Digital marketing is so important for the growth of any small to medium business these days. It can bring in new clients while you hone your craft, help you build a network of interested parties, and help you solve the problems your clients face every day. But if you have no experience in digital marketing, it can be a bit of a hassle to do everything yourself – especially if you are on a fixed budget. So in today’s article, we will be highlighting the best free marketing tools for your small business that we have used and fallen in love with.
Canva: Best Free Design Tool for Small Businesses
Canva is an awesome tool for designing any kind of graphic your business may need. This tool is completely free to use and offers many pre-designed professional templates anyone can use to create mockups, beautiful Instagram posts, graphics for social media, presentations, and even websites!
Canva runs completely inside a browser so you don’t need any expensive computer hardware to run it, saves and manages items directly in your account, and even offers some premium AI design features at their pro tier which is very affordable for most businesses.
However, what makes Canva really impressive is you can get almost everything in the free version without needing to ever spend money on the pro version. Many of our ad design team members have used the free version of Canva to design our world-class ads which makes it a solid free tool for most business owners.
Check it out at canva.com/free/
Rytr.me: Best Writing Assistant for Small Businesses
Every great digital marketing campaign usually includes SEO and Copywriting. For most business owners, this can be a bit of a headache since SEO requires highly well-written content and professional copywriting can get expensive. However, if you are taking your digital presence seriously, being able to rank on Google Search organically or through paid advertising can be a monumentally valuable marketing proposition.
In our business, we have occasionally used tools like Rytr.me to help organize or design blog posts. Although you should never have an AI write every part of your blog or be the sole writer of your ad copy, AI can be a tool to help set you up for success.
Why every business should have an AI writing assistant:
In online business marketing, communication is essential. It allows you to get your point across and can make or break your client’s success rate. Everyone has a unique communication style and sometimes, our communication style can rub others the wrong way.
Writing assistants like Rytr.me are free to use (up to 5000 words), and can help you write emails, craft important announcements, or even create tweets (or whatever we call them now but I’m not calling them Xeets).
Check it out at https://rytr.me/
Like any tool on this list, you should use it with discretion and be smart with how often you use it. Not every message needs AI to write it up, and some business communications are better done in person. But when you can’t have someone meet up with you, sometimes sending a 5-minute video recording can be the next best thing…
Loom: Best Free Video Messaging Browser Extension
In 2023, video marketing is really important but it can be really time-consuming and expensive to generate. If you are comfortable hopping on a Zoom call, you may want to consider this free video capture tool for free video content creation.
Loom is an awesome tool we occasionally use when our team can’t quite hop on a call but wants to do a little screen-sharing video instead. It’s a free browser-based tool you can install on Chrome, Safari, Windows, and Mac.
Loom is really impressive because of how easy and quick it can be to send your thoughts over video. In our brief demonstration below, we show how loom can be used to create a video message that is easy to embed on your website, share in an email, or even just embed in a blog post if you want to add a bit of extra interactivity in your SEO strategy.
Loom is completely free to use for up to 25 videos, but if you already have a youtube account, you can download Loom videos and upload them to youtube, then delete them later for unlimited video recordings.
Loom can also be used as a Windows or Mac App if you have a slower internet connection and sometimes have trouble with chrome extension security.
Check it out at https://www.loom.com/
Clockify: Free Time Tracker For Businesses
When your business is just getting started, it’s all about doing what makes the most money for the least amount of time spent. Small businesses today need to do a lot to keep the money coming in – social media, SEO, website management, client management and so much more can take up your time. If your time is money, you need to know where your time is going.
As we detailed in our article 10 Tips for Success as an Entrepreneur, running a business will involve some overhead costs – but you might be surprised by how much you can save on both time and money when you are tracking time spent on various work tasks.
That’s why we highly recommend Clockify for small businesses.
HR software can be expensive and tracking time can be a bit of a headache. But when using Clockify, you can keep track of how long some tasks take, where you may be having the biggest “time sucks” and where you can afford to be more efficient.
Clockify allows you to track your time, allocate it to client work, and organize them by task or team member. It’s a great free way to generate reports on how your team’s time is spent on various tasks so you can know where to trim the fat, and where to increase resource allocation.
Check it out at https://clockify.me/
Semrush: Best Free Social Media Calendar Tool
Last but certainly not least, we love using Semrush for various digital marketing tasks. Semrush is a free tool that can be used for basic keyword research, social media content scheduling, and even more extensive tasks like domain management and backlink building.
Though many of these features are limited on the free version, Semrush may have the best free social media scheduling tool on the market.
Their social media management tools can be really helpful and include everything from a social media poster to allow you the ability to consistently post to your content channels, but also includes a social tracker, basic social analytics, and a social inbox for managing reputation.
Check it out at https://www.semrush.com/features/social-media-marketing/
Thanks for reading our 5 favorite free tools for growing your digital marketing on a budget. If digital marketing on your own feels a bit overwhelming, consider reaching out to our team of digital marketing experts for a free consultation call. We like to meet you where you are and work with you to help grow your business as fast as possible.
Preston is a true Idahoan with a potato addiction. He grew up as the oldest of 5 and had an interest in marketing since he was a kid. He would often notice differences in messaging and imagery between Idaho and Utah when traveling across state boundaries. The marketing fascination eventually took him to Utah Valley University where he is currently going to school for Digital Marketing. He has worked with many small Utah businesses in industries like stormwater, construction, software, web design, and shipping/logistics where he helped in a variety of tasks to help businesses succeed in their marketing endeavors.
