Master the Marketing Game: 5 Free Small Business Marketing Tools (2023)

Marketing can be a daunting and overwhelming task for even the most seasoned professionals. With constantly evolving technology, an endless sea of platforms and channels, and the ever-increasing pressure to stand out from the crowd, it's no wonder small businesses are struggling to keep up. The good news is that there is a plethora of marketing tools available for free that can make your life easier and your campaigns more effective.

Here are a few of my favorites:

My Favorite Free CRM: EngageBay 

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a software tool that helps you manage your interactions with customers and leads, from initial contact to post-sale follow-up. Essentially, it's a fancy database that helps you track who your customers are, take notes on your interactions with them, track where they are in their purchase decision, and ultimately, improve your relationship with them. It is a must-have for all B2B companies to support their sales and marketing efforts.  

EngageBay is free for up to 250 contacts and has a lot of powerful options included for tracking your deals and managnig your relationship with your customers. The free option also includes email marketing and nurturing options and has great dashboard features to manage the touchpoints of all your clients. Landing page design, lead generation forms, SMS marketing, and automation are included for upgraded accounts. Their paid versions compete head-to-head with much larger companies such as Hubspot and ActiveCampaign, but at a much more affordable price for small businesses.

My Favorite Free Copywriting Tool: Grammarly

Grammarly goes above spell check to highlight errors in your grammar and punctuation, as well as make suggestions to improve clarity and engagement. Their upgraded plans detect plagiarism and make suggestions on how to improve your writing.  It also gives insight into your writing such as it's readability level, vocabulary choice, and it's word count and speaking time length is very helpful for video and podcast development!

Every article, email, blog post, and piece of content I write is first completed in Grammarly.  

My Favorite Search Engine Optimization: SEMRush

Search engine optimization (SEO) is never done, sigh. Google updates its algorithm around 500 times per year. Though most of those updates are small and inconsequential, they add up.  If you want your website to be found, you need to keep up with it. I find it both exhilarating and exhausting. 

SEMRush is my absolute favorite tool to use to see how my site is performing. I can benchmark my site against my competitors, check out my website's authority score, track keyword rankings, and even get ideas on how I can improve. I also use their backlink tool to gain insight into sites I can network with to gain links to my site and gain more traffic.  

Two of my other favorite free SEO tools include:

• Google Search Console:  This is a great tool to analyze how users are finding your site through their search queries report. This powerful tool not only shows you how often your site popped up during a search (impressions), but also shows how often they clicked on your site (CTR: Click Through Rate).
• Google Analytics: By installing a tracking code on your website, Google Analytics reports website traffic and details about who your visitors are. You can see what country your traffic is coming from, traffic acquisition data (direct, paid search, organic search, etc), and even determine engagement by details on how long a visitor spent on your site.  

My Favorite AI Tool: ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a game changer. It is an AI tool that, for now, is free to use (I would expect it won't be very soon). Similar to a search tool, you input queries and it goes to work. Unlike Google search results, ChatGPT creates full articles, writes code, creates original images; you name it, it does it. 

My favorite way to use ChatGPT is to outline content and speed up the writing process. For instance, if I want to write a blog on ways businesses can create better business goals, I query the app, copy-paste the generated content into Grammarly, my favorite writing tool, then make edits and insert my original content until it's just right. An article that once would have taken me several hours can take less than one.  

My Favorite All-in-One: Hubspot 

Hubspot's free CRM gives you a visual dashboard so you can see who your customers are, sort by which deals you've won or lost, who has appointments scheduled and track your entire pipeline. It allows you to build websites and landing pages, has blog tools, and includes automated emails. My favorite part? You can get insights into your customer's behavior, see which pages they visited, track which resources they downloaded, and so much more.

This explanation is incredibly simplified as Hubspot is an extremely powerful marketing and sales tool that does it all.

What other free tools would you find helpful for marketing your small business?