5 excellent free marketing tools for your business to use right now

There are plenty of online marketing tools out there which won’t cost you a penny and you can start using them now.  

Google Analytics (website behaviour)

If you're looking for some serious insights into your online marketing, then look no further than Google Analytics. This really is the bread and butter of understanding how your customers and prospects are behaving on your website. 

But why is GA so useful? Well as they say ‘the devil is in the details’ and this tool certainly provides plenty of that. Want to know the average time that people spend on your site? Well, you can do that. How about where your visitors are coming from? For example, are they finding you from putting in a search term or perhaps your site was mentioned on another site. You can find all of this out from GA. We wrote a piece that covers this in more detail, for more information click here. 

Mailchimp (email marketing)

Any kind of marketing is going to require a fair amount of communication to get your name out there. But getting that message out to all your contacts (in the form of an email) can be a very time-consuming activity, especially if you are going to do this manually. Ask yourself this, do you really want to be spending hours of your valuable time doing this?

Why not cut your emailing efforts down and work smarter with one of the great email marketing tools out there, Mailchimp. If you’re looking to send out well crafted and beautifully designed emails to your customers and contacts, then this really is an excellent platform to help you with this. 

But Mailchimp also has so many other extra features which really make it the complete package including its own analytics tools and even landing page design. 

Buffer (social media management) 

At this point you might be thinking but what about social media? And you would be absolutely right. Social media should be a key part of any business's online marketing strategy. 

A really effective social media strategy can make you known to a large audience, who may well not have known about you before. But as with email, staying on top of your companies’ social media accounts can be time-consuming - particularly if you do it all yourself. 

But there are free social media management tools like Buffer allow you to: 

• Schedule posts from platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
• See what your most popular posts are
• Gives you a complete dashboard of all your social media activity so you can see everything that is going on at any given time. 
• Organise hashtags so that your posts are tagged with the most relevant subjects. 

To see more about what Buffer could do for you check out their website by clicking here. 

Canva (design)

We’re all told from an early age about the importance of first impressions, and nothing determines a good first impression more than eye-catching marketing. Whether it’s a proposal, illustrations, posters or even logos, excellent design can really be a game-changer. 

Fortunately Canva - an excellent design tool - allows you to craft professionally designed visual marketing for free. So whether you’re looking to design an Instagram story or just want to create a sleek new business card, then Canva really is a terrific all in one platform to help you with all of your design needs.

To see more about what Canva can do to help you visit their site by clicking here. 

Evernote (idea organising)

When it comes to marketing, you’re bound to have numerous ideas in terms of what you could be doing. Whether it’s social media campaigns, special offers or going to local events, the likelihood is there will be numerous paths you can go down.

But sometimes, with all the day to day goings-on, it can be easy to forget about that idea you had - then it becomes an afterthought. With Evernote, you can create a reference point for all of your ideas and revisit them when you want to. 

Evernote allows you to capture it all into one place. What’s also great about this tool is that it can integrate with any of your existing apps such as your email, so you never miss a trick. You can even use it to record important points from meetings. 

Marketing moments (calendar)

Halloween, Easter, Mothers day, Black Friday etc... Sometimes it can be hard to keep up with all the various different marketing opportunities throughout the year.

Here at takepayments we have created a free marketing calendar, so you can have all this information to hand rather than doing time-consuming research.

To see how this calendar works simply click here for more information. 

David Goulden

Copywriter