Starting and growing a small business can feel like building a plane while trying to fly it at the same time. You need to market it, but you might not know how. You need tools, but you’re on a shoestring budget and you’re not sure which ones to choose. We see you, business owner, and we’ve got you covered. We’ve put together a list of some of the best marketing tools that you can start using to promote your business for free.
Read on for 10 free marketing tools for small businesses, plus some tips to help you use them and keep growing.
10 free marketing tools to grow your business
You don’t have to break the bank to establish your presence, find your best customers, and grow your audience. Let’s explore 10 software tools that offer features and functionality you can access for free in the early stages of your small business.
1. Bitly
We might be a little biased, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t give ourselves a shout out on this list! As you build your small business, you need to offer user-friendly ways for your audience to take action from every channel. Invite them to connect with you by learning more about your products, booking a meeting to learn more about your services, signing up for an email list or event, or making a purchase. Links and QR Codes are the perfect tools to promote your brand and track how people are engaging with you—and you can get started with them for free with Bitly.
Bitly lets you shorten any URL to create memorable, easy-to-share short links, and build QR Codes that your future customers can scan with their smartphones in seconds. With our free plan, you can create two QR Codes, shorten 10 links, and build a custom landing page each month. You can even customize these tactics with five custom back-halves of your URL (so instead of a random string after the slash, you can choose your own slug like “/freemarketing” if available) and adjust QR Code elements like color, style, and logo.
Make the most of every audience interaction with the Bitly Connections Platform.
2. Buffer
If you’re going to use social media to reach your customers (and you should!), a social media management tool like Buffer can help you stay organized and keep the ideas flowing. With Buffer, you can capture post ideas, manage community and comments, and schedule posts ahead of time so you don’t spend all of your time on social media.
Buffer’s free plan is a great way to get started on social media for your small business, letting you schedule up to 10 posts at a time on up to three social media channels. You can also save post drafts, capture up to 100 post ideas, and choose from integrations like Canva and Google. Ready to build a social media presence for your small business? Buffer is a great place to start.
Did you know? Buffer will shorten links that you include in social posts. By connecting Buffer and Bitly, those short links will be created through your Bitly account. This means you can keep your links and click metrics all in one place, making it easier to track the success of your efforts!
3. Mailchimp
Email is an all-important channel to stay in touch with customers who have bought your product or opted into receiving a newsletter or the latest deals from your business. It boasts an average open rate of around 33% across all industries, and because it’s an owned channel, you control who sees the message (unlike the whims of the social media algorithms).
A free email marketing tool can be one of your most valuable assets early on, so check out Mailchimp’s free pricing plan to help you get started. Their intuitive, user-friendly platform lets you send engaging emails with pre-built templates your audience will be excited to receive.
Mailchimp’s free plan is perfect for your small business if you have less than 500 email contacts, and it allows you up to 1,000 sends per month.
4. Canva
From social media images to your website to physical flyers, a strong brand and good graphics are must-have elements as you market your small business. You don’t have to be a designer to create engaging and on-brand graphics—and you don’t have to break the bank, either.
Get started with Canva and its easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor to design anything you need. Access more than a million templates, tap into their bank of millions of stock images, and use up to 5GB of cloud storage—all on their free plan.
Did you know? Canva plays nicely with other free tools like Bitly. Use our integration to design your QR Codes with your brand colors and logo and include them in your next campaign to drive brand awareness and recognition with every scan.
5. WordPress
Your website is the “home base” for your marketing efforts: It’s where you’ll send your followers and subscribers from various marketing channels. It’s also your starting point for creating targeted landing pages for different offers and your audiences’ varied needs.
Building a website for your business will take some time, creative energy, and effort, but it doesn’t have to cost you. WordPress, one of the biggest names in website builders, offers a free plan to get you started with your site. Build your first WordPress website for free—choose from their selection of themes, create unlimited pages, and review visitor stats to understand your audience and marketing performance.
Did you know? Bitly’s WordPress plugin allows you to shorten links, view engagement data, and streamline your creating and sharing workflow without leaving WordPress. With the ability to shorten links for pages, posts, and attachments, the Bitly WordPress plugin makes publishing and sharing your website’s content easy. Learn more about the Bitly + WordPress integration.
6. HubSpot
Whether you have 1, 100, or 1,000 customers, you need to keep track of who buys from you, how to contact them, and relevant details about your past interactions. That’s why customer relationship management (CRM) software might belong in your tech stack. It helps you stay organized in your marketing efforts, so you don’t lose leads or miss the chance to drive repeat business. HubSpot’s free CRM helps you get started.
Their free solution helps you manage contacts for your business and supports your marketing efforts. Tap into their free form builder and landing pages to convert visitors into leads, and answer customer questions in real time using live chat. HubSpot offers a ton of other free features, from email tracking and templates to document sharing and meeting scheduling. For service-based and B2B businesses, HubSpot can help you start managing relationships like a boss.
Did you know? Connecting Bitly to your HubSpot account will let you create Bitly short links for all of your social posts while being able to track performance data back to in your Bitly account. Learn more about how to keep your links and click metrics all in one place with the powers of Bitly and HubSpot combined!
7. SparkToro
Who is your target audience? What do they care about, and where do they spend their time? You can guess these answers, but it’s research that will tell you what you need to know—and SparkToro is one of the most robust audience research platforms around. Using their search tools, you can look up audiences based on websites they visit, terms in their bio, and keywords they search. From there, you can get ideas for what content to create, where to reach the right people, and what matters to them about your product.
With their free plan, you get five searches a month which can uncover valuable intel and spark ideas for campaigns and channels that will resonate with your audience.
8. Calendly
If you’re building a service-based business or relying on networking to expand your product’s exposure, you likely have a lot of meetings in the near future. To keep your calendar organized and your scheduling hands-off, you definitely want Calendly on your team.
Calendly offers scheduling automation via one simple link—you can set your availability, virtual meeting platform of choice, and brand your booking page. With the free tier, you get unlimited meetings of one meeting type and worry-free automated confirmation emails.
9. Notion
When you need to manage a project, launch a product, document a process, or get all of your best ideas down on virtual paper, you need a flexible workspace to do all of these things. Notion helps you capture processes, to-dos, and knowledge with ease, collaborate with others, and stay organized as you complete tasks for your small business.
Notion’s free plan offers you its basic features, which include unlimited pages, up to 10 guest invites, and 7 days of page history to help you get your small business off the ground and manage every workflow with ease.
10. Zapier
If you’ve ever completed a repetitive task for your small business and wished it could happen without you having to think about it, Zapier might be your new best friend. Zapier offers user-friendly automation across thousands of apps so you can automatically file emails, log form responses, create Google Docs, or add meetings to your calendar.
Their free tier provides support for basic use, automating basic workflows for up to 100 tasks per month. As a small business, you need all the support you can get, and automation saves you time to focus on what you love about your business.
Did you know? You can use Zapier to connect Bitly with thousands of apps, so you can automate your workstreams and make short links, QR Codes, and landing pages more efficient and effective within your day-to-day workflows.
3 bonus tips for growing with your tools
As you build a small business, you might be tight on time as well as money. Want to make the most of the hours in a week using the tools we’ve explored today? Here are three tips to keep in mind as you grow.
1. Stay consistent
If you’re new to marketing, you might feel tempted to take a “start-and-stop” approach—you create content when you feel inspired or when your calendar opens up. This is natural, but it’s not the way to grow an audience sustainably. Consistency is key, so find a way to build it into your schedule and business. Set aside an hour or two at the same time every week to schedule social media posts on Buffer or tweak a page on your website. Schedule time to review data across your research or digital marketing tools and make changes to your approach.
Don’t leave your business marketing on the back burner. Make it a priority by putting in consistent effort—that’s how you’ll see ongoing growth and results.
2. Make the most of your assets
When you’re operating with limited time, money, and people, you might need to get creative with how you produce your marketing materials. This is where repurposing is the way to go. Repurposing is an approach to content and marketing that maximizes your output by strategically splitting up and reusing your marketing materials. Source images from a product photo shoot for multiple different kinds of posts, instead of posting them just once. If you record a long video talking about a topic related to your services, share the long version on one channel, then split it up into multiple short clips and turn the content into text posts for other channels.
When you reuse your content many times in thoughtful ways, you can build the consistency we were just talking about, and reinforce your message with your audience. You’re not being repetitive or redundant—you’re being clear and cohesive to ensure your message is heard.
3. Spend thoughtfully as you grow
As your business grows, your budget might, too. Over time, you could find yourself ready to upgrade some of your free plans to paid ones. When you’re ready to invest, review all of your tools and assess which ones are driving the most value. Which ones bring in data and drive sales? What tools do you need additional functionality from, and how would they tangibly expand your marketing? Prioritize your list, and decide whether you want to invest in lower-level plans for several tools, or go premium on one or two.
You’ll get out of your tools what you put in. Lean on your free tools when you need to, then allow your tech stack to scale up with your business.
Build your small business through connection
To make a big splash for your small business, you don’t need a huge budget. Some of the most powerful marketing and project management tools offer starter plans to help you get off the ground and build processes that can scale and grow with your business.
Even if you don’t spend a dime on the no-cost version of these tools, how you spend your time and energy matters, too. Invest them in measurable campaigns, customer-friendly interactions, and lasting connections with your audience. Bitly’s here to help you make the most of every click and scan, so you can turn engagement into growth. Get started with our free plan today.
