As fellow entrepreneurs, we understand that when you’re growing your small business, it’s difficult to get everything done when there’s so much to do. Luckily, there are a number of free online tools that can help you manage and automate different parts of your business.

In this blog, we’re laying out four free online tools that will make digital marketing a heck of a lot easier for you. With these tools, you’ll be able to easily handle marketing tasks, allowing you to focus on and grow other parts of your small business.

Publer

If you’re finding it hard to keep your business’ social media active, Publer will help you. Publer allows you to schedule your posts in advance for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google My Business. Their free plan allows 1 user to make up to 50 scheduled posts for 5 social channels of your choosing. 

This can be helpful as a small business owner when you’re wearing a lot of hats and don’t have time to do every thing every single day. Choose one day to schedule your social media posts for the week and you’re set and done. 

In addition to publishing and scheduling, Publer’s free plan also includes a bunch of other great features like a free stock image gallery, built-in photo editor, link in bio landing page, and so much more!

We have tried many similar tools like Buffer, Sprout Social, agora pulse, in the past but have found that Publer’s free plan (and paid plans) are the best bang for your buck!

Canva

When you need graphic design but don’t have a graphic designer on your team, Canva is the next best thing! Their free plan offers thousands of templates, hundreds of design types, photos, graphics, video, and 5GB of cloud storage. It also allows you to create teams and work on designs together in real time. 

Canva’s interface is user friendly and super easy to use! When you first start using the tool, it will guide you through their customization options. You can change up the colors, fonts, dimensions, whatever you want! You can have a great eye-catching design in a matter of minutes. 

Why is it important to have eye-catching designs on your website and social media? Well, you only have one time to make a great first impression on a new customer coming across your small business. Putting effort into how your brand looks, online and offline, shows prospective customers that you know what you’re doing and you care about how others perceive you. 

We use Canva for all of our social media graphics, even though we know how to use other graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. For the day to day stuff, Canva gives us everything we need.

Mailchimp

What better way to engage your current customers than appearing directly in their inbox? That’s where Mailchimp comes in! Their free plan includes basic templates, an email builder, a customer management system, email automation, 2000 contacts, 10000 sends per month, sign up forms, landing pages, postcards, and much more. 

Getting started with email marketing is easy. Think about who your audience is, what kind of content you want to send out, and how frequently you want to send your emails. If you want to send emails to previous customers, it’d be a good idea to send coupons or special offers to them one a week to entice them to do business with you again. Make sure your emails are concise, eye-catching, and fit your audience. 

There are a lot of email marketing providers out there like Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, sendinblue, etc. but Mailchimp is one of the few that offers a free plan with as many features as it does. We even use it to send our newsletters every month!

Google Analytics

Google has so many free tools that you can use but one a lot of small business owners are intimidated by, even though it’s one of the most useful tools out there, is Google Analytics. You don’t even need to be a marketing data analyst to use this extensive tool. 

First off, this tool is completely free. It allows you to see what users are doing to find your website and what they’re doing once they’re there. Second, it’s easy to set up an account and add the code needed to start tracking website traffic. Lastly, Google has many resources to help you learn the basics to advanced uses of the tool. 

It’s important to know which pages are getting the most traffic and where the traffic is coming from. With this information, you’re able to optimize your website to how people are using it. If you see that most of your traffic is coming from Facebook, you can cater your website to that audience. If there are pages on your website that aren’t getting any traffic, you can make the decision to update or remove that page. The data Google Analytics provides gives you the power to really get to know your customers and get a better understanding of your small business!

These aren’t doing it for you?

It’s always important to take advantage of all the resources you have at your disposal. These free tools are only four out of the hundreds out there on the internet. It’s worth putting some time upfront to research what tools would work for your business in order to save even more time in the long run. 

Not sure if these tools are right for you and your small business? We’d love to recommend ones that fit your business! Contact us today or schedule a free marketing consultation!