23 Of The Best Free Marketing Tools To- Grow Your Startup

The marketing technology landscape is massive! There are simply so many tools to choose from which can cause a lot of confusion. I mean, take a look at this graphic below… 

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Yep - that is over 7000 marketing tools to choose from :)

“How do I know which tools are right for me to grow my business?”

“Which tool is right for my content marketing business to get more clients?”

“I can’t afford to spend over $300 per month on SaaS tools but I know I need the features of this tool to generate more traffic and awareness”. 

I hear these sorts of statements all the time. To be honest, even I get personally confused with what the best tools are best to use for our startup Cenario. Whilst I enjoy playing with new products, I need a reliable arsenal of marketing tools to help with the growth of my business whilst keeping it all at a relatively low cost. 

We’ve been exploring lately what “freemium” (or simply free) marketing tools you can use for the growth of your SaaS startup or business.

We've prepared a one-stop-shop of some of the best freemium tools you can choose from in 2020! 

So, let's get started: 

1. Mention

Keeping track of your social media analytics can be quite challenging. Therefore, the best way to automate and streamline the management of your business accounts on these platforms is to use a freemium marketing tool like Mention.

It provides you essential services like online user monitoring, brand management, competitive analysis, and much more! Therefore, it acquaints you with in-depth brand intelligence, and tailors it as per your marketing goals!

You can expect:

• Visualize data based on your brand’s KPIs.
• Monitor your competitor’s reviews.
• Get hold of any sort of crises with your brand being mentioned and respond before it gets out of control. 

Pricing:

• Free plan available, paid plans begin from $25/month. 

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‍2. Loom (One of my personal favourites)

Loom is a wonderful tool for marketers to help record anything that’s on screen. You have the ability to screen record whilst even at the same time recording yourself in the camera (I use it every day). 

It’s very easy to use and a great tool for sharing tutorials, instructions to your team or outsource workers, content marketing or anything that requires recording. 

You can expect:

• Unlimited numbers of videos to record
• Share your videos instantly via a URL link to anyone
• Also GIF Thumbnails & much more!

Pricing:

• Free service for unlimited videos! Premium versions starting from $4 per user per month.

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‍3. Buffer

One of the best time-saving products you can have for your business is scheduling your posts across your social media pages. Buffer is a simple yet functional social media tool which does just that. 

It lets you schedule many posts by composing everything in a single go across various channels, and spreading those updates in time & days that you choose. 

What’s awesome about Buffer as well is their analytics & custom URL tracking. Very reliable social media scheduling tool. 

You can expect:

• Queue up thumbs-up content for your social media channels.
• You can schedule across Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram (amazing) & LinkedIn.
• Measure your performance by receiving reports on reach, sales, and engagement.

Pricing:

• Free of cost (after 14-day free trial)
• Pro plans begin at $15/month.

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‍4. TweetDeck

Twitter is one of the most renowned social media platforms today. TweetDeck is one of the best marketing tools for Twitter lovers (myself included)! 

It enables you to manage multiple business operations and helps you facilitate real-time tracking, conversations, messages engaging with audiences, and organising tweets.

You can expect:

• Customizable social media dashboards.
• You can deploy it as a Web, Chrome, or desktop tool.
• Flexibility regarding message tracking, tweet filters, and scheduling.
  

Pricing:

• Free of cost with no enterprise pricing plans.

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 5. Hotjar (One of my personal favourites)

Have you ever been curious about how your visitors use your website? Do you want to know where they click the most, how far they scroll, where do they pause or even leave your product, etc.? 

Hotjar displays exactly what your visitors do on your website, via clickmaps, scrollmaps, heatmaps, and visitor recordings.

You can expect:

• Reports on user behavior logic.
• Insertion of messages and surveys to visitors.
• Multi-device support.

Pricing:

• Free for 2000 page views/day.
• $89/month up to 20,000 views per day.

6. Canva

You should know who Canva is by now if you’re reading this post and was deciding whether or not it should be on this list, but it’s simply such a good tool I couldn’t leave it out. 

The power of Canva, even as a free tool, just keeps getting better over time and use it regularly for social media posts, content marketing initiatives + even doing presentations. It provides so much value I feel guilty not upgrading to the pro plan which is only $10 p/m. 

You can expect:

• Create any custom graphics that you desire (and has an array of amazing templates)
• A huge collection of templates, icons, images, charts, etc which you can use for free.
• Resize images, a library of fonts & much more. 

Pricing:

• Free to use and can upgrade to the pro plan for $10 p/m which unlocks an incredible amount of graphics, images, icons, templates & more.

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7. Amplitude

If you’re a startup or product company you must try Amplitude. The value Amplitude can provide for it’s free version is simply amazing. 

Whilst it does require a developer to set up, you have the ability to track up to 10 million interactions just on the free plan itself, create funnels, segmentation + more to understand how your users interact with your product. 

You can expect:

• Core + User analytics reports analytics
• Have multiple team members in the one account
• Create custom dashboards

Pricing:

• It’s free for tracking up to 10 Million events. It does have premium plans which you need to contact the sales team. 

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8. Hemingway

This is one of my favourite applications I use for content marketing. Hemingway is an online tool to help your grammar, sentence structures, fluency + more to improve your writing. It’s great for content marketing, ebooks, presentations or whatever task your doing. 

For a completely free tool it does provide a lot of value to make you a better writer.

You can expect:

• Colour coding and helpful suggestions for improvement.
• Very easy to use interface.
• No issues with handling long form posts or content 

Pricing:

• Free :)

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 9. Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers a convenient way to track all social media accounts at a glance, and schedule posts. With Hootsuite, you can set up “streams” for anticipated messages, posts, mentions, and more. Additionally, you can assign a message to your team member to look after a response, request from a customer or more!

You can expect:

• Monitoring of user reviews.
• Instantly responding to your audience.

Pricing:

• Limited Free Plan (Pro plans start at $39 per month)
  

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10. Sumo

Sumo’s free email capture tool has to be one of the best valued tools on the internet for marketers and entrepreneurs. It’s very easy to setup if you have a Wordpress website with no coding required and the ability to collect up to 10,000 emails… for free!

Not only 10,000 emails, but the ability to send automated welcome emails, drip campaigns, use for eCommerce with cart abandonment & much more. Hats off to the Sumo team keeping this free! 

You can expect:

• Easy installation/connection with your website or store.
• Have up to 10,000 emails and send out email campaigns + drip sequences
• Visitor targeting, social media sharing and customizable design.

Pricing:

• Free of cost and then has a premium plan starting from $49 per month.

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 11. UberSuggest

Whilst I do love Ahrefs and SEMRush as SEO tools, if you really want to keep costs down and working on SEO/Content marketing, then I highly recommend UberSuggest by Neil Patel. 

It’s a free SEO tool to help you generate new keywords, explore domain authorities of various websites, top SEO pages, content ideas, backlink data and much more! 

Yes, all of this for free. It’s pretty powerful and incredible value. If you’re doing less than $5k MRR then add this to your arsenal. 

In many ways this tool also replaces the likes of one of my favourite apps Buzzsumo, due to the ability to find out social shares and backlinks of various articles. 

You can expect:

• Domain overview is very good value for what it is. Not as much data compared to Ahrefs and SEMrush but provides enough value to take away. 
• The ability to do competitor research for free is what is so impressive with Uber Suggest. 
• Detailed backlink data

Pricing:

• Free :) 

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 12. Sniply

A very cool tool I often suggest to startups or online businesses is Snip.ly. It’s a basic tool but very effective for social media, content marketing and even paid campaigns. 

It’s a simple Call-to-Action pop-up which is shown on various articles or resources you share. 

So you can share any article, whether yours or even a 3-rd party website, and use a custom link which will show the pop-up on that article. Use the CTA to drive to your offerings or other content. Highly recommend giving this a try. 

You can expect:

• Track 1000 clicks per month (free version) with analytics to track who’s clicked the links.
• Can edit themes to align design to your branding.

Pricing:

• It offers a free version of 1000 clicks per month. Then plans start at $29 per month.

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‍13. Pexels

There’s a few free stock photos websites out there but have to say the quality of Pexels is amazing. Pexels serves over 1million+ creators around the world supplying high-quality stock photos to help with their marketing or business efforts. 

Now, they don’t just do images like we have always known - they do free stock videos too! Incredible value.

You can expect:

• Huge library of free stock images & videos
• Ability to favourite and create collections to keep/share with your team

Pricing:

●      Free of cost.

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14. WeVideo

WeVideo is a handy tool for marketers and entrepreneurs who want to do quick video edits with existing assets they may have. You can use WeVideo to quickly mockup videos for social media promotion, content marketing & much more! 

Whilst the free plan is limited, the ease of using the platform to create quick square and vertical video ads without a video editor is very handy. 

You can expect:

• Use existing assets (or find free video stock footage) to quickly edit simple videos
• Store on the free plan 1GB of video 

Pricing:

●      Free to use with then plans going up from $4.99 per month. 

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15. Free Ads Spend Calculator

A free tool we created a while back from the team at Cenario was this Free Ads Spend Calculator. 

We found it hard to find good quality free calculators which took into account various metrics for those doing outreach, paid media + more. So, we created a free tool :)

You can expect:

• Calculate CAC for any channel you’re considering to use
• Outreach method ROI metrics
• Paid Ads metrics

Pricing:

• It’s free :)

16. Google Trends

Another excellent tool for your business which I often see underutilised is Google Trends. It enables you to search for keywords based on the maximum user searches. Moreover, it identifies the workability of several long and short-tail keywords. 

You can expect:

• View the volume of keywords searched on Google’s search engine.
• Understand what’s trending for certain topics that you can create content for… Or better yet, create new products or services you can offer.

Pricing:

●      It’s free :)

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17. Notion (One of my personal favourites)

If you’re connected with me on LinkedIn or know me personally, I’m an incredibly big fan of Notion. It’s like a combination of Trello, Asana, Evernote + features of other tools all in one amazing, simple to use tool. 

It’s incredibly customisable and a great product to organise essentially everything our business Cenario and other projects I work on. The freemium version is awesome value! Also rate the mobile app to keep across all tasks.

You can expect:

• Create wikis, content calendars, projects, notes, docs + more! Essentially, whatever you want to use it for. 
• Amazing for collaboration with various team members

Pricing:

• Free for basic usage.
• A premium starts from $4 per month

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18. Headline Analyzer

Want your article to appeal and attract every eye? Simple! Choose an ultra-creative title! 

It's easy! Headline Analyzer determines the effectiveness of your titles and helps you to generate a suitable heading for your blog posts. Therefore, with such captivating titles for your write-ups, user-engagement is bound to flourish! 

You can expect:

• Provides scores for SEO, readability, and sentiment.
• Identifies “weasel” words, which do not convey much meaning. 

Pricing:

• Free :)

19. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is designed to assist you in identifying SEO-related issues in your URLs. Also, it effectively flags glitches in redirects, metadata, broken links, duplicate content, and much more! 

You can expect:

• Analysing the technicalities of your website.
• Revamping the website’s architecture. 

Pricing:

• Free plan available for up to 500 crawled URL’s.
• Advanced plan from £149 per month.

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20. Fruition’s Google Penalty Check

To boost your organic results for your online business, it’s imperative to keep one eye on your website’s health, as far as Google is concerned. Fruition’s marketing tool introduces you to how several google searches and algorithm updates impact your webpage growth.

You can expect:

• Statistical analysis of updates that have a significant effect on your website.

Pricing:

• Free to use :)

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21. INK for All

Wow, that’s all I have to say for this tool. Ink was launched on Product Hunt in October 2019 and has received over 5000+ upvotes and for very good reason. 

It’s an AI powered tool that helps optimise your existing content for SEO to improve rankings - all for free! You can download either for Mac or Windows :) 

I’ve started using it and have to say pretty impressed!

You can expect:

• Get AI powered insights into your content or articles you’re writing to ensure it’s optimised best for SEO rankings. 

Pricing:

• Free to use :)
  

‍22. Image Resizer by promo.com ‍

This is a clever acquisition strategy + promotional strategy for promo.com. A wonderful tool they have created for free for marketers and business owners to resize images for all content formats and platforms. 

All you need to do is upload your creative and then the tool looks after the rest. Then instantly download all the assets into a folder to then use across social media and other placements. 

It’s very handy in particular if designers are busy with other tasks or your a solo marketer doing things on the cheap. 

You can expect:

• Simply upload your assets which will then be populated into the various social media formats automatically. 
• Work out which designs/images work best across all types of placements
• Download when you’re satisfied and use across platforms. 

Pricing:

• Free :)
  

23. Airtable (One of my favourite products)

Airtable is a god send when it comes to organising key data for various projects and tasks. Whilst we use Notion as the main product when it comes to operations, we use Airtable for sharing content and collaboration for those members who aren’t directly within our organisation full-time. For example, outsourced workers to help with social imagery, designs, customer success + other things. 

Airtable is amazing just due to its flexibility to arrange and sort anything and everything. They also have a powerful template library to choose from to organise certain projects like content calendars, CRM’s, user research, product launching & more. 

You can expect:

• Choose from 100+ templates to use for your business
• Collaborate on Airtable’s with team members
• Super customisable and there are various formats from cards, tables & more. 

Pricing:

• Free with then premium plans starting from $10 per month :)
  

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed reading this article! Let me know if you’ve tried and tested these tools above. 

Also are there any others I’ve left out I really should add? Let me know, I’ll check them out and if they’re really cool, then I’ll add them :)

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