As a marketing professional and enthusiast, I am always interested in the latest and greatest marketing tools that become available.
Each marketing tool has a different, specific benefit to your business. Be it recording new content such as tutorials, helping with the day to day management of your business or aligning your sales and marketing departments, marketing tools are crucial to the overall success of your business.
2020 brings a fresh slate for your marketing, whether you’re a small start-up, or a global titan marketing tools can help propel your business to the next level.
We’re going to list what we believe to be the 20 best free marketing tools for businesses of all shapes and sizes to use going forward in 2020.
Google Search Console –
This tool measures the traffic on your website through search as well as flags and fixes any issues to ensure your ranking does not decline.
You can check backlinks, see your most popular pages and keywords, track clicks, submit your sitemap (very important for indexing on Google search) and more. And it’s free!
Google Keyword Planner –
A personal favourite, we know writing content can be quite mundane and unflattering at times but at the end of the day, if you want to be successful, it has to be done.
The Google Keyword Planner is a free Google ads tool that allows you to search for keywords, highlight their average monthly searches and then see how they are likely to perform if you were to use them.
Great tool to help shortlist some keywords to base your next few content pieces on!
SEMRush –
If you ask any marketer what tool they know of for SEO, chances are they’ll mention SEMRush.
It tracks your keyword research, competitor keyword strategy, runs an SEO audit on your businesses’ blogs and looks for any backlink opportunities across your website.
SEMRush is the “go-to” tool for SEO research and is trusted by marketers all over the world.
HotJar –
HotJar is a very powerful tool that reveals the online behaviour and voice of your users. By combining both Analysis and Feedback tools, HotJar gives you the ‘big picture’ of how to improve your sites user experiences and performance/conversion rates.
The best feature for us is the heat map reporting, giving you the ability to see exactly how your visitors are interacting with your site.
Feedly –
Feedly is a news aggregator application for various web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android. It compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the users to customise and share with others.
A great tool to stay up-to-date with the goings on within your target market community.
Google Analytics –
Chances are, you’ve heard of Google Analytics. Google Analytics plays a pivotal role in measuring the success of your website as you can track monthly visits, look at your best-performing pages and much more.
No marketing plan is complete without Google Analytics. An essential tool for any business with a website.
Ubersuggest –
A simple tool to gauge what keywords you should focus your resources on. Simply enter your domain or main keywords to get a range of information including related keyword suggestions, search volumes, SEO & PPC difficulty, and even content ideas.
HubSpot –
Marketing automation is a huge breakthrough in the marketing world. Marketing automation gives you the freedom to be more productive and spend more time on work that really matters. Quality is not affected either which is probably why Marketing automation is seen as a ‘revelation’ to most marketers.
HubSpot is a global CRM and CMS company that is extremely successful. HubSpot has a workflow feature which allows you to automate any number of tasks in a concise flow. You can send internal or external notifications, change properties in your CRM and group leads together. The endless possibilities of HubSpot’s marketing automation earn it the best in competition badge for the marketing automation section.
It also goes way beyond that with further marketing tools, sales and customer service features as well. Click here to find out what else HubSpot can do for you.
Zapier –
Zapier is a global remote company that specialises in task automation. The online platform aims to connect various apps together to automate workflows easily within the business or even for personal productivity. With its powerful technology,
Zapier moves information between user web apps automatically, so users can focus on the more important work at hand. For example, you could have Zapiar automatically pull leads from your CMS when a form is completed and build out a leads list in Excel.
Databox –
Databox is another great way to measure the success of your business. Databox is easy to use and allows you to create custom dashboards to track KPIs from many different sources.
It allows your team to get an overview of marketing performance, identify trends within your industry and then act accordingly by making adjustments.
Canva –
A very simple creative platform for users who may not have the necessary design experience. Canva lets you create professional standard designs.
The user interface is very simple with drag and drop making it very easy to customise your designs, images and video sections.
Great for mocking up quick visuals for your social channels and website.
An essential if your lead designer is busy! And, most of the features are free, so it’s great for anyone who isn’t familiar with Adobe suite or on a small budget.
Ahrefs –
Another SEO tool that is criminally underrated. Ahrefs offers your business high quality competitor analysis, keyword, and content research.
Ahrefs also has a feature where you will be notified of new and lost backlinks, web mentions and keywords ranking.
Grammarly –
Available as a browser extension, web editor and a mobile app, Grammarly is your personal writing assistant.
Grammarly helps over 15 million daily users write nearly everything from emails to blog posts more clearly and effectively. Essentially, it’s spell check on steroids.
Screencastify –
The number one screen recorder for chrome. Screencastify allows you to record, edit and share videos in seconds.
Great if you want to easily show your developers an issue you’re facing, or creating web tutorials of your product or service. Quick, easy and free.
Medium –
Great platform to get some more free exposure for your blogs. Once you’ve posted on your site, be sure to upload the post to your Medium account as well. It’s less of a tool and more of a network/social media site.
Bloggers across the spectrum use Medium as it’s an opportunity for anyone to get exposure.
Medium also runs a newsletter that pushes some of their top picks – what’s great is they may reach out to you for your newest piece, or one of your oldest, and all of a sudden your blog has been sent to the whole Medium’s email list. Not bad for a free service!
SimilarWeb –
The Ultimate Market Intelligence Platform… according to their website. SimilarWeb is a service that provides web analytics for businesses.
The company offers its customers information on their clients and competitor’s website traffic volumes; referral sources, including keyword analysis.
As a browser extension it makes it simple enough to visit a competitors site and see some top level stats, it doesn’t always have data on sites, but at a click of a button it can provide useful insight when it does.
Hootsuite
One of the easiest to use social marketing automation and listening tools out there. Now, if you’re not using HubSpot this would be the next best tool to use.
You can login with several social media accounts in one place, schedule posts and create ‘windows’ that track conversations of keywords, hashtags and location. A free 30-day trial also gives you some time to decide if it’s for you.
Yoast –
Slightly different from the likes of SEMRush and Ahrefs, Yoast is an SEO plugin for WordPress. Whether you’re running a personal blog or you’re an SEO professional, Yoast is a powerful tool that can help you make your site as search-engine-friendly as possible.
BuzzSumo –
A platform that finds the content that performs best in your industry and allows you to collaborate with key influencers in your sector. Use these insights to generate ideas, produce high quality relevant content, monitor your performance and identify influencers to potentially work and engage with.
WebScraper –
Ever find you need to copy details from your webpages, word docs or another site? WebScraper is a great tool that saves you time copying & pasting during dull data entry.
This extension will simply pull that information off the page and put it into a CSV file. You can then go in and format the sheet however you see fit. No more manual entries, a great time saver.
Google Alerts –
Simply enter in a few topics you’re interested in and each time there’s some new news, Google will notify you via email. You can even set up several lists.
Great to keep on top of competitors, Google Alerts is also useful to stay on top of industry trends and to help you think of new content ideas.
Google AdWords –
A no-brainer if you’ve heard of it, if you haven’t then you’re missing out. Whenever you search for something on Google and you see the first few results with ‘Ad’ next to it – that’s a Google AdWord result.
The PPC (Pay-per-click) ads are great when your SEO isn’t up to scratch. Long-term you’ll want to optimise your content on your site so you naturally rank higher, however for the short-term Google AdWords gives you the opportunity to appear first – for a price of course.
Website Grader –
Another tool from HubSpot, this site provides a free grading of your website. The grading will tell you how your site is performing and where you can improve both technically and through SEO.
And there you have it. Our 20 best marketing tools for 2020 that are useful for businesses of all sizes. It’s a lot to use at once, but trial each tool and find which ones work best for you and your business.
Liked this blog? Check out our guide on How to Generate Leads that Close: The Ultimate Guide here.
