Raise the bar with these top 5 free digital marketing tools for beginners and small businesses
Sharing my favorite tools to improve your digital marketing skills and make your small business or startup a success
Digital marketing is a process of defining a target audience. The process surrounding all marketing strategies which requires a digital medium or the internet. The digital channels which include search engines, social media, email, and other websites are used to connect with potential customers.
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Digital marketing is vital for your business and brand awareness. Almost every brand or company now has a social media presence or at least a website. As competition grows, digital marketing is becoming an important part of brand awareness if they want to stand out.
Digital marketing can be an intimidating topic for beginners. With so many resources and tools around it can be overwhelming for some to find the right tool. Here are 5 of the top digital marketing tools which can make your life easy and are also available for free.
- Google Trends
This is an incredibly useful tool. If you want to find popular and trending topic ideas, then this is one of the best tools to find. Whether its blog posts or YouTube videos then this is a must-try. Google trends will show you what the world is searching for. You just search a term or a topic and you will be presented by various analytics for that term or topic. Also, if you are searching for a blog post idea or a topic for a YouTube video then you need to find terms that have high search volumes. These analytics tell you if the term or topic is trending or not. If you’ll make a blog post or a video based on that topic, which is trending in the last 30 days or less, it will easily get into the top of the search results. Because the topic is trending in fewer days, obviously there is not a lot of content available for it.
Also, you need to look out for “Breakout” terms. Those are terms which are trending and people have an incredible interest in them. If you are a small company or a brand, there are many topics or terms which are saturated and highly competitive. So these breakout terms help create a gap for small businesses or a brand to look into and also gives chance for your post or video to rank top in search or get maximum shares.
2. Similarweb.com
SimilarWeb is the best website to provide web analytics for any business in 5 minutes. The website offers information on their clients’ and competitors’ website traffic volumes, referral sources, keyword analysis, and other website features like page views, bounce rate, etc. It gathers data from the world’s largest panel of millions of web users, who have allowed monitoring of their internet activity, combined with other observations like website traffic, etc.
Just type in the website address of the competitor you want to track and SimilarWeb will create a whole report and provide you detailed analytics of your competitor’s website. With SimilarWeb you can find out how your competitor is marketing their business, what’s working for them, what all channels they are using for their content. You can study all these strategies and apply them to your own business. You can also get analytics from 3–4 competitors and compare them for more detailed study and build a perfect strategy for yourself or your client. SimilarWeb also has a browser extension. It is a key tool for any digital marketer.
3. Canva
Canva is big money and time-saver if you want quick graphic design options. If you want to make graphic designs for Facebook posts or ads, or need a thumbnail for your YouTube video, you can use Canva.com. It is essential as a marketer to use images that follow proper guidelines provided by the concerned websites like Facebook, YouTube, Blog posts, etc.
Canva has many free templates with proper guides that can be used. You can also make very fast adjustments to it, saving you time. If you have multiple clients or have deadlines for your project, this could be a real time-saver. As a digital marketer, you just need to have very basic graphic design skills to use Canva and still create eye-catching designs, adding value to your business. It’s drag & drop feature makes it easy to use.
4. VidIQ Vision for YouTube
YouTube is the largest website in the world and also the second-largest search engine in the world. So as a marketer it is very important to understand analytics for YouTube. VidIQ is the best tool to help you with video marketing and is also a chrome extension. The tool helps in getting detailed analytics for each video or searches for a particular keyword or topic, which can be researched to help you rank on top. It also gives details for keywords being used and different traffic sources.
I liked the way it gives suggestions when you are uploading a video, like a keyword score, suggested keywords, tags, and competitor scores. It also gives you tips to improve and helps you rank on top. You can also add alerts like trending videos or for competitor's videos so that you are up to date with the latest topics and trends.
VidIQ helps small YouTubers rank top on searches by giving analytics for certain keywords. When you search a term or a keyword, a section comes up on the search page itself where you check the volume of searches being made for the particular keyword and if the competition is low or high for it. This, in turn, is shown as a score. As a small YouTuber, you need to target high search volumes with low competition. Higher the scores the better you will rank up on the searches, which will translate to more clicks.
5. MailChimp
Email marketing is powerful to get returning customers and or convert your users to potential customers. Email is very important for any business or those who are starting with digital marketing. MailChimp is a great platform when it comes to email marketing. Founded in 2001, Mailchimp has been popular among digital marketers especially small businesses. It helps you collect email addresses from potential customers in a very cost-effective manner.
MailChimp has step by step guide for beginners to build your first campaign and with many templates to choose from with easy to use email design. You can make a list up to 2000 emails and send 12000 emails per month for free, which is a boost for beginners. As your business grows, you can always upgrade to a paid plan for more volume.
It also provides you with media storage and image upload functions. It has ready to use sign up forms and list management with segments. Not only this, it provides you detailed analytics for each email sent like CTRs, clicks, etc. You can also use third-party integrations like Google Analytics, other social platforms, etc.
I hope these 5 free and easy tools will help you grow as a digital marketer or be helpful to any small businesses or startups.
