4 free Digital Marketing tools you need in your life

There are a lot of amazing digital marketing tools out there. With most digital marketing tools, there are different paid plans available - take Hootsuite for example. The amount you pay monthly / yearly depends on what you want from the tool.

You don’t have to spend mass amounts to grow your business - there are so many free digital marketing tools. Some of these tools may have an option to pay a small monthly charge to access more features, but they are just as cool without them.

Canva

Canva is by far my favourite free tool for creating content like graphics and leaflets. Don’t get me wrong, InDesign is also an amazing tool, which I use on a regular basis, but it’s also a paid tool.

There are so many different features available in Canva, such as the elements feature, which allows you to add stickers, shapes etc. and the background feature, which allows you to add cool textures to jazz up your graphics,

If you are like me and work in a company that targets a younger demographic, having the elements feature on Canva is so important for reaching our audience, making it more kid friendly.

Here a few free things you might want to search in the elements tab:

● Section chart Instagram

● Animated FB Facebook button

● Animated IG Instagram button

● Animated IG Instagram white light gradient

● Gold metallic brushstroke

● Textured holo sticker

Google Analytics

So, you’ve just used Canva to create a graphic that you are going to now post on socials. You put it out on Facebook with a CTA of a link to your website.

Using Google Analytics, I can see what percentage of traffic came from social channels and what percentage of those social channels were down to Facebook - it is a great way to see where your traffic is coming from. Why is this important? It helps you make future decisions when posting.

Google Analytics has three important areas: acquisition, behavior and conversion. These sections branch off into different areas and through this, you can really get to know who your audience is.

If you haven’t already, you need to be using Google Analytics. There are lots of useful videos out there on how to set your account up.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is another great tool to use and one that I’ve just started using recently myself. There are paid plans on Mailchimp, but there is also a free plan. This free plan however does depend on how many contacts you are sending the email to - there is a max amount of 2,000 contacts.

We send out quarterly newsletters, covering three months of content about what we have been getting up to, so as you can imagine, that is a lot of content. With Mailchimp, you can easily design an email template, which means when I come to do the next quarterly newsletter, all I have to do is write the content - it is definitely less time consuming!!

If you want to know a bit more about Mailchimp, make sure to check out their pricing plan page to see what they offer on the free plan.

Social media platforms themselves

I think a lot of people underestimate the features available on social media platforms, and Facebook is probably the best example for this.

Facebook has an amazing ‘insights’ feature which gives you really in depth stats about a certain period of time. People think they need to invest a mass amount of money into analytics tools, when really, this isn’t the case at all.

At the end of every month, I collate the stats using the social media platforms themselves, putting all of the insights into one excel document. This excel document has different spreadsheets for each month and that way, I can easily compare our monthly findings.

Basically, you DO NOT need to spend a lot of money to successfully grow your business. Before you go ahead and spend lots of money on tools, make sure to check out the free tools first - they might offer you exactly what you need.

Amy Fryer, Cohort 29, Digital Communications Apprentice at HideOut Youth Zone