For companies to grow, effective digital marketing strategies are key. With each increase in customer base, the marketing becomes more complex and requires new ways to help users stay engaged.
Every company could benefit from tools to market, measure, and optimize its efforts. This is true whether it is managing web traffic, automating repetitive tasks, or collecting data regarding email or promotional campaigns.
Depending on the business and the marketing strategy, parting with some cash for marketing tools might be the right decision.
However, for many, a tight budget necessitates tools that offer free, robust features and high-quality capabilities. These five free tools offer everything a company needs to stay on top of its digital marketing strategies.
IFTTT
IFTTT (If This Then That) is a platform that helps businesses do more with various apps and devices. This tool allows companies to streamline workflow based on triggered events. Choose from more than 4,000 events, or set up your own.
Once you set a trigger event, you can forget about it. IFTTT automates it for you from then on. For example, every time you create a blog post, you can choose either to automatically share it on Facebook or to generate a Tweet.
You can also use IFTTT to retweet a particular #hashtag, making it easy to foster buzz around a promotional campaign.
Hootsuite
Every company knows how important social media scheduling is for digital marketing.Click To Tweet Let’s face it—no one has the time to be on every account constantly posting fresh content. With Hootsuite, you can manage every account in one place.A company can schedule posts for the future in order to remain relevant and stay engaged with its social communities without being stuck at a desk.
Hootsuite offers not only automated scheduling but also content curation, social media analytics, and app integration. Convenience and ease all in one place goes a long way.
SurveyMonkey
We’ve all had to make buying decisions for the bedroom that required filtering through thousands of bits of research in order to confidently make the right choice.
If this universal experience has taught us nothing else, it’s the importance of collecting data to understand how to move forward in the best possible way.
If you don’t have the resources to get data on customers by hiring a market research firm, SurveyMonkey could be the tool for you.
This robust platform is a survey and questionnaire tool, allowing companies to design and send surveys to an email list. It also allows you to utilize SurveyMonkey’s analytics tool to evaluate the answers.
You can send out surveys via email, chat, web, or social media. And you can extract actionable data from survey responses in order to discover ways to drive business forward.
The good news is the tool has expert-reviewed templates available to ensure any questions you create aren’t skewed by ineffective phrasing.
SurveyMonkey also offers survey tips for companies who prefer to create a more customized template. Templates include customer satisfaction surveys, marketing or market research surveys, and planning surveys for preparing to launch a new product or service.
There are many Surveymonkey alternatives you can learn about if this isn’t the tool you are looking for.
Traffic Travis
This tool is an excellent option for those with no SEO knowledge or experience. Proper search engine ranking makes it easier to know where you need to particularly focus.
Traffic Travis lets a company check the health of its website, keeping an eye on where the site appears in the rankings for selected keywords. Companies can also analyze how other sites are performing according to those same keywords.
By keeping tabs on your competitors, it’s easier to spot keywords that you should target. Traffic Travis also uncovers technical mistakes that might be affecting a company’s ranking.
For example, the tool highlights whether a page contains too many unrelated tags or if an image is missing an alt tag.
Trello
While this isn’t a tool directly related to marketing per se, Trello allows companies to market more effectively by remaining organized.
Trello’s site showcases individuals utilizing the tool to organize anything from kitchen and bedroom decisions to an upcoming vacation. Businesses can create boards that can be shared with the team.
You can also use these boards to track the progress of various marketing projects. Move a board from idea to to-do, doing, and then done. Along the way, you can add comments, upload files, create checklists, and add due dates.
You can also divvy up tasks by simply dragging and dropping people into each particular section while still allowing everyone to see the same board and the whole project at once.