There’s no shortage of paid marketing tools out there. Every good digital marketing manager will have a few favourites that they swear by. And this is almost always followed by a wish list of tools they hope to one day add to their arsenal, budget allowing.
But what about the free marketing tools? Free doesn’t always have to mean low quality. Take a tool like Buffer, for example. This is without a doubt one of the best social media scheduling tools you can use – and it’s completely free. If you are only managing social media accounts for one company, you’ll find the offering is perfectly sufficient.
We dug deep this month to come up with a list of three totally free tools that every marketing manager should have in their tool kit. Rather than just scratch the surface and tell you three free tools, we dug a little deeper to find the tools that would deliver the most value. Starting with…
Google Analytics
We’re willing to bet you’ve barely scratched the surface of what Google Analytics has to offer. Maybe you pop in every now and then to see how your organic traffic compares to last month. Or maybe you get a little fancy and look at your most popular landing pages. By going beyond the basic setup, there’s a whole world of possibilities right at your fingertips.
The first thing you should ensure you have in place is conversion tracking. There are many different ways you can set this up. And it’s equally relevant for e-commerce and enquiry-based websites.
Once you have conversion tracking in place, assign a value if it isn’t linked to e-commerce orders. To establish your value, you need to work out how much an average order is worth. Then calculate your average conversion rate from enquiry to customer. You can then assign a value to each and every conversion.
Another handy free tool you should make use of is customer journey mapping. This can offer valuable insight into where you are losing attention. It can help you to understand which landing pages bring the most value to your website.
It can also help to shape your customer personas as you gain a better understanding of the types of customers landing on your site. Not bad for a completely free service!
Hotjar
Ever wondered how your customer’s interact with your website? Launched a new landing page and want to know if your PPC traffic is even making it past the fold?
There’s a completely free tool that will tell you this and so much more. Hotjar is a user experience insight generator that collects feedback on everything from where users click on the page to how far down they scroll.
Why would you even care about this? If you’re determined that your website needs updating and you’re struggling to get approval from above, this is the kind of hard evidence that will back up your case.
Impress your bosses with impressive heat map reports showing exactly how visitors interact with your content. If the only contact form is at the bottom of the page and you can prove that only 20% of website visitors are scrolling down that far, you have the evidence you need to make powerful changes that will ultimately impact the ROI of your website.
Hotjar offers incredible functionality for a free service. Upgrades are available if you want to remove recording limits, but for light users, this probably won’t be necessary. Just be sure to update your privacy notice as this service will require an additional tracking code to be added to your website.
FAQ Fox
If you really want to connect with your audience, you need to be able to answer the questions they are asking. This kind of research takes time and patience, or a little help from the FAQ Fox.
This tool allows you to scrape websites for questions related to your target keywords. You could search websites like Reddit and Quora for the questions that matter the most to your audience.
This kind of research can then feed into your content marketing strategy, allowing you to create topics based on insight rather than an inkling. It can also be helpful for populating your FAQ page to make the customer journey more streamlined.
These are just some of the free tools available to marketing managers to help them connect with their audience and gather valuable insights. Don’t forget that Auburn also offers a completely free website audit. Why not discover how well your website is optimised for your target keywords?