I do a lot of finance writing , but once upon a time, I was a corporate marketer for an international organization (along with a few smaller ones). Today, I love any opportunity to spread the news about how to do good marketing on the cheap (because marketing is really expensive). With that in mind, as my Christmas gift to you, I thought I’d compile a list of free marketing tools that you can use to build and grow your business today.
Add a Little Spark to Your Social Graphics
Adobe Spark is by far the easiest program to create social graphics and videos on. It has a simple drop-and-drag interface that allows you to build great graphics with a few clicks. Best part: it’s a completely free marketing tool for you to use.
The graphics you create on Adobe Spark can be as simple or complex as you’d like them to be. You can add photos, icons, and text – as much or as little as you’d like. Plus there are pre-designed templates and layouts that you can make your own.
Find Free Photos
Images are incredibly important for your marketing (in case you didn’t already know this). According to Impact, blog posts with images get 94 percent more views. Tweets that have images paired with them are 150 percent more likely to be shared. Likewise, Facebook posts get 2.3 times more engagement if they have images paired with them. Basically, I’m saying you need to use images with everything (when appropriate).
However, you can’t just share any image. You need to have the proper permissions. Some great websites that I use for creative commons images include:
Note: I’m no expert in copyright law, so definitely read the fine print and your local copyright law to make sure these images are okay for you to use!
Create a Sound Clip With Headliner
While you can do a few things with Headliner, it’s particularly great if you’re creating promo pieces for a podcast. This free marketing tool allows you to upload your audio, upload a background photo and presto you have yourself a video.
As an added bonus, Headliner will transcribe the audio for your short video. Note that you’ll likely have to do a bit of editing for this (I always do) but you should definitely put in the effort because the statistics show that videos with subtitles are more likely to be watched to completion!
Track Your Click-Thrus with Bitly
If you’re sharing links on social media or through an email (both of which you should be), you should definitely consider tracking your click-thru rates as an added metric for you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing with.
Bitly is a free marketing tool that allows you to create links and track the click-thrus in real time. As an added bonus, it shortens the link so they take up less space on social media where your character count is limited (I’m looking at you Twitter).
Manage Your Content Calendar With Airtable
I previously included Airtable on my list of free tools that you can use in your business, and I’m going to include it again here as a free marketing tool because I think it is a fantastic service. Seriously, I use it for everything from my accounting to my podcast schedule and my blog content calendar!
If you need to manage content, they have a pre-built content calendar template for you to use. Your content calendar can not only help you organize your content but it can help organize your social media content as well!
What free marketing tools do you use? Share them with me in the comments below!
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Tae started out as a journalist before following the money into the corporate world. But it turns out that the grass isn’t always greener and now you can find her spending most of her time writing about all the things she loves. Namely, money, travel and business with a hefty dose of self-deprecating humor. She is a podcast fanatic, blogging aficionado and loves to find new ways to turn passions into cold hard cash!