We reckon that you’re a small business that is just starting out and getting things done at a blistering pace. Maybe there’s a thorn in your path to market your services or products. You don’t just need to pitch your product, but manage to brush aside the competition. You have all those big tasks in hand, but your budget for marketing is stretched thin like an elastic band. Instead of treading that wafer-thin ice, you can opt to get your job done for absolutely free. How, you ask us?! Let us give you a glimpse of eight free and dependable marketing tools for SMBs.
Content marketing tools
Content marketing is an integral part of marketing your small business. It’s an art of speaking to the majority by creating and marketing content. Well, remember, you have fierce competition and you’ve got to brush them off your shoulders.
With rivals hot on your heels, you could grab a top-spot by marketing your content smartly. If you’re still struck by the low budget, let us offer you these free software content marketing tools that are dependable.
YouTube
Everyone is familiar with this video-sharing website owned by Google. Just like some other handy products of Google, YouTube is absolutely free to use. Video content marketing is really the trend these days, so it’s a godsend for new age SMBs.
If you still don’t have a video marketing campaign, we suggest that you get down to creating one. No matter what the size of your business is, creating videos and marketing them is the way to connect to millions of potential customers.
Let us also tell you that YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. (We all know who’s No. 1). So … make the full use of it.
WordPress
With the credit of giving rise to more than 10 million websites in the world, WordPress is the largest ever content management system (CMS). The process of building a website from scratches starts with just a primitive process of drag-and-drop.
It has a wide array of plug-ins that can be used for adding features to your web page. Being one of the most powerful free tools available for content marketing, this is your go-to tool for marketing your content and creating a website, if you don’t happen to have one.
Canva
No one is unknown to the purview of online advertisement in today’s marketing strategy. All the major websites in the world are a great way to promote your content online. Are you looking to create a new advertisement campaign for your SMB?Look no further.
Canva is a great tool to help you create graphics that you can utilize for online ad campaigns, websites, blogs, and social media pages. You can even build custom charts with this easy, feature-rich and free-to-use web tool.
Social media marketing tools
Creating a social media profile is just the first step. You need to maintain a social media presence and continue to interact with your customers regularly. We understand that it’s a mammoth task for SMBs to create multiple social media profiles and keep track of the activities and control the posts.
Buffer
Buffer is a free-to-use social-media-management tool that can help you control the posts and manage up to three different social media profiles. You can schedule as many as 10 posts in one-go on a single profile. SMBs that don’t ride completely on social media marketing and can make-do with 10 posts per profile can opt for this light and free tool.
HootSuite
A household name in the field of social media marketing, there is no other product that can provide you the level of service that this widely known tool can. Similar to Buffer, this social-media-management tool can schedule 30 posts and manage a number of social media profiles. The free version of HootSuite, on the other hand, helps in tracking the influencers and the competitors, unlike buffer.
Google Alerts
Add this to the long list of free tools provided by Google. As the name suggests, it can be used to set an alarm on different mentions and keywords. The application sends you an email every time the keyword or name is mentioned. Being a budding SMB that you are, you should be ready to grab on to any such brand or company mention that you get. This is usually the first step in collaborations and forming customer-SMB relationships becomes a notch easier.
Email marketing tools
When talking about outreach, whether you’re dealing with a potential client or promoting your product, emails are important. So to help you in your email-marketing process, these tools can come in handy.
MailChimp
MailChimp is not a stranger for many, as it has laid the groundwork for most of the great SMBs in the world. This tool allows you to custom design your emails the way you want them to appear. Trust us, the aesthetically pleasing emails are the best feature of this tool. MailChimp is absolutely free if you’re an SMB with fewer than 2,000 subscribers and you send out fewer than 12,000 emails in a month. Even if you decide to get a paid license, it is almost as cheap as free.
MailJet
It works similarly to MailChimp, and can help you design and customize your emails. There is no upper limit to the number of subscribers or the mails that you send in a month. It’s absolutely free! However, there is one minor drawback. The mails drafted using MailJet may not be as aesthetically pleasing as the ones designed by MailChimp. However, if you’re an SMB that focuses on the quantity more than the quality, this is the software for you.
Which marketing tools should I use?
Yes! The usual question that we all have in our mind. If you ask us to recommend one software, we’d be spoiled for choice. All the software that we’ve brought to you are essential for your marketing process. We would suggest you use all these software as they are free of cost. There are a gazillion things that you can do by combining all of them for your SMB. Remember, this is the age of smart marketing, and all these tools can help you design and maintain a fabulous marketing campaign.
Images: Pixabay
