My 3 Favorite FREE Marketing Tools

There are a lot of amazing marketing tools available to marketers today, in fact there might be too many good marketing tools out there. A lot offer similar services that integrate managing your social media sites, project management, content management (and more) on one streamlined dashboard – but for a cost. We certainly use tools that require a cost, like Hootsuite, but some of my most useful and go-to tools are totally free. Below are my top 3 favorite and free tools I use almost daily:

CrowdTangle (The Chrome Extension) – Content Research

Here at Novelty Media, we have a very diverse collection of online magazines that we create content for. Everything from science to finance to celebrity facts to sports and beyond! With over seven specialized brands, it can be hard to keep your pulse on the most trending topics for each magazine. This is where CrowdTangle really helps us analyze our audience and understand what content of ours is performing best organically on social media. With CrowdTangle, you can evaluate any article’s URL to see who is engaging with that content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit and identify trends within your audience to develop a new potential target audience.

I like this tool for people who are researching new content ideas for their brands, as well as identifying who their potential audience is so they can cater their content and online campaigns to the people most likely to engage with their content.

The CrowdTangle data on our History 101 article about Jim Morrison

Canva (and Canva the mobile app) – Content Creation

Canva is both a beginner and advanced designer’s dream! The basic, free features are anything but basic; there is everything from templates to create your own designs from scratch to videos and GIFs options. While I have had the paid subscription to Canva Pro in the past (at a whopping $13 a month it’s totally a worthwhile deal), I’ve mostly used the free subscription over the years and managed just fine. I am able to design my weekly Facebook and Instagram posts, job postings for open positions at Novelty Media and various other graphics. All your creations are customizable, either by uploading your own images/graphics or by using Canva’s image/graphic/text/template libraries.

I like this tool for people who are creating visual and video graphics on a daily/weekly/monthly basis. For an easy and user friendly method to produce high quality and professional creatives, Canva is the way to go.

Inside my Canva project where I create graphics specifically for job postings

Trello – Project Management

If you or your team don’t have a project management platform or you’ve been looking to change yours up, then look no further! This is easily the easiest, cleanest, most customizable (aka fun), and efficient way to accomplish your project management goals (Yes, I even like Trello better than Asana. Sorry not sorry). I have used this platform to keep track of my own daily/weekly/monthly tasks and projects, team projects, as well as managed projects between my team and our clients. This really can be used for the individual to track their tasks, but you get the most out of the tool when it’s used with a team. Every column, category, alert feature (every little detail) is completely customizable and Trello is as easy to use as literally dragging a column or a card within a column to any location you like (and once you’ve finished a task you can archive the card to reference if needed). Say bye-bye to all the spreadsheets, calendar reminders, and chasing people down on slack, Trello organizes everything for you in one place.

I like this tool for people and teams who have a lot of projects and tasks that need to be managed and communicated on in a clear and efficient way. Projects are already enough work, simplify the project management process with Trello.