10 Free or Low-Cost PR Tools Brands Should Be Using Right Now

By:  The team at Your Marketing People

Today’s business owners, marketing experts, and PR professionals are expected to handle multiple responsibilities, from distributing content to analyzing campaigns, to creating marketing collateral. Nonetheless, taking care of all these tasks by hand would grind productivity to a halt. Also, there are times when you need a quick turn around to meet deadlines or leverage the latest trend.

The good news is that you don’t need to break your budget to manage the program load required by your marketing and PR campaigns. You should simply take a look at the following free and low-cost tools and start using the ones that best suit your business’ needs.

Canva

Canva is a free tool that allows you to create any kind of professional-looking graphics that you might need for marketing and PR. For example, you can use it to create infographics, images, and banners for social media posts and stories, email marketing campaigns, CTA buttons, flyers, posters, presentations, virtual backgrounds for online meetings, logos, and business cards. You can even use it to design annual reports for your company. There are thousands of different templates, clip art, and fonts to choose from and customize your project.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free web service that will help you find out what the specific search queries people make when they land on your website. It’s an amazing tool for knowing what keywords are leading people to find your company online, how your website is ranking for certain search terms (checking indexing status), and how many people are clicking on your webpage once they see it in the list of results. All this information is super useful for optimizing your website’s visibility.

Headliner

If you’re using video marketing, it’s highly recommended to have captions on each video that you post. This way, when people watch your content with the sound off, they know what is being said in the video. In order to do that without actually spending time to write the captions yourself or assign someone in your team to do it, you can use a free tool called Headliner. This app will caption the videos for you and share them on social networks. Headliner also has a paid,  low-cost plan, as well as a customized pricing plan available. 

Google Keyword Planner

With this free keyword research tool, you can search and find countless keywords and keyword ideas, as well as see how keywords perform. The Forecast section is great for having an estimation of the impressions and clicks you’ll receive for chosen keywords. In addition, you can easily uncover other essential metrics, such as the competition for every keyword. Afterward, you can use this research both for your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and Google Ads campaigns.

Ask Your Target Market (AYTM) and Survey Monkey

Both Ask Your Target Market (AYTM) and Survey Monkey have free and affordable plans businesses can use. These services will help you collect valuable data from your existing and potential customers. While Survey Money is nice for easy and quick surveys, AYTM is more suited for in-depth industry surveys. These tools provide a user-friendly survey creation experience so that you can almost effortlessly create relevant surveys for your target audience.

Unsplash, Pixabay and Pexels

Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels are perfect if you’re looking for high-quality photos and vectors that can be used without paying a royalty fee. You can edit and use the pictures you find on these platforms for your blog, social media posts, flyers, brochures, and other commercial purposes. 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free tool that not only helps you with keyword research, but also displays important domain-level metrics such as organic traffic value, number of backlinks, number of referring domains, top content web pages, and many others. You can use it to discover the keywords that your competitors rank for and see a traffic estimate that the website receives over time. Moreover, Ubersuggest tracks the number of keywords for which your website ranks (out of 100) on Google and shows you an analysis of the top pages on your website for a given period of time. 

Help a Reporter Out (HARO)

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is great for creating relationships with reporters and bloggers and positioning your company as an industry thought leader. HARO is a free service that connects you with reporters and bloggers who are looking for experts to quote on a wide range of topics. You can join several different email lists (such as High Tech or Business and Finance) in order to get a constant stream of queries. HARO is, therefore, a resource you can use for immediate PR for your business on influential media websites and blogs.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics allows you to look at the full journey that users are taking when they land on your website. With this service, you can find out which are your most popular webpages, how long are people spending on your website, where do they go next after reading one of your blog posts, what do they search for on your website, what’s the last page most users visit before leaving your website, and so on. Google Analytics is free and gives you precious insight that you can use to optimize your website in order to further drive people to those calls to action you want them to complete.  

Loom 

Loom is a web-based tool that allows you to capture anything on your desktop and send it as a video message. You can also record your camera, microphone, and desktop at the same time from any page on the web. It’s especially useful when you want to walk clients through your products and services, as well as the results your team has achieved for their brand or your portfolio. Loom is useful for customized video screen sharing for anything you want to zip off to clients, coworkers, and partners. The basic Loom app is free, but you can opt for an upgraded plan which is still pocket-friendly. 

By implementing these tools into your workflow, you can easily improve your marketing and PR without breaking the budget.

Byline: Submitted by Your Marketing People


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