There is literally a smorgasbord of free online marketing tools that can help you propagate your company's message, while also simplifying how your marketing team measures the performance of individual marketing campaigns. Most are easy-to-use, easy-to-track and just as easy-to-implement. So, what are some of these free online marketing tools that can help you save valuable time?
1. Google Analytics and Google Developer Page
First to make the list is a zero-cost solution every digital marketing professional must use; Google Analytics allows you to build customized dashboards where you can define specific benchmarks that track your own unique metrics.
You can use analytics to track total expenditures, cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and click-through-rates (CTR) of individual online pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. You can also analyze your bounce rates and time-on-site for separate pages of your company's blog and website, and or define separate dashboards to track which landing pages work best for mobile and desktop users. In fact, Google's Developer Page will provide insight into how you can make your website more mobile-friendly. A mobile-capable website will rank higher in online searches.
Google Analytics provides essential data
on all things marketing-related.
cc image courtesy of Blue Fountain Media of Flickr
2. AddThis and ShareThis
Looking to fully engage your audience, leverage your strong social media presence and take advantage of your brand champions and influencers? If so, then it's time to benefit from two stalwarts of social media engagement; AddThis and ShareThis are two social media propagation tools that help users share your most engaging content. They're free, easy-to-use and might just help make some of your content go viral.
3. Wordtracker and Google Adwords Keyword Planner
Putting together a budget-friendly, keyword-specific PPC campaign is never easy. However, Wordtracker is one service that can make this often daunting pursuit a much easier process. This free online marketing tool will produce upwards of 100 keyword-phrases complete with estimated search volumes for every phrase entered. Once you have that info, you can then move to the Google Adwors Keyword Planner in order to put a cost-effective PPC campaign together.
4. SEO Workers, Lipperhey and DIY SEO Report Card
SEO Workers, Lipperhey and DIY SEO Report Card are free online search engine optimization (SEO) analysis tools that allow you to better understand your website or blog's popularity. They'll provide a full report card on SEO health relative to given keywords and your website's URL. You'll get a complete grade and assessment allowing you to pinpoint areas of improvement.
Even the best SEO professionals need a little insight.
cc image courtesy of Surminga WN of Flickr
5. Pingdom and Webpagetest
By now all online marketing consultants understand how important page speed load times are. To help, both Pingdom and Webpagetest allow you to input your website's URL and get an immediate summary of your website's performance. Both of these are invaluable resources when looking to decrease parse times and lower page load times. You'll be able to test your website from multiple worldwide locations, while getting a summary grade and in-depth page analysis summary.
Don't make your job more difficult than it needs to be. Use these tools to simplify how you measure results. They'll help make your job easier while also saving you valuable time.
