10 Awesome, Low-Cost Marketing Tools

Here’s a rundown of some of our favorite free and low-cost marketing and project management tools. These resources can help teams work more efficiently, get smarter and get marketing results with less time and money.

1. Google Analytics: Your website is the best place to track the effectiveness of any campaign. This free tool from Google is one of the easiest to use and customize. It helps you know who is coming, what keyword they searched for, what SEM campaign they clicked on, what email they responded to and what they did on your site. Analytics is an absolute must for any business with a website.

2. Campaign Monitor: Email is the lowest cost tool for engaging prospects and customers. Campaign Monitor is one of the best email marketing tools that we have found. It’s easy to use (really), it integrates with Google Analytics, does the testing for you and is much less expensive than Constant Contact, Emma or Vertical Response.

3. WordPress: Forget what you heard about WordPress being a blog engine… it’s a free, robust, Content Management Application and it’s awesome! Thousands of fanatics around the world support this application through it’s open source community. It separates content from presentation and functionality and has more plugins than we could explore in a lifetime. What’s more, WordPress is super search engine friendly right out of the box. We use it to power a number of our small and medium sized business websites.

4. Press Release Point and PR Newswire: Outside of getting to know the staff at the local papers, there are two great press tools that are available online. Press Release Point is a great way to do an online press release for $20. Not only does it get your message out there, it also creates hundreds of pages that link back to your website (increasing your search engine ranking). PR Newswire is a more traditional approach and is surprisingly affordable. It’s important to use these tools in the correct order… few reporters will be interested in your story is plastered all over the internet.

5. Adwords: For most, Search Engine Marketing is a mystery. The best approach is to go slow. We love Adwords as a starting point because it integrates with Analytics (for tracking) and has some great targeting ability. The best approach for getting started is to start small and targeted. Set a budget of $50 per month, focus on your state and pick the fewest, most targeted keywords (and pay more than anyone else for each click). At the start, you will get everyone that is looking for you or a solution that is very close to the one you offer… that’s a good place to begin.

6. Google Docs and Basecamp: Working collaboratively with teams in different locations can be a grind. Whether your sharing content with your agency or working with a colleague down the hall, Basecamp and Google Docs make it easier. Basecamp is best for organizing a lot of documents and notes. Google Docs is best for working within documents.

7. Volusion: Setting up an online store can be painful… especially if you are trying to create something from scratch. Sure, you can plug in 2Checkout or PayPal but that looks budget. Volusion is an eCommerce Software-as-a-Service provider. Basically, they maintain a great application that can be easily customized and offer it up for reasonable monthly rates (hosting and support included). Volusion has some great marketing features, including CRM, Affiliate Marketing and Quickbooks integration.

8. Share a Sale: Affiliate Marketing is a great way to increase the visibility of products in your online store. Share a Sale is a great, low-cost way to begin an affiliate marketing program and invite sites and bloggers to participate. You define your commission structure and have full control of who’s in your program.

9. Sugar CRM, Pipeline Deals, Highrise (Relationship Marketing): The Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) marketplace has changed dramatically in the past few years. It used to be that you had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for an application to automate marketing messages. Now, a new company appears every day… offering lower costs and more features. Sugar CRM, Pipeline Deals and Highrise are a few that we have played with.

10. Protoshare (Website Prototyping): Imagine if Visio was easy to use, remembered your template and was online so colleagues could help you out. Protoshare helps you build a website prototype so everyone can test drive it before it goes to code. This is a new one for us. We signed up for an account recently and are happy with the results so far.

Be sure to add a comment if you have one to add to the list!