Whether you're looking to improve your productivity, increase your Facebook reach or find link building prospects there are tools out there that can help make your life easier. Some are expensive, some don't work all that well. But there are also lots of great free tools out there.
We've rounded up 71 of the free tools that our marketing team use most often and love. They cover just about every situation a marketer could think of.
A/B Testing
Optimizely allows you to test changes to your website - anything from the colour of your buttons to a whole new page layout - and so make your marketing more efficient at converting visitors into customers. The great thing about it is you don't even need to know HTML to get started; just pop a snippet of code onto the pages you want to test and see your ideas come to life.
We love Optimizely because it lets us show our clients - and our clients show their bosses - exactly what kind of an impact the changes we make are having on their businesses. It's also very easy to analyse the results of your experiments.
Content - Creation
It's easy to quickly create quizzes with Qzzr! Unlike a lot of online survey tools Qzzr lets you customise your quizzes to make them visually appealing; Qzzr also makes it easy to share your quizzes via social networks and to analyse the results.
A great tool for overcoming writer's block. Give the Topic Generator three terms you'd like to write about and it gives you a big list of potential blog titles. It doesn't suggest the most engaging headlines, but this tool is very useful for helping you come up with ideas for blog articles.
Grammarly is a Chrome extension that corrects grammatical mistakes, poor vocabulary and spelling errors in your browser. You can use it to make sure your posts on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter are grammatically perfect, as well as your blog posts and web pages.
Another grammar-checking tool, Correctica checks all the content in your website, blog or your newsletter and identifies your grammatical or spelling mistakes. It works with attachments , instead of web documents as Grammarly does, so it's great if you prefer writing your web content in Word before putting it online, or if you're not a fan of Chrome.
With Madmagz you can create easily your magazine online. Just choose a starting template then customise it by choosing things like image location and the font. The free version is online-only and hosted with Madmagz, but if you upgrade to the paid version you can host it yourself and create a PDF version.
A very useful tool for tailoring your content to your audience. Textalyser gives you an indication of the frequency you use words in a document and the complexity of the text. This means it's also very useful for identifying what the search engines will think are the keywords in a document.
Content - Research
Google Alerts is a free and useful tool for staying informed about the content that is published daily on the topics that interest you. It helps to save time because instead of manually searching every day for new articles are published on a topic you can be informed automatically. You can keep track of any topic or keyword you like and so get alerts for your industry, mentions of your brand, or even find out when your competition are being talked about.
Pocket is aptly named; instead of trying to look after a huge list of bookmarks for articles you want to keep to read later you can pop them in your Pocket. It's a very useful tool because all the articles you save in Pocket are accessible offline and are sync'd across all your devices.
Feedly is our favourite content curation tool. It lets you pull together content from blogs, online magazines, and newspapers and collect them into themes in any way you like. This means you can easily find useful content to learn from and share.
With Buzzsumo, you have just to enter a term and it gives you all content that was published related to this topic, including articles, infographics, videos, and posts. Our marketing team loves Buzzsumo because it tells you the number of social shares each piece of content has had, helping you to identify (and possibly emulate) those that have been a runaway success.
Buzzsumo lets you filter posts by date, country, language, and type of content, which means that you can tailor the results to your market and resources.
Design - Colours
This one's addictive. Kuler makes it easy to create colour themes that will help your infographics, websites, printed media, or animations look great, without you needing to know anything about colour theory. You can choose from themes that others have created or start with your own colour.
Design - Fonts
Font squirrel provides a huge number of free webfonts for personal and commercial use, great for helping your website stand out from the crowd.
Another great collection of webfonts that are free for commercial and personal use. The main difference between Google Fonts and Fontsquirrel is that with Google Fonts you use Google's content delivery network, but with Fontsquirrel you host the font files.
Design - Image Editing
Photofiltre is a free tool that allows you to easily retouch and make adjustments to your pictures or create effects with filters. It's a great alternative to Photoshop that means you don't need to pay an expensive license if you're a small business or don't edit images regularly. It's not as efficient as Photoshop but does allow you to do simple touch-ups easily
Another free Photoshop alternative. Pixlr has drawn lots of good comments from the media and is an easy way to retouch and modify your pictures.
Design - Stock Photos
Our go-to source of stock imagery, Pixabay offers a huge number of high-quality photos. Unlike some free stock imagery sites it also has vectors and illustrations and lets you filter by the type of images.
A curated stock photography collection whose founders have a definite mission: to kill off the boring, generic, or useless stock photo. Delving into their archive requires a paid account, but if you sign up for a free account you'll get ten high quality photos emailed to you every month that you can download and store yourself. Death to Stock Photos is a great way of building up a (legally acquired) archive of photos to use on future projects.
Like Death to Stock Photos, Unsplash are a high-quality stock image site that email you regularly with curated collections. Their selection is smaller than DtSP's but their website is more useful, letting you filter and sort photos.
Design - Visual Media
Canva is great for creating any type of graphical media without bugging a designer. You can use it for business cards, banners, posters, brochures, and more, but we use it most often for social media cover images and for infographics. If you want to use Canva's premium graphics you'll need to pay - only $1 a time - but we've found the free graphics are perfect for most situations.
Like Canva but specifically for creating infographics. Piktochart helps you to turn your data into charts and your stories into graphics. A free account will give you access to some templates, but to get to them all you'll need a paid account.
Another free tool for creating infographics, Easl.ly lets you turn your plain text into visual content by just choosing a ready-made template and popping your content in. It's not as flexible as Piktochart or Canva but it's very quick and easy to get creative results from, and you can upgrade to a Pro account to access more templates.
Design - Web Design
Adobe's own free alternative to designing websites - and anything else - in Photoshop or Illustrator, Sketch has loads of vector shapes, painting tools, and Typography. It also connects directly with Creative Cloud, letting you export files straight to other Adobe products, and with Behance in case you want to show off your creation.
The one downside with Sketch: it's only for Mac users. So far we've not heard anything about a PC version (sorry, PC users)
Wayback Machine lets you look at cached versions of websites from the past. Another slightly addictive tool, especially when you discover how embarrassing some companies' websites were back in the day (I mean, who puts a sliced vegetable on their website. I mean come on… oh wait, that was us).
Design - Wireframes & Sitemaps
Cacoo helps you to create easily diagrams like flowcharts for business processes or sitemaps for websites. It also lets you share your diagrams with your team and clients and chat with them.
With the free version you can share your diagram with 15 users who can also edit it. You have a credit of 25 sheets and you can only export your diagram in a PNG format, but if you upgrade you can have as many diagrams as you want and export to PNG, PDF, or SVG format.
Gliffy helps you to create professional flowcharts, wireframes or UML diagrams. With the free version you only have the ability to create 5 diagrams, but you do get access to all of Gliffy's features.
Email
MailChimp
The only (or at least only that we can find) tool that lets you send email broadcasts to more than 1,00 people. Lots of our clients use MailChimp to send their email newsletters, since you can upload your own templates, split test emails, and set the date and time you want your broadcast sent. If you hook into their spinoff Mandrill you can even use it to send transactional emails.
Simple-Mail allows you to send your email campaigns for free to up to 1000 contacts. You can very easily create your emails through a lot of available templates, all of which can be customised. Simple-mail isn't as flexible as MailChimp and doesn't let you send as many emails for free, but it is very easy to get started with.
Management & Collaboration
Dropbox is the perfect tool for when you're working with people on the same project, as it lets you store, synchronize and share files with your teammates. It lets you share different folders with different people - very useful if you're working on several projects at the same time - and you can even create a password for each folder. It also sync's across devices, meaning you can take it anywhere you go. Unlike Drive it's not made by Google, which can be a big positive point for some people.
Google Drive is another cloud-based file storage system that sync's across all your devices. It's also where all your Google Docs are stored, so if you use that suite of tools instead of Microsoft Office then it's very convenient.
A great tool for representing knowledge, information and ideas with shapes, arrows, and colours. Xmind is an easy-to-use mind mapping tool that lets you quickly and easily find information.
Skype is very useful if you would like to communicate with your customers, co-workers, and partners who are in different locations. You can set up online meetings or audio-conferences with the Press by Skype. This tool allows you to do business worldwide without having to travel the world.
Slack is an instant messaging app, similar to Skype but dedicated to companies. It is built around the idea of channels, which might correspond to topics, teams, or projects. You can have conversations with everyone in these channels, even sharing images and videos with your colleagues and linking to tools like Twitter, Dropbox and Google Drive.
Doodle is a simple, intuitive way to get people together for meetings. Because it's cloud-based you can sync across devices to see the results of your poll at any time
Evernote is very useful for planning, collaborating, and note taking. It's especially useful for teams because you can share and discuss your notes in real time with your co-workers. Our designers use it like a collaborative scrapbook - storing and sharing inspiration - and our project manager Ben uses it for all his note-taking in meetings. Like the other cloud=based software in this list Evernote sync's across your devices automatically.
Trello is an online card-based project management tool that lets teams organise work and share tasks. By creating boards, sharing them between your team, and creating lists of cards you can plan and organise projects and campaigns. There are lots of extensions, like Scrum for Trello, and it integrates with tools like Toggl and Harvest to bring all your project management tools together.
Pro tip: use the calendar view to see your milestones.
Productivity
If you write your content in a tool like Microsoft Word, Evernote, or Google Docs you've probably experienced the weird formatting issues that come up when you paste your text directly into your CMS. Pasting into Word2cleanhtml first corrects these problems and creates clean HTML for you that you can paste straight into your CMS.
SEO - Analytics
Moz offers a huge range of tools to help you do things like identify your most inked-to pages, the best keywords for you to target, potential link building opportunities, and analyse your social media performance. It's probably our favourite SEO tool set out there, although the free versions of their tools can be rather limited.
Moz also have one of the best communities in the content marketing business and create great guides, webinars, and blog posts.
Google Webmaster Tools lets you monitor your site's performance in Google's search results, but it does so much more than that as well. It lets you know about Google's indexing patterns for your website - very useful if you've got a 10,000+ page website - whether there are any broken links, errors, manual penalties applied due to infringement of Hummingbird rules, and other important health-related data.
It's not just for webmasters though, it's also for marketers: now that keyword data has all but gone from Google Analytics it's the only place you can find out which specific keywords are driving people to your website.
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google's suite, although obviously their data comes from their search engine. Like Google Webmaster Tools, Bing's offering tells you about crawl issues on your side, data on links back to your website, and whether your sitemap is being viewed correctly. It also tells you about the number of impressions and clicks you get through which keywords in Bing - helping to plug a gap in your otherwise very Google-centric analyses - and gives you page-by-page SEO advice.
This is a big suite of Excel tools and formulae that will make any analysis of your SEO work in Excel much easier. For example, it gives you a formula for automatically converting a URL into a META title and another that creates a search engine friendly URI from your content.
Google Analytics is pretty much the most powerful free web analytics tool out there. It creates a huge number of reports on your visitors, their behaviour, and the technology they use. It's great for tracking everything from your day-to-day activity to multichannel campaigns - as long as you put the time in to learn how it works.
One of its most important features is that it lets you tie revenue back to specific activities, whether your website is driving direct sales or leads.
Page loading speed has its own place in the search engines' algorithms and can be a factor in potential customers' decisions about whether or not to buy from you. But how fast is your website compared to others?
Page Speed Insights lets you analyse each one of your pages' loading speeds, giving you suggestions to improve their quality and loading times. Very usefully it analyses your website with both a desktop and a mobile browser, giving you user experience improvement and speed-boosting recommendations for both.
Want a quick way to evaluate the marketing effectiveness of your website? Put your URL into Hubspot's Marketing Grader and it will take a look at your content, mobile friendliness, social media activity, blogging activity, email marketing, lead nurturing, and a whole lot more. As well as giving you an overall score Marketing Grader gives you recommendations on which areas to concentrate your efforts on so they have the biggest impact.
Analytics tools like Google Analytics and Piwik tend to focus on a page-level view of your website, but sometimes that's not enough. Enter MixPanel, which is built to analyse individual events, not pages (I know, Google Analytics uses events as well, but they're just an add-on). It's particularly loved by practitioners of lean analytics and growth hacking.
The free version includes 25,000 data points per month, after which you'll need to start paying.
A straight-up Google Analytics alternative. It gives you many of the same reports as Analytics, but without you having to share your data with the search giant.
SEO - Keyword Research
This is one of the essential tools for a good marketer! Google Trends helps you to know the volume of searches for a range of keywords and phrases, helping you to see whether your keywords match the terms used by real searchers and to predict how those search volumes will change in the future. One of its great features is comparing keywords against each other to see which will be the most useful for you.
The new ""Google Trending Searches"" feature also lets you see the most popular topics or keywords sought our by customers on different days, months or years; very useful for putting together your content marketing strategy, editorial calendar, or social media plan.
Ubersuggest does exactly what it says: it suggests an uber-long list of keywords for you. Choose a language, enter a base term, and Ubersuggest will bring back suggestions and alternatives from real web searches. You can use these for SEO or to get inspiration for your next blog post.
Google's Keyword Tool helps you find the perfect keywords for your content by letting you compare search volumes and competition levels. Be warned, though: some of the numbers are a bit hazy, so don't treat them as the absolute truth. Combine this tool with Google Trend for bigger and better insights.
SEO - Link Building
This tool collects all the information you could ever want about the links to your (and your competitors') website into one dashboard. This dashboard gives you useful graphs like your link growth over time, what sort of domains those links are coming from, and the anchor text of those links.
With the free account you get in-depth data about one website and upgrading lets you add more sites.
SEO - Technical
Notepad++ is an efficient, minimal code editor that's widely used as a free alternative to Adobe Dreamweaver. Its interface and plugins mean that it's great for beginners and experts. Particularly useful is the ability to colour-code your markup depending on which language you are using.
Want to add schema.org markup to your website but confused by all the possibilities? The Schema Creator website is for you. It helps you create semantically correct microdata using form fields, including writing the code you can give your developers.
Screaming Frog is an SEO-focused web crawler that analyses key technical elements of your website so that you can identify and correct and mistakes or problems. Much faster than going through each page manually it can identify your page titles, META descriptions, h1 tags, broken links, and other important on-site SEO factors. The free version lets you crawl up to 5,000 URIs, which includes stylesheets, images, scripts, and of course HTML documents.
As learning more about your competitors' SEO strategies is always useful you can also point Screaming Frog at their websites to learn more about how they use on-site SEO.
Lighter than Screaming Frog, Link Sleuth was originally built with one job in mind: analysing broken links. It's expanded over the years and although it's not as feature-rich as Screaming Frog it is completely free, so if you have a site with more than a few hundred pages it's a very useful alternative.
This browser extension, built by Yahoo!, analyses the performance of your web pages to determine the factors that might be causing them to load slowly. It gives you a grade between A and F so you know how fast your site is compared to others and shows you any errors or issues on your pages, giving you suggestions on how to improve page load speed.
Social Media - Analytics
Social Mention analyses the content published on social networks and lets you see the sentiment around it. Searching on a keyword or phrase indicates whether there is generally positive or negative feeling around it, as well as showing you the key influencers discussing a topic.
This means it's not only possible to tune your content marketing efforts to how your audience feels - nobody wants to put out a blog post about why a product is great when it's being slammed on social media - and to the topics that key influencers in that audience are discussing.
Twitter Analytics gives you statistics about your activity on Twitter so you can measure the impact and power of your tweets. It also tells you about trends like follower growth, where your new followers have come from, and the engagement of your audience. An essential tool for any business using Twitter.
Twitter Analytics is great for telling you about how your tweets are performing, but not so good at telling you about people. That's where Followerwonk comes in. It tells you everything you could ever want to know about a Twitter user - where they are, when they tweet, what topics they tweet about, who they follow - and even lets you compare stats on influencers and topics. It's useful for everything from finding new people to follow to comparing yourself with your competitors.
Topsy helps you to identify what's trending in your industry, letting you see the most popular tweets, hashtag users, and influencers in your area. You can filter by language and by content type to find inspiration.
YouTube Analytics gives you information about how many people have been watching your videos and when, how long they've watched for, and where they've come from. It also tells you about how well your audience is engaging with your videos, giving you useful statistics like the number of likes and comments on each video.
Facebook Insights gives you a wealth data about the performance of your Facebook page and posts, letting you see which posts are getting you the most engagement, when the best time for posting is, and other valuable information. Exporting the data to Excel will give you a lot more than using the online interface.
Statigram is very useful if you're serious about using Instagram as a marketing channel. It gives you a range of information about useful statistics such as the number of Likes and comments on your photos, your daily follower gains and losses, and who your most active followers are.
Social Media - Management
Tweetdeck is Twitter's official scheduling and management tool. It lets you monitor multiple accounts and schedule tweets for them all in the same place. Tweetdeck also lets you see activity from your lists, monitor hashtags, and track topics.
One very nice feature is the ability to share accounts with team members so that you can all schedule your tweets in the same place, making managing large teams much easier.
This tool lets you schedule post publication across your social networks, letting you plan when you want to publish your posts and giving you some very useful performance data about those posts.
"If This Then That" is a tool that lets you create a chain of actions across online services like social media and email, helping you to automate your online marketing processes.
There are lots of uses for IFTTT, but some useful recipe ideas include creating a "thank you" tweet for new followers, updating your Twitter cover image automatically when your Facebook cover changes, and saving photos of business cards automatically in Evernote
Social Media - Research
With tweepi you can see your Twitter followers and control who you follow on Twitter, including showing those people who you have previously followed and those who have unfollowed you. It's useful for finding people in your audience who you're not yet following and cleaning up the who you follow based on their activity.
Tweepi can be used for free but it's worth paying low price for premium to get rid of the ads.
Tweepi offers a lot of possibilities such as find the unfollowed people that are involved in your topic or clean up people that you follow or people that follow you.
Socialshaker is a monitoring and scheduling tool for social networks, letting you create campaigns and schedule your posts on Facebook or Twitter.
You can also visualise the best times to publish with a colour code.
Mentionmapp is a tool that lets you map the connections between Twitter users, helping you to identify useful people like you your followers' followers, the hashtags your followers use, and which influencers are the most closely connected to you.
Social Media - Sharing
Sumo is a free social media sharing tool that is useful for increasing social shares of your content. It's free and easy to implement.
Sumo also have a range of other useful tools, both free and paid, that are worth taking a look at
Surveys
Survey Monkey allows you to build online surveys for free, helping you to understand your customers better. The free version gives you lots of useful features - their partnership with MailChimp, for example, means you can email everyone on your mailing list without being put straight into their spam folder. The reports Survey Monkey give you are also very useful
The drawback of the free version is that you can only have up to ten questions in your survey and only collect 100 answers, meaning that if you want to do some serious survey work you'll need to upgrade.
Google Forms allows you to create questionnaires and surveys for you customers to test out product ideas and collect feedback. Unlike Survey Monkey Google Forms lets you ask as many questions and get as many responses as you like, but you can't personalise the survey design.
