My Favourite Free Marketing Tools

Today, I want to share a few of my favourite marketing tools to help you grow and manage your business. Most of these I still use myself.

(There's a TLDR version at the end with just the list. None of these are affiliate links, just my faves.)

Project Management: ClickUp or Notion

ClickUp combines the channel-like features of Slack, board-style layouts of Trello and document sharing like Google Docs, into one powerful online project management tool.

It uses a hierarchy of workspace, spaces, projects, folders and tasks. The key to unlocking the power of ClickUp is understanding this hierarchy, but here's the basic idea:

- Your Workspace is everything within your organisation. 

- This is broken down into Spaces which are like departments or functions for your business e.g. sales, marketing, operations. 

- Each Space contains lists, tasks and docs which can be grouped into Folders. 

It takes a little getting used to but it’s a powerful platform especially if you’re delivering services like I do, juggling multiple clients, where each client is running multiple projects.

Notion is a better option if you’re looking for something simpler. It’s less feature-rich but will keep you organised without needing to learn a new hierarchy to do so.

Surveys: Typeform

I use Typeform for onboarding new customers. 

It’s not the only free survey tool, but it’s the most user-friendly, by far. 

I love the layout. Each question appears on its own page which feels less burdensome when there’s only one question to focus on at a time.

The free plan gives you 100 responses per month, more than enough for most solopreneurs and side hustlers.

Blog Copywriting: AnswerThePublic, Hemingway App and Article Title Generator

If you’re looking for content ideas, AnswerThePublic is a great place to start. 

Type in a topic and see a circular list of questions your audience are searching for. Pick a question and answer it in a blog post.

When you’ve finished writing your blog, paste it into Hemingway to check you’re using the right words, sentence length and language.

Then use Article Title Generator to give you suggestions for your title. Pick a good one. It’s the most important part of your article.

As David Ogilvy said: “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

Awareness: LinkedIn and Help a Reporter Out

Everyone selling to businesses (which is almost everyone), should use LinkedIn to grow. Why? Simple. It’s the only B2B social media network. 

Invest in creating content, either with your time, or your money, or both. Interact with people. Leave comments. Reply to people. Engage. It sounds cliche but the more you put into LinkedIn, the more you’ll get out.

If you’re looking to raise awareness for yourself or your business, check out Help a Reporter Out. The premise is simple. It connects journalists to qualified sources to get expert quotes for their news articles and blogs.

Register as an expert to get quoted. Great way to build your authority.

(Full disclosure, I haven’t used Help A Reporter Out yet but it’s top of my to-do list because I love the concept.) 

Email Marketing: Mailchimp

Free for your first 2,000 subscribers, Mailchimp is a great option for solopreneurs and small businesses to get started with email marketing. 

The interface is super-simple to use with five starter email templates. They’ve developed an intuitive email builder which is perfect for newbies.

After your email is sent, check your open rate and link clicks to assess whether your email was engaging for your subscribers.

Design: Canva and Unsplash

Never use stock-looking photos, unless you’re making memes. 

Try Unsplash for higher-quality images. I use the filter by orientation feature - portrait or landscape. Really useful when you’re looking for an image to fit a particular space.

Edit images in Canva. 

Canva just announced that more than 100 million people in 190 countries are using its platform every month.

I’m a Photoshop guy but I’ll occasionally use Canva for simple design tasks. It’s easy to use and an excellent option for designing social media posts, presentations and documents.

The free plan gives you access to over 250,000 templates. 

Website: Carrd or Wordpress

Carrd is a simple, single-page website builder. Their templates are clean, modern and responsive.

If you need a bigger website, use Wordpress.

It was built to manage content making it ideal for updating copy and images regularly. Perfect for bloggers. 

There’s a bit of a learning curve for beginners but it’s simple once you get the hang of it. 

The Wordpress software is free. You’ll need to pay for hosting. I’d recommend investing in a professional theme too. For around $49, your site will look like you spent thousands on design.

SEO: Google Search Console and Ubersuggest

It surprises me how few people use Google Search Console to maximise their visibility on Google. 

You can see how often your website pages appear in Google’s search results. Discover which keywords you're ranking for. 

One of my favourite tricks is looking for pages with lots of impressions but low clicks. (Click on performance, then rank by impressions.)

Sometimes you’ll notice Google is giving you impressions for search queries you haven’t answered in the page. Update your page to provide those answers. Change your page title too so it will attract clicks when it’s shown in the search results.

Tweaking content is one of the fastest ways to turn impressions into clicks.

Ubersuggest is a keyword tool, similar to Ahrefs or Moz but with a free option. You get three free searches a day, which isn’t a lot, but it might be enough to get you started. Use it to find relevant keywords with lots of search volume and discover other content ideas.

Wrapping Up

Check out my favourite free marketing tools:

• Project Management: ClickUp and Notion

• Surveys: Typeform

• Blog copywriting: AnswerThePublic, Hemingway App and Article Title Generator

• Awareness: LinkedIn and Help a Reporter Out

• Email Marketing: Mailchimp

• Design: Canva and Unsplash

• Website: Carrd or Wordpress

• SEO: Google Search Console and Ubersuggest