Best Free Online Marketing Tools In 2021

This post was written by April Campos

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What free marketing tools still exist?

Are the free online marketing tools as good as the paid tools? As a digital marketing agency, we use paid and free marketing tools every day. So, here is a list of our absolute favorite FREE marketing tools. Once you’re done, check out our review of our favorite paid marketing tools!

1. Google Analytics

What Is Google Analytics?

“Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.” As an agency, we rely heavily on Google Analytics to track everything that happens digitally with our clients. This includes organic, paid, and everything in between. We use GA (an essential free online marketing tool) to track every user through the sales funnel, their journey through a website, the phone calls that are made, and much more. Being able to make decisions based on sound data collection is essential in creating efficient and top-performing marketing campaigns. Google Analytics enables us to be able to track users that turn into conversions and better optimize campaigns to recreate this process. 

Why We Use Google Analytics As A Free Online Marketing Tool

Google is still the reigning champ when it comes to data collection. So, it makes sense that Google Analytics is the best at analyzing the mountain of data it collects on each and every one of our clients. The tool is completely free. In an age of add-ons, this is a huge bonus for a marketing agency, considering we have dozens of clients that we need to manage on a daily basis. 

2. Canva

What Is Canva?

Canva is a free, online graphic design platform that allows you to create social media posts and ads, infographics, banners, gifs, videos, and more. With the free version, you have access to many templates for every social media platform as well as the free elements and stock imagery. The animated elements all in one place mean that you don’t need to customize a stock vector in illustrator to get the graphic that you want. You can do it all in Canva. We use Canva when we need to create simple social media posts or quickly whip out infographics. Interested? Check out our 5 tips for content creation.

Why Canva Is One Of Our Favorite Free Online Marketing Tools

As a digital marketing agency, we have all the tools, including the entire Adobe suite. So, why do we use Canva? Canva is a place we can quickly snag a template for a social post or even a video. We use a lot of their features to create content for ourselves! Canva does have a paid version, but you will definitely be pleasantly surprised by everything that does come with a free account. 

3. Ahrefs

What Is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset with free learning materials and a passionate community & support.” Ahrefs has free online marketing tools (for search engine optimization) that any business owner can and should use to improve their digital presence. We utilize Ahrefs when we want to do a quick site rank for a potential new client or even perform Youtube, Amazon, or Bing keyword research that doesn’t require an exhaustive search through Semrush (for which we have a paid subscription). While Ahrefs does offer everything that Semrush offers, we personally find that Semrush has more bang for our buck and we absolutely love our rep (shoutout Tyler). 

 As stated above, Ahrefs does offer free online marketing tools for SEO for those that are looking for the basic information to get started on their SEO journey. However, Ahrefs does have a paid version that you can try for 7 days through their free trial offer. After the 7 days, it is $99 per month for the lowest tier and $179 per month for the all-inclusive package. 

4. WordPress

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or Maria DB database.” In layman’s terms, this means that a website can be custom built from the ground up. We use WordPress alongside many other platforms and plugins to create interactive, mobile-friendly, and visually stunning websites that are not only friendly to all search engines but are light enough to have a less than 1 second load time.

Why WordPress Is One Of Our Favorite Free Online Marketing Tools

To get started on WordPress, it is absolutely free. In addition to this, WordPress offers templates for free. These templates are more akin to Squarespace and Wix. You will install the template you desire and then follow a detailed tutorial that shows you how to use it. The template allows you to upload your own content and drag and drop everything on your entire site. Keep in mind that the more detailed you want to get, the more likely it is that you will need to pay for a monthly subscription. However, monthly payments start at a mere $4 per month, but it does go all the way up to $45 per month depending on the type of service you and your company require. 

5. Google Optimize

What Is Google Optimize?

Google Optimize is a free website optimization tool that helps online marketers and webmasters increase visitor conversion rates and overall visitor satisfaction by continually testing different combinations of website content.” In other words, Google Optimize allows us to A/B test landing pages to determine the best layout by measuring traffic, user retention, and conversions. There are many other metrics that are tracked in Google Optimize and can also be tracked in Google Analytics to get a better picture of landing page performance. 

Why Google Optimize Is One Of Our Favorite Free Online Marketing Tools

For every client for which we perform PPC ads or develop landing pages, we utilize Google Optimize. We are able to determine whether it is the form placement, the length of the page, or even the copywriting that deters or retains users on a landing page. As an agency, it is vital that we are able to optimize landing pages to have the highest conversion rates possible for our clients. In addition to being one of the best platforms Google has come out with, the software is completely free. Even the most inexperienced website developers are able to navigate through the platform. Keep in mind that you do need to have access to the backend of the website in order to use Google Optimize. 

*Bonus* Chrome Extensions

Eye Dropper: Found a color online and absolutely love it, but don’t know the hex or RGB code? Simply point and click! Eye dropper does the hard work and tells you the exact code you need.

SEOQuake: We love this tool because no matter what search we perform on Google, SEOQuake shows the key SEO metrics on every single search result that populates. Know instantly the page ranking and keywords for this site with a simple click of a button!

April Campos

April Campos is the Emerald Digital operations manager and digital marketing expert. April has been managing digital campaigns for nearly a decade and is a client favorite.

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