MARKETING TIPS 2017

With the new year here, it’s time to really think about your New Year’s resolutions—those little promises we all make to ourselves to do better and lead more fulfilling lives.

Well, I’ve got a New Year’s resolution for all of you marketers out there to add to your list:

“I WILL GET MORE LEADS FOR MY BUSINESS THIS YEAR”

Okay, I know, it’s all well and good to say you’re going to get more leads, but how can you actually do it? If lead generation were as simple as just wanting to do it, we’d all be rolling in more contacts than we’d know what to do with.

Well, with the right marketing tools, you might find that improving your marketing efforts and generating leads is easier than you think. The best part is, there are a ton of free tools out there that you can use to improve different aspects of your marketing and drive more leads for your company, including:

1: SurveyMonkey

Surveys are a time-honored tradition for some marketers—one that helps them get into their target market’s headspace to learn what really matters to their customers. But, launching a survey and reviewing the results can be astoundingly difficult to handle internally.

Thankfully, there’s a free tool for that now.

SurveyMonkey is a leading provider of online survey solution with a 99.5% satisfaction rating from its customer base. The company offers a variety of monthly and annual plans ranging from free to $85/mo. billed annually.

The free plan gives marketers access to a basic 10 question-long survey with up to 100 responses per month as well as standard email support. This is great for smaller companies that want to do inexpensive exit surveys for clients to find out what worked and what didn’t.

2: Lead Flows on HubSpot Free—Visitor Conversion

Yes, HubSpot has a free marketing package for companies that are just getting started with their marketing. This package contains a few lightweight free tools for marketing, including a tool called Lead Flow.

What Lead Flow does is allow you to create a pop-up form that you can add to your website’s pages for visitors to fill out. You can choose from four different types of popups, set conditions for the popup to trigger, and attach the form to a specific conversion action, such as a blog subscription.

Now, you really do need to be careful with this tool, as abusing it can result in annoying website visitors. However, as HubSpot noted in one article about Lead Flows, “AWeber found that using a pop-up form for obtaining blog subscribers converted 1375% better than a traditional form.”

So, keep this tool in mind when you want to get more subscribers and engagement with your posts.

3: Google Keyword Planner

Yes, I’ve talked about Google’s KW planner in detail once before. However, as a free tool from the king of the search engines, it bears mentioning again in this list.

The Google keyword planner can provide critical intelligence about which keywords your company should pursue—and users who have active Google AdWords campaigns get access to better data without having to pay for a separate subscription.

For those without active AdWords campaigns, the tendency of the Google Keyword Planner to group or “bucket” similar KWs together, and to give broad range values for monthly search counts, can make it a bit less reliable than some paid keyword planners.

But, when you need keyword research on a budget of $0, it doesn’t get much better than this.

4: Hotjar—Heat Mapping

Here’s another “freemium” product with a basic level of service that you can get for free, and a paid plan that offers more data and features.

Hotjar provides heat mapping data that can show you how people interact with your company’s website, such as where they’re clicking and how far down the page they’re scrolling.

The basic plan is free, and will provide you aggregated data on up to 2,000 page views a day with 3 months of data storage and 3 heat maps—perfect for smaller websites that have low traffic.

Paying customers get upgraded to unlimited reports and more tracked page views per day with plans ranging from $29/mo. to $589/mo.

Businesses doing Growth-Driven Design often use heat mapping software to see how people interact with their websites so they can make tweaks to their page design that move people down the sales funnel.

5: HootSuite—Social Media Management

Need to consolidate your company’s social media platform profiles to save time managing your presence on Twitter, Facebook, etc.?

HootSuite has you covered with a free tool to manage up to 3 social media profiles, complete with:

• Basic analytics

• Content scheduling

• Lead capture campaign management

• RSS feed integration (for 2 feeds)

• Free social media courses

It’s easy, it’s free, and if you need more, they have business plans as well.

6: Medium—Free Blogging Platform

Don’t have a platform to put a blog on, but want to pick up some experience writing content and building an audience? If so, you might want to give Medium a try.

In reality, this isn’t so much a marketing tool as it is a new social network dedicated to blogging. But, it does give people who don’t have much experience with blogging the ability to build a following.

The biggest danger with this tool? Falling down the rabbit-hole of reading all the content being generated by countless writers and other marketers.

7: Wistia—Free Video Hosting

Here’s a personal favorite tool of my coworker and Digified Marketing Solutions videographer, Ken.

Wistia is a video hosting platform designed for businesses of all sizes. The free version of the platform gives you space for three videos and up to 200GB of bandwidth for playing them.

You also get several customization tools for videos that allow you to collect email addresses and other data from viewers.

Paid versions of the tool give you more resources, more space for storing video content, and advanced integrations with tools such as HubSpot’s CRM.

8: Peek—User Testing

User testing is a critical tool for many website designers and marketers that gives them an idea of potential issues with their website’s design and user experience. However, user testing tends to be a bit expensive for what amounts to a case study.

That’s where Peek comes in. Peek is a tool from usertesting.com that gives you a FREE 5-minute video of a person while they use your website or application.

While Hotjar is better at giving you actionable data from a larger user set, Peek can really help you connect with your website’s users.

9: Google Scholar—Research

Psst. Hey, you want to hear a secret? I don’t really know everything. For many of the more technical articles I write for clients, I have to do a lot of research—usually online.

The problem is that finding factual articles and sorting them out from the ones that are erroneous or flat-out false can be tough if you don’t have a solid grasp on the basics. So, I try to hunt down scholarly, research-quality articles on subjects whenever I can.

Google Scholar helps with this. It’s basically like a filtered version of the Google search engine that limits your search results to scholarly articles, books, and theses from academic publishers, professional organizations, universities, etc.

10: Grammarly—Content Editing

Surprise! While not a marketing software by any stretch of the imagination, more marketers really should consider signing up for a free Grammarly account.

The free version of Grammarly gives you access to a browser extension that will automatically check your spelling and grammar through your emails, Facebook posts, blog posts (in most blog editors), and pretty much any other text editor you write in online.

Having this tool can help you avoid making major spelling and grammar mistakes so you can write better content and avoid potential embarrassments. It won’t catch everything, but it can help you avoid major mistakes.

Paid versions add more refined editing features, as well as a plagiarism detector to help you stay out of trouble with copying content.

Hopefully, with the help of these 10 free tools, you can improve your marketing efforts in 2017.

For more help, check out some of our other blogs and marketing resources or email to us at support@digifiedmarketingsolutions.zohosupport.com