10 Free Digital Marketing Tools for Your Local Business

In today’s fast-paced Internet world, small brands should know how to market their products and services online and with this reason, we have written these, “Free Digital Marketing Tools to Start your Local Business” just for you!

Digital Marketing for Local Businesses

Starting your digital presence in the Internet requires a well-planned digital marketing strategy. You need to plan ahead before letting everyone know that your business is already online.

Data shows that are already over 4.39 billion Internet users and 3.48 billion social media users as of January 2019.

So, it is really needed that before letting these people know about you, you should carefully plan your marketing strategy first. 

There are a lot of digital platforms in the Internet and these involves social media, messaging, e-commerce, video, blogs, and search engines. 

Because of these increasing number of platforms which people extremely use, business owners and digital marketers have already made different forms of marketing strategies that everyone can use digitally.

These digital marketing strategies include social media marketing, search engine optimization, omni-channel marketing, advertising, content marketing, search engine marketing, email marketing, automation, remarketing, and other new forms of digital marketing that usually includes the new form of Internet platforms. 

Take note that you should not use every strategy that are written in this article. Use each strategy accordingly. Keep in mind your resources, allocation, and human resources as these strategies needs research before starting each.

Free Digital Marketing Tools

Using strategies for your digital marketing campaign will really let you achieve your goals for your local business. However, if you don’t have much resources to buy the tools needed in each strategy, achieving this will really be difficult. This is why, here are the free digital marketing tools to start your local business!

1. Google Trends

Digital listening is an important aspect in knowing more about the trends in your industry. This is why you should use a Free Digital Marketing Tools called Google Trends. 

This is a trend search features that shows the popularity of a search term on Google’s search engine. With its insight, local businesses can create content that are optimized for search queries.

You should utilize this to provide better content to your audience. As this is a great tool in monitoring industry trends, this enables you to evaluate the popularity of certain terms, compare them against other industry keywords, analyze their popularity over time and in different regions, and show related industry keyword in coming up with new keywords which can be helpful in creating new content. 

Other things that you can do with this tool is to monitor your competitor’s position in Google. This tool allows you to compare your business to other brands and see how they’re performing against your local business. As your business gains bigger search audience, you can use this tool to make sure that you are a step ahead of your competition. 

Use Google Trends to start analyzing your digital marketing strategy, the channels that you use, the content that you create, and start analyzing how you can improve with the help of this tool.

2. Google My Business

If you’re just getting started with the digital marketing campaign of your local business, using Google My Business is a great place for you to focus first.

This is a free tool that lets you manage how your local business appears to Google Search and Maps. With a free Google My Business account, you can add your business name, location, official business hours, short introduction of what your business does, phone number, website URL, and social media links.

You should really give every information Google asks in order to provide better information to people who search about businesses in your locality.

This also lets you post photos and offers catering what makes your local business different. Your posts will become mini-ads or social media posts that shows in Google search under your local listing. An example is the post from Houlihan’s Cranberry where the company also added a “buy” button which acts as a  call-to-action (CTA). 

With this, you can monitor and reply to customer reviews and learn where and how people search about your business. Possible customers can ask questions directly into your local listing and this enables you to have a better interaction with them because every time a question is asked, you will then be informed about it in your email address.

This is really important in increasing your local SEO as more people research on local listings first before going to a local business. This is why when people search for “food establishments near me,” your local business should show up with all of your accurate business details. So, if there are changes in your information, you should change your Google My Business details and make sure that it is optimized and up-to-date.

Creating a listing for your local business is essential in building your brand by allowing them to see who you are, how to reach you, and what other people think about you. So, connect with your possible customers in this platform and make sure to provide them a better customer experience.

3. Asana

In starting your digital marketing strategy, you need a tool that would help you monitor the tasks and processes of your business. 

This is why you need to use Asana, a project management tool, that will help you track every aspect of your business.

With this tool, you can map each step of your project and organize all the details of your business in one place. You can add a project and include tasks, subtasks, tags, key person, details, deadlines, and other information needed in a task to complete the project. Any of your stakeholders can also highlight whether the task is complete or still in process. This way, you can easily track each of the needed tasks before completing a project.

This tool also lets you visualize the stages of your project with its boards, timeline, and calendar feature. 

Lastly, this lets you monitor the progress of your projects in real-time. 

4. Canva

In creating visual content for your website or any of your social media posts, Canva can help you with it. 

Canva is a Free Digital Marketing Tools for graphics editing. It is a software that provides free and paid subscription service. With this tool, you can easily make designs with its mobile optimized application and drag-and-drop features. 

It also offers free templates for you to work on where you can create shapes, logos, charts, graphs, presentation and your custom fonts using its design tools. 

By using the intuitive and easy-to-use Canva, you can create brochures to social media images and infographics.

5. Hootsuite

Using different social media platforms are really necessary for your local business to reach more audience and turn them into customers. However, switching from one application to the other is difficult without a tool that will help you automate or simplify your social media strategy.

For that reason, you can use Hootsuite in your social media post management. Although, there’s a paid version of this that offers more advantages, its free plan is also a steal. With it, you can already schedule all of your social media posts and monitor all of it in one place.

Do keep in mind that in social media, being present is needed to build better impressions and connections with your target audience. With this tool, you can connect up to three social media profiles and schedule up to 30 posts at the same time. Thus, you ensure that you never miss posting on different social media platforms and giving your audience information about your brand and offers.

Moreover, this tool also provides engagement management and analytics. You can respond and engage directly with your audience without having to log in to your different social media accounts as it help you centralize all mentions and messages in one dashboard. This also helps you analyze the performance of all your social media accounts in one place by its Hootsuite Insight.

With all of these, the tool will help you manage your social media accounts, connect with your audience, improve your social listening, and increase the performance of your business in terms of social media marketing.

6. Yoast SEO

With your website built in WordPress, you can easily use the free version of Yoast SEO.

This tool will help you rank better in terms of content and readability. If you are already done adding its plugin, this will directly suggest some changes to your title and meta descriptions so that your content will really have a good SEO.

Then, it also set your targeted keywords, track how you often use these and help you in other things that will improve your search engine ranking.

This also analyze pages of your content whether it is search engine friendly or not. Yoast will give reports if you are stuffing too many keywords or not, have you added inbound links or not, and other important factors that your content should follow to improve its SEO.

7. Mailchimp

In the world of social media and messaging applications, email marketing is definitely not yet dead. This is why you should utilize an email automation tool like Mailchimp.

This is a highly effective tool in creating your email marketing campaign as it gives you basic template and standard behavioral targeting facilities. You can store up to 2, 000 contacts, use their content studio to design your emails, and target your email list based behavior. 

This tool also enables you to track the activity on various campaigns. Once an email is sent, you can view how many subscribers have opened your email or left it closed. This also includes how many clicks your content received, its bounce rate, and how your content performed compared to your industry. Lastly, this also provides data which is broken down by country and highlighted on a map.

Using MailChimp in your email marketing strategy, you can directly create an email based on your audience behavior or special occasions, send it to your target audience, use it to re-engage subscribers, and analyze its performance in order to give better email campaigns into your website audience.

8. LeadPages

One thing that you should not forget is to provide a mobile-friendly landing page for your audience and you can always do this with LeadPages.

Landing page is an important aspect to your digital marketing strategy as it is designed to convert audience into customers.

A website that is not optimized, generic, and has a static page will not win the attention of your audience; this will only waste your time and money. However, you can prevent this by making a landing page that is optimized to different devices, have an engaging page that attracts the right audience, and brings them to a definite CTA.

When using LeadPages to convert your website clicks into customers, you need to remember some aspects. This tool lets you choose a template depending on your brand colors and other things associated with your branding.

Then, you can already edit your lading page’s content and even add widgets which acts as a CTA. Afterwards, set up your form, attach a lead magnet, and a thank you page. Lastly, publish your page. Before publishing it, make sure that you test it first before making it public.

9. Google Analytics

One of the best free Digital Marketing tools in tracking your website’s digital performance is Google Analytics.

This is a free search data tracking tool to monitor and assess different SEO activities of local businesses which includes onsite engagement, referral sources, and resource of unique visitors.

According to research findings, 92% of consumers visit websites of local businesses when deciding which businesses to use. This is why businesses need to monitor the performance of their website.

By using Google Analytics tool on your website, you will discover information that you don’t even think about. You will know more about your website visitors, the sites that send traffic into your website, which part of your website your audience stays the most, and the actions that your visitors take on your website. 

Although using this tool might be a difficult task for a local business owner. Just focus on the important metrics that are important to your field. Some data that this tool have given might be more useful to other industries. So, only use reports that reflect to your business.

With this tool, know more about your website visitors and get useful insights on how to improve your website, products and services, and your local business in general.

10. Supermetrics 

Data from Google Analytics is an extremely difficult thing to understand and for this reason, you need a tool like Supermetrics.

The purpose of this tool is to help marketers monitor and analyze their data by connecting it to wherever they want to use. 

With this tool, you can track your marketing performance, automate your entire process and understand the reason behind it. 

Then, you can store your Google Analytics data in Google Sheet which lets you use it wherever you want and use it to analyze your overall business process without the trouble of understanding the difficult terms from the data.

Lastly, as one of its key factors, you can directly customize your report in any way you want, combine it with other data, and visualize them in any format. 

Need a Digital Marketing Agency?

Using different tools in your digital marketing strategy is really a must. However, if you find it difficult to handle your digital presence and you don’t know how to use these various tools, worry no more because ESTRAT Digital Marketing Agency can solve this problem!

ESTRAT is one of the leading digital and social media marketing agency in the Philippines. The company has helped different brands grow through their relevant, up-to-date and effective Internet marketing strategies. This will ensure you that ESTRAT will provide a professional service that is perfect for your business!

So, for your digital marketing problems, hire ESTRAT now!