Every smart entrepreneur understands the hustle of digital marketing. Trends change quicker then you can finish this sentence and in order to keep up, businesses, big or small, have to change right along with them. If you’re a small business, you may not have the time or access to premium tools so instead, you must turn to scrappy solutions to get your products out there. For that reason, I compiled a list of free tools that can add value to any company, not matter the size or experience.
First, let’s start with the most important aspect of any marketing campaign (so you can truly utilize these tools effectively): the customer. The customer, or user, is the one who ultimately decides if a search result or content on your website is relevant and of high quality. Although having keywords on your blog is important, the days of stuffing keywords into a page thoughtlessly, hoping to rank high in a Google search, is over. The algorithms are much more sophisticated then they use to be at understanding high-quality (hard links, original content) and relevant content. For that reason, given enough time, the best stuff on the interent (highly original content) will emerge on top. Users will then see it, engage with it, and further it’s visibility on Google.
Seth Godin puts it best: “marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”
This is why it’s so important to understand your audience. When you understand who they are, what they’re interested in, and how they search online, you can deliver personal and relevant content no matter what social channel you’re on. These tools will help you effectively understand who your customer is online so you can be there with them throughout their journey.
GA is the most widely used website analytics platform on the market and there’s a big reason why. It has tons of features for identifying target customers:
Demographics (Age, Gender)
Geo (Language, Location)
Behavior (New vs. Returning, Frequency & Recency, Engagement)
Technology (Browser & OS, Network)
Mobile (Devices)
Interests (Affinity Categories, In-Market Segments), and much more.
When you plug in your industry, business size, and region, this website tool will help you uncover various marketing channels that your customers are most likely to use (and in what order) throughout their purchase. It also helps you uncover how your various marketing campaigns may have a different impact on your customers and understand what percentage of users view Generic Paid Search (and other channels such as Brand Paid Search, Email, Referral, Social, Organic, etc.) at the beginning, middle, and end of their search journey.
This tool digs into Twitter analytics so you can see audience insights, search bios, compare users, analyze Twitter accounts, track and sort followers, and much more. With the free version, you can view social authority rankings, see followers and their locations, and know when followers are active.
This is a great tool for keyword search. You can plug in any keywords and see the real life questions about your product, website, or service. The questions are broken up into who, what, when, where, why, which, are, and how modifiers. On of the many features includes being able to view a master list of questions in alphabetical order, and export them for your own use.
This online keyword tool uses Google Autocomplete to generate hundred of relevant long-tail keywords for any topic. Other features include toggling between Google, YouTube, Amazon, and the App store. You can also change geographic location and language setting very easily.
In premium, this Planner allows to search for keyword ideas, get historical keyword statistics, check out the performance of a list of keywords, and create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together. This tool will help you understand how often a user is searching for a term on a monthly average.
This type of tool shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to its total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. Two highlight features include a graph showing search-term trends, and popular statistics by countries, regions, cities, and language. This terms can then be easily compared in order to understand how your site, product, or service stack up against the competition.
This simple tool allows you to tally up how many times a URL has been shared across almost any social media platform or website that allows you to bookmark or share (reddit, pocket, etc.).
In summary, there are so many tools out there for identifying and reach your audience online, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Start with the tools above and see where they take you.
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