And a friendly reminder not to neglect your marketing budget.
Whether you’re a small business owner or a marketer at a large corporation, chances are you’ll have to make magic happen on a tight budget throughout your career. In a challenging economy, marketing budgets are often slashed; a risky practice if your business isn’t equipped with effective and affordable tools. The following resources are our top picks for free marketing tools that you can use to create compelling content and drive sales for your business.
Canva
Canva is a web-based content creation tool that is democratizing design. By no means is it a replacement for a Graphic Design degree or certification, but it can empower professionals that know little about design to create effective brand assets for omni-channel distribution. Canva has countless templates for social media graphics, flyers, presentations, videos, signage, and much more. Canva also partners with FedEx Print services so you can customize Canva templates and have them printed from a FedEx location near you. Canva is a must-have for small business owners and marketing teams with limited resources.
Adobe Lightroom
Adobe Lightroom has been an industry standard in photo editing for years. The Lightroom application is free to download, with some additional premium features available with a paid subscription. The free features are all you need to ensure all of your photographic imagery is up to standards and looking consistent. Lightroom allows you to enhance photo lighting, experiment with filters, add effects, adjust color grading, and more. Even if you’re taking photos with your smartphone, Lightroom can help take them to the next level.
Unsplash
If taking photos isn’t your thing, or if you’re looking to supplement your photos with quality stock photos, then check out Unsplash. The Unsplash library is curated by independent creators and all of the photos are free to use without a license. Unsplash credits the creators and will provide you their information so that you can do the same. It is easy to search their database of photos for the specific business function you’re looking to showcase.
Google Analytics
So now you have everything you need to create compelling content, you just need a way to measure success. Google Analytics is a powerful reporting tool that you can integrate with your web domain for free with your Gmail account. Use Google Analytics to measure web traffic, review referral sources, analyze e-commerce conversions, and more. Understand what platforms or websites leads are navigating to your site from or explore what keywords they are using to find your site on Google. There’s no limit to the number of web performance indicators you can evaluate using Google Analytics, and it will help you recognize what types of content drive people to your site and what pages they tend to navigate to and from.
Free Consultation with MKM
By no means is this an exhaustive list of all of the free marketing solutions that are out there today. At MKM, we’re here to help you make sense of it all and we can provide a list of recommendations tailored to your unique business needs. Click here to schedule a free consultation today.
