The Inbound Growth Blog

The Inbound Growth Blog covers all topics relating to an integrated marketing strategy. We write about inbound marketing, social media, integrated marketing strategies and the sales process.

4 Amazing Free Tools To Improve Your Inbound Marketing Results

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Posted by John Beveridge on Dec 3, 2015 1:56:33 PM

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In the spirit of the holiday season, I want to share the gift of 4 free tools that will really help you step up your inbound marketing game. And who doesn't like free? It's not just that they're free - many of us are DIY-ers that like the thought of doing something quickly ourselves that produces a professional quality result. So with no further ado, here are 4 amazing free tools to improve your inbound marketing results. 


Leadin and CRM from HubSpot

Many small businesses don't have the budget for an integrated inbound marketing software product like HubSpot. Many other SMB companies may have budget, but need to be sold on the ROI potential of an investment in inbound marketing software and the human resources necessary to successfully manage it.

If that describes you, the team at HubSpot has 2 free products to help you get started with automating your sales and marketing process without a major investment in software. 

The first product is HubSpot's free CRM. The HubSpot CRM is a full-featured free CRM product built for salespeople. It helps salespeople focus on selling without getting bogged down in date entry. When combined with the free Sidekick email tracking software, the HubSpot CRM gives salespeople insight into their prospects so that they can have context-based sales conversations tailored to the prospect's digital body language. Sidekick for Business is a paid upgrade that builds in a prospect list-building tool and a robust sales email component.

Last, but not least, in HubSpot's free product portfolio is Leadin, a lead generation tool that lets you build contact lists from free content offers on your website. Leadin can be added to your website by means of a WordPress plugin or javascript easily added to other CMS platforms. It provides pre-formatted lead generation forms that can be used to convert website visitors to leads by exchanging contact information in return for a premium content offer. Leadin integrates with many popular email marketing platforms like Constant Contact and MailChimp.


 

Canva

Canva is an incredible free tool that let's the design-challenged among us (present company included) create professional designs for a broad range of uses including:

  • Social media images
  • Infographics
  • Presentations
  • eBooks
  • Social media profile headers
  • Custom designs

Canva includes a wide selections of free templates and images as well as a library of paid images and templates. You can also upload your own images to build into the Canva templates. You can also upgrade to a branded Canva account that incorporates your colors and logos into their templates.

Don't get me wrong - I will always go to my design team for important design projects, But if I want to bang out a quick social image to promote a blog post, Canva is my destination.

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Hotjar

User experience is a critical part of website design and inbound marketing performance. Hotjar is a free tool with paid upgrade options that gives you UX feedback from the most important audience - your website visitors.

Hotjar gives you heatmaps, recordings of how your visitors interact with your pages, conversion funnel analysis, feedback polls and surveys to help you understand how users interact (or not) with your website. Hotjar is free with limits on recordings and heatmaps with affordable paid upgrades if you want to go deeper.

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Clicktotweet

Many businesses that use content marketing create good content, but fail to promote it properly. You know, if a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it? Click To Tweet is a free tool that lets you give your readers an opportunity to share your content on social media. 

By pulling a sound bite from your content and linking back to the content, Clicktotweet lets you place a sharable version of the soundbite in your content that your visitors can share. For an example of how Clicktotweet works, click anywhere in the link below.


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 So there you have it - 4 amazing free tools to improve your inbound marketing. Be a giver - share them with your friends. 


 

Topics: Inbound Marketing

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