Tools to instantly improve your marketing for only £15.47
Now more than ever, we all have free (or low-cost) access to marketing tools and technology that used to cost thousands of pounds.
The extent to which you manage and analyse your marketing efforts is no longer a budgetary decision.
Marketing performance is an area that is full of amazing free, and super low cost tools. Here are the tools you need to improve your marketing, that are either free, or ridiculously cheap.
A/B testing
Tool: Google Analytics Content Experiments
Instead of guessing, or using educated assumptions, use data to direct you towards the perfect page.
Google Analytics comes with A/B testing built in, allowing you to statistically determine the best way to present information to achieve your goals. Read my post about running your first A/B test.
Cost: Free
Email Marketing
Tool: MailChimp
I use MailChimp myself to manage this blog’s subscribers and automated emails. MailChimp is very easy to use, and quick to pick up. You’ll need to upgrade to a paid account (starts at $10 per month) to remove their branding or use the automation tools.
Cost: Starts at free
Brand awareness tracking
Tool: Google Consumer Surveys
You can use this service to run a survey asking “Which of the following companies have you heard of?” listing your own and your direct competitors. After your brand campaign has finished, run the survey again and track the changes in awareness. I’ve covered this in more detail in my post “How to do brand awareness tracking without spending thousands.”
Cost: £60 per survey
Customer surveys
Tool: SurveyGizmo
A very easy to use, hosted survey tool. Everything is point and click, and you can easily add your own branding. Analysing your survey results is made as simple as possible as well.
Cost: $25 (£15.47) per month
Project/ task management
Tool: Trello
I am a huge fan of Trello, and have used it extensively for large and small projects, across multi-office teams. Trello helps to stay on top of all your projects and tasks, including documents and comments.
Cost: Free
Event marketing
Tool: Get Invited
If you organise events for your customers (and here is why you should), don’t run it through email and Excel. Get Invited has all the tools (including sign up form) to keep on top of all the admin surrounding any event. Here are my 9 tips for running a successful customer conference.
Cost: Free (free events) or 2% + 50p per ticket (for paid events)
Giveaways and competitions
Tool: Rafflecopter
Run competitions on your website with this copy and paste tool. You can also incentivise people to share the competition via social media. Plus it integrates with leading email platforms (including Mail Chimp) to help you generate more leads. You can see a live example here.
Cost: Free to $84 per month
Image creation
Tool: Canva
I only came across this excellent online image creation and editing tool, but the more I play with it, the more impressed I become. It comes with ready made templates (e.g. Social media profiles, blog graphics, posters, business cards, presentations etc.) and a huge library of free pictures, icons, shapes, illustrations and more. I used Canva to create the images in this post.
Cost: Free (with some images charged at $1 each)