It is a marketer’s secret weapon (not that secret!) to use free trials and even freemiums to promote a product. This comes as a win-win, the user enjoys the flexibility of trying out a product without buying it and then decides whether or not it is valuable to them and the promoter builds a bigger audience in order to show how great a new product is and ultimately convert more leads into customers.
In this blog post, we are going to focus on freemium, and which ones can really help you optimise your marketing efforts while minimising your costs, especially if you are at the starting point of your business or your size is small and you don’t need premium solutions just yet.
If you are not familiar with the term, freemium is the combination of the words free and premium, and it indicates that a user can enjoy the standard features of a product, and a fee is only required if the user wants to scale up.
Free Marketing Tools
Graphics – Canva Free: There are 250,000+ free templates and 100+ design types (social media posts, presentations, letters, and more) to begin with. This tool is very easy to use for everyone; you don’t have to be a graphic designer to understand how to use it properly. You can even collaborate with your teammates. However, if you want to optimise the way you work and create consistency across all the collateral you use, you could get the pro account for £8,33/month and get the first month free. This will allow you to create your own brand kit and upload your own fonts and logos and use the one-click design magic resize along with numerous other features. Both versions could work depending on your needs.
Social Media Scheduling – Hootsuite Free: Save yourself a great deal of time by scheduling your social media posts. Hootsuite is very straightforward to use and it is free for up to 3 social media accounts, one user and it allows you to schedule up to 30 social media posts at a time. There are more free similar scheduling tools like Buffer.
CRM – Hubspot Free: With one easy-to-use platform, you get to have everything you need to manage your customer relationships. It also includes sales engagement tools, quote functionality, reporting and analytics, and you can integrate it with numerous other apps your team might be using.
Email Marketing – Mailchimp Free: If you are now starting and you still have a limited amount of contacts- to be more precise up to 2000- you can enjoy Mailchimp’s free version. It offers a selection of templates and basic reporting and the moment you start growing as a business it is very easy to switch to the essentials version and pay $9.99/month for up to 50000 contacts.
Marketing Analytics – Google Analytics: As we have mentioned in our past blog posts, you should always track your performance after a new campaign to understand how it has performed and if you need to make any changes. The perfect tool to do that, that is absolutely free is Google Analytics. You can find and customise reports regarding who visited your website, where they are from, what interests they have, what channels drive the most traffic, you can understand the conversion rate and so much more.
There are numerous other free marketing tools out there that you can benefit from. These five are enough to build your initial marketing strategy if you are a very small business or if you are just starting out. Even if you don’t feel comfortable using these tools, it is highly recommended to test them or in other words, get the free trial in several tools before you decide which one is the best for your business.