Don’t Overlook These 20 Free, Undervalued Marketing Web Resources and Strategies
One Great List of the Best Free Marketing Resources Curated by our Marketing Experts
by Alyssa Rice
Executive Summary
Are you struggling with a reduced marketing budget? Has your boss cut down on your marketing expenditures? Is your company just starting out? Do you like getting something for nothing?
This list includes free resources that are at the tips of your fingers. You’ll be surprised to know that most of these have been available for years.
Google My Business is one of the best things you can do for your company. It’s #1 on our list for a reason!
Okay, that might be a little dramatic, but hear me out.
A Google My Business listing allows your customers to find you when they are doing a Google or Google Maps Search. They will be able to find directions to your company, phone number, contact information, your website, photos, and reviews.
It will appear at the top of your browser, whether you’re on a phone or computer. It is an informative, convenient, and free way to get your information out.
2) Review Sites
There are a few companies that allow you to create a listing for your company and customers can write reviews. It is similar to Google My Business, but it gives your company some more exposure.
Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Capterra are some examples of these sites. Reviewtrackers created a list of 52 review sites, all organized by category.
3) Buffer- https://buffer.com/
Buffer is a social media planning platform. You can manage one Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn account with ten posts scheduled for free.
This tool will let you schedule a social media post for a later time and it will post it for you. It's free to use, and it costs only $10 to upgrade to unlimited posts, which is not a bad deal. It will track your post analytics with easy-to-read graphs and insights.
4) Canva - https://www.canva.com/
Canva is one of the easiest, customizable, and enjoyable Photoshop-type application on the web. It offers thousands of free templates that you can just quickly edit and voila! You have a perfect graphic for your company’s social media and website.
If you want to buy a Pro plan, you get the opportunity to make a brand kit, 420,000 templates, and 75 million photos, videos, audio, and graphics to use.
5) Screaming Frog- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Screaming Frog is a SEO spider tool that will “crawl” your website and extract data to find SEO issues.
With the free plan, it will find broken links, review meta robots, analyze page titles and meta data, and more, while also avoiding you a headache.
6) Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla marketing is innovative, out of the box, low cost marketing for the purpose of exposure. The idea is that it’s a fraction of the price, but has the same or a better effect. It typically happens in new, smaller businesses because of their smaller marketing budget.
Guerrilla marketing can use unique, zany, funny and outside-the-box ideas to get the word out. With Guerrilla marketing, you are only limited by the crazy ways you can think of to promote your company, and get free exposure and press when your idea gets noticed.
As an example, a not-so small company, Domino’s Pizza, once used stickers to leave a sidewalk imprint ad on the ground. It worked!
If you need help coming up with your own Guerrilla marketing ideas, this link shows 100 examples of guerrilla marketing through pictures.
Wix allows you to build and customize your own professional website, all free of charge. It offers gorgeous templates and aesthetically pleasing features. Every user will find some template that they love.
8) Social Media
There are many sites that make it easy for businesses to set up pages. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are some of the most popular sites that businesses create a presence on.
All of these sites offer insights and analytics to help you examine your content and decide what’s working and what’s not working.
This blog by Pixel Fish explains the differences between these four sites and examines what site is right for different businesses.
9) White PapersA white paper is a research report that presents a problem and provides a solution. Ideally, it should be fair, unbiased, informative, and authoritative.
It will provide value to your customers, allow you to be seen as a thought leader, and provide technical expertise. They have proven to be very beneficial for SEO and website traffic. This article, “What Is a White Paper and How to Write It” explains how you can utilize this strategy for your organization.
10) Inbound Links
Inbound links are links on other web sites and social media platforms that get people to your website.
There are many strategies to build them, like getting mentioned, doing do-marketing activities with brands, getting your press releases to be published in publications, and guest blogging, which is explained next. Inbound links are great because they usually last for years.
11) Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is writing a blog post to be published on another blog as a featured author. Guest blogging will give you solid backlinks (links back to your web site from the blog), grow your awareness and following, and help expand your professional network.
It will just take a little extra time on your part, but it will be worth it. Learn more at Guest Blogging 101.
12) YouTube Channel- https://www.youtube.com/YouTube has proven to be a great way to promote your business. 5 billion videos are viewed everyday on YouTube, so it is an extremely popular app to create content for.
Only 9% of businesses have a YouTube account, which is a perfect untapped resource for your company to look into.
13) Podcasting
You can start a podcast about your business and industry and provide value to listeners. Or, you can appear as a guest on other podcasts to talk about yourself.
BuzzSprout, SoundCloud, and Podomatic are free podcast hosting apps. Audacity is a great editing application to edit your episodes that is also free.
14) Typito- https://typito.com/
Videos have become a huge part of social media in the recent decade, and Typito will let you edit videos while adding text, creating transitions, and more, all for free!
15) Comment Marketing
Some businesses use a strategy of comment marketing by commenting on other business’ posts. Of course your valuable, informative, or clever comment will typically include a link to your web site and your great solution to a problem. The goal is to provide a valuable, beneficial comment to create trust, awareness, and exposure for your own company.
Check out this Complete Guide on Comment Marketing by Raven.
16) Positive ReviewsTestimonials create trust with prospects. 92% of customers read online reviews before buying.
Ask your current customers for reviews. They can email them to you directly or write them in your Google My Business listing. Most platforms make it easy to send a link to your best customers so they can leave you a (hopefully) positive review.
17) Hotjar- https://www.hotjar.com/
Hotjar provides valuable analytics about your website.
The Basic free plan includes snapshot recordings of your visitor’s behaviors, snapshot of heat maps, and creates reports that can be downloaded at any time.
18) Grammarly- https://www.grammarly.com/p
Grammarly corrects your writing. They have a free option that identifies spelling and grammar errors. It doesn’t hurt to try!
19) Blog Title and Topic Generators
Are you ever out of content ideas? These free and super-fun tools will offer you spicy, fresh, and sometimes humorous blog and subject titles: Portent’s Content Idea Generator, and Impact’s BlogAbout Generator are our personal favorites.
20) Wordtracker- https://www.wordtracker.com/
SEO is a crucial aspect of marketing your business. This free tool allows you to find new search words, see how certain keywords are performing, and what keywords your competitors are using.
Resources
How to Benefit from Google my Business https://www.netatlantic.com/resources/articles/youve-created-your-google-my-business-account-how-to-benefit-from-your-listing
Twitter v. Facebook v. Instagram v. LinkedIn, by Pixel Fish https://blog.pixelfish.com.au/twitter-vs-facebook-vs-instagram-vs-linkedin
More Free Web-Hosting Services https://themeisle.com/blog/best-free-website-hosting/
What is a White Paper and How to Write It https://cointelegraph.com/ico-101/what-is-a-white-paper-and-how-to-write-it
100 Guerrilla Marketing Examples https://anerdsworld.com/best-100-guerilla-marketing-campaigns
Email Marketing Articles and Ideas https://www.netatlantic.com/resources/email-marketing-articles