As online marketing is becoming more and more important for all businesses without exception, when you are a smaller business and looking to secure value with all your business activities and doing what matters in order to drive the business forward, it can be a minefield out there. 
However, there is help at hand with lots of free online tools to help with many aspects of your business. For example, design, planning, and organisation, SEO, email, managing your social media content, gaining feedback through online surveys and automating tasks. 
 
At it’seeze Web Design Watford, we have rounded up what we feel are 10 of the most useful marketing tools, and the great attraction for each is that they are free to use and help you get to the next stage of development. This content will only be shown when viewing the full post. Click on this text to edit it. 

Top 10 Free Tools 

1. Canva: a simple design platform, which is easy to understand and allows you to quickly create social media graphics, leaflets, business cards, and presentations. 
 
2. Trello: This is a dynamic project management tool, great for collaboration and keeping projects on time and organised. 
 
3. Ubersuggest: developed by Neil Patel, a digital marketing ‘guru’, this comprehensive SEO tool is ideal for finding keyword suggestions and content ideas for your website. You can also have a peek at what your competition is up to. 
 
4. Google Analytics: a free tool from Google that is often under-used. It really is a must for managing the performance of your website and seeing which pages are working well, e.g. with regard to visitor views and time spent on each page. This can be easily set up yourself or you can get your website provider to help. 
 
5. Google Search Console: a great tool from Google, with even more data on offer (as you would expect from the most used search engine out there by far!). You can use Google Search Console to monitor and maintain the position of your website in Google Search results. Again, a really useful resource and free! 
 
6. Mailchimp: a favourite free email marketing tool. To get you started for free, you can send emails to up to 2000 contacts in one go! Plenty of capacity for a typically smaller local business to get a consistent message out there and into the mailbox of clients and/or prospects, quickly. 
 
7. Bitly: I am sure you will notice when sending out some URL links to those you are in communication with, they can be long and rather off-putting, particularly to the recipient, who may decide not to click on it. So, this clever bit of software makes links shorter and more clickable. Try it, we assure you it works. 
 
8. SurveyMonkey: this allows you to create structured survey questions and gather feedback and ideas from your customers, in a way that can be easily understood and actioned. 
 
9. WhatsApp Business: WhatsApp is now commonly used between friends and is an excellent medium for communication. What is perhaps less well known is that there is a business version - a free to download app for the small business owner. You can create a catalogue to showcase products and services. Also, you can connect with your customers easily by using tools to automate, sort, and quickly respond to messages. As an example is the option of a short acknowledgement to any message sent. Great for when you might be in meetings or otherwise engaged. 
 
10. Tidio: something for your website. This is a live chat tool with the option of a chatbot to automate communication with visitors to your site and collect contact details for follow up. Visitors to websites are becoming more and more used to live chat communication as they are almost universally used by the bigger businesses on their sites. Worth trying. 
 
We hope that you will find the above list useful. There are plenty of free tools out there that can help you take your business from strength to strength, with many of them a great addition to a professionally designed website. If you would like to find out more about our recommendations for small business marketing or about the affordable web design services we offer, please get in touch with the team here at it’seeze Web Design Watford. 
 
Tagged as: Online marketing
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