30+ Free and Useful Tools for Digital Marketers

I have put a list of tools in various categories that make a Digital Marketers Job easy. There are a lot of tools available in the market for similar use cases. I have listed the tools which I personally use or have used in the past and would recommend

Most of the these tools are free or a have a free plan which provide some free features and are still helpful.

Also, please bear in mind that some of the tools have additional functionality which you can explore. For the sake of simplicity, I have only mentioned the use cases and USPs of tools which I have used

The below list of tools is more than enough to be a successful Marketer and cover most of the uses. There are millions of tools which primary do the same thing. The research for the tools can be overwhelming in the beginning. So, I have created this list to make your life easy

The list will be updated regularly. Click on the tool name to directly go to the account creation page


1. Competitor and Market Research:

  • Similar Web (Learn More)
    • Useful for Web and App Analytics
    • You can enter a name of a website and App and get the details like traffic, ranking, installs, traffic source, Bounce Rate, Country wise traffic
    • You will also understand the traffic source details like contribution from Paid Digital, Paid Social, Paid Search, Organic and referral details
    • This tool is helpful when working on a audit for a client or a business pitch or to understand the analytics of competitors to get an idea
  • Social Blade (Learn More)
    • Useful for analyzing social media handles (Most useful for analyzing any YouTube channel)
    • Helpful and accurately reports in Subscribers, Video uploads, Channel Creation date, channel category, country and country rank
    • It is more useful to report on day wise views, subscribers, and overall growth of channel month on month for last 12 months
    • It can help you understand the activity of any YouTube (or other Social Media handle) and see what they have been doing and check the growth
    • Note: Don’t rely on earnings report as that is estimated and in most cases, wrong!
  • Statista (Learn More)
    • One of the biggest platform with research and data about millions of topics
    • You can download pictures, statistics, books, articles and research about millions of topics
    • Very helpful when you are doing a market research for a business pitch or proposal e.g projects under construction in UAE, eCommerce sales in Germany, Facebook users in United Kingdom, etc.
  • Facebook Ad Library
    • This is a great tool to check what Ads are competitors running on their Facebook and Instagram
    • This helps to understand what the competitors are running and what Ads are working for them
    • This is a great place to get learning and decide on your creative approach and also research for competitor audit
    • Link to YouTube explainer video

2. YouTube Creators & Video:

  • Tella (Learn More)
    • A simple and powerful screen recording tool with amazing features
    • Tella is your all-in-one screen recorder. Create demos, online courses, 1:1s for customers, promote your project on social media, and more
    • Comes with ton of features like backgrounds, format, in-built editor and easy to share and download
  • Camtasia (Learn More)
    • Undoubtedly, the software to create YouTube tutorial videos and editing software in my opinion for new creators
    • If you want to record screen and camera at the same time and an easy to user post recording editing software, then this is the best option
    • Includes features like green screen, multiple screen recordings, audio recording and processing post recording. Almost all videos post June 2021 on my channel are recorded and edited in Camtasia 2019 (which is an older version)
  • TubeBuddy (Learn More)
    • Very useful tool for YouTube channel owners
    • Can be used to do audit of YouTube channel in terms of performance and opportunities to improve
    • Can be used to understand what other channels are doing in terms of YouTube SEO, Tags, ranks against tags and keywords
    • Also provides some deeper and easier to understand insights about your channel and competitors
  • StreamYard (Learn More with 14 day free trial)
    • Very helpful tool to go live on YouTube on other social platforms
    • Can be used to go live on all Social Media platforms together and customize
    • The output video can be customized with showing comments on the video, branding as well as inviting multiple participants on the live
    • Can be used to schedule live events on almost all social media platforms

3. Important Admin tools/Partnerships:

  • Orangetrail.io
  • OrangeTrail is an exclusive provider of whitelisted agency ad accounts for all the main platforms (Google, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter & Snap).
  • Here are a few benefits of these accounts:
  • Harder to get blocked
  • Unlimited spending limits
  • Highest tier of support possible
  • Fastest turnaround times in the industry
  • Direct line access to the reps
  • All GEOs unlocked for TikTok & Snap
  • Google cash back accounts
  • Special allowlisting on Twitter
  • Book a free consultation call now!

ClicksArmour

  • Monitors the Google Ads traffic your website receives 24/7
  • All visits that come from paid sources are analyzed for fraudulent activity and blocked instantly
  • When detected, your ads won’t be shown to them again and you’ll have more budget for the right people

Link for the free trial

Video Editor

  • Most of my videos are edited by Tayyab Anwar. I highly recommend working with him
  • Contact Details: Email – [email protected] / WhatsApp

4. Email Automation, Landing Pages:

  • Visme Forms (Learn More)
    • An incredible and engaging tool to create Forms and Landing pages
    • Landing pages with Visme forms increase the engagement rate and reduce the drop-off rate by 2X
    • Easy to create, connects with most of the email marketing tools
    • Easy to setup a landing page without a domain and works with just Google sheets and MS Excel
  • Systeme (Learn More)
    • One of the few tools which has a lot of features in freemium plan
    • Can be used for Email Automation – Newsletters, Email campaigns with in-depth reporting
    • Can be used to host video courses, digital products with easy to setup payment methods
    • Can be used to host a blog with or without a custom domain
    • Can be used to create landing pages, click funnels, etc
  • AppMySite (Learn More)
    • Create an app with the most powerful mobile app builder
    • AppMySite makes app development easy. You can literally convert your Website into an App within minutes and few button clicks
    • Build premium native mobile apps for both Android & iOS without writing a single line of code
  • Google Forms
    • Can be used to create basic online forms, quizzes and surveys with interactive features
    • Doesn’t support custom domain
    • You will need a Gmail ID to create these
    • All my quizzes linked to my videos are created using Google forms
  • Google Sites
    • Can be used to create HTML pages/Webpages with very easy drag and drop functionality
    • You can use this to quickly setup information pages if you don’t have a website or domain
    • Also helps you collaborate with your team easy where you can share the access

5. Audience Research

  • Sparktor (Learn More)
    • As the tagline mentions, Audience insights at your fingertips. This is a very amazing tool which provide a lot of information in the free plan
    • The easiest way to understand this platform is you provide any of the input e.g
      • What your audience talks about
      • What words like designation they use on their social platforms
      • What website they visit
    • The tools gives you audience insights like:
      • Demographics and other insights about these audience
      • What other words they use on their profiles
      • Top hashtags used
      • What social profiles they follow (You can target this in Twitter)
      • What websites they visit frequently
      • What YouTube channels and Podcasts they listen to
  • Audiense (Learn More)
    • This is a bit expensive but a great tool. Comes with two modules
      • Audiense Connect: This modules is a great tool for Twitter Analytics. If you are someone who works on Twitter Handles, this tool is for you
      • Audience Insights: This module connect data signals from multiple sources like IBM Watson and other to give you very detailed insights about your Audience
  • Crystal AI Extension
    • This is a Google Chrome extension which has a free plan
    • Once this is upload on your Google Chrome and you visit a LinkedIn profile, the extension gives you a detailed information of the person whose profile you are visiting like the work ethics, how they take decisions and other details.
  • Lead Feeder (Learn More)
    • This tool analyzes the traffic on your website and tells you about your audiences in terms of which company they work for
    • This can be very helpful for ABM (Account Based Marketing)

6. Keyword Research Tools

  1. Google Keyword Planner
  2. Google Trends
  3. SEM Rush
  4. aHREF

7. Graphics, Editing and Social Content creation

  • Canva (Learn More)
    • A great beginner’s users friendly tool to create social content, thumbnails, posts, Videos, Resume, Banners for websites
    • You can use thousands of templates to create any type of graphics and Vides with a click of a button
    • Has some great templates even in free version which can be helpful to create content with few clicks
    • You don’t need a designer if you have Canva
    • Use the above link to get a month of free Pro version
  • PhotoPea
    • In simple words, it is Web version of Adobe Photoshop
    • You can do some advanced graphic designing, Thumbnail creations
    • Use it only if you have some experience with graphic design applications
    • No login or account creation needed
  • Envato Elements (Learn More)
    • The reason I use this tool is there is no limit on downloading unlike other platforms like Shutterstock
    • You can download License free unlimited 4K Footage, Photos, Graphics, Music, Templates and even WordPress templates

8. Presentations and Reporting

  • Google Slides
    • If you don’t have MS Powerpoint or want to collaborate online with someone on a presentation, Google Slides is the best option you got
  • Slides Carnival
    • No one like to create a good presentation from scratch or pay a designer
    • This is a library of Presentation templates which are ready to use
    • You can search for themes like funky, business, or topics and many other options
    • Once you select a theme, you can directly copy it in Google Slides or MS Powerpoint and start working on it
    • It is FREE!
  • Report Garden
    • A Paid tool useful for small clients and automated report from various sources like Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook etc.
    • Can be used to create a template with graphs, etc. and connect multiple sources like Google Ads, facebook Ads, etc.
    • Once done, you can schedule the report or generate it anytime with one click
    • It also keeps a track of budget and some level of automation is available

9. Web Analytics and Data Visualization

  • Google Analytics
    • Every one knows about this beast. Comes in a free version and a paid version – GA360
    • One of the best and most commonly used Web and App analytics tools. Place a tag on your website and monitor everything like sessions, bounce rate, traffic source, medium, Geo, demographics and a lot more details about your traffic
    • Monitor behavior of users on your website or App like what actions they do and how they navigate on your website
  • Microsoft Clarity
    • A FREE and very interesting tool to understand user behavior with your UI
    • Put a tag on your website and see actual screen recordings of your users on your site
    • Understand the user journey and see heat maps and rage click areas on your website to optimize your UI
    • This tool helps to understand most clickable areas and areas of interest for users
  • Data Studio
    • Another Freebie from Google and one of the easiest and best Data Visualization tool
    • Create graphical dashboards to represent your data from Excel sheets, Google Ads, Facebook Ads and almost all the Ad platforms
    • You can create a real-time dashboard and connect all your reporting sources and bang! you are done reporting
    • Free templates available – Connect your Ad Platform and you have a real-time reporting dashboard and can be shared with anyone
  • Supermetrics (Learn More)
    • If you have a Google Studio dashboard, you can natively connect all Google properties including YouTube. However, to connect non-Google platforms like Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, Yahoo and everything else, you will need to subscribe to a connector
    • Supermetrics is a practical and probably cheapest solution for that. In Data Studio choose supermetrics connector and create an account and you are done

10. Other extension and Tools

  • Google Tag Assistant
    • Add this Google’s extension on your Chrome and you can check the implementation of all Google Tags on a site (Your owned and non-owned). It literally works on any site
    • Once you enable this extension, you will be able to see which all Google tags are firing from a page and if they are firing properly and identify the properties of tags
    • Very helpful to test tags once client confirms the conversion and remarketing pixels are implemented
  • Facebook pixel helper
    • This chrome extension helps to test and check the Facebook pixel implementation on any website
    • It is exactly like Google Tag Assistant but for Facebook pixels

More categories to be updated……..

I hope it was helpful

Peace and love

Ovais

Video: 30 Tools in 30 Mins:

https://youtu.be/gEpZt8W3J-k