Tools for a Small Budget that Make a Big Impact

There is a huge selection of online marketing tools available to business owners today. The question is, which tools are necessary and fit a small business sized budget? In this post, we’re going to look at some of the most popular and least expensive tools to help with your search and social media marketing.

Talkwalker or Google Alerts for Reputation Monitoring

Cost: Free

If you want to have a great online reputation, you need to maintain it by staying on top of conversations about your business. Talkwalker Alerts and Google Alerts are free services that allow you to sign up for email or RSS alerts that will notify you whenever your search query is mentioned throughout the web. You can use these alerts to monitor your own brand or monitor your competitors.

Buffer for Social Media Updates

Cost: Free to $10 per month.

Buffer is an easy to use application that allows you to schedule updates to your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. As opposed to other social management tools that make you configure the time and date for each status update you want to schedule, Buffer allows you to create a custom schedule. When you add updates to your Buffer, it will automatically schedule them to be sent at the next available time slot on your schedule. Best of all, you’ll get analytics on your Twitter updates to see their reach, retweets, favorites, replies, and clicks. This can help you better determine when you should be updating your Twitter account.

HootSuite for Social Media Management

Cost: Free to $8.99 per month for non-enterprise users.

HootSuite is an inexpensive tool that you can use to monitor multiple streams of social media account activity. You can have unlimited tabs with up to 10 columns each that can include the following - and beyond.

• Twitter home feed, mentions, direct messages, Twitter lists, and searches.

• Facebook newsfeed, wall posts, events, and searches.

• LinkedIn updates and job searches.

• Google+ newsfeed, circle feeds, sent messages, and searches.

This can help you monitor incoming updates all in one place and send out immediate responses.

Commun.it for Social Media CRM

Cost: Free to $29.99 per month for non-corporate users.

One of the biggest challenges with Twitter is the amount of noise. It’s hard to sort the real people from the bots. Commun.it is a Twitter CRM that shows you mentions and engagement from the most valuable members of your Twitter community. You can click on any Twitter user within your Commun.it dashboard to immediately see the number of engagements (replies, retweets, direct messages) that you have had with that particular user.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool for Keyword Research

Cost: Free

Need to research new keywords for your online marketing campaign? Google provides one of the best keyword research tools. Best of all, it’s free. If you have an AdWords account, you can log in with it to get up to 800 potential keyword ideas based off of the phrase you enter. You can use this tool to find more keyword phrases that can lead to content topic ideas as wells.

Google Analytics

Cost: Free for non-enterprise users.

Another highly useful tool provided by Google is Google Analytics. Google Analytics can show you just about everything you want to know about visitors coming to your website: how long they stay on, how many pages they visit, where they are located geographically, what devices they use to browser your site, what page they enter on, and what page they exit on. You can also discover your most (and least) popular content, the top keywords that bring visitors to your website, and the top referring sites that drive traffic.

SumAll

Cost: Free

Want to go beyond individual analytics to see how your online marketing affects your bottom line? That’s where SumAll comes in. You can plugin your website’s Google Analytics, social networks, ecommerce platforms, payment systems, and (soon) your email marketing to find out how a boost in one area affects the rest.

Sign up for a free account and start measuring the most important aspects of your business in a visually appealing way, all in one place!

What are your favorite freemium tools for online marketing? Please share in the comments!

Kristi Hines is a freelance writer, professional blogger, and social media enthusiast. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.