By: Ben Walker of Transcription Outsourcing.
With thousands of marketing tools out there, how do you choose? Some tools are incredibly effective and cost a fortune. Some are free and don’t work or lack essential features.
When choosing the right ones, there are many factors to consider: reputation, features, function, and price. You can spend hours researching, trying to find the tool that fits all your needs.
Lucky for you, that’s not necessary. We recently created a list of the best marketing tools that are budget-friendly or free. Here are ten more tools to add to your list.
1. Hootsuite
Best all-in-one social media management tool.
HootSuite is an all-in-one social media management system tool that helps keep track and manage social network channels. You can monitor what people are saying about your brand and respond appropriately and instantly. Hootsuite also offers a calendar, automated publishing, and great analytics. Integrations include YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.
Plans: Professional – $19/month, Team – $99/month, Enterprise – contact for price.
Free Trial: 30-day free trial
2. Hunter
Best for scouting emails unavailable to the public.
Have you searched an entire site and failed to find the email you were looking for? Many websites hide emails from users for privacy reasons. However, a quick search on Hunter presents you with the email addresses of basically everyone in a company. Type the company name in the search bar, and you’ll see the staff’s email address and the job role.
Plans: Hunter offers a free plan with 50 searches per month. All you need to do is make an account. If you need more searches, plans start at $49/month for 1,000 searches and up to $399 per month for $50,000 searches.
3. Gmass
Best for sending mass personalized emails.
Gmass is an essential tool for building and sending mass email campaigns. It’s a tool by Google so you can use it with Gmail and Google Inbox. Aside from building and sending emails, Gmass helps with email lists. You can organize your campaign lists by deleting emails and adding labels. Gmass also has the option to automate follow-up emails. You can use Google Sheets to capture the names of people on the list so the receiver thinks it’s personalized.
Free Plan: Gmass offers a free plan for an email list of up to 50 emails.
Paid Plans: Minimal – $8.95/month, Standard – $12.95/month, Premium – $19.95/month.
Note: Only the premium plan offers automated follow-ups.
4. Trello
Best for effective communication with the marketing team.
Trello helps you manage projects and stay on the same page as your team. In the past, before apps like Trello, email was the best way to collaborate with your team. As you can imagine, the back and forth can get confusing. Trello’s interface makes it simple to communicate with team members. You can share files, chat, invite members, and use color-coded labels. There are many tools like Trello on the market and Trello is by far one of the best.
Free Plan: Trello offers a free plan that is sufficient for any small business. It includes 10MB per file attachment and up to 10 member boards.
Paid Plan: Business Class -$9.99/month, Enterprise – $20.83/month.
5. Unbounce
Best for creating attractive, high converting landing pages.
Are you having trouble getting people to follow your call to action on your landing page? Unbounce is known for helping build high-converting landing pages. It’s easy to use for anyone with the drag and drop builder. On top of attractive landing pages, you have access to Unbounce’s analytics. You can integrate Unbounce with Google Analytics if you prefer Google’s platform. A helpful feature of Unbounce is its ability to do A/B testing. Test 2 landing pages to see clearly which is doing better.
Free Plan: Yes, with limitations such as no custom domain.
Paid Plans: Essential – $79/month, Premium – $159/month, Enterprise – $399+/month.
Free Trial: 14-day free trial.
6. SEO SpyGlass
Best for ensuring your backlinks are better than the competitors.
Backlinks represent a “vote of confidence” from one site to another that’s extremely important for SEO. Backlinks indicate to search engines that others vouch for your content, making your rankings higher. SEO SpyGlass makes sure your backlink list is comprehensive enough by integrating with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The tool identifies spammy sites that can be hurtful to rankings and cuts the connection with the built-in disavow file generator. You’re able to see a list of backlinks to competitor websites so you can make a strategy to get more authoritative backlinks.
Free Plan: Yes, with 1,100 links per project.
Paid Plans: Professional – $124/year, Enterprise – $299/year.
7. Link Tally
Best for seeing the magnitude of the social media shares of your content.
Link Tally is one of the most straightforward tools available, and it’s 100% free! It works by checking how many times a URL has been shared on social media. This helps you know how many people your content is reaching and make critical marketing decisions accordingly. You can see shared URLs on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and LinkedIn.
8. Grammarly
Best for capturing pesky spelling mistakes.
Imagine finally launching the campaign you’ve been working on and realize you spelled “n frills” instead of “no frills.” How embarrassing. If you’ve been looking at your work all day, it can be challenging to edit your own errors. It’s also a bit of a pain asking a colleague or friend. Grammarly is helping millions of people around the planet avoid grammar mistakes. When you write a document, plug it into Grammarly, and errors automatically underline in red. Grammarly catches punctuation mistakes, sentence fragments, plagiarism, readability, and more. It offers suggestions on how to fix them so you swift through editing quickly.
Free Plan: Yes. Features include critical grammar and spelling checks, and conciseness.
Paid Plans: $139.99/year.
9. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer
Best for creating catchy headlines readers will enjoy.
Your blog posts need catchy headlines. That’s what keeps readers from bouncing and gets you more shares and conversions. Enter your headlines into CoSchedule’s headline analyzer and see if you should use it or think of a new one. The analyzer gives a score based on words that have done well in the past. The higher the score, the more attractive the headline. This tool is entirely free.
10. Infogram
Best for creating professional visuals.
Visuals play an essential part in your overall presentation. Infogram allows you to import data and create professional charts, reports, maps, graphics, and dashboards. The graphics are easy to make with a drag and drop builder. You can make interactive graphics and refer to how it performed with Inforgram’s analytics tool. All graphics are optimized for mobile for every audience.
Free Plan: Yes. This plan includes enough features for a small business.
Paid Plan: Pro – $19/month, Business – $67/month, Team – $149/month, Enterprise – contact for prices.
There you have it! The best free and low-cost marketing and PR tools your business should use right now.
Quick note:
While good transcription doesn’t exactly come in a tool, we thought we’d mention it quickly here as it’s an increasingly crucial part of marketing strategy and many marketers overlook it.
Video marketing has become increasingly popular. Videos are engaging throughout and can strike emotions in users. That’s why they’re so effective for marketing. However, many people watch videos without sound, and of course, there’s a broad audience of deaf and hard of hearing. Transcribing videos can make them accessible to everyone. Failing to transcribe the audio in videos, however, can neglect potential customers.
We recommend using a reputable transcription company to provide you with extreme accuracy and fast turnaround time.
Conclusion
Tools play an essential role in every company. Most companies need more than one tool to thrive in different areas. Adding tools to your collection can drain your budget quickly. Having said that, all the tools in the list above are free or cheap and will help you with your marketing and PR efforts.
So what are you waiting for? Get a few of them today and start boosting your campaigns.
Byline: Submitted by Ben Walker of Transcription Outsourcing.