Free Marketing Resources that all Marketers should know about.

There’s a lot of choice (and noise) out there regarding platforms for marketers. A plethora of solutions from project management to organising and analysing social media are on offer. It can all get just a bit well…overwhelming.

We’ve written this quick guide to some of the free marketing tools for marketers we like to use. We hope it provides some clarity so you can just get on with your day job. And what’s more – this lot is free!

Social Media Scheduling

Hootsuite

A vital platform for social media marketing. Hootsuite manages different social media profiles all in one place. The free-deal allows:

One (1) user to manage
thirty (30) scheduled messages across
three (3) social profiles.

Newsfeed

Inoreader

Do you need to take control of the stories that are relevant to your business (but don’t have a huge budget)? Inoreader is the answer.

It is a content reading platform that leverages the power of RSS. It will help you discover, read and share the best on the web. We’re calling it a content reader as it goes beyond the traditional use of RSS.

Inoreader lets you follow not only news and blog posts, but also social media feeds, keyword searches and much more. We use it to source relevant stories, monitor PR activity and make sure we are on top of news and industry trends for our clients.

Social Media Analytics Tools

Socialbakers

From free influencer discovery to social media benchmarking, get everything you need to boost your social media performance with the Socialbakers free tools. It’s quick and easy to use. The reports are clear and concise.

Facebook Ad Library

The Ad Library provides advertising transparency by offering a comprehensive, searchable collection of all ads currently running across Facebook Products, including Instagram.

Twitter Snooping

Followerwonk

This is a useful analytical tool that enables you to identify, analyse and optimise growth on Twitter. It is possible to make comparisons with other users, find out the details of your followers (their location and tweets) and organise your followers using different criteria.

You can find and connect with your target audience and most importantly see how your competitors are using Twitter.

Content Marketing Guru

Contently

This well known content marketing giant also provides free resources for marketeers and freelancers. It regularly produces free ebooks, guides and reports to download to help navigate through the content marketing minefield. Drop by to update your knowledge.

Project Management

Project.co

This is marketing campaign and project management tool is ideal for freelancers, agencies and large business marketing departments. It includes timelines, budgets, task assignments, team communication chat and can include internal and external stakeholders.

Free for up to 5 users – ideal for small teams who need to manage projects and keep everyone on the same page. They are UK based too, we like to support homegrown talent.

Readability Checker

Readable and WebFX

The difference between good and great copywriting is writing for your audience (not your boss) and making sure it’s easy to read. Readability scores are a way to measure whether written information is likely to be understood by the intended reader.

A reliable way to check this is to use a readability check that includes algorithms such as Flesch-Kincaid ease-of-reading scoring.

Text that scores a readability grade level of 8 or better (8 or below) will be readable by around 85% of the general public. But if you are writing for academics or well educated professionals you may want to consider a higher score as part of your tone of voice and branding rules. This article scores 9.5 and should be easily read by 16-17 year olds.

We love the free checkers on Readable.com or WebFX.

Free Image Libraries

Working with high quality imagery is vital in our industry. But not all companies have huge budgets for creative.

We use Adobe Stock Images for a lot of our work but we also use the following free image libraries when appropriate.

Remember to always, always, always (can’t stress that enough) check that you have the right to use the picture you download in the way you want to. Some allow print, web and social media use but some don’t. Do check – please – you don’t want to receive a bill for misuse.

Here are some of our favourites:

We hope that this article has been of use to you. We may even write a Part 2 as things can move pretty fast in the marketing world! Follow us on social media for more tips and to keep current!

The Marketing Lounge is a FREE central resource for marketers, managers, business owners, Directors, CEOs and anyone who has an interest in gaining top tips and advice on how to grow their business and increase sales. It is part of Breadcrumb Media & Marketing, a client-lead, creative campaign agency. Want to know more about what we do? Pop over to our client work case studies.

If you have a marketing topic you’d like to see an article about drop us a line and we’ll do our best to address it. hello@breadcrumbmedia.co.uk