Are you about to start a new inbound campaign for your business? Then efficiently managing all aspects of inbound marketing by yourself within a tight budget and an even tighter time frame is going to be cumbersome.
You need help running a successful inbound marketing campaign, and free tools are available across the web are there to help. We’ve put together eight of the most useful tools to help you smoothly launch, run and monitor your next inbound marketing campaign.
1. HubSpot
The complete package
HubSpot is a software product that could prove to be the only tool you need to successfully pull off your next inbound marketing campaign. It’s a powerful device for inbound marketing and its features for social media marketing, email marketing, content management, web analytics and search engine optimization make it a one-stop inbound marketing powerhouse.
Though HubSpot isn’t completely free, you can thoroughly check it out by taking advantage of a 30-day free trial. You’ll get full-fledged access to everything in the paid option, plus free sales software that also includes the HubSpot customer relationship management (CRM) tool. All in all, you can’t go wrong in paying for this all-in-one product.
2. HootSuite
Social media
Managing your social presence, especially if you’re a small business, can be hectic and unwieldy. Hootsuite is a social media management tool designed to help you cope.
Hootsuite links all of your social media accounts, which makes for much easier account management—you can post, like, comment and share all in one place. HootSuite also provides tools and customizable reports that provide valuable data for understanding the effectiveness of your social media strategies.
Consider each of Hootsuite’s three tiers of membership—Free, Pro and Enterprise, but know that even a free account won’t let you down.
3. Moz
Search engine optimization
Moz is the leading SEO (search engine optimization) tool provider. It provides tools and applications to analyze the quality and authority of websites and keyword rankings.
Moz is extremely helpful if you want to thoroughly understand the intricacies of your website’s organic traffic, keyword rankings, domain authority and link profiles, as well as the SEO tactics of your competitors.
If you’re still learning SEO, Moz’s free tools are helpful learning devices. Its free services include services such as Open Site Explorer, which helps with identifying content, link building and searching and comparing competitor’s back links, Moz Local, which helps with local SEO (LSEO), and Followerwonk.
Moz’s premium services range from $99 to $599 per month, though you can test drive them with a 30-day free subscription.
4. WordPress
Blogging
WordPress, according to Wikipedia, “is a free and open-source content management system (CMS).” With more than 60 million websites associated with it, including 24% of the top websites, WordPress is the web’s most popular blogging system.
WordPress provides bloggers with ease-of-use publishing that makes it the best blog posting platform on the web. It includes thousands of free customizable themes to create your blog.
WordPress offers two options to publish your blog or website:
- A regular .com account provides a free blogging platform where your website’s blog can be posted and published.
- A plus .org account allows you to manage your entire site using the WordPress themes.
5. MailChimp
Email marketing
MailChimp is a cloud-based third-party email service provider. It’s a great alternative to a robust email marketing solution like HubSpot. This tool is a must-have if you want to build and manage your email list while avoiding the dreadful spam filter of your users.
MailChimp also provides businesses with beautiful email templates for creating campaign emails, segmenting out user lists for better targeting and easily tracking email subscribers’ engagement.
MailChimp is also as free as a bird. Don’t skip this one.
6. Google AdWords—Keyword Planner
Keyword search
Proper keyword targeting is important for any inbound marketing campaign. To reach the right audience for your campaign, you have to pick the right keywords. Having keywords with good search value, high relevance and low difficulty is a requirement for any inbound marketing campaign.
Google AdWords is a useful keyword planner for small-scale enterprises. It can be used to build search network campaigns from scratch or to expand existing ones. You can search for keyword and ad group ideas, see how chosen keywords might perform on your site, get historical statistics on keywords, compile keyword lists from existing keyword lists and use it to make competitive bids and budgets for your campaigns.
And one of the best things about Google AdWords is it’s free.
7. Google Analytics
Traffic monitoring and management
Before starting any inbound marketing strategy, you have to understand everything that’s going on with your website. Google Analytics is a web analytic service that lets you track, collect, analyze, measure and report your site’s traffic. And it is by far is the best analytic tool for small businesses to do this.
Google Analytics is basically free and is easy to implement, though two additional versions are also offered:
- Google Analytics Premium, that is subscription based and can be used for targeted at enterprise users.
- Google Analytics for Mobile Apps, an SDK that gathers usage data from your Android and iOS users.
8. Google Search Console (Google Webmaster Tools)
Webmaster tools
Google Search Console, previously known as Google Webmaster Tools (GWT), is a web-based service that helps keep a tab on search queries, crawl errors, security issues, duplicate content, broken links and most importantly, the accessibility of your site to search engines and your users.
In addition, you can use it to submit and check sitemaps, write and check your site’s robots.txt file, and check and set the crawl rate for the Google bot, among other things.
It is also free and a must for new and small-scale businesses.
The post 8 essential free tools to rock your next inbound marketing campaign appeared first on - Snyxius.
