Budget-Friendly Tools to Help Exceed Your Marketing Goals

Everyone is navigating this new reality of life. From virtual events and meetings to significant budget cuts, we marketers are forced to be extra creative while being budget conscious.  Majority of firms have been forced to alter their norm and change their marketing strategies for the remainder of 2020. We compiled a list of eight tools to assist your team as you work to develop a new strategy and meet and exceed your marketing goals. Here is a brief synopsis of each tool.

Hubspot

Hubspot is an inbound sales and marketing tool. Although you can pay for extended use and robust capabilities within the program, Hubspot offers a free CRM. This is a very effective tool to start getting your lists and contacts organized. In a couple quick steps, you can upload your entire database to their CRM via an excel spreadsheet.

Hubspot also offers marketing automation. For a monthly fee, which varies depending on your package, Hubspot provides a variety of email templates, email workflows, chat features, conversational bots, landing pages, and more.

Canva

Not a graphic designer? No problem! Canva offers over 8,000 free templates, over 100 design types, including social media posts, presentations, infographics, letters, free photos and graphics. This tool is extremely easy to use and provides the creativity with minimal skill required from the user. For advanced capabilities, they do offer paid packages that include resizing designs, advanced branding capabilities, more template designs, and photos.

Click here for more on the benefits of Canva.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is a great tool for optimizing your website for search engine optimization (SEO). The plugin provides a check list of items that ensures your content is optimized. The free version includes the following:

• Keyword optimization – allows for 1 keyword
• Website Indexing – tells Google what your page is about
• Readability check of content
• Duplicate content check

For an advanced package, there is a minimal annual fee of $89. This is an effective tool for the SEO beginners who have some experience but could use some SEO guidance.

Hotjar

Hotjar helps you analyze the traffic on your website by visualizing user behavior. This tool measures clicks, taps, scrolling behavior and displays the user behavior through heatmaps on the website. If you are interested, they offer a free trial for 15 days with no credit card required. This tool is perfect for visual learners and is a great tool to share with your partners who may not fully understand the numbers behind website analytics.

Grammarly

Need assistance when writing emails, communications, website content, or marketing collateral? Grammarly is your new best friend! Grammarly is an AI powered writing assistant. You can write directly in the software, upload a document, or install on Google Chrome. The free software will provide you with a performance score, notify you on a variety of errors (advanced notification available in the paid version). Grammarly is extremely valuable for anyone, even copywriters.

SEM Rush

SEM Rush is another SEO tool to add to your marketing toolbox. This software will provide an SEO audit, keyword tracking, organic traffic strategies, linking audits, competitive analysis, and more. SEM Rush can assist your marketing efforts beyond just SEO. The other capabilities include social media, paid search, content, and market research. A free trial is available.

SpyFu

SpyFu is a great way to “spy” on your competitors. Learn their keyword strategy, organic ranking, and any advertising in the last 14 years. Make their successes yours. Turn their leads into yours. The basic package is just $33/month.

Trello

Organization is key with accounting firms. We all know without organization it is challenging to manage projects, proposals, meetings, and the list goes on. Trello is a project management tool that allows your team to collaborate with each other. This tool allows you to assign tasks, deadlines, and upload documents. Trello also offers the assistance of a robot feature, giving automated reminders and calendar commands. The best part of this tool? It’s free!

These tools are effective for any marketing team especially those with a limited budget or who have spread themselves too thin. Between managing digital marketing efforts, drafting proposals, creating designs for collateral, recruiting, and the list goes on, it can be hard to stay on track. These inexpensive tools are very valuable and can take the heavy bricks off your shoulders without breaking the budget. For more tool suggestions, read Hubspot’s blog post, “The 61 Best Marketing Tools for Every Business and Budget.”

Good luck in your marketing efforts and navigating the best tools for your firm.