By Derek Miller
Source: Entrepreneur
If you’re an entrepreneur, bootstrapping a business, then you understand the importance of every dollar.
While executing your core competency is a crucial factor to your business’ success, another important step is effectively marketing your business. Fortunately, there are hundreds of free digital marketing tools that can greatly impact your business. Below are a few of the best, free online marketing tools for entrepreneurs.
1. Use Due to track time spent on marketing projects for budgeting, invoicing, and payments.
Due is a free tool for marketers that offers a time-tracking app to assess how much time is spent on each marketing project. This helps your organization budget time appropriately and increase productivity. Along with the time tracking tool’s capability to help you calculate billing time, it also offers an invoicing and payments platform, which is an ideal way for freelance marketing talent to bill clients for their work.
2. Use Buffer for social media management.
Buffer is a social media management tool that will help you streamline your social posting efforts. We already know how powerful social media is for your marketing initiatives, but leveraging a tool like Buffer will help you increase your followers; engage your audience; and build your brand.
The benefit of Buffer is its ability to let you connect multiple accounts to one dashboard; schedule posts; create drip campaigns; and analyze the success of your posts. Buffer’s free plan is perfect for new businesses looking to grow their social presence, but to unleash the full power of the software, you might want to consider one of their upgraded plans.
3. Or use Hootsuite for social media management.
I’d be remiss to put Buffer on this list and not include Hootsuite. While Buffer is a great tool for scheduling posts, Hootsuite really taps into the central social management platform.
Its free plan allows you to sync three social media profiles, which is a great place to start for most entrepreneurs. The benefit of Hootsuite is its ability to let you quickly respond and post across all your social profiles in one easy-to-use dashboard.
4. Build a logo with Spaces’ free logo maker.
Branding is one of the most critical steps when marketing your business, and the logo is arguably the most important part of your branding. Fortunately, with tools like Spaces’ free logo maker, you no longer have to waste resources on hiring a designer to interpret your vision of the perfect logo.
Using its library, filled with hundreds of icons, frames and font classes, you can create a stunning logo that expresses your brand identity without any design training and without spending any money.
5. Use Canva for easy designing.
Visual content is becoming an increasingly popular form of marketing collateral. From custom illustrations and infographics to fully-designed sales proposals, visual content is a fantastic way for new businesses to gain credibility and build a professional appearance.
There are several free graphic design tools on the market, but one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use is Canva. Its free library of fonts, illustrations, templates and images give you a pool of graphics that you can easily drag-and-drop. From flyers and brochures to social media images and infographics, you can create it all for free in Canva.
6. Use Evernote for organization.
When it comes to marketing your business, organization is critical. Ideas may come to you at any hour of the day. If you’re not able to organize and prioritize your notes, you may not be able to capitalize on opportunities.
Evernote will help you capture ideas, inspiration and trends, all while storing it in one easily accessible location. You can access it on your phone, laptop or tablet, making it the perfect tool for finding and storing content ideas, market research, brainstorming and competitive analyses.
7. Use SurveyMonkey to secure customer feedback.
SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular free online survey tools. Surveys are a good way to collect consumer information, engage customers, uncover trends and secure tangible insights on your business. SurveyMonkey’s software is incredibly simple. In just a few minutes, you can design, create and publish your own business survey. Additionally, you’ll be able to analyze the results in the backend.
8. Use Mailchimp for email marketing.
Email marketing is imperative to the success of most businesses. While building a brand on platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are important, you’re limited to the constraints of those channels. This makes it particularly difficult to move consumers through a funnel and provides you with relatively little control.
However, email provides a more intimate interaction between brand and consumer by offering you the tools you need to control effectively nurture leads. Mailchimp is an excellent free email marketing tool and one of the easiest for newbies to learn.