Grow your Business with These Free Online Tools

Whether your business is big or small, you need to have a strong online presence to be successful. There are tons of tools available that can help ensure this success, and you don't have to spend a whole bunch of money in order to be successful in your digital marketing efforts.

In this article, we'll be going over some of the best free online tools that are great at keeping you connected with your customers.

Google My Business

Google provides several free online tools for businesses, one of which is Google My Business. Google My Business is the most widely-used directory where customers can find and contact their local companies, and you can use this tool to increase your online visibility easily.

When a consumer searches for a local business on Google, such as "vet clinic Jacksonville" or "vet clinic near me," Google displays the Google My Business listings, and the searcher is able to see the most direct and relevant content, such as the business's:

• Name, address, phone number, and website link,
• Map and location,
• Operating hours,
• Photos,
• Reviews and ratings.

Google My Business listings appear before the standard search results, therefore gaining more exposure to searchers. Search results may list the GMB listing for your business as well as your webpage in the standard search results depending on your ranking. That means you'd have two first-page results at no cost!

MailChimp

According to the 2018 results from the Data & Marketing Association, every one dollar spent on email marketing returns an average of $32 into your pocket. So, if you think email marketing is a thing of the past, you might want to reconsider.

It doesn't matter if your business is large or small, or even if your email list is large or small, you always want your emails to look appealing and professional to the customer. MailChimp's basic version is an excellent free online tool that can simplify the way you send emails and has tons of features to help them stand out and look great! Here are some of the features of MailChimp's free version:

• You can send emails to up to 2,000 contacts.
• You can send up to 10,000 emails.
• You can integrate MailChimp with 200+ apps.
• You can choose from 100 amazing templates.
• You can automate order notifications, abandoned cart emails, and welcome emails.
• You can get basic reports on your email campaigns.
• You can also access all of these features and more on their mobile app.

While MailChimp does a fantastic job at helping you with your emails, it also has some great social media options as well, including popup forms, Instagram and Facebook ads, social posting, and much more.

With the basic version of MailChimp, you also have access to their "Content Studio," which is an easy-to-use tool that helps you create professional and eye-catching marketing campaigns. You also have the option to upgrade to receive more email and marketing options, but the free version alone has enough features for almost any business, big or small.

Smylelytics

Do you find that navigating through your website's Google Analytics is time-consuming and confusing? Google Analytics is packed with data about your website, but it's crucial to actually understand this information to know how your site is performing.

Smylelytics is a free business tool that turns your data into photographs by taking all of the data from Google Analytics and turning it into something you'll actually enjoy looking at. Not only is the service free to use, but it's also easy to understand as well.

All you need to do to get started with Smylelytics is:

• Enter your Google Analytics email address.
• Choose a theme.

Now your bi-monthly data and emails will be turned into images! You'll receive an email that will give you a simple breakdown of how your website is performing as a marketing tool.

Hootsuite

In today's world, it's crucial for your business to have a social media presence. However, it can be hard to manage all of your content across all of the social media platforms, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Alignable, and Instagram. Hootsuite is a popular social media management tool that offers a great bunch of features in their free version alone, making it an enticing option for businesses that are on a budget.

When you sign up for Hootsuite, you'll get a dashboard that will organize all of your social media profiles in one place, which will end up saving you a lot of time and effort. Hootsuite has other great features as well, such as:

• Allowing you to schedule your social media posts.
• Allowing you to send private messages to target groups on any of the social media platforms your business uses.
• Allowing you to gain insight into how your social media posts are performing through reports and click summaries.

No longer do you need to spend hours getting everything together for each social media platform! So, before you get burnt-out trying to keep up with your social media presence, check out Hootsuite.

Canva

In order to be successful, you need to capture your audience's attention, and you can definitely do this with the help of Canva. Canva is a free online graphics editing software that helps you create eye-catching social images, graphics, ads, illustrations, graphs, and so much more.

Canva has an easy-to-use drag and drop feature, making designing your graphics quick and easy. With Canva, you'll also have access to:

• A variety of fonts,
• Millions of photos, stock images, and illustrations,
• Amazing photo filters,
• And a plethora of shapes and icons.

This is definitely a great tool that you'll want to add to your online marketing toolbox. Not only can you create beautiful visual content quickly, easily, and for free, but they also have short online courses available, so you can learn and improve upon your design ability.

Answer the Public

If you want to keep your audience engaged and coming back, you'll need to have amazing content. But to do that, you need to know what searchers are really looking for, so you can stay at the top of their search results. Answer the Public is an excellent free online tool that can help you with that.

This tool uses the results from Bing and Google to provide you with insight into your customers. With Answer the Public, you'll be better able to understand what your audience is looking for, so you can then provide them with the answers to their questions.

Start by typing a phrase related to your business into the search box on Answer the Public's homepage. You'll find that your results are then sorted into the following categories depending on what people are typing into search engines: how, will, can, where, when, which, what, who, why, and are.

You'll be able to see what questions are coming to your customers' minds, and you can then start thinking of great ideas for content that will bring them to your site.

You can use the results from Answer the Public to create landing pages, blog posts, social media posts, and much more. With the help of Answer the Public, creating content that your audience will be excited to read has never been easier!

Feedier

Understanding your customers is the key to maximizing your marketing efforts, but getting into their heads can be difficult and time-consuming. One way you can get to know your customers is through online surveys. However, most of the time, people don't want to take the time to fill out a survey because they are busy or impatient. Therefore, you need to entice your customers with surveys that are engaging and rewarding for them.

Feedier is a free online tool that makes designing surveys easy. This tool has a clean, modern interface that's easy to use. When creating a survey, you can choose a game-like survey experience, or you can opt for a more professional one. Whichever one you choose, Feedier allows you to create enticing surveys that can increase your engagement rate.

The free version of this tool includes features such as:

• Custom branding on every survey.
• 1,000 emails per month.
• Unlimited response feedback.
• Customer support.

You also have access to free live demonstrations with experts who will walk you through how this tool can help your business collect feedback from customers.

YouTube

If you're looking for a powerful online marketing tool that will drive traffic to your website, video marketing is the way to go, and when you think of videos, your first thought will most likely be of YouTube.

More than 50 million users are watching more than 5 billion videos a day, making YouTube a goliath in the online video space. What's more amazing is that YouTube is free for anyone to use, including businesses. YouTube can be an excellent tool for increasing your ranking, and if you haven't already hopped on this ship, you need to!

While creating videos may or may not cost you money, uploading them to YouTube won't cost you a dime. These videos can then be shared in email marketing campaigns, across numerous social media platforms, and even on your website itself. Here are some of the fantastic benefits that come from using YouTube for your business:

• You can reach people around the world.
• You'll get an increase in website traffic.
• You'll get more attention from this marketing tactic.
• You'll also have the ability to go viral.

Wrike

There are many options out there when it comes to business project management tools, but it can be challenging to find one that will both improve the efficiency of completing projects and not sap all of your business's money. Wrike is a great tool, with both free and paid versions. Their free version includes many useful features that help you manage your business's projects, including:

• Managing workflow.
• Communicating with each of your teams.
• Developing plans across multiple teams.
• Viewing real-time reports for each of your projects.
• Access for up to 5 people.
• File-sharing capability.
• Task management tools.
• Spreadsheet view.
• 2GB of storage.

Wrike gives your team a dashboard which can be used for all project, plans, communication, reports, and priorities. You may find that once you start using the free version of Wrike, you really like it and want more features. If you decide to opt into their paid version, you can upgrade for as little as $9.80 / month.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Having a slow website can negatively affect many things, including bounce rates, conversion rates, SEO rankings, and dwell times. Customers don't like slow website pages, so it's essential to ensure your website is quick to load. Faster is better when it comes to loading times, but Google recommends that your website loads in less than one second, which is quite fast.

So how do you figure out how fast your website is? To find this out, you'll need to test it. While there are multiple different website speed tests out there, Pingdom is one of the most comprehensive and well-known.

Start by putting your address into Pingdom. From there, Pingdom will deliver results separated into four sections: history, performance grade, page analysis, and waterfall breakdown. The results from this free speed test can help you see where you need to improve in terms of speed, so you can avoid low rankings and high bounce rates.

And while the speed test itself is free to use, Pingdom also offers a variety of other solutions, resources, and products.

Takeaway

Your business doesn't need to be rolling in cash to have a strong and successful website presence. There are a variety of free online tools out there that can help both big and small businesses with getting their brands out there and organizing internally as well. Growing your business and increasing the reach of your marketing efforts may be easier than you think with these tools!