Save your budget: FREE Martech tools everyone can benefit from

Two weeks ago I shared an article called How to Create a marketing automation programme on a £500 budget. It can be done! It got me thinking – no matter if you work in a start-up, scale-up or big fish, we can all benefit from free tools.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many scenarios where we need advanced software. Investments in our CRM and Marketing Automation tools are some of the most critical to get right. But no matter whether the marketing budget is £5K, £50K or £5M; spend wisely and you can achieve more. 

Here are some of my favourite budget saving tools:

Create professional quality collateral with no specialist software

Canva enables you to create everything from social media banners, to PDFs to presentations in many different styles. You can drop in images (Pexels and Unsplash are brilliant for this although be aware Pexels has a mix of free and licenced photos). Add icons and your brand colour palette and share draft content with team members. Takes a little getting used to but once you’re in its amazing!

Build your website or landing page (DIY)

Wordpress templates are amazing. In particular I found Astra Starter Sites offer a range of pre-built websites. When used with the drag and drop functionality of Elementor you can configure and personalise your website very easily. There’s even a great step by step tutorial by Tyler Moore called How to make a Wordpress Website – 2019 – For Beginners.

Optimize your website

The Yoast SEO plugin is amazing, it has a very neat traffic light system for everything you write and publish. The language will most likely be new to you if you are not a website techie but the tool gives prompts and guides you along the way.  It indicates where you can improve both your readability and your SEO scoring.

Audit your website

nibbler will give you a digital health check and tell you where your website is and isn’t working for you. For example, it breaks down more than 18 features giving scores for things like marketing, experience, usability, mobile optimisation and links. Either make the edits yourself or integrate changes into your wider Marketing Plan or with your agency.

Track the performance of your website

Your domain and web-hosting provider will offer basic analysis of traffic to your website. However, for proper web analytics you need Google Analytics. Installing the plugin Google Analytics by MonsterInsights will embed the code on your website. Another useful tool to optimise your website performance is Hotjar which creates a heatmap of user behaviour, where they are clicking and exiting your website. While not free, it does offer a free trial period.

Remember – to remain compliant with EU Data Protection legislation, you must have a privacy and cookie policy on your website to inform visitors that you’re running web analytics.

Understand what end-users are searching for

Answer the Public can give you an idea of the most asked questions on the web against a search word or phrase. It provides a visual map of the kinds of questions split into a what/how/why format. Use this insight carefully to craft your keywords and make sure your website and any digital content is optimised for them.

Social media management   

Crowdfire lets you integrate up to 5 accounts from different platforms (although it doesn’t give analytics with the free version.) You can set up Twitter alerts against specific words or phrases using Warble. You can also geo-locate these to a specific radius based on lat/long co-ordinates which is very handy for those with a retail presence or if you are looking to attract new business in a specific region.

Find concentrated, detailed, academic insight

Google Scholar removes all the adverts and noise and just provides you with direct access to academic/scholarly reports and articles which are otherwise hard to find. Depending on your industry, very useful for researching thought leadership topics, historic case studies and even patents.

Checking your copy (for non-copywriters)

If you want a quick and easy tool which highlights adverbs, passive voice, sentence structure or complex phrases then Hemmingway is the answer. Simply copy and paste the text you want to review and you can improve it in seconds.

I hope you found these ideas useful, if you have other suggestions please share in the comments!

You might also want to check out our Marketing Strategy: A Practical Guide if you want either a recap or some suggestions on structuring your Marketing Plan. www.see-blue.co.uk