more

    100 Free Tools to Do Your Own Marketing. Part 1

    Any self-respecting marketing professional or small business owner running their own marketing are always on the lookout for new tools to help th...
    100 Free Tools to Do Your Own Marketing. Part 1

    Any self-respecting marketing professional or small business owner running their own marketing are always on the lookout for new tools to help them streamline their work. That’s why we’ve decided to create this guide to the most essential marketing tools for business that you can use for free!

    We’ve divided our blog post – doubling as a mini wiki – into two parts, so study our infographic below and refer to the detailed key below to learn more about the tools that piqued your interest. Pro tip: use page search (Ctrl + f) to find specific tools using keywords.

    100 Free Tools to Do Your Own Marketing. Part 1

    Today, we are taking on the left side of the beautiful infographic, produced by our staff designer Anna Voina. “The left side is titled Create. It represents the fun and experimental side of marketing materials development. Marketing doesn’t have to be data-based and clinical first, we can have some fun along the way,” she explains.

    Here are the units of our Create section:

    • Schedule posts
    • Find keywords
    • Get publications
    • Write better copy
    • Send better email
    • Use design tools and editors
    • Discover

    So let’s get started, and be sure to come back tomorrow for the second part of our guide with the detailed overview of the free tools for marketers that deal with the managerial side of the process!

    Schedule posts for social media

    1. Buffer. A better way to manage your social media, as boldly claimed the product’s landing page. Let’s see what this tool can do: schedule posts, analyze performance, manage Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ accounts.
    2. Later. A #1 marketing platform for Instagram, say its creators. It allows you to visually plan and schedule Instagram posts, as well as auto publish for Instagram business profiles. Helps organize your photos and create a prettier feed.
    3. TweetDeck. Quick show of hands – who remembers TweetDeck from before it was acquired by Twitter Inc.? The tool proved to be so popular that the very platform for which the client was originally developed for decided to invest in it. The product is basically your Twitter feed, but for multiple twitter accounts – on the same deck, duh. Pretty efficient.
    4. SocialOomph. Ever tried to delete all of your tweets? Quite a hassle to do this manually, SocialOoph can do that for you, as well as run up to five Twitter accounts and save and reuse drafts. Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn features are paid, as well as social media updates submission via email.
    5. Friends+Me. It allows to schedule your social media content and post it to Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumblr. It works on desktop, as a mobile app and there’s a browser extension. Integration with Zapier is in beta at the time of writing.
    6. Crowdfire. Crowdfire helps you discover and schedule content, as well as manage social accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can also get hashtag, article and image recommendations, as well as curate content from your own blogs, YouTube videos and Shopify/Etsy shops.
    7. Hootsuite. Probably one of the hottest scheduling tools around – with your free account you can manage 3 social profiles with option to schedule 30 messages at a time to post automatically throughout the day or week.
    8. ScoopIt. “Scoop” content and share it to socials along with your own original content. In the free account, you can create up to 50 scoops within your selected topic (one per ScoopIt account). Get a browser extension to make scooping links faster.

    Find keywords

    1. Displaypurposes. Type a hashtag or two in the search box to get relevant hashtags for your Instagram post. The tool filters out banned and spammy ones, and what’s really cool – it offers relevant hashtags in several languages for your international audiences.
    2. Google Keyword Planner. Search keywords to find out average monthly hits for the keyword and dozens of similar searches. The tool shows you how competitive a keyword is and what other relevant keywords you can use. You can search within customizable time slots.
    3. Answerthepublic. Enter a topic or a keyword you’d like content recommendations for, wait a few moments and voila – a neat, mandalaesque graph wheel with popular questions for the topic will appear on your screen.
    4. Keyword Tool. Search through keywords popular on Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, eBay and App Store. For Google, you can scan keywords for all searches, just image searches, just videos, or just the news. For Amazon, search within all or any individual department.
    5. Meta Tag Extractor. BuzzStream’s tag extractor will extract page title, description and keywords from any given URL. Enter multiple links to get a neat table and compare meta descriptions, tags and keywords.
    6. Keyword Eye. This tool provides detailed keywords for your content with PPC comparison score and search volume numbers. The service offers a handy auto suggest of topic keywords for Amazon, Google and YouTube. Download reports in .csv.
    7. SpyFu. Enter competitor’s web address and get an instant report on their reach, organic keywords, organic competitors and more. Click on organic keywords to get detailed report – stats on the top five are free, the rest is locked under paid plans.
    8. Ubersuggest. Find keyword ideas, get search volume, CPC and competition rates. Filter results by searching for target words or excluding unwanted terms. Search categories include web, image, shopping, YouTube, and news. Copy your results or export to .csv.
    9. Moz. Explore keywords, links and on-page metrics with Moz’ free SEO tools. Use 20 free keyword idea queries per month, 10 for links and install Moz SEO toolbar that gives you instant metrics while viewing any page, including search result pages.

    Get publications

    1. Expertise Finder. Wanna be featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg or The Economist? Want your quote to make it on CNN or the BBC? Expertise Finder claims the outlets are searching their engine, so join as industry expert as long as you have an academic title.
    2. GlobalExperts. This service allows you to nominate an expert or self-nominate and receive requests for comment or analysis from top media, including Reuters, CNN, the BBC, the Wall Street Journal, and more.
    3. Smedian. The tool helps you attract new writers to grow your publications as well as find publications to grow your audience. Chat, start a discussion, contribute to publications to get the word out about your company or brand.

    Write better copy

    1. Hemingway App. Highlights lengthy, complex sentences and common errors in your copy to help you remove verbiage and difficult to comprehend sentence structures. It highlights difficult to read bits, weakening adverbs, and passive voice.
    2. Coschedule Headline Analyzer. The analyzer evaluates overall structure, grammar, and readability of your headline, determines common and uncommon words, categorizes your headline by type (generic, list, how to, time) and performs length analysis.
    3. Grammarly. This tool checks spelling, grammar and punctuation in your text. It provides useful insights, like character count and readability score, as well as the recently en vogue “reading time” and even “speaking time”. Reading time for this post? 10 minutes 2 seconds.

    Send better email

    1. MailChimp. The tool allows you to create and publish email campaigns, landing pages, pop-up forms, as well as automate your marketing emails, for example, order notifications and product recommendations.
    2. SendGrid. This email management tool helps you build and send marketing campaigns, keep client libraries, perform A/B testing and track results. Other useful features include contact segmentation by interests and categories, as well as flexible template editor.
    3. Beefree. This fast email builder allows you to choose an email template and design your message for both desktop and mobile users. You can start creating your email from scratch or use professionally designed templates for various types of email.
    4. Neverbounce. The service verifies email addresses on your mailing list and along with a number of paid plans offers free list analysis and a thousand monthly API verifications. It identifies valid vs invalid email addresses, differentiates temporary emails and catchall boxes.
    5. Mail-tester. The tester provides you with an email to send your message to and returns analysis result for the “spamminess” of your message. Get a SpamAssassin score, your authentication status, improvement recommendations, broken link alerts and blacklist status.
    6. Streak. Streak’s free plan for personal use includes basic CRM features, email tools and 200 tracked emails per month. Once you install this browser extension, your Gmail inbox get a number of additional tools built directly into the interface of the page.
    7. Hubspot Email Signature Generator. This tool will help you create a neat email signature complete with your photo and social media icons. Populate the form with your contact information, upload your photo and choose one of the 8 available themes.
    8. Putsmail. The service allows testing of an HTML email before you send it to your recipients. Enter up to 10 recipient addresses, your subject line and your HTML. Optionally, include a plain text version of your email, as well as a version for Apple Watch.
    9. Contact Form WPForms. This WordPress plugin allows you to create a contact form for your WordPress website in minutes. The tool offers customizable templates to create simple contact forms, request a quote forms, forms for donations, billing/order, newsletter signups and more.
    10. Share Link Generator. The generator creates Facebook share links, Twitter “tweet this” links, Google Plus share links, LinkedIn share links, Pinterest “pin this” and email “mailto” links. The generated URLs will work even inside emails.
    11. FreshMail. Create email campaigns and autoresponders, get reports, manage subscribers. The service’s free trial account is valid for 30 days and allows you to upload up to 100,000 email addresses and send up to 1,000 emails during your trial period.

    Use design tools and editors

    1. VistaCreate. This online graphic editor offers thousands of professionally designed templates for social media posts, illustrating your webpages or a blog, as well as advertisements or print marketing materials. Notably, the tool has a collection of stunning animated templates.
    2. Wix. Create a website using Wix templates. The service offers ready website designs for business, online stores, photography, video, music, design, restaurants, tourism, events, portfolio, blogs, forums, and much more. You can even use templates for landing pages.
    3. Freelogoservices. Generate a logo with this free logo maker – enter your text, select an industry and browse generated designs. Pick the logo you like, customize the image by adjusting fonts, colors and location of the items within the design.
    4. Animoto. Use this video editing tool to design your video content into stylish video clips. Use ready-made storyboards, add music, filters and text to your raw video footage. The service allows adding logos or watermarks to the video, as well as subtitles.
    5. Venngage. Present your data and tell stories with Venngage infographics templates. Some of the infographics the tool can help you create include informational, statistical, process, geographic, timeline, comparison, list, and tutorial.
    6. Google Fonts. The service helps you choose a font for your project or design in minutes – choose between 888 font families, search by font thickness, slant and width. Filter fonts by categories: Serif, Sans Serif, Display, Handwriting, and Monospace.
    7. WhatFont. This browser extension helps identify fonts on the web pages you visit, their size, color, line height, weight, style, and family. Simply hover over the font you are interested in on the page and get the result.
    8. Tiny Png. Drop your .png or .jpg files onto the page to compress your files. You can optimize up to 20 images, max 5 MB each. The tool uses “quantization” technique that aims to compress files that look great in side-by-side comparison.
    9. Iconfinder. Find icons for your designs. Select between colored and monochrome icons in 60 categories and 12 styles, including glyph, outline, flat, photorealistic, 3D, hand drawn, cartoon, pixel, smooth, badge and more.
    10. DeGraeve. Get color palettes that match your image – insert a URL of your picture and get a coordinated color palette for your website, marketing materials or social media posts. The service returns two sets of color palettes for each image you enter.
    11. Hubspot CTA template pack. Download the pack of 50 customizable call-to-action templates, inspiring examples and a free beginner’s guide to create CTAs for your website, landing pages, emails, and more.
    12. PlaceIt. Use the service to make mockups for how your image will look like on apparel and in print, as well as digital devices. Select a device, upload your image or insert a link and see a realistic screen mockup.

    Discover

    1. FlexClip is easy to use and has thousands of video templates to help with slides and overlays to make video creation a breeze. The video and audio library is the highlight of this platform. And it offers a good amount of animated elements, overlay effects, text styles and background libraries. Plus, there is also a GIF maker, a screen recorder, a video converter, a slideshow maker, and a video compressor.
    2. Feedly. Create feeds of relevant content, organize your favorite publications, blogs, YouTube channels, and RSS feeds. Set keyword alerts, share articles you like on social media and collaborate with teammates.
    3. Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator. Enter up to five different nouns and get cool blog topic ideas in a neat slideshow.
    4. Google Scholar. Use Google’s search engine that indexes scholarly literature to find relevant research on any marketing topic. The service focuses on the most peer-reviewed online academic journals, books, and papers.
    5. Portent. Portent’s title maker is a fun tool to get ideas for an article or blog post title. Enter keywords and get a title, which you, admittedly, might have to edit to fix grammar mistakes. We are completely floored by the one generated for this guide: 8 Unexpected Ways Free Marketing Tools Can Give You Better Hair!
    6. Content Row. Use the service’s link bait generator to come up with irresistible clickbait titles for your content. Enter your keywords and generate 25 impossibly baity titles, like 8 Deadly Uses for Free Tools to Do Your Own Marketing.
    7. Latest is. The tool provides an automatic list of 10 most popular links on Twitter compiled in real-time. The service has buttons to help you instantly share content on your Facebook and Twitter pages.
    8. Alltop. This news aggregator has a simple interface that allows you to check out the day’s headlines at a glance. Hover over a headline to get a snippet of the article’s content, add RSS feeds from your favorite websites.
    9. Google Trends. Explore searches across the globe – search for specific keywords, check out latest stories and insights, as well as all the trending searches in any region. The tool offers interesting aggregated data in its Year in Search section with the archive dating back to 2001.

    What’s next

    Now that we’ve taken a look at all the free online marketing tools to help your create content, it’s time to discover tools to manage your time, work and content even more efficiently. Come back for seconds this Wednesday, September 12, for part 2 of our blog where we’ll cover the remaining 45 tools to help you manage your marketing!

    VistaCreate Team

    Latest news

    Don’t miss out on our top articles

    Subscribe to the VistaCreate blog newsletter and get our top articles in your inbox each month. No spam ;)

    Guest blogging with VistaCreate

    Share your story or article idea with us and thousands of VistaCreate blog readers. Pitch your ideas by filling out a short form.
    Create a design now