Being an entrepreneur gives you a considerable learning curve. Most of the time, when you have just started a company, you will end up doing everything (or the majority of it) by yourself. With a limited budget and plenty that require an investment, you will do everything you can to keep the spending low. Thankfully, when it comes to marketing, there are many freemium tools for you to execute your strategies. The problem is, you might end up spending hours testing these tools to find the best fit. At Villa Finder, we have been through the same, and we thought it’d be great to share our “winners” with you. These are the tools that we are fond of and still use them up to this day. Rest assured, they all have a free option or only cost a small amount!
Moosend is an award-winning Email Marketing and Automation platform that combines an easy to use User Interface with intermediate features that will not break your bank. It’s featured packed with an intuitive and easy to use drag-and-drop email editor where only your imagination is the limit in terms of your newsletter designs. It includes analytics in real-time and list segmentation that will allow you to laser-target your audience. Moosend offers a FREE forever plan for up to 1,000 subscribers which also allows you to send unlimited email campaigns after that pricing plans start at $10/month and all of their plans include unlimited email sendings!
We all know that social media has become an important part of the marketing strategy. Although you may not be able to be present on all channels, you will have to commit to the ones where your customers are. If you have to log in to every single channel every day to publish a single post, it’s gonna take away all your time. This is why scheduling tools exist. At Villa Finder, we rely on Onlypult to schedule Instagram posts. This tool allows you to plan as many posts as you want, reply to comments and direct messages. As for Facebook, we find that Facebook’s scheduling function works very well, so there is no real need to get another tool to do that.
Nightwatch is an advanced SEO tool with extensive functionality. It is exceptionally good at segmentation and visualization of the data. Like no other tool it enables internet professionals to get a better understanding of how search rankings, site changes, and traffic correlate and affect search visibility. Besides rank tracking, backlink monitoring, and reporting, it offers advanced segmentation, filtering abilities, graphs and visualizations, and much more. It’s perfect as an all-in-one SEO performance solution, especially for the websites aimed at scaling.
It’s common to make mistakes when you are writing. However, it’s not very interesting to let your customers see them. Sometimes, even when you have reviewed the copy a couple of times, a few typos still manage to escape tired eyes. This is where Grammarly comes to the rescue. It is a great application to help you write error-free. With just the free version, the app scans your text and spots spelling and grammatical errors. It also informs you of any accidental plagiarism. You can also install a browser extension, which will examine the text you write online, whether it’s a Facebook post, an email or a google document.
BuzzSumo is a great tool to find new ideas. Once you have a list of topics you want to write about, do a quick search on Buzzsumo. You will be able to see the best-performing articles, page views, backlinks, and social shares of the posts. You can also check out what ’s trending. Do note that there is a limit for the unpaid version. You can only conduct up to 5 searches every day.
With Google Keyword Planner, you can identify keyword trends and make sure that your content and search campaigns remain relevant. The tool gives you information which keywords people are using for the search, the competition, average monthly search and more. Check out a useful guide here to know how to use Google Keyword Planner for your business.
Even if you have just started the business, you should consider collecting customers’ information and keep them up-to-date with what you are doing. MailChimp is a valuable tool for this. Even with the free option, you can already make use of various functions such as A/B Testing, basic segmentation and pop-up. You also have many pre-made templates to create a beautiful newsletter at ease. If you want to create one from scratch, the drag-and-drop model makes the process simple and straightforward.
Designing is a real challenge for entrepreneurs. Having a visually pleasant presentation is equally important to having meaningful, quality content. However, hiring a designer or outsourcing can be very costly. This is where Canva can help. This tool gives you access to pre-designed templates, colour palettes, icons and stock images, which you can use to create a nice visual. More importantly, it also has templates that cater to various social media channels’ dimensions for you.
PosterMyWall helps you create posters, videos and graphics for your business. They have a great selection of eye catching templates and free downloads which you can use on your social media channels to promote your business. Their designs are easy to use and it doesn’t take long to create some awesome graphics with their website.
Free stock images
While there are free images on Canva, the selection is quite limited. If you are not able to build your own image library, check out Pixabay or Unsplash. There are over a million stock images for you to choose from. These are all in the public domain, meaning you don’t have to worry about copyright. The downside of this is that it may take quite some time to find the right images.
These are the tools that we use every day at Villa Finder. I hope that these will be as helpful for you as they have been for us. All the best for your endeavour!
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