A lot of Digital Marketer uses online marketing tools which helps them to be ahead of other competitions.
We don’t run a big agency and a ton of people working with us with big budget. I do however proudly represent our work because its authentic to the point and simple. Although we occasionally give away free creative stuffs we are sometimes labelled as Luxury Brands Marketing Agency. Indeed, it’s a nice title to have but it has not harm us much. I would perhaps talk about it in a separate blog.
Inside our agency use excellent tools online and find ways to do things smarter and better than most of the competition in the market. As a result, we are still in the same space as most of the so called big players are. We also built some rookie tools to our advantage to really wanting to kill the competition.
However most of the time we kind of felt in our face. I had to wake up and start all over again. We shall continue the quest of making the dream of building something awesome someday. Till then we will be using tools that are readily available and very easy to use.
Disclaimer : We don’t endorse any of these online marketing tools. But at the same time we found it extremely useful. Off course I don’t afford to pay ridiculous fee every month. This is why we have included the list below where you can use most of them for free without having to pay.
1) Brizy: If you are a Digital Marketer of any kind and want to create site which is quick yet very sleek and off course cheap ass agency like us would say got no dime to pay.
We use their WordPress plugin to create small campaign probably few pager and forms. Once installed with WordPress, the page creation capacity is enhanced. I have been testing this quite religiously for sometime now and its smooth compared to other similar products in the market.
I cannot recommend this solution to be useful for any enterprise level website because
- I haven’t tried to really scale it coz I use free version.
- I didn’t have to really think about scaling it.
2) HubSpot: I are one of those agencies who are a slow starter of hubspot. If you are trying to convert the visitors into lead then perhaps it’s a good tool. I found few leads from using this tool. So I must say it is quite useful tool. There are many flaws which I have found out and would love to share in a different blog altogether. I cannot say we are 100% convinced using this tool. Still it’s good enough to be in your list.
3) Google Open Source: If you have read some lines above then perhaps you saw us trying to crush our competition. Now I use some of the projects here to try and build something cool to impress our clients. But have been poorly successful.
If you are looking for little bit of collaboration with the community and perhaps want to make a use of something that is free this is a great platform.
4) Google Trends: I simply love this tool. Not because everyone is using it. I could perhaps argue that we are the early birds. I personally spend a good time in research before finding a niche to write content. At least when I write for the client. However if I have to write for @hitechies I simply express what I feel. Perhaps its satisfying as I don’t need to be politically correct.
5) Zoho Mail : This is quite handy mail system. Anyone can register with zoho and get free email account for 5 users. Offcourse there are steps to follow before you will have your company’s email account. There are steps to opening zoho’s account. The mailing system is really interesting if you are a cash strap startup, who just wants an email account for a specific domain. There are other very interesting features that you would love to have. As a veteran Digital Marketer its quite important to have access to zoho mail that offers for small companies free accounts which does the job.
If you are running a small content marketing agency and want to reach out to your readers then this a good way to get started.
6) Validity : If you have a bunch of subscribers and want to validate if those email address still works. You might want to use this tool. This tools allows anyone to easily verify the validity of the email address. Whether or not the email address exist for a specific domain you can do that easily. I love this tool as we do a lot of mass email campaigns for our client and every now and then it’s a good idea to run it against the subscribers database. This one is not free but its almost free. The cost is less than 1 cent per email address verification. The higher the number of list the cost is further reduced. Anyways please have a look at it yourself.
7) WordPress: Simply loved this open source. I have been an active user of wordpress for over 10 years now. I have seen the evolution of wordpress by leaps and bounds. No matter how much we compliment about wordpress, its still less and probably all of the digital marketer would agree. I personally contributed to few plugins myself which offcourse didn’t go well or lets say died in its infancy. Regardless of my personally failure in creating something interesting, I still feel there is no other tool which has so much to offer to anyone.
I also love Drupal and other open source systems which is great in itself. However the choice is based on how user friendly wordpress is to the end user. And how easily it integrates with a lot of plugins. Most of these plugins are probably a useful edition to making your website useful and simplifying the process of digital marketing.
8) Stripe : Imagine few years back when there was no payment gateway as such where we had to rely on other merchant providers who charged us for no reasons. We paid monthly fee for nothing. There were a lot of issues with payment processing and even just to discuss with the customer service on getting your own payment to your bank account.
Stripe provided an alternative and has been a very useful payment gateway. We use this to sell our services to our client. Why I like this stripe is because once again its free. There is no monthly fee and the cost of transaction is very low compared to other providers.
9) Google Page Speed Insight : As google has implemented mobile first indexing. All the digital marketing professionals must know about it if you are not aware of how it works. You can check your site against its responsiveness in mobile as well as the desktop with the score google provides. Extremely helpful tool if you are trying to optimize your site for speed and performance. The faster the site opens the better it is for the ranking. As users must be able to browse through your site and find the relevant information as soon as users lands on the page. The user experience is a key factor in a lot of bounce rates. Check if your website is mobile friendly
