Top 10 Free Online Marketing Tools for Small Business Owners

You are a small business owner, finding yourself struggling and losing temper between your daily tasks, it’s almost like nothing is moving forward. Would it be possible that the cause of the problem is the way you manage your business and which tools you utilize?

I’m still in a bit of a shock after finding out that there are roughly 16M new websites launched every month. That adds up to 200M every year, and of course the number is growing as the years ago by. You know what else is growing? The amount of tools that we see launching and developing for not only bloggers or webmaster, but also small business and their owners.

The whole term marketing is very broad and includes a ton of sub-niches, but the general idea behind having a set of tools for a business that are essential is fairly simple. You need the basic tool-set to always have things like statistics and the ability to engage with users at your disposal.

Ant Working Hard

We need to find out about some free marketing tools what can help our small business along the way, and that is exactly what we are go to learn about in this post. I have tried to include a decent variety, but most will somehow relate to you and you should at least get the idea of what you are missing and what could possible save you more time as you work on other things within the business.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics
This could potentially be the most overlooked marketing tool that any new or established small business should have. There are plenty of rumors that Google uses Analytics data to rank your website, but whether that is true or not, we are likely to never find out. Google might say it’s not so, but it very well could be, the huge volume of sites that use Analytics would make it that much easier to make a user friendly search engine.

‘Nuff of speculation. You should have Google Analytics installed, period. They have grown over the years to include some super cool features like lead tracking and real-time analysis, which is something that other companies would charge you insane amounts of money for.

2. MailChimp

MailChimp Logo
This isn’t the only email subscription service/tool out there, there are plenty of others, like AWeber, but I clearly prefer MailChimp, especially because of the free option it offers to new users. Anything up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month is completely free of charge. This is a great offer than any small business should take advantage off – straight away!

Freddie MailChimpYou can let your subscribers know about new posts by utilized the Feedburner mail function, like I do on my subscribe page, and the rest of the content, like product launches and new offers can easily be sent through MailChimp – to people who signed up for such news in the first place.

10,000 email subscribers with unlimited emails is only going to cost you $80/per month. Incredible value for one of the greatest email list services out there.

3. Tableau Public

Tableau Public
Having images, data graphs and other nifty visualized content types are becoming increasingly popular, and people rather read and scan blog posts that are rich with images. It makes the content itself more rich and easier to navigate. I put images in my posts wherever I can – for you, as a small business owner, it should be a part of your strategy to crate graphs that somehow display the current state of your industry, as people immensely enjoy learning from these graphs.

You can find out more about Tableau on the how it works page, it’s an essential tool that any business, blogger or even a company should have to create amazing graphs for data that otherwise would be impossible to be put on for display.

4. LoopFuse

LoopFuse Logo
To automate your marketing efforts means to make it easier on yourself and your business, sometimes it means saving a ton of money by not having to go and hire professionals who will do these tasks for you. LoopFuse is a great tool for any business, allow you to do inbound marketing, email marketing and even things like lead capture and nurturing, all from a simple to use and understand dashboard.

It might not be the cheapest of tools, but this is a free marketing tools post – and LoopFuse is awesome enough to offer a free plan to anyone who is interested, at least to test the waters.

We also have a Free Plan for 1 user, up to 250 prospects, & 500 emails + up to 1,500 pageviews per month.

It’s not a lot, but it’s definitely enough to do some tests and see how it goes, might be the tool you need after all!

5. Analytics SEO

Analytics SEO Logo
One of the most sought after tools out there, are the ones that help you track your rankings on search engines and across the web. Analytics SEO is kind enough to offer a free plan to anyone who is interested.

Analytics SEO Freemium
It’s of course, not a whole lot to play with, but like I said, the tiny amounts can help us test the waters and see for ourselves if the tool we are using is something we’d like to invest our money into. It’s actually a great business plan and is much nicer than to have a 30Day Trial that simply ends and you cannot gain access to it anymore, not if you don’t pay for it.

6. Populr

Populr Logo
Populr is a service that offers creation of single pages, which we might otherwise know as landing pages. The ideas is that you can create a page for literally anything and point your domain to it. This would be best used when you are preparing to launch a new product, and through Populr you can create an amazing and professionally looking page that will help people understand everything about what you do and your businesses vision.

Things like analytics and pre-made designs come integrated into the service, and with the free plan you will be able to:
• Unlimited Published Pages
• Point 3 domains at your account
• Drag and Drop Editing
• Sharing
• Collaboration
• Video Recording
• 12MB Document Limit
• Prominent Populr branding

Paid upgrades will let you allocate teams and integrate other analytics solutions like Google Analytics, and of course increased space and sharing limit for documents. Give it a try and see how you like it, it’s free!

7. SOCIOPAL

Sociopal Logo
This little wonderful tool will help you create social media accounts in no time, and not only that – but will also help you with setting up your very own website. That of course means that this tool is aimed purely at people who are looking to open their business to the online world.

 

 

 

 

Not only that, but you will also get to share some awesome content with your ever growing follower list, or so the company says!

8. Tregia

Tregia Logo
Knowing what your competition is doing to get such amazing results for their business is pretty much essential. It doesn’t mean you are stealing, it simply means that you are ready to expand your business. Tregia will help you analyze a website of your choice and try to gather as much information about it as possible.

CodeCondo Tools

You will get reports like which A/B testing tools a site uses, or what kind of analytics tools it has integrated. You can find out about all this by looking at the websites source or saving the HTTP requests, but it’s not something everyone knows how-to do, so this tool will help you save a lot of time.

9. HootSuite

Hootsuite Logo
Hootsuite is the ultimate tool for managing multiple social media channels, and I couldn’t recommend it enough to any small or even large business owner as it can take away plenty of load of your daily work life. The tools stands out with features like tracking yourself across multiple social media websites, as well as the ability to schedule posts for days ahead. When you are going away for holidays – it’s not a bad idea to consider scheduling some posts ahead of time, so that you know your followers will still be updated with content even when you’re gone.

You will be able to analyize social media traffic that is coming from your social media efforts to further increase the amount of new people you are reaching out to, by having the ability to analyze content that is doing really well across all of the social networking sites.

Free plan is pretty basic, but it will be enough to get you started and to help you make a decision whether to invest in this magnificent tool or not.

10. Tweepz

Tweepz Logo
Content marketing and continuous content publishing is of course a must have in these hard times, where quality content is really shining over anything else. What is the content going to be good for, if nobody is not reading it?

Tweepz can help you with finding the right people to follow on Twitter, more specifically – influential people. Tweepz allows you to search for Twitter accounts that have been created as far as back in 2006, but will only allow you to see up to the ones that have been created 2010.

It might not sound appealing straight away, but it’s great to find real accounts that have been around for a long time and have established themselves as sort of an authority in the industry. Your small business needs the attention these profiles can provide – you only need to find a way to get their attention.

Free Online Marketing Tools

I think I have covered most of what I wanted to cover. These really are the tools you should be looking to invest your time into, in order to see what your business might be missing. It’s all about statistics, analytics and engaging customers these days. Having to do those tasks all by yourself can become incredibly time consuming and stressful to say the least.

I welcome any more additions to this list in the comment section below, there is no way I could have listed them all :)