8 Free Tools Every Startup Needs
When you’re starting up a business, you need all the help you can get, but for most of us, we don’t have a big team or a big budget.
Even if that’s the case, we still have competitors who do. Luckily, there are plenty of free tools to help us save time or do complex jobs so that we can punch above our weight.
On our list are some essential free tools to help you in marketing, website design, content production, SEO and more.
There’s a reason why 35% of all websites run on WordPress.
It’s free (you’ll still need to pay for web hosting, of course), easy to install, has thousands of free themes, it’s easy to modify your theme without any coding knowledge, there are thousand of free plugins that give you control over everything from SEO to sign-up forms to on-site animations.
If you’re looking to get a really well functioning website up and running on a tight budget, then WordPress should be your first port of call.
The daddy of web analytics tools, Google Analytics is a shoe-in here.
Although it can be a little tricky getting to grips with it at first, it really is a powerful tool in tracking your customers’ digital journey.
As well as giving you general information about traffic and demographics, GA lets you view users’ journey through your site, which pages are performing as you want them to and which aren’t.
The ability to set up events and goals and link into campaign URLs (see Campaign URL builder – another great tool), gives you great info on how each piece of marketing collateral is performing in achieving your goals.
Definitely an essential tool.
Still on the topic of your website, Responsively is a great little tool to make sure that your website looks just as it should whether on a desktop, tablet or mobile phone.
With the ability to show multiple heads-up displays of different devices connected to your site, you can see in real-time how your design changes will affect how your site appears across devices.
It’s got one job and it does it brilliantly.
A classic on lists like these, MailChip has been the go-to email marketing tool for small businesses for years.
With their free plan allowing you to send up to 10,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 contacts, an easy-to-use Creative Assistant to help you design on-brand emails, a marketing platform that lets you integrate with your social media and Facebook and Instagram ads and a basic marketing CRM, MailChimp has super-useful functionality straight out of the box.
If you haven’t heard of Trello, it’s a magic little tool for simple project management, or just generally keeping your tasks organised and prioritised.
Organised around simple drag-and-drop Kanban boards, the intuitive user interface allows you to easily see what tasks you have pending, what’s in progress and what’s been done.
With the ability to add checklists, files and media to any task, assign tasks to team members, create up to 10 boards on the free plan and share boards with the whole team, Trello makes managing your projects simple and easy.
If, like mine, your design skills stopped at drawing stick-men in year 5, then Canva will be essential to you in producing content for your website, social media posts, infographics, logos, flyers, banners….the list goes on.
A simple drag-and-drop interface lets you create graphics with ease, with the free plan including over 250,000 free templates, 1 million free photos and graphics and 5GB of storage.
You may not be a designer, and you may not be able to afford one, but Canva will solve that problem for you!
It seems obvious, but the reach and targeting of Facebook and Instagram can’t be ignored.
Even if you don’t have many followers, the ability to post your message to groups of people likely to be interested in your product or service is unbeatable, and with a smart strategy you can quickly build a following.
The real power, though lies in the ad manager. With the ability to target super-specific audiences anywhere in the world, easy-to-use ad building software, great analytics and excellent algorithms to maximise your advertising effectiveness, Meta is an old favourite that continues to deliver.
Last, but no means least, on our list is Google’s Keyword planner.
As a small business, it can be a great strategy to target long-tail searches that your larger competitors might not pay so much attention to.
Keyword planner helps you identify those and plays a central role in helping you plan your content to fit your Keyword strategy.
Simple but invaluable.
So, while not an exhaustive list, we think that these eight tools will give you a boost in different areas of your business.
If you’re looking for more tips and advice, why not join us for Startup September, where over 8 free sessions, in-person and online, you’ll learn more about marketing, finance, business registration, sales and much more?
We hope to see you there!