20 Best Free Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

January 23, 2024

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In today’s digital age, marketing is one of the most important aspects of owning and running a successful business. In fact, without a consistent and thoughtful marketing strategy, there’s almost no way to increase your online brand recognition or grow your business. 

But marketing isn’t always easy. It can take a lot of time, effort, research, and access to the right tools. And when we say tools, we’re not necessarily talking about paid apps or state-of-the-art software with sizable annual fees. In fact, there are actually some incredibly useful free options available that might surprise you.

From social media management and influencer marketing to website tracking and content creation, here are twenty of the best free marketing tools available to help improve your marketing game without breaking the bank.

1. Talkwalker Alerts

Known widely as the #1 Consumer Intelligence Acceleration Program, Talkwalker is a “social listening” and analytics tool that helps businesses monitor their online reputation and track their competitors. Their free tool is an alert system that notifies you whenever someone mentions your brand online, which can be incredibly useful.

2. Feedly

While RSS feeds aren’t as popular as they once were, Feedly is a free software that allows users to consolidate and organize their favorite content from various sources into one easy-to-read and manageable platform. On the “Basic Plan,” you can follow and consolidate up to 100 different sources. 

3. Right Relevance

Right Relevance is a tool that allows you to follow specific content online that aligns with your business or interests. But the biggest benefit of the platform is that it enables you to find and follow influencers in your industry. If you can leverage influencer marketing and watch trends start and end in real-time, you can easily get an edge over your competition. 

4. KeywordTool.io

If you’ve ever spent time searching for relevant keywords for a blog post, article, or social media post, KeyworkTool.io should be one of your go-to free tools online. The website can generate over 750 long-tail keyword suggestions for every search term you put in it. 

5. Moz Open Site Explorer

One of the best ways to build traction online is to get backlinks to your website from other places. Moz Open Site Explorer is a free SEO tool that gives you a comprehensive backlinking analysis of whatever URL you input, which may be yours but could also be your competitors’. 

6. Similar Web

Speaking of keeping track of competitors, if you’re looking for a way to track your competition’s online marketing strategy in real-time, Similar Web is an excellent free tool for your arsenal. It allows you to monitor and analyze website traffic for any website you input, giving you valuable insight into your own business and your competitors. 

7. Google Trends

If you’ve ever been unsure which search terms you should use in your posts, blogs, or articles, Google Trends is a must-have free tool. It enables you to analyze popular search queries on Google, giving you easy-to-read graphs that show search volume over time.

8. Canva

Canva is an invaluable free tool that enables you to create stunning, visually-appealing graphics with the click of a finger. It’s the ideal free tool for any small business owner or solopreneur’s toolbox because it gives you the ability to create content, images, flyers, advertisements, and more with little-to-no graphic design experience required.

9. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a game-changing free tool that allows you to track and analyze traffic to your website. It not only monitors traffic volume but also shows you which pages people visited, how long they stayed, and where they came from. It’s a must-have free tool for any business owner with a website.

10. Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor is an alternative to the ever-popular Grammarly and offers a ton of valuable copy-editing features. The online app is free, allowing you to proofread and fix grammatical errors in every post, script, and blog at no extra cost before you show them to the world. 

11. SurveyMonkey

If you’ve ever taken an online survey, there’s a big chance that SurveyMonkey was responsible for it. It’s a free online survey tool that allows you to reach a large number of people and ask them important questions relevant to your business and industry. 

12. TikTok Hashtag Generator

Few things are as elusive as the TikTok algorithm, so it isn’t surprising that many experts and influencers are up in the air about which hashtags you should use on your TikTok posts. For that reason, the TikTok Hashtag Generator is a super valuable tool that gives you hashtag suggestions, plus the number of posts using those hashtags and the number of views you can expect from using them yourself.

13. Pexels

Like Unsplash, Pexels is an incredible free tool that allows you to find free-to-use images for social media posts, blogs, and more. That said, it’s important to note that you need to be careful when using them for commercial purposes. There are some horror stories about people using images on sites like Pexels and Unsplash, only to find out later that they were still under copyright. 

14. Twilio Segment

Segment is a customer data platform that allows you to collect, organize, clean, and utilize your customer data. With the free plan, you can send track up to 1,000 visitors per month from 2 different sources.

15. Wolfram|Alpha

Ever heard of Ask Jeeves (now known as Ask.com)? Well, Wolfram|Alpha is today’s modern, data-driven answer to all your questions. It’s essentially an “answer engine” that provides answers for factual queries by computing externally sourced data. 

16. Chat GPT

Chat GPT has legitimately taken the world by storm over the last few months, and for good reasons. The free trial feature for the program offers such a large number of credit that it might as well be considered unlimited. And the language processing tool is capable of so many things that are valuable to business owners and solopreneurs, including writing blogs and articles, creating outlines, teaching code, answering questions, and more.

Seriously, if you haven’t taken some time to try it out yet, you should. 

17. Hotjar

Hotjar is another website-based analytics free tool that every business owner should have. It offers visual insights into your website traffic with heat maps that track the most-viewed parts of your web pages.

18. LinkFolio

Even after decades, places like Instagram only allow you to post one external link on your profile at once. But what are you supposed to do if you have multiple points of contact you’d like to list? That’s where LinkFolio comes into play. As the #1 LinkTree alternative, LinkFolio allows you to consolidate and customize all your links into one easy-to-read place, accessible via one URL.

19. WeTransfer

As a business owner, sharing files is a must. Fortunately, WeTransfer allows you to send data, images, and information to anyone worldwide. The free option is limited to just 2GB per file, but that’s more than enough space for most small business owners and solopreneurs. 

20. Bitly

If you’ve ever struggled with copying and pasting super long URLs into your social media bios or posts, then you’ll love the power of Bitly. It’s a free online tool that condenses any URL into a small string of letters that take up little space and are easy to remember.

Optimize Your Business with These Free Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

The digital marketing landscape is incredibly vast and complex. It’s not enough to post on social media and pay for advertising opportunities when possible. To be successful, you have to fully commit to creating a consistent and reliable online presence, using a multitude of platforms and creating a wide array of content.

And while there are many low-cost marketing tools available that can help you accomplish that, not everyone has the budget to pay monthly or annual fees for a hundred different platforms. That’s why we created this list of twenty of the best free marketing tools available today. We hope they come in handy!