5 Marketing Tools That Will Save You Hundreds of Dollars

In this blog, I am sharing 5 great productivity tools that can significantly enhance your marketing strategy, while helping you drive more business & visibility at the fraction of the cost.

We all operate under shrinking budgets, yet we are expected to produce better and better results every single day, quarter after quarter, no matter if and what marketing tools we are using.

One thing we are all very short on is time. So anything that would speed up our productivity or let us do things faster and easier is a much welcome relief.

Unfortunately, many of us have to prioritize our budgets and are very often left wth little to no money to spend on marketing automation tools.

Luckily, there are fantastic tools out there that can save you a huge amount of time and effort. They also cost a trifle and will give you the option to test them extensively before hopping on the payment train.

Here are five of them, used by thousands of marketers to cut down on days of manual, boring, error-prone work, while saving and generating hundreds of dollars for their companies.

1. EpicBeat.

Who is it for – digital marketers, content strategists, bloggers, curators, editors, journalists.

Why you want to use it – At under $40/month, what you get for the price is unrivaled. The tool gives you a complete 360 view of everything you need to know to build an agile content strategy in a heart beat. It has saved me days worth of work for sure.

To see it in action – sign up for a free account, then start with a simple keyword search, like “productivity tools,” sit back and watch. In seconds, you get so much intelligence that would have probably taken you weeks to collect:

• See in one click most popular content (titles and links), a list of all the top writers, as well as top content formats preferred by your audience.

• Find out the social accounts of the people who are interested in and share this content.
• Identify both the top domains which produce such content and host it/share it.
• Last but not least, find the best days/times to publish your content, as well as details text analysis, including keywords, sentiment, and more.

2. GetResponse.

Who is it for – digital marketers, event, and campaign managers

Why you want to use it – GetResponse is the first marketing automation service to include an integrated webinar solution and a survey capability in one platform.
No more time spent on trying to integrate and test disparate systems, no more worries about remembering passwords or reconciling differently branded look and feel. No need to manage yet another separate provider and contract.

For under $15 a month, you get email management, automation, surveys, landing pages and unlimited online forms ready to be embedded on your website, along with visually appealing performance stats. I quite like their Multimedia Studio, where you can store images, audio files, videos and create QR codes. Webinars are an add-on, but the one-click integrations with SalesForce, Slack, Paypal, Amazon Pay are free.

To see it in action – create a free account and enjoy their wonderful set of templates and training videos.

3. Grammarly.

Who is it for – anyone who needs to write anything online

Why you want to use it – Grammarly will save you hours of work and will protect you against embarrassing things like typos, repetitions, and grammatical mistakes that might affect yours or your company’s reputation. Regardless of where you write online, yes, regardless!

Whether you are writing a tweet, posting on LinkedIn, composing an email, or creating a blog, Grammarly is with you, every single moment, correcting, suggesting, offering solutions.

It fixes over 250 types of grammatical and contextual mistakes, helps you improve your sentences, and has a plagiarism filter! For under $15/month, it offers enormous value. It catches things that neither Microsoft’s nor Apple’s spell checkers can detect.

It is incredibly powerful and immensely helpful. No need to pay an editor to correct your writing anymore.

To see it in action – create a free account and use it for as long as you want.

4. Canva – the visual content automation tool.

Who is it for – anyone who creates content.

Why you want to use it –I love what one of their customers is saying: “Canva enables anyone to become a designer.” That says everything.

From automating and storing your branded colors and their hex values to offering great and super-easy to manage templates, to letting you swap out designs and fonts with a click of a button, to allowing teams collaborate seamlessly… Everything that Canva has to offer is great. At just under $15 for a single user, the returns that you reap are huge. If you want to learn more about the tool, you can check out my blog that details exactly how Canva lets you fuel your content strategy in no time.

To see it in action – set up an account and start designing. As an example, below are a 10-page eGuide and the image for this blog that I created using Canva.

5. Brand24.

Who is it for – digital marketers, social media and PR teams and managers

Why you want to use it – For $49/month you get great productivity while being rest assured that you will never miss another brand mention on the web. In real time.

To see it in action – Start by entering a keyword relevant to your products/services and let the tool work its magic. You can elect to monitor for sales leads, competitors, topics, or a brand. You get instant insights, including, social media reach & popularity, and mentions across numerous social entities.

In Facebook, you can see all the groups and pages related to your keyword of choice (imagine how much “Google-searching” you are saving here). The biggest value for me is that you can see all your brand mentions via visually appealing graphs across Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Forums, Blogs, and so much more. The data is available by category, channel, and author.

You can instantly see the influence generated via Social versus other media, including sentiment. Not only that, but you can get the names of the people who talk about you, their quotes, and where they are saying that, in seconds. Try and quantify that value using your basic Social Media tools:)).

With so much intelligence, you can instantly see where on the web people need services like yours, complain or praise your business, or just need help. And you can pretty much respond in real time, reap the benefits and monetize the results of your efforts. This generates incredible value for your company’s bottom line.

Conclusion

If you are marketer whose budget needs saving, have a look at these five excellent productivity tools that are guaranteed to free you from hours of tedious work while helping you save and generate hundreds of dollars for your company.