSpot Marketing Free. The tool gathers email addresses from your website and shares key data points like its employer and which pages your leads have visited. It also tells which pages are converting at a significantly higher rate than others.

The marketing tools listed here are great to get you started. The best way to move forward is to do your research and determine which tools best fit your need.