Read on to discover a must-have collection of FREE marketing tools for business owners. We’ve hand-selected these to suit varying levels of technical prowess, from the beginner all the way up to the seasoned pro!

1.) Canva

Canva lets you design professional visuals through an app. You can use this tool to create social media posts, videos, presentations, and a variety of graphic designs. It offers a wide range of customizable templates, royalty free images and AI features to enhance the final product.

Canva is easy to learn and caters to beginners. It offers a FREE level with limited access to assets. The Pro level is affordable compared to many other editing and graphic design programs, although the feature sets are relatively basic.

All in all, Canva makes graphic design easy and affordable. So how does it work?

How Canva works

You can access Canva via a web browser, the mobile app, or the desktop app (Access to the content library does require an internet connection).

Canva offers several key components:

Design: Pre-designed layouts for a variety of mediums (e.g. social media posts, videos, presentations, etc.)

Elements: Royalty free photos, videos and graphics you can add to a template or a blank slate.

Magic Studio: AI-powered design tools for generating or editing content. This includes background remover, avatar voiceovers, animations, and more.

Text: Choose from pre-formatted specialty texts or from a list of dozens of classic texts; Canva makes it easy to resize or change the color and shadowing, among other characteristics.

Biggest pro of Canva: its Stock Library

Canva includes a huge library of photos, videos and audio files, numbering into the millions. It has the perfect visual or sound bite for just about any marketing project.

 2.) Mailchimp

Mailchimp is the most popular free tool for sending marketing emails. In addition, it offers newsletters and automated messages. It’s user-friendly and provides a FREE tier for those who want to get their feet wet before making a commitment.

How do you use MailChimp?

Start by collecting email addresses from your website visitors, clients, or subscriber lists. Mailchimp helps you manage, segment, and message your contacts. You can even schedule automated emails, such as for birthdays or thank you emails, as well as messages based on a customer action. Mailchimp helps you send the right message, to the right audience, at the right time.

Mailchimp provides a comprehensive library of pre-loaded templates. Alternatively, you can use its drag-and-drop editor to design customs emails. Then, upload your desired logo and images to personalize it further.

Reporting Tools

Mailchimp offers an in-depth reporting suite. See your results for opens, open rate, link clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and conversions. This helps you analyze results as well as optimize future campaigns based on the data.

3.) Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) helps you track and understand how people interact with your website.

It provides insights into visitor behavior, location, engagement, and conversions. Most businesses leverage the free version of GA, which provides everything the vast majority of websites need. There is a paid version called Google Analytics 360, which is geared towards large companies with 10 million+ monthly visitors.

Google Analytics tracks the entire consumer journey plus data on channels, locations, and devices. It also provides information regarding on-site activity, conversions, and returning visitors.

Why does it Matter?

Business owners and marketers can use the GA data to uncover opportunities and challenges. GA allows its users to make data-driven decisions to optimize the website experience for visitors. For example, if a lot of homepage visitors transition to your product page but fall short of adding items to the cart, you can focus attention on the CTA (call-to-action), the conversion button(s), and the product page content.

In addition to helping with website decision-making, GA is also an important source to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. You can use GA to measure visitor behavior based on the marketing source and then act upon the results.

What are the key benefits of GA?

The standard version of Google Analytics includes the following advantages:

• Cost-Free
• Relatively User-friendly installation
• Detailed insights into web behavior
• Customizable reports and dashboards
• Integration with other Google products
• Post-click integration with non-Google traffic sources, including Meta, Yahoo, and Bing

4.) ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that answers questions and generates unique text responses. It is a type of large language model, or LLM, trained on vast amounts of internet data. ChatGPT can offer advice, compose articles, and even write code. It can also critique writing, summarize documents, and translate text from one language to another. ChaptGPT is free to use, although there is also a paid version which offers expanded image and voice inputs and integrations with other OpenAI services

How Does ChatGPT Work?

ChatGPT is composed of artificial neural networks trained on massive amounts of information. This allows ChatGPT to produce the most statistically probable response surrounding a specific context. The process builds from individual words to sentences to paragraphs to pages of text.

What is the ChatGPT Use Case?

ChatGPT is useful for generating text quickly and is able to respond to in-depth prompts. This can enhance the efficiency of content writing for companies, and also serves as a beefed-up thesaurus when wordsmithing. ChatGPT can also create a variety of taglines or CTAs for marketing purposes, allowing the user to pick and choose (or mix and match) from the best options, as well as combining with their own ideas.

Another use case for Chat GPT is for answering specific questions. While search engines, such as Google, have offered access to online information for decades, ChapGPT provides more tailored answers to specific inquiries, especially on an individual user basis. For example, a person could request, “provide three valid industry sources to corroborate the main claim in the third paragraph of this report.”

Limitations of ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a useful tool to improve efficiency, but it is not without its drawbacks. While it creates unique text for each user, there are some consistent stylistic elements that make it obvious to the discerning eye that the content is AI generated. It is effective for creating rough drafts, adding details, editing down verbiage, and wordsmithing specific phrases, however, over-reliance on it will leave your organization with a generic output.

Furthermore, AI has been known to “hallucinate” which is when it produces “facts” or “quotes” that are either inaccurate or completely fabricated. As such, diligent users must double-check any information it provides of which they are not already familiar. In its current iteration, ChatGPT is a powerful tool to help people, but not a replacement for human oversight.

5.) CapCut

CapCut is a free video editing app that allows users to quickly and intuitively enhance their video output. Included features are cutting scenes, adjusting speed, adding music or sound effects, enhancing color, tweaking lighting, layering multiple files, and more.

The free version provides all of the necessary elements for basic video editing, while the paid version provides more options and enhancements for the serious video editor. As such, Capcut suits a variety of skill levels. It is available online, as a download, and through a mobile app.

What Are the Top Features of CapCut?

CapCut offers users a smorgasbord of basic and advanced video editing features. Let’s explore some of the most useful ones:

Template Library: easily insert your video clips into pre-loaded, professionally designed templates

Text Overlays: Select from a wide range of text styles, colors, and effects (note: the Pro Level also has an automatic caption feature)

Audio Features: Choose from an extensive library of copyright free music and sound effects (AI avatars and voiceovers are available at the Pro Level)

Transitions: Swipes and fades are just the beginning of a wide range of smooth scene transitions available, even at the free tier

Chroma Key: Remove backgrounds and unwanted elements through the built-in color matching chroma key (the Pro Level has a surprisingly effective auto background removal tool)

As you can see, Capcut is a useful item in the toolbox of business owners and marketers alike, covering a large swath of video and image editing needs.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Business owners will find the entire suite of tools listed in this article useful. From content creation and editing to performance tracking and optimization, we’ve covered a wide range of applications. At the most basic level, these tools provide a DIY option to business owners desiring to keep things in-house. If the more advanced levels seem daunting to you, then Ciniva is poised to help. We will put our experience and expertise with these tools and a plethora of others to work on behalf of your company or organization. Reach out today for a FREE consultation.