7 essential free digital marketing tools for small businesses

Make your — and your small business’ — life easier with this suite of helpful, free digital tools

There is a wide array of free or freemium tools that can accelerate your small-business marketing efforts — if you know where to look.

At search/local, one of the first things we do with any of our new clients is to educate them about what free digital tools are available, and how they can impact their small-business marketing. This guide is, in part, meant for those clients as a reference and any future clients, but also for any small-business owner or marketer with a sense that they could be doing more, but don’t know where to start.

1. Google My Business

Click the image to jump to Google My Business’ website, where you can use a Google Account to create a GMB listing for your small business.

I’ve written extensively about Google’s suite of platforms and how to optimize for them elsewhere (Where Do I Start; Generate Google Reviews with a one-click link; How It Works). The reason I spend so much time banging on about Google is simple:

Search Engine Market Share Worldwide | StatCounter Global Stats

As of the time of this writing, Google controls more than 92% of the search share market. Bing, Yahoo, Baidu & DuckDuckGo combined account for less than 6% of that market (though I love DuckDuckGo’s business model and corporate ethos, and am hoping to see their share climb higher and higher over time).

Google My Business is, hands-down, the most powerful free tool for marketing a small business that has ever existed. That search-market share I mentioned earlier? It was already dominant in 1998, the year after Google debuted, but it has been steadily been climbing since then, too, up from 86% in July ’18.

Google My Business offers a bevy of free tools, all of which are useful. Posts allow you to create free digital ads that appear beneath your business’ listing on Google Maps and Search. The Insights tab offers (what else?) insight into where your traffic is coming from. Reviews allow you to see and respond to your customer reviews, while Messaging allows customers to contact you directly.

Take some time to explore GMB once you’ve created your listing — I spend a great deal of time every week on this platform, both for search/local and on behalf of our clients, and it’s always time well spent.

Google My Business: The gold standard for free digital marketing tools, and a vital necessity for any business anywhere doing virtually anything.

2. Mailchimp (etc.)

Click the image to jump to Mailchimp’s website.

Mailchimp is the most prominent/popular of a number of free/freemium email marketing services. Constant Contact serves essentially the same functions. The point is not so much Mailchimp (though I prefer Mailchimp, and use it myself and recommend my clients do the same, unless they have some concrete reason to use another service), as it is email marketing.

Unlike Google AdWords, Facebook Ads or any other marketing platform that acts as an intermediary, your email marketing list is yours. If your Facebook Page was deleted tomorrow, it would be of absolutely no value to you (and I’ve seen exactly that happen; Facebook is usually reasonable when I have occasion to deal with them, but unfortunate situations do occur, and the results can be disastrous if all your marketing eggs are in that singular basket).

Your email marketing list is yours, to do with as you see fit. Mailchimp and other similar services will allow you to export your list even if you quit the service for some reason. That means you can email your contacts your specials, deals, offers, new location openings — you name it.

Mailchimp also allows you to create popup signup forms for your website, landing pages and highly-customizable email subscriber newsletters with segmentation abilities and a full suite of tools that you can use for up to 2,000 contacts and for up to 12,000 emails per month.

Email marketing offers one of the most significant and reliable ROIs in marketing — alongside SEO, it’s something I consider to be of paramount importance in growing any business. Whether you go the Mailchimp route, or another, similar freemium service, this is a top priority, and one that you can use to great effect for free until you’ve grown this marketing channel to the point that it is bringing in enough revenue that paying a little more as you grow is a no-brainer.

3. Bitly

I’ve written elsewhere about Bitly’s link-shortening service and using it alongside creative domain-hacking to craft memorable, resonant marketing strategies, but it bears repeating because Bitly is completely free.

Take a look at the Bitly (free) dashboard:

Not only does Bitly track the clicks for any/all of your links in one, simple location (enabling you to tab over to Bitly and quickly select the proper link — a vast improvement over an Excel spreadsheet or similar method of collecting the information in one place), but it also tracks where those clicks came from, enabling you to compare apples-to-apples how your various social media profiles are performing, allowing you to make adjustments based on that data.

I’m a Bitly evangelist — like any of the tools on this list, it streamlines a series of processes on one platform in one place, allowing you to leverage the collected data in creative, big-picture ways that would be otherwise impossible.

4. HubSpot

Click the image to jump to HubSpot’s website.

HubSpot has one of the most comprehensive suites of free tools around, including sales, marketing, CRM, education/training (through HubSpot Academy, which I also wholeheartedly endorse).

However, one of my favorite little tricks is to link your email address to its email tracking — you will then get notifications when the user receiving your email engages with it (opens it, clicks on a link inside of it, etc.), up to 200 notifications a month.

Imagine how much more effective you’ll be at sales and marketing, armed with the knowledge of when your emails are opened! I don’t have to imagine, because I’ve been doing exactly that for a while, and (although this technology is widely available, and not terribly difficult to implement) that knowledge at times feels like a superpower, or some sort of psychic ability. It is, again, totally free, and worth at least a shot (at no risk) to see how much more effective it makes your marketing efforts.

Also, the full suite of free tools HubSpot offers is far too extensive and varied to get into here, but the email-tracking and notifications is a good way to test the waters and see the value this free digital tool offers.

5. Unsplash

Click the image to jump to Unsplash’s website.

High-quality, high-resolution images are a vital and nonnegotiable component of any marketing strategy. Whether you’re email marketing, implementing digital ads, writing blog posts on behalf of your company… any marketing effort you make on behalf of your business will benefit from quality photography. Conversely, any marketing effort without photos, or with poor-quality photos, will suffer.

However, photographers are expensive, especially good ones, and not every business has the cash-on-hand to contract a quality photographer. It’s an Ourobouros situation with no solution — or was, until services like Unsplash (Pixabay and Pexels are two other examples, but like all the entries in this list, I’ve emphasized my favorite/the best, in my opinion) launched.

Unsplash is filled with more high-quality photos on more subjects/topics than you can possibly imagine (well, depends on what you can imagine — but it’s a lot). To bridge the gap between unable-to-afford-graphic-designer-slash-photographer and able-to-afford, Unplash is the perfect tool. Here I’ve searched for ‘digital marketing’ to demonstrate, and you can see there are 6.4K+ photos to choose from. Awesome.

Unsplash gives you the option to ‘thank’ the photographer, but requires no payment for usage of the photography, which can turn your marketing efforts from ‘meh’ to whatever the opposite of ‘meh’ is — WOW or GORGEOUS, something to that effect.

6. Canva

Click the image to jump to Canva’s website.

Like all of the tools on this list, Canva is awesome. It might be the most fun/exciting for me (Bitly? Canva? Gracious, they’re all so great… hard to choose a favorite, and now that I think of it, nobody is making me choose a favorite, so this is an entirely self-imposed difficulty), because I am objectively a horrible graphic designer/artist/aesthete. I would be hopeless without Canva. With Canva… well, I’m not hopeless. How good I am or am not I’ll leave to you to judge.

The Canva dashboard, which offers size-optimized options for various social media platforms, 8.5" x 11" paper, notecards, flyers — you name it.

Canva is the only way a profoundly untalented graphic designer like me can design clean, crisp images and posts like these.

7. Medium

This one is a bit of a gimme since — hey — you’re here already. But lack of a website, or lack of technical ability to update said website hinders a lot of clients I meet from undertaking meaningful content marketing efforts on behalf of their business. It shouldn’t.

In addition to serving as a company blog (much like this very publication does for my clients, and anyone else who happens to wander across it), Medium also has what I think is one of the coolest built-in functions on the internet: baked-in rel=canonical links for republishing content.

The option on the lefthand side allows you to use the URL of a story, post or article you’ve published elsewhere, and — with a single click — import it to Medium for republishing.

Here, on the next page, you would just paste the URL (of content you produced, own or have the right to distribute), and Medium will create a gorgeous story that — and here’s the brilliant part — tells Google’s webcrawlers that it is republished, and (through the ‘magic’ of rel=canonical links) that the original content is located at the URL you pulled the story from.

That means that when you republish the content, it is given the boost of Medium’s considerable domain authority/reach, feeding all of the ‘Google juice’ (yes, we really call it that; yes, it is kind of gross sounding) back to the original article. So if you are already blogging diligently, you can simply wait 24–72 hours for Google to index the original content (or game the system by using Google Plus), then re-post it to Medium, thereby supercharging the visibility and prominence of your original article, and boosting the SEO for the website that hosted the content originally. The More You Know!

This is by no means a complete, comprehensive or exhaustive list, but it is a great place to start, and a solid way to get enormous value out of tools that cost nothing to use. But we intend to expand this list with more tools and tips, so if you have a free digital marketing tool that has yielded benefits for you and your small business, leave a response letting us know what it is and how it’s helped you, and we’ll add it to the list!

If you’d like to know more about how these free tools — or others like them — could be leveraged to help you build your small business’ presence online, click the image above to jump to search/local’s Google Maps listing, where you can Message us or contact us by email or phone, and we’d be happy to answer your questions!