The average marketer uses between 5 to 20 marketing tools to automate laborious tasks related to the creation and execution of marketing campaigns. There are plenty of customised tools powered by complex algorithms that can aid with data collection, calculation, and analysis. These tools enable marketers like you and me to get insights from our data on-demand and make immediate decisions.
It is important to be aware of the tools that can help your business perform better and mastering these tools is key to successful marketing. Thankfully, there are a host of free tools out there to ramp up our efforts to reach out to more people (and marketing segments using through your new website) – and if you’re a small business owner or marketer, this list is your jackpot.
Free Marketing Tools
This is a 3-part article on free tools that will help small businesses with Research & Design of content, Posting, and Monitoring, to ensure that your next marketing campaign will be a great success!
Part 1 Free Tools to Research & Design Effective Content.
Most people associate online marketing with the creation of viral videos, advertisements, email campaigns and being seen on social media. The reality is that marketers take actions based on a set of data points on their targetted consumers. Effective teams create marketing campaigns based on reliable intelligence and follow a disciplined content production process. This intel comes from insights, research and reports from third party research institutes or primary research done prior to the campaign. Most people fail to see that viral campaign comes after dozens of not-so-viral campaigns.
We see online marketing as a series of experiment that can be improved on. These experiments follow a systematic and disciplined process (E.g. Research —> Design —> Monitor.)
Research begins with listening to voices within and outside of your immediate community so that you retain a high degree of connectedness with your target audience and competitors.
Getting reliable and relevant data on time allows marketers to make better analysis and decisions, which translates to cost-savings and time saved. Without detailed data, measuring the success of any marketing campaign is guess work. Get yourself out of the dark, monitor the statistics’ of your future marketing campaigns and arm yourself with information using these free, easy-to-use analytical tools:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free tool that provides comprehensive measurement of traffic, new users, signups, and more. It works with other google products like AdSense, AdMob, and DoubleClick advertiser and publisher products. It allows you to get the most of out of your data by making sense of it, surface users who are likely to convert and highlight customers with high revenue potential.
Personally, Google Analytics has been integrated into every aspect of my businesses; It tracks the traffic on my website, app, and blogs, and tells me where my visitors are coming from and what keywords did they use to find my content. It also tells me how my organic searches are performing in comparison with paid advertising. This allows me to double-down my effort on content and platforms that are converting so that more people can benefit from all my work. As a company that also does web-development, my team loves how easy it is to integrate this into all our projects. Our clients are also happy with the Google Analytics because it is a tool that they can manage and monitor easily.
Google Alerts
There is no better alternative than Google Alerts for reviewing the latest developments in your industry. Google Alerts tells you whenever there are mentions of your brand name, competitor or sector names. Setup alerts simply by entering keywords. There is no substitute for this as a listening post for development in your industry.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo allows you to analyse what content performs the best for any topic or competitor. Simply enter a topic or domain and Buzzsumo will scour the most shared and engaging content across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+. This helps you identify what content are people interested in and who are the producers of really producing highly valued content.
TweetReach
TweetReach (by Union Metrics) is a social media analytics tool for Twitter. It allows you to search a hashtag, account or keyword, and receive data about the estimated reach, exposure, activities, top contributors, see the most retweeted tweets, and much more.
There are many ways to use TweetReach. I use it to complement my keyword research so that I can quickly gather trending topics on twitter, then customise campaigns that can benefit from organic searches on twitter. Also, when embarking on a new genre of content or industry, TweetReach acts as my ears to get a snapshot of the community so that I know what people are interested in and to whom they are listening in real time.
Twitonomy
Twitonomy is a dashboard that provides visual analytics and allows users to perform most actions like sending out tweets, mentions, following and unfollowing. Personally, I think the user interface needs a lot of work but if you can overlook the (poor) user interface, Twitonomy is pretty useful because it has everything in one place – all the tools are so handy and users can post directly from Twitonomy (website and app). In fact, I usually just post directly from it instead of the actual twitter app.
Twitonomy can provide an assessment of any twitter account, and give you details about their latest activities and best performing content. I use Twitonomy to do “social-stalking” of competitors and target consumers. I use competitor’s performance as a benchmark for myself, find out which of their content perform extremely well and replicate them. You can also “hijack” your competitor’s community by engaging their followers with content they have previously liked. To do more with Twitonomy, like printing or downloading data, you have to purchase their premium plans.
Part 2 – Free Productivity Tools to Streamline Content Deployment.
Since you have spent a good amount of time and money creating great content, you should maximise your audience by deploying them on wherever your target customers are. A good content deployment begins by identifying all the possible platforms (Linkedin, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Scribd, Flipboard and more…). Certain platforms require you to customise your content so that the content better converts the audience into fans.
Managing your social media updates and posting out content is a time-consuming process. Thankfully, we have content management tools that can help save time and effort.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media management platform that lets you manage Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, schedule posts and provides analytics for all posts.
Buffer provides the convenience of posting similar posts across different platforms in a single action, which is fantastic for small businesses who intend to duplicate content on their official Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Buffer is magical because it greatly improves time management with its ability to queue content. As such you are no longer restricted to posting in real time. You can let buffer determine the best times to post these contents or set those timings yourself.
HootSuite
HootSuite is another social media management platform that allows you to schedule posts and manage your content. Why should you use HootSuite when you already have Buffer? Well, there are two great reasons:
Firstly, I use Hootsuite to complement Buffer because it is far easier to respond to followers there and I love the HootSuite Apps (which are third party integrations/plugins like Pocket, YouTube, and SoundCloud). On the other hand, I prefer the ease of scheduling content on Buffer.
Secondly, I manage social media accounts for myself and my clients, and many of them are experimental accounts for me to test out new content. Since the free version for Buffer and HootSuite limits the total number of social media account, I can create many accounts with an overlapping one so as to enable content duplication with a few clicks – without having to purchase a premium plan until these new accounts have proven to be successful. If you are planning to take your social media game and content production to the next level, the premium plans for Buffer and HootSuite are absolutely worth it.
Another good practice for content deployment is to find influencers who share a similar audience and can benefit from helping you with promoting your brand (for a fee).
Followerwonk
Followerwonk (by Moz App) is a tool that lets you source the best candidate/influencer, compare them, analyse follower segments, and track and sort followers. The free version has limited functionalities.
Keyhole
Keyhole provides real-time tracking of influencers via hashtags, keywords, or accounts for twitter and Instagram. Based on the search item, you can track users who have the highest engagement, followers, impressions or exposure based on keywords, and then decide to build relationships with them.
Growing a community of followers requires constant nurturing to keep them aware and interested. Regular postings do that and help to shape their thoughts and behaviours so they become easier to convert into paying customers. However, like most businesses that don’t have a dedicated content creation team you may not have the ability to create original content as often as you like. So it is necessary for you to share relevant and helpful information by reposting other people’s posts. RSS feeds such as Feedly and Scoop.it allow you to do content curation by selecting your sources, bookmarking articles, and post share them at your convenience.
Part 3 Free Tracking Tools to monitor and optimise your content.
Cyfe
Cyfe is an All-In-One Online Business Dashboard that allows you to monitor about 80 different types of metrics, such as google analytics, WordPress, MailChimp, Shopify, Alexa and much more. It’s simply my go-to-dashboard for me to get a daily snapshot of all my business performance. Getting everything in one place helps me see what needs action and prioritise my efforts.
What I love about Cyfe is how simple it is to setup and customise the layout so that I can focus on the metrics that drive action and rearrange them when the focus of my project shifts.
Sumall
Sumall wants to be “your personal data scientist”. It is a free application that brings your social, web, and email audiences together, and helps you track, understand and target segments of that audience to improve your marketing efforts. that reports your data through an email digest, and automatically create posts for you using your data (currently only available for Twitter).
Other Dashboards:
Conclusion:
Great content marketing is data-based and data-driven. You should exploit these free tools to gain access to data that can help you make your campaigns more focused and more effective. There is one thing to remember, however. Good content marketing starts with well-written, unique, and engaging content. Tools cannot help if you’re missing this foundation.
If you are looking for high performing team who have the expertise to manage your campaigns and deliver real results, you can reach us here.
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