Exploring Free Digital Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business

If you are in digital marketing business, it is of utmost importance for you to understand the nuances of today's increasingly competitive online small business market. You get the best out of your digital marketing business if you truly understand your customers and your competitors well enough. That is in addition to being fully abreast of the latest market trends in your industry. This is a very useful knowledge to have no doubt. However, unless you have the right tools, all the digital marketing knowledge in the world may not be of much help in your business. If your business is still in its early growth stages, and cash-strapped to boot, it is best to rely more on free digital marketing tools to grow it.   

Find below some of the best free digital marketing tools that can help grow your business to new heights.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is one very useful tool you can use to find relevant influencers within your business niche. You can do this by analyzing bios, follower counts and engagement rates on popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Ubersuggest
 
Ubersuggest helps to provide insights into what people are actively searching for around the world. This it does by reviewing summaries of Google's "suggest" or autocomplete results in various countries. These reviews reveal some insights into what people are actively searching for worldwide within any industry or niche.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite digital platform allows marketers to easily program social posts and maintain a posting schedule weeks or even months in advance. It is a very useful tool for blog schedules and targeting. Hootsuite helps to provide the useful insights to enable marketers compare how well their social posts are performing in comparison to those of their competitors.

Trello

Trello is one very useful tool to track milestones and facilitate project collaboration. Digital marketers can also use it to remind themselves of deadlines in order to stay on top of their digital marketing campaigns, objectives and schedules.

These digital marketing tools can only be of help to your business if you know what you are doing and what your targets are. Granted it is a matter of trial and error before you discover which tools work best for you, such tools that help to drive engagement, build web traffic and hit your targeted Key Performance Indicators, KPIs, are the tools you really need. By taking A/B test of every campaign and changing the tools for each campaign, you can determine what works and what doesn’t. If the results you are getting from free tools are not satisfactory, you can try paid tools if you have the resources but, with a note of caution. Avoid paid tools that do not allow you to try out their full applications first before purchase.

Leveraging Free Digital Marketing Resources to Grow Your Business

What is most important in today’s hugely competitive small business marketing world is to understand your customers and competitors as well as the latest market trends. If you fail or neglect to do this, it will be very difficult for your business to have any traction amidst the stiff competition in the digital marketing world. One way out is to leverage free digital marketing resources to gain valuable knowledge with some tricks and tips to boot even if your business is so cash-strapped as not to have enough funds to invest in big-ticket marketing courses. If your business is still in its early growth stages, you can access free digital marketing resources online to aid your business growth. Continuing education is very essential in a fast-moving industry such as digital marketing. You must take full advantage of that in your own business if you want the business to grow. 

What to Do

First, you must be willing and open to learn new digital lessons no matter how experienced you already are. Next is to take concrete steps to enroll in free digital marketing boot camps and courses. These courses will provide you an excellent base knowledge of how the digital marketing industry functions in practical terms.

Here are some free resources that can be of help to you for a practical, hands-on knowledge that you really need to grow your digital marketing business.

Google Analytics Academy

You can hardly do any meaningful marketing business online without the aid of Google resources. Google Analytics Academy appears to be one of the best entry-level courses for digital marketers. From it, marketers learn how to collect/collate market data. Next is, how to analyze the data, and how to derive useful insights from it to help make useful decisions for business growth.

MOZ Academy

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a hugely challenging marketing technicality for most marketers. This is why most marketers hire experts to do it for them. Without proper SEO on your website, getting organic traffic from search engines is near impossible. Having a working knowledge of SEO is helpful to all digital marketers. MOZ Academy helps to provide marketers a great crash course on the basics of SEO.

Ahref's Blogging for Business

Blogging is one very useful marketing strategy which most marketers now rely on to promote their businesses online. Ahref's Blogging for Business is an amazing resource for mastering the basics of blogging. You learn from it such skills as blogging for business-to-business, B2B, business-to-consumer, B2C, SEO keyword research skills and even copy-writing skills.

HubSpot Academy

HubSpot Academy provides short crash online courses, which generally take several hours to complete. It teaches all aspects of modern digital marketing skills/principles. These include email marketing, social media marketing, inbound sales, and content strategy design among others. 

Hootsuite Academy

In Hootsuite Academy, you have access to a slate of free and paid certification courses depending on what you want. However, in this Academy, only the paid courses offer certifications. Courses available include, social media advertising, content marketing and social media strategy building among others.

Social Media Influencers

There are many free digital marketing lessons to learn if you search out and follow social media influencers in your industry. By entering industry keywords and phrases into the search boxes of popular social media platforms like, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. you can discover influencers and thinkers within your industry who have high engagement. These are the ones to follow. You will learn a lot by not just following them, but also taking very active part in their conversations.

Trusted Marketing Blogs

Marketing blogs are other free online resources you can learn from. These blogs are a great way to keep up on industry news. You have free access to digital marketing industry news if you follow trusted marketing blogs and online news websites. It is advisable to diligently, shop around to find out which platform provides the most insights for your specific business niche. Some expert marketers recommend trusted marketing blogs from Search Engine Land, Moz Blog, Content Marketing Institute and Search Engine Journal among others as very useful digital resources.