Creative tips and tricks

41 best free marketing tools: Ways marketers can do better with less cost-effective options

Mar 16, 2023

The most effective marketing tools can will save you time, money and can make your work easier, but here's the most important part: getting them isn't easy.

Test out new tools and see the way they'll work in your workflow is a hero's mission. It takes time, effort, and cold sales emails galore. The result? It is possible to try out a variety of free software, and you'll get the best tools.

We've come up with the following list of free tools for marketing online to pull you out of this conundrum. This list contains tried-and-true tools that I've either personally tried (and would recommend) or genuine marketers use and swear by.

Make sure you bookmark this piece so you can revisit it anytime you need an overview of the tools available including AI-powered writing tools to time-savers as well as project management platforms.

Marketers, what are some useful tools for productivity and marketing that are free? that you simply cannot live without?
Disclosure: This is for a piece that I'm working on for a client.

-- Masooma | Content Writer (@inkandcopy) March 6, 2023

You can jump to any category:

Free CRM software

1. EngageBay

EngageBay is ideal for solo and small business marketers to manage and track sales transactions on one place. It has an intuitive, drag-and drop interface as well as filters to separate contacts.

2. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is one of Zoho's suites of products, giving you five hundred records free of charge with the option to remove the records that are not being used in your lead and free more space for the premium version.

Freshsales CRM. It provides artificial intelligence-driven capabilities to generate leads, qualifie leads, and close deals.

Video producers

3. Create

Make edits to the video to add titles and elements to it and use the aspect ratio feature to change the size of your video in a matter of seconds. It is also possible to connect your account with social media platforms like Facebook as well as Constant Contact to share the video content that you created straight through Create.

4. IMovie

iMovie remains a staple in video production, specifically for novices. The video maker that is free designed for Apple devices lets you make basic videos while on the move. Create a new video from scratch or ask for assistance from the program's storyboards, or templates that are pre-made.

 Option to pay at the time of its completion:

Create's premium plans to unlock advanced features such as adding custom CTAs and end cards to your video and monitoring their engagement statistics.

Social media tools

5. Buffer

The no-cost Buffer plan lets you handle three social networks, and lets you plan and schedule ten posts for each channel (such an efficiency saver! ).

6. Social Remarks

Social Mentions analyzes the mentions of your brand and hashtags on social networks, revealing how often and in what the tone of your audience discussing you, or using your custom hashtag(s).

7. Hypefury

Hypefury is a Twitter-specific scheduler that is great for marketing who want to make the most of this platform. It is possible to schedule not just tweets, but as well Twitter threads by using this program.

8. Sparktoro

Sparktoro is an online tool for research on audiences. Its tools are free and give you a score on Twitter users' actual influence. It also helps you understand their social media followers and display what other marketers are talking about and posting via Twitter.

 Paying option to think about when ready:

Hootsuite   Hootsuitefor making plans, scheduling, analyzing -- even report on social content by using one application.

Tools for editing and writing Tools for editing and writing

9. Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor can improve your writing's readability score. It does this by emphasizes long sentences that are difficult to read and also ones that employ passive voice.

10. Grammarly

Grammarly freemium catches typos and check your grammar.

11. SpeechTexter

SpeechTexter allows you to talk to the program so that it is able to write your text -- perfect for days when you're not feeling like or can't (God forbid!) to type.

12. ChatGPT

ChatGPT assists in brainstorming ideas, getting first drafts out, writing the meeting agendas, and so on.

 Option to pay when ready:

Writer to improve readability of content as well as grammar and repurposing while maintaining your brand voice and the editorial standards.

Collaboration and brainstorming

13. Miro

Utilize Miro's free plan to create three mind mappings that you can edit as well as brainstorming boards (or pick from their pool of brainstorming templates).

14. Figma

Figma is a completely free collaborative tool that allows teams to prototype and working together on design concepts.

 Paying option to think about when ready:

Twist to facilitate async-based team collaboration , which includes organized collaboration on files.

Tools to market content

15. Coschedule headline analyzer

Headline Analyzer evaluates your headlines for SEO and click worthiness, helping create engagement-driving headlines.

16. Blog Topic Generator

Input five keywords relevant to your field or blog's theme, as well as the HubSpot Blog Topic Generator can give you a week's load of ideas to post around.

17. Content Idea Generator

Portent's Idea Generator is perfect to generate concepts for writing content. Input a search term and the tool will present a fistful of fun suggestions which you can later improvise on.

18. PrimoStats

PrimoStats offers you unique stats that you can add to your site without having to go down the rabbit hole of research. The free plan gives you access to 1,200 stats.

19. Yoast

Yoast is a no-cost WordPress plugin that helps optimize your content for SEO through analyzing the use of keywords and its accessibility.

 Paying option to think about at the time of its completion:

GatherContent. It's a software for managing content that lets you manage all aspects of your content marketing- create templates briefs, style guidelines, briefs and a workflow for content complete including an editorial calendar.

Tools for managing freelancers

20. Toggl Hire

Toggl Hire lets you assess the skills of freelancers prior to hiring them, by creating assessments for their skills.

21. Google Meet

Utilize Google Meet to join free calls with freelancers to discuss your company's brand and requirements for content.

Content Harmony for creating briefs for freelancers.

Invoicing tools

22. Zoho invoice

Zoho Invoice lets you make free invoices.

23. Deel

Deel is a secured payment platform for hiring and paying for teams from 90 countries (in the free plan).

 Paying option to think about at the time of its completion:

Deel premium to automate invoicing Pay contractors in more than 150 countries and much more.

Tools for design and graphics

24. Canva

Canva can be a super simple and easy tool to create blog and social media-related graphics in just a few the span of a few minutes. Make use of their templates to get started or start from scratch If you're skilled at making designs.

25. Venngage

Venngage is a different, easy diy design tool which lets you design five stunning free images, which include informationgraphics, presentations, reports, charts graphs, as well as printable.

Visme. Utilize it to create animated visuals including videos and get access to your visual video's performance statistics.

Productivity tools

26. Otter.ai

Otter's basicplan, which is free converts 30 minute long webinars, videos, and podcasts so you can perform it all by hand. You can transcribe 300 minutes per month , and upload up to 3 audio and video files.

27. screen recorder

28. Pocket

Pocket allows you to save your content (videos, podcasts, and blog entries) for reading them later. Additionally, you can add tags to the content to make them easier to find as well as use the audio player to read written content for you.

 Paying option to think about when ready:

Evernote to keep track of notes and organizing them, creating reminders as well as sharing them with colleagues.

Tools for time-saving that are free

29. Zapier

Zapier allows you to connect various applications and to automate the steps between them using Zaps. Free plans let you create 100 one-step zaps per month.

30. Waldo

Waldo It's the free Chrome extension that speeds up your research. It offers an ad-free Google search experience by extracting content from high-ranking sections for easy skimming providing filters to help users find what they're looking to find quickly and efficiently.

31. WayBack Machine

WayBack Machine It is an alternative Chrome extension which works by giving you website archives. Make use of it as a source for the content you create and examine how your competition and/or companies that have been a source of inspiration planned their campaigns over time.

 Option to pay when ready:

Zapier Premium for creating multi-step zaps.

Tools to manage projects

32. Trello

Trello is an uber easy-to-use software for project management, which gives the user ten completely free Kanban boards for managing your tasks in as many columns as necessary.

33. Notion

Notion is an entirely customizable tools for managing projects. You can use it to create Kanban tables, boards, documents, or anything else you'd like. The software also includes Notion AI that summarizes content, creates tables from hyperlinked content, and many more.

34. ClickUp

ClickUp is another intuitive and flexible tool that is easy to customize. It can be used to make documents, view different aspects of your project pipeline, and so much more. If starting out feels daunting just pull out any of their templates, and you'll be ready to go.

Asana. It's perfect for task, project, and work management as well as a variety of integrations.

Free SEO tools

Google Trends shows you how popular a keyword or phrase is across specified time intervals.

36. Keyword Rank Checker

Ahref's Keyword Rank Checker can show you how the keyword you are searching for is ranked on the result pages of search engines.

37. Website Authority Checker

Another free tools by Ahrefs, Website Authority Checker will show you the target site's domain authority (DA).

38. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic enlists all the questions that people have asked about the keyword.

39. Keyword Tool

The free Keyword Search Tool by Ryan Robinson gives you keywords to search terms, showing you the volume of searches they have and their ranking difficulty.

Semrush or Ahrefs to access a complete suite of keyword research tools and link building and Clearscope for optimizing content to rank better.

Analytics tools

40. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free software that tracks your website's user's behavior and traffic (how how long people are spending time on a webpage, for example).

41. Hotjar

Hotjar's free plan provides you with unlimited heatmaps that let you know the way your customers are engaging with your website -- the CTAs they're clicking, and the places they're stuck.

 Paying option to think about once you are ready

Chartbeat for tracking content analytics on engagement in real-time.

Free resources

Hope you've found some helpful software to try in this collection of no-cost marketing tools. And if you're looking for more information about video marketing, particularly, we've tons of resources for you: