Marketing your brand online is time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.
Below are a variety of free tools and resources to help you brainstorm, produce, edit, and measure content that you publish online.
We’ll continue to add to this list as new tools become available, so bookmark this page.
Content Creation
- Headliner: Turn your podcasts and audio files into videos to distribute across YouTube, Facebook, etc.
- Remove.bg: Easily remove the backgrounds of images to customize photos for social media or your site.
- Experte: A free tool that automatically removes the background of an image. It works for all resolutions without registration.
- Unscreen: Remove the backgrounds from videos.
- Canva: Design templates, presentations photos, etc. An alternative to Photoshop. Free and paid plans.
- Pexels: Free stock videos and photos. Unsplash is another site with freely-usable images.
- GifJif: Customize GIFs and share them directly to your social media channels.
- GIPHY Capture: Turn anything on your screen into a GIF in a couple clicks.
- Rev.com or Descript: Save time transcribing audio. There are free and paid plans.
- AnswerThePublic: Type any search query to see related data and visualizations. Helps to uncover insights and understand the motivations behind specific searches. A gold mine for content creators.
Social Publishing
- Planoly: The first visual planner for Instagram. They also have a Pin Planner and a Stories Edit app.
- Linktree: Allows brands to use a single link to house all of the content that they’re driving followers to.
- Layout from Instagram: Remix up to nine photos and play around with the layout. Save it to your camera roll to publish across Instagram or other social channels.
- Tweetdeck: Still a helpful tool for scheduling tweets, creating searches, managing multiple accounts, etc.
Measurement
- Crowdtangle: An indispensable tool for competitive analysis and benchmarking, research, and more across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit. Does not include YouTube. Start by downloading the Chrome extension.
- Google Trends: If search volume is a proxy for interest, use Google Trends to monitor demand or brand affinity over time, etc. This also helps reveal seasonality, and you can use this to measure share-of-voice among competitors.
Miscellaneous
- LucidCharts: Amazing tool to map out and visualize marketing-related processes.
- TinEye: Reverse image search. Helpful to see if anyone is stealing your photos – among other use cases.
Special thanks to Nick Velliquette for his contributions to this list
