Digital marketing is a rapidly expanding industry with thousands of mar-tech tools on the market. With thousands of options, discovering useful tools and testing them can be both time-consuming and expensive. We’ve compiled a list of 4 of our favorite easy-to-use free digital marketing tools that we’ve found very helpful in elevating SMBs’ digital marketing efforts.
SCREAMING FROG
Screaming Frog is digital marketing software that crawls your website and helps you identify issues affecting your search engine ranking and user experience. This software has a free version that crawls up to 500 URLs on your site. It’s an excellent resource to use for a first-time assessment of your website.
The software is extremely useful in diagnosing any SEO issues that are negatively affecting your search engine ranking. Although Screaming Frog has many useful tools, here are three of the most valuable tools we at Sprint Digital use regularly:
- The software identifies broken links within your website. This feature is essential as broken links can deteriorate your search engine ranking, negatively affect your user’s experience, and discredit your business.
- It identifies missing meta titles. These titles allow the user to know what type of content is on a webpage before clicking through to the site. Missing meta titles will also negatively affect your search engine ranking and click-through rates.
- It identifies duplicated content within your website. This duplicated content confuses the search engine and can lead to it giving another website a higher ranking. Copied content will negatively affect your website’s search engine ranking.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
For any business with a website, Google Analytics is a must-have. Google Analytics is a free tool that collects data for your website and provides you with valuable digital marketing insights into your business and customers.
Understanding your target customer is a critical element of marketing. With Google Analytics, you can gain a better understanding of your customer’s demographics, locations, and interests.
This is invaluable information that can help you build accurate customer personas. With this data, you can then go on to create a digital marketing strategy that is more tailored to your customer’s needs.
Google Analytics also lets you track how and when your customers engage with your website. Building an understanding of your customer’s behaviour allows you to pinpoint which of your digital marketing channels has led to customer acquisition.
By identifying which channels generate traffic to your website, you can design a more strategic digital marketing strategy that will generate a higher ROI.
Google Analytics also tracks what pages your customers are viewing most. By monitoring this, you can identify what type of content your customers are most interested in. This will help you invest your digital marketing budget and time into content that is more likely to engage your audience.
CANVA
Now that you’ve fixed issues on your website and identified your target market, it’s time to create content to attract your target customers. Using the customer persona, you’ve developed and the content that best engages your audience, you can use Canva to develop social media photos and images to attract these users to your website.
Canva is a design tool with an excellent free version and many useful features. Its main benefit is a user-friendly interface that allows anyone to create, download and post engaging content.
One of Canva’s best features is its sized templates tailored for social media posts. These templates ensure your content is optimized for Stories, Reels and on-page posts across all popular social media networks.
If you don’t have the time or skill to create your own design from scratch, Canva’s predesigned templates are sure to come in handy. These templates can quickly and easily be altered to represent your brand. The easy-to-use interface allows you to import your own logos, photos, fonts and colours and add a message.
MAILCHIMP
Mailchimp is a free digital marketing tool that is useful for businesses with small email marketing lists. The Free plan allows you to have 500 contacts and up to 2,500 emails per month. The generous free plan is a great starting point for businesses who want to begin their email marketing journey.
- Mailchimp makes it easy for you to build email marketing designs. It has a variety of free templates that have a sleek and professional design and are easy to customize to your brand.
- Mailchimp reports on the performance of emails you’ve sent out. These reports include valuable data such as open rates, links clicked, unsubscribe rates and ROI from emails sent out. Mailchimp also evaluates the design and elements within your email to help improve the reader’s experience. These valuable reporting tools enable you to improve your email marketing content and track your results.
Digital marketing can be overwhelming. Be sure to check out these 4 Sprint Digital-approved free tools before investing in expensive digital marketing tools. Getting to grip with your digital marketing strategy can be challenging.
