41 Free Options for Popular Paid Marketing Services and Tools

The list of tools you use — often referred to as a marketing stack — probably covers a variety of different uses and needs, everything from social media marketing to content to email and lots more.

Related Post: 8 Different Types Of Traditional Marketing

Is it possible to have all these great tools without paying a cent?

It was a fun challenge to come up with a way to build a $0 marketing stack, and to find free alternatives to popular paid tools and services. I’m grateful for all the amazing companies out there that offer such value for so little. Here’s the list I came up with for free alternatives to paid tools. I’d love to know what you think!

What’s in the stack?

The $0 Marketing Stack: Free Alternatives to Paid Tools

For a quick overview, here are the tools I found that seemed to be great, free options for some popular paid services.

1. Social Media Scheduling: Buffer

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Sprout Social, MeetEdgar

Perhaps our best time-saving tip for social media marketing is scheduling posts ahead of time for your social profiles. You can batch the social media marketing process: Do all your curating and composing in one go, then spread those updates out across the next day or week.

How we use Buffer: The forever free plan at Buffer lets you connect a profile from each network (one from Facebook, one from Twitter, etc.) and schedule ahead 10 posts for each network. If you share three posts per day, that means you can stay three days ahead all the time.

We’ve found a lot of value in the hand-picked content suggestions (thanks to Courtney who finds all that great content!), which are easy to read and then add.

• Hootsuite (free for your first 3 social profiles)

2. Design: Canva

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Photoshop, InDesign

Over 2 million people trust Canva to help with creating images for social media, blog posts, and practically any other use you can imagine.

How we use Canva: The optimized sizes and built-in templates make it fast and easy to create tall pictures for Pinterest, rectangular ones for Twitter, square for Facebook or Instagram, and any size in between. We find Pablo (another free alternative) to be great for Twitter-sized images of 1,024 pixels by 512 pixels, and Canva to work really well for all else.

Also free:

• Pablo
• Gimp
• Pic Monkey

3. Real-time Analytics: Google Analytics

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Chartbeat

Google Analytics does pretty much everything in terms of tracking the traffic to your website. It’s a huge, monstrous amount of info, generously given away for free.

How we use Google Analytics: As a social media marketing team, we appreciate the ease with which we can see traffic from the different networks (Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals). We can check the engaged reading time by looking at Time on Page. And for the real-time stats of who’s on our site right now, we can simply click on Real-Time > Overview.

Also free:

• Go Squared (free for the first 100 visitors and 1,000 data points)
• MixPanel (free for 25,000 events per month)

4. Website optimization: Hotjar

Great, paid options if you can swing it: KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg

Let’s say you’re curious how your visitors are actually using your website — where they click, how far they scroll, etc. Tools like Hotjar can show you exactly what your visitors are doing, via heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and visitor recordings. Hotjar also has options to analyze your funnel and to insert messages and surveys to your visitors.

How we use Hotjar: User research can be incredibly powerful stuff. I find great value in seeing how someone interacts with blog posts. How much of the post do they read? Where do they pause? What do they click? Seeing all this information helps me design my posts in a clearer way.

Also free:

• Inspectlet (free for 100 recorded sessions)
• SumoMe Content Analytics

5. Reports: Simply Measured

Great, paid option if you can swing it: SumAll Reports

Simply Measured offers enterprise-level analytics and management for big brands and their social efforts. It has a wide array of free tools for the rest of us, too.

Among Simply Measured’s reports are these:

1. Twitter Follower Report
2. Twitter Customer Service Analysis
3. Facebook Fan Page Report
4. Facebook Content Analysis
5. Facebook Competitive Analysis
6. Facebook Insights Report
7. Instagram User Report
8. Social Traffic Report
9. Traffic Source Report
10. Google+ Page Report
11. Vine Analysis

Phew! That’s a lot of reports!

How to use Simply Measured: Each of these reports costs no money, although Simply Measured will ask for a Twitter follow or a Facebook mention in exchange for the free report. You can save loads of time in pulling reports from this one location as you seek to gain insight into where your social media efforts have been going lately. They’ve got all six major social networks covered: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Also free:

• Followerwonk
• SumAll’s free version

6. SEO: Open Site Explorer

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Moz Pro

is a great free tool for checking your domain and page authority and also for checking how many links you are getting and from which source. You can also check your competition. But the free version only gives you 3 reports per day. Signing up offers unlimited reporting on all your links, keywords, and competitors.

How to use Open Site Explorer: Plug your blog’s URL into Open Site Explorer to see the high-level stats like page authority and incoming links. You can also click over to the Just-Discovered tab to see recent links and Top Pages to see which pages on your site get the most links.

Also free:

• SEO Book
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider
• Keyword Tool

7. CRM: Charlie

Great, paid option if you can swing it: SalesForce

A lot of the best CRM tools (Customer Relationship Management) help you stay abreast of your current and future customers. Think of a futuristic address book. The best ones are loaded with features and information. Charlie is a bit of a quick-and-easy hack to get to know a person really well.

How to use Charlie: Intended as a tool to help you prep for meeting new people, Charlie gives you a full run-down of a person — social media profiles, biography, interests, big news, etc. — by looking at your upcoming calendar or running an email address. If you’re wanting info on a single person ad-hoc, simply enter their email address into Charlie, and they’ll tell you everything.

Also free:

• Norbert

8. Email inbox insights: Sidekick

Great, paid option if you can swing it: Cirrus Insight

Sidekick can track your outgoing email to tell you when the recipient has read your email. It’s a very, very advanced read receipt. Plus a lot more.

How to use Sidekick: You can gain a lot from the Sidekick notifications about your email, and there’s also a lot of value that Sidekick adds to your inbox itself, with a sidebar of information on everyone who sends you a message. The sidebar includes links to all the person’s social profiles, plus a stream of recent tweets.

Also free:

• Banana tag
• Signals

9. Landing Pages: WordPress

Great, paid options if you can swing it: Unbounce, LeadPages

For those who are running their website or blog via WordPress, perhaps the fastest and easiest way to set up a landing page is simply to create a new page. If you blog with WordPress, the blog content you create falls into Posts. The static content for landing pages — “Download our ebook,” “Sign up for our webinar,” etc. — can be made quite easily via Pages.

How to use WordPress: Build a new landing page in WordPress, and use this as the focal point of your social media ad campaign or your social media updates. Certain plugins like WooDojo even let you hide the content in your sidebar for particular pages, which could be a great option for minimizing the look of your page.

Also free:

• Unbounce free plan (includes Unbounce branding) (more)