MarTech Series Talks About the Basic Attributes of 20 Tools for Marketers That Can Be Tried for Free

Marketers today are exposed to dozens of tools that promise to make their lives easier, however, narrowing down on one is easier said than done. MarTech Series seeks to ease this process for the marketing community by featuring the best tools that can be tried for free as well as their paid equivalents.

1. Buffer

Buffer is an easy to use tool to schedule posts on social media. Prior editing can be done to check post accuracy before scheduling. Tweets/posts can then be lined up as per user convenience in order to achieve a constant online presence.

Paid Alternative: Sprout Social

2. Hotjar

Users leverage Hotjar’s software to understand what their customers are doing on the website. For a free software, Hotjar is sophisticated with the provision of audience information via heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and visitor recordings.

Paid Alternative: KISSmetrics

3. HubSpot Marketing

Website owners can easily extract email leads from their website by utilizing HubSpot Marketing.

Paid Alternative: Cirrus Insight

4. WordPress

Well, WordPress needs no introduction. It is one of the best tools to create landing pages.

Paid Alternative: LeadPages

5. Crowdfire

Crowdfire is one of the leading free tools for Twitter management! The tool perfectly suggests people to follow/ unfollow, follower engagement, and insights on competitors’ activities.

Paid Alternative: Crowdfire Premium

Also Read: Another $115 Million in InVision’s Revenue Pool as Part of Series F Funding

6. SumoMe

SumoMe infuses the ‘Share it’ buttons on your webpage so that users can share your page to any website. The feature is a part of the SumoMe suite for products going on the website. The brand allows you to use the feature if you permit them to brand themselves for free on your digital property.

Paid Alternative: Easy Social Share Buttons

7. Google Scholar

One of Google’s hidden jewels, the software is a search engine that limits its results to scholarly articles. Hence, it’s excellent for people into heavy researching. The best thing is that the tool can be paired with Google Alerts to get notifications on ‘fresh-of-the-press’ articles.

Paid Alternative: None

We asked Aashish Dhamdhere, Vice President of Marketing, Skilljar, about his favorite Marketing Automation tool:

“Since we’re a small and nimble team where every Skillet (that’s what we call Skilljar employees) juggles multiple hats, we appreciate multipurpose tools that let us do things quickly and easily.

HubSpot is the Marketing Automation tool we find ourselves appreciating for this reason. We use HubSpot for lead scoring, lead routing, email automation, landing pages, forms, data enhancement, blogging, and attribution. For a company and team our size it hits the sweet spot,” he said.

8. Blog Ideas Generator

HubSpot’s brainchild, Blog Ideas Generator aids writers who are out of wits for their next blog. An elixir for writers, all they have to do is add a few words and areas of interest and the tool erupts with ideas.

Paid Alternative: None

9. Content Idea Generator

Portent’s Content Idea Generator is more play than work. Enter a keyword and just see what happens!

Paid Alternative: None

10. Readable.io

Score your content for readability. What more do you want? Readable.io has a pro version too but the free version provides fairly deep insights into how readable your text is. It’s excellent for content developers.

Paid Alternative: ReadablePro

11. Hemingway

Hemingway is similar to Readable.io but way simpler. There is no registration required. Upon typing the URL, you are directed to insert your text and bam; the results are right there. The conclusion is not detailed, however, it is sufficient to quickly rectify the text and move on.

Paid Alternative: None

12. Onpage Optimization Tool

A truly brilliant free tool, The Onpage Optimization Tool accurately pin-points elements of a webpage on your website pertaining to keyword density, external and internal linking and many other things.

Paid Alternative: None

13. After the Deadline

After the Deadline is basically a glorified grammar Nazi that works as a Google Chrome extension. It checks for the English Language from all perspectives no matter what you surf on the World Wide Web. All you need to do is use your Gmail!

Paid Alternative: None

Also Read: Salesforce Optimizes Lightning Platform’s Tech Stack for Faster Application Development

14. Tweriod

As the name suggests, Tweriod is a portmanteau symbolizing a steroid like agent to boost your Twitter account. The tool suggests peak times for your account to get maximum exposure and replies. The best part is once you assess these times, you can sync Buffer into Tweroid. All you need is a Twitter account.

Paid Alternative: None

Speaking about his favorite marketing tool, Jeb Ory, CEO, Phone2Action, said, “My favorite marketing automation tool is MailChimp. The premier mass-mailing system on the market, MailChimp makes creating emails a breeze, and they offer easy-to-deploy rules to create ongoing drip campaigns and easy cadences to engage and re-engage your supporters.”

15. SharedCount

Some sites are notorious for not showing numbers for the content that has been shared over the internet via Socia Media Share Buttons. Here is where SharedCount comes to the rescue! As a user curious to know these numbers, all you have to do is copy the URL and paste it in SharedCount. Do you have multiple URLs? SharedCount also has a multi-URL Dashboard to assess these numbers across websites. After the analysis, you can even download a quick report or import URLs for analysis.

Paid Alternative: None

16. Facebook Page Barometer

An Agora Pulse product, Facebook Page Barometer keeps a check on how your Facebook Marketing initiatives fair against the average page count of about 6,000 pages.

Paid Alternative: None

17. Quicksprout

Quicksprout’s unique capabilities allow this free tool to audit your website, analyze your social media and extract your competitors’ reports all at one place.

Paid Alternative: None 

Also Read: Hootsuite Releases Their Take on Social Media Trends for 2019

18. Website Grader

Website Grader thoroughly measures the overall performance of your website. The tool is a HubSpot product and helps measure websites on parameters such as –

• Mobile factors
• SEO
• Security
• Speed
• Performance
• Suggestions about how your website can be improved

Paid Alternative: None

19. Charlie

Yes, Charlie can be identified as a toned down CRM. As far as CRMs go, they help their users stay up-to-date about their current and future customers. Think of Charlie as a really advanced address book. You get to know every detail about the person you are engaging with. Further, just by entering somebody’s email ID, like a Charlie user, you can know a lot about this ad-hoc entrant.

Paid Alternative: Salesforce

20. Wistia

The first thing that marketers will think about after producing a beautiful video for their marketing initiatives is YouTube (at least when they are looking for a free tool). Although there is nothing wrong with it, controlling videos on YouTube is a major pain area. This is coupled with unwanted advertisements and promotions. Here is where Wistia comes in handy! Be it keeping your audiences engaged in your video or leading them to a spot on the video where you exactly want them to go, Wistia is your go-to-tool.

Paid Alternative: Vimeo Pro

Commenting on her favorite marketing tool, Marya Dzmitruk, VP of Marketing, Zailab, said,

“My favorite Marketing Automation tools are Asana for team collaboration and AdRoll for retargeting campaigns. Asana gives me a pulse on my team’s workload and active projects while keeping everyone in the loop of upcoming tasks. My team is able to be proactive, rather than reactive — that is key in any organization’s success. AdRoll is a great tool for engaging the right audience and to make sure we get the best advertisement placement online. Only 2% of buyers convert to a lead during their first visit to the website, AdRoll helps re-engage the other 98%.”

That was our list of 20 free marketing tools for every marketer. Let us know what you think by mailing us at news@martechseries-67ee47.ingress-bonde.easywp.com

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