Let’s face it: we all love free stuff. If you’re starting a new business and looking to make the most every resource available to help you to scale quickly, a cost-efficient helping hand is even more valuable. Where you’re a startup that’s bootstrapping, scraping together funding from a friends-and-family round, or if you’ve just received a €14M funding round, you’ll need to be maximizing ROI whenever possible. That means, in the growth hacking race, free digital marketing tools for startups are becoming pivotal to success. They enable you to automate repetitive tasks to save time, leverage data analytics to optimize campaigns and get organized when managing an expanding team.
We wanted to gather the insider scoop on the best digital marketing tools out there, so we’ve asked entrepreneurs and marketing experts that specialize in startup marketing to share their top recommendations with you. Without further ado, here are the results:
Best Free Digital Marketing Tools For Startups
Free tools are defined as digital tools that are available either as a free version or as a free trial with a low price (<100€/month) afterwards.
Analytics
Data is key to making informed, customer-driven decisions when is comes to your startup, which can be challenging if you’re a relatively fresh company lacking in customer data and insights. All the more reason to employ an analytics tool to help you gain valuable real-time information about your SEO performance, customer engagement, content and web traffic. Let’s see which tools have made the cut.
SEMrush
SEMrush is a competitive intelligence suite for online marketing.
Price: free trial, then 99$/month
Ekaterina Novoseltseva, Apiumhub
“You have all in one! Excellent tool for content planning, distribution and traction. Using this tool, you can: find relevant keywords, analyze your website in terms of SEO; follow, nofollow links, number of backlinks, referring domains, domain scores, trust scores, etc. You can also track the performance of your social media accounts in terms of engagement: number of likes, shares, comments, mentions, mentioners. etc.”
Pablo Mascaro, OneCoWork
“It helps you gather really important/relevant data on how your company is doing in Search Engines (paid & organic) but also how you benchmark against your main competitors. It helps you analyse how users search to find your products/services, where your competitors get backlinks from, etc. I believe it’s probably one of the most comprehensive tools for analysing Search Engine Results.”
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google.
Price: free
Alvaro Muhlethaler, DrivinApp
“If I had to choose just one, my choice would be Google Analytics. It gives you all kinds of information about your client or potential client; from which pages are the most visited, how long have they been there and even what type of device they are using. Based on this information we are not only able to make decisions about how we’re going to change our product to fit our clients’ needs, but also how to communicate with them and how to customize our marketing campaign.“
intelliAd
intelliAd is a Performance Marketing Suite.
Price: no information provided on the website, no free version available
David Pérez, Mondo
“It gives us the possibility to analyze the conversion chains depending on their length, development and performance in a deep way, to be able to draw conclusions about the performance of the different channels within each click path to detect strengths and weaknesses and be able to use them later in the reallocation of the investment among channels and the optimization of each channel.
With a single platform, Intelliad gives you full control and visibility over digital marketing activities. A tool that bases its operation on the management and interpretation of data, with a remarkable after-sales service and customer service.”
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a toolset for SEO & marketing running on Big Data.
Price: 7-day trial for 7$, then 99$/month
Kristian Gosvig, Zido.dk
“Ahref is originally an SEO tool. But it can be used for all sorts of analysis in terms of competition, getting new content ideas, and generally getting a quick idea of what a company is doing (and how they are doing online)”
Automation
Some of the most useful free digital marketing tools for startups are those that help you save valuable time and resources. That’s where automation tools come into play. They can help you streamline and speed processes such as lead generation, customer service, social media communications and so much more. Let’s take a look at the contenders!
Dux-Soup
Dux-Soup is a lead generation tool for LinkedIn.
Price: free version
Tim Cakir, Restb.ai & timcakir.com
“Dux-soup enabled me to reach to thousands and thousands of new contacts, thanks to automating it every morning with my chosen segment. If you can search for a contact on LinkedIn, that means you can also reach out to them, all automated with minimum effort. Also, my b2b lead generation has been outstanding thanks to this incredible tool with amazing customer support.”
Drift
Drift is a leading conversational marketing platform.
Price: free version
Lucas Wickerath, Shore
“Actually I wanted to pick “google analytics” but I think a lot of other marketers already mentioned that. I’m a fan of drift because I see huge potential in (automated) dialog with our prospects and customers. People are used to (written) dialog. Though a bot is maybe not smarter than a real person, it can help to qualify conversations and let our real team focus on the dialogs that really matter. More than that, as a SaaS inbound marketer, I like how drift is selling themselves and how they are positioned.”
Later
Later is an Instagram scheduler and social media platform.
Price: free version
Paula Haunit, Sheer Apparel
“As a fashion brand – we are a multi-brand ecommerce for stylish, sustainable fashion – having attractive, coherent and regular Instagram content is key. Later allows us to design not just individual posts but our overall profile and schedule far in advance. That means we use the time spent on this important but quite manual task as effectively as possible. As a result, we’ve increased our traffic, time spent on site and conversion from this channel.”
Postcron
Postcron is a tool for scheduling posts on social media accounts.
Price: free trial, then 8$/month
Saam Ali, Pharmacy Mentor
“A very efficient and streamlined social media scheduling tool is hard to come by (I don’t know why!!) but Postcron, in my opinion, seems to top them. I’ve used plenty of others in the past and for the price, it’s pretty good. It’s still not 100% perfect to use, however, its simplicity is what attracted me and its synchronisation with mobile for Instagram.
Postcron saves me multiple hours every week when working on the marketing strategies for my clients. Using just one dashboard, I usually schedule the whole week’s worth of posts across dozens of profiles. Without this tool, my life would be considerably more stressful. Highly recommended for startups but if you have another scheduling tool that you recommend, please connect with me and let me know!”
Ploxia
Ploxia is an Instagram bot that helps you boost your Instagram followers.
Price: free trial, then 10$/month
Patrick Wind, Patrick Wind
“Ploxia helps you grow your Instagram followers and fans with real people via a bot. For just 10$ per month, you can get around 500-1000 new monthly instagrams followers. For example, for my own business, it allowed me to scale my business on Instagram from 700 to 6000 fans almost exclusively with the help of the Ploxia bot. The way it works is that the bot automatically follows and unfollows people, shares likes and comments on posts (I don’t recommend this last option since it can lead to unpleasant situations).”
Marketing
In particular if you’re starting from scratch, generating leads and getting the word out about your startup can be challenging, time-consuming and expensive. These highly recommended tools allow you to grow your audience, improve your sales funnel and streamline communications in order to cut your marketing team some slack!
HubSpot
Hubspot is a comprehensive inbound marketing and sales software.
Price: free version
Ben Comstock, OfficeAccord
“It, albeit creepily, allows me to see when the prospects I send emails to open the email, how many times, and from where. If someone has viewed my email more than 4 times, that is a pretty good sign they are interested in our tool and is worth calling.“
Florencia Echevarria, Lateral View
“Hubspot is a sales tool that allows you to create templates of emails, know who’s opened and click on the links you’ve attached them to see the success rate of your text. It has A/B testing and it helps you follow deals and improve your sales funnel overall.”
Unbounce
Unbounce is landing page builder for reducing turnaround time & converting more traffic.
Price: free trial, then 79$/month
Jordi Capdevila, ForceManager
“At the end of the day, for any given startup, demand generation is key and the success of it falls down to Landing Page Conversion Rate. That’s why Unbounce provides a simple yet powerful tool to build, launch, measure and iterate landing pages to get the most out of your paid and non-paid campaigns.”
Revue
Revue is an editorial newsletter tool for writers and publishers.
Price: free version
Scott Mackin, Bourbon Creative & Barcinno
“For a high-value quick win in digital marketing, I’ve been thrilled with Revue’s newsletter tool to drive audience growth through curated content. It’s a clean, turnkey solution that makes it super easy to share value, build a community and attract new leads.”
El Toro
El Toro is an IP Targeting tool that adds location-specific accuracy of direct mail to digital ads.
Price: no information provided on the website, no free version available
Chris Collins, Gelimas Chilliprinting Inc
“It provides a new cookie-free technology to target your main audience with your offer and thus opens a new, wide field on doing efficient marketing, which is especially for startups very interesting due to a limited budget.”
Management
Running a startup usually means you’re wearing many different hats. Sometimes it can feel that there are just too many tasks, projects to manage and processes to oversee. That’s why some of the very best free digital marketing tools for startups are those that help you get organized, and manage your team in a more streamlined way. Read on to de-clutter your company….
Trello
Trello is a web-based project management application.
Price: free version
Pablo Samaranch, ApetEat
“Trello is the platform through which we manage anything from the most complex projects, to internal communications, to relationships with our partners. The capacity to create teams, assign owners, set deadlines, upload files and communicate with relevant parties are just a few of the features that make this tool a fundamental part of our day-to-day business at ApetEat.”
Asana
Asana is a web and mobile application for managing and tracking work.
Price: free version
Chiara Tenuzzo, Aria Journeys
“Start-upers are extremely busy people, who try to manage their tasks and check coworkers’ progress in the most effective way within a tight timeline. While I was building Aria Journeys, Asana helped me to bring clarity in my cluttered desk, have a neat view of my coworkers’ week plan, track improvements and have more control over the project overall. Ah, and did I mention it is free for teams up to 15 people?”
Conclusion
When it comes to free digital marketing tools for startups, there are so many out there that it can be difficult to tell what will actually work for your business. Thankfully, we’ve got the inside scoop from 17 successful entrepreneurs and marketers on 2018’s must-have marketing tools. As automation continues to shape the future of business, data-driven insights become invaluable and streamlining internal processes becomes key to growth, these solutions could give you the business edge you’ve been looking for. Thanks to our industry insiders for sharing, and enjoy!
