“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”
For new entrepreneurs on a budget, there’s always this dilemma: What if there’s not enough dollars to spend on marketing?
Looking into what free marketing tools can do is an option to consider.
Here are five to get you started:
Bitrix24
CRM, email management, client management, telemarketing, quotes, invoices, file sharing – there’s a ton of things involved in marketing.
If you’re the modern marketer, you know the importance of having technology on your side to automate certain tasks and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
But … freelancer management, email marketing, telemarketing, CRM, file sharing, task tracking, internal communication, collaboration – that’s a lot of tools to worry about!
Enter Bitrix24, a social collaboration platform equipped with 35+ work tools to help with your marketing efforts.
It comes with:
- an activity stream so your entire team is on the same page as to the status of your marketing activities,
- CRM for client and contact management,
- time in/time out functionality to track logged hours,
- chat and video tools,
- task templates,
- reports,
- document management system,
- calendars,
- and so much more.
Instapage
Landing pages are an essential part of a winning inbound marketing strategy.
You don’t only want qualified traffic to your site; you also want your visitors to convert into leads, then, paying customers, and ultimately, brand ambassadors.
And that’s what landing pages help to accomplish.
Instapage allows marketers, regardless of their design know-how, to create functional landing pages within minutes.
Its template library carries 70+ landing page designs you can customize at will, and its WYSIWYG editor lets you instantly visualize how your landing page would look like.
The app has the necessary tools to effectively A/B test your landing pages, and ready-made integrations with business tools such as MailChimp, Google Analytics, Qualaroo, Salesforce, and Twitter make it easy to gain insights into your customer base.
Instapage has a completely freemium option, and paid plans depend on your monthly unique visitors.
MailChimp
It’s one of those rare things that people claim to have lived and died, and lived yet again.
Email isn’t dead, and email marketing is very much alive and well, as evidenced by the following statistics:
- For every $1 investment on email marketing , the average ROI is $44.25. (Source: Email Expert)
- 73% of marketers consider email marketing as core to their businesses. (Source: Salesforce)
- According to 40% of B2B marketers, leads generated via email marketing are high quality. (Source: Mark the Marketer)
- enables you to design your email newsletters,
- send and save your email templates,
- perform A/B testing to identify the best techniques or email formats,
- gauge your email marketing performance through reports, among others.
Bananatag
You sent a prospective client an email. A week and two follow-ups later, you’re still not getting any reply.
You don’t want anybody, let alone a prospect, to brand you as the obnoxious type, so you decide against sending another follow-up.
Still … whatever the heck happened to your emails?
Bananatag is an email tracking service that takes the guesswork out of the emails you send by notifying you of opens and clicks.
When an email is opened, you know that:
- first, your email was successfully delivered,
- and second, your email subject line did what it’s supposed to.
Bananatag offers three options to track your emails: Gmail or Google Apps, Microsoft Outlook, and all other email clients including mobile email.
The app is free for up to five email tags per day. Paid plans start at $5 per month for up to 100 tags per day.
Pixabay
Just how important are images to your content?
As per this infographic by MDG Advertising:
- Articles with relevant images generate 94% more views than those without.
- In selecting and purchasing products on an ecommerce site, 67% of consumers say that the product image’s quality is “very important.”
- 60% of consumers are highly likely to contact a business with an image showing up in local search results.
So yes, without a doubt, images are very important.
Pixabay is an international community that shares public domain images. It’s where you can obtain high-quality copyright-free images to accompany your blog posts, articles, and other content.
The site carries 380,000+ free images that you can use in printed or digital form, and even for commercial purposes.
Final word
While it’s true that you can’t afford to scrimp on your marketing spending to get the word out about your product or service, it’s also true that what you don’t have you can’t spend.Until you have some serious cash to fund your online marketing initiatives, the above free tools are worth looking into.
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