As a small business owner, you don’t have a huge marketing budget and you probably can’t afford to hire an in-house marketing team to handle your social media, email marketing, and customer data collection and retention. Luckily, there are some free online marketing tools that can help you grow your business—and the best part is that many of them will help you with more than one of these tasks at once! Here are 5 free online marketing tools every small business should use (and how to get started with each one). Let’s jump right in!
1) Google Trends
With Google Trends, you can track how often people search for specific keywords or phrases (or keywords) over time and by geographic location. This information is invaluable to entrepreneurs looking to create marketing campaigns targeted at local audiences and/or customers who are actively searching for solutions to their problems online.
2) Canva
One of our favorite free online marketing tools, Canva is an easy-to-use design tool that helps you create infographics, social media graphics, invitations and a variety of other content to help promote your brand. Since it’s free (for now), Canva’s easy drag-and-drop interface takes a lot of guesswork out of designing in terms of sizing and formatting.
3)Grammarly
Grammarly is a must-have for anyone looking to improve their writing and it’s completely free. It checks your spelling, grammar, style, and even reads your content out loud to you in many languages. Grammarly highlights errors as you type, so you can easily see what mistakes you’re making as you write. Grammarly also has a built-in plagiarism checker so that no one can claim that any of your content is theirs.
4)MailChimp
A free email marketing service for small businesses, MailChimp can send out emails to an unlimited number of people. When you sign up for a free account, you start with 500 subscribers and 2,000 emails per month.
5)BufferApp
Buffer lets you schedule updates to all your social networks at once. It’s a simple way to make sure you’re posting consistently across all of your networks, and an awesome tool for keeping your audience engaged. For small businesses, it’s also a must-have way to monitor what people are saying about you—positive or negative.
