With many marketing teams on furlough or budgets slashed amid COVID-19 finding free tools is incredibly welcome! Working in marketing at the best of times can be a bit of a whirlwind. Lofty goals to smash, new methods to learn, emerging technology to master, and (hopefully) an ever-growing customer base to engage with. Sometimes it’s hard to find space to breathe.

This blog is here to remedy your marketing overwhelm. We’ve compiled thirteen super useful, free tools to save you time. Read on to learn where to turn to regain some head space and improve results.

Campaign and project management

Marketers spend their lives managing campaigns and projects. Here are two tools that make that an easier task to tackle:

1) Asana

Asana is an awesome free project management tool that will help you manage tasks, collaborate, and get a clear view of what’s coming up.

Asana is our tool of choice here in the Pure360 marketing team and keeps our campaigns running like clockwork.

2) Trello

Trello is another free project management tool that many marketers love. It has a super clear and intuitive Kanban project board layout, where tasks are easy to move around.

Time management

One of the best ways to save time is to start measuring it. When the clock is running against a task, you’ll be amazed how much more focused you are on getting it done.

But, which tool should you use to track time? Here’s our favourite:

3) Toggl

Toggl is an easy to use free time tracking tool. It makes keeping track of time spent on tasks, projects, and clients easy to manage.

Toggl has a great reporting function too so you can pinpoint where to improve efficiencies.

Communication and collaboration

Communication, communication, communication. It’s pretty much the most important aspect of successful teamwork. So, what tool can you use to improve it?

4) Slack

Slack is undoubtedly the rising star of communication and collaboration tools. You won’t find a startup in town that doesn’t swear by it.

Slack makes communicating on various projects or clients easy, with the ability to set up a range of channels.

It’s simple to share files and pin important conversations so you can find them quickly later.

5) Xtensio

Xtensio helps people collaborate and create beautiful presentations and living documents. Many groups, marketers and entrepreneurs have simplified their business communications through this tool.

SEO and content

Creating and optimising quality content that drives organic traffic and increases engagement is high on the agenda for many marketers.

We’ve paid special attention to the SEO and content part of our list as we know it’s a biggie. So, here goes:

6) Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner takes the hard work out of keyword research.

Want to know what people are searching for on topics you want to become an authority on? Keyword Planner should be your go-to free resource.

7) SimilarWeb

When it comes to tools, SimilarWeb is a super handy SEO all-rounder.

It allows you to benchmark your SEO performance against your competitors and gain insight into their strategy.

8) Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is the perfect tool to check what content is getting the most social shares for any topic. It also allows you to research influencers you might want to reach out to.

Buzzsumo has a free version which gives you enough insight to get started. You could ask for investment for the paid version if you find it useful.

9) AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a handy free tool to turn to for content planning. It allows you to see all of the questions people are searching for answers to around any topic.

Using this tool is a great way to plan content to meet search intentions and drive organic traffic.

Design

When you don’t have time or resource to get your design team to help, where should you turn? Our first port of call is:

10) Canva

Canva is an excellent free graphic design tool. It turns even the most visually clueless marketer into a design pro, with easy to use templates and an intuitive user interface.

Social media management

Managing your social posting manually can be massively time consuming. Here are two tools that are here to help:

11) Buffer

Buffer is a fabulous free social media management tool. We also love its social media blog! Super handy social media marketing advice.

12) Hootsuite

If Buffer isn’t for you, another tried-and-tested social media management tool is Hootsuite.

Automating tasks

Having lots of tools to help save you time is handy. But what happens when all the tools you are using can’t communicate with each other? We’ve found an answer:

13) IFFT

IFFT connects various tools and apps, allowing you to automate tasks that may otherwise slow you down.

For example, you can automatically save your Instagram photos to Dropbox. Neat!

Takeaway

This blog post has explored thirteen free or freemium tools that help marketers to save time. Try using these tools to remedy your marketing overwhelm and make your work life a little bit easy.

We’re massive fans of taking the manual labour out of marketing here at Pure360. That’s why we’ve made it our mission to empower brands to use marketing automation technology.

Our platform makes light work of building better experiences for your customers. To see it in action, book a demo here.