12 of the best free PR and marketing apps and tools for freelancers and small businesses
Love a helping hand with marketing and PR? Here are 12 of the best free PR and marketing apps and tools for freelancers and small businesses.
When you’re running your own small business you often rely on apps and tools to work smarter with the limited time and resources you have available.
To help you get a head start in marketing and PR, Emma Estridge, founder of Mushroom Marketing & PR, has compiled a list of her favourite 12 tools, including three PR apps, seven marketing tools and two organisation tools… all of them free! We hope you find them helpful.
Three of the best free PR apps
Love more media coverage for your businesss, but don’t have the budget to invest in expensive publicity agents? Here are three of the best free PR apps.
1) Anewstip
Anewstip helps you find relevant media contacts based on what they tweet and build your own media lists. So, if you are looking for journalists that have a particular interest in a subject matter, type in the keyword in the search box, and the site will come up with a list of relevant contacts.
With a free option, this is an invaluable tool. There are also upgrade options to enter your pitch or press release content; create an alert to monitor what’s being talked about in the media; and create media coverage reports.
2) Readly or pressreader
Readly (£7.99 pcm) or pressreader (£27.49 pcm, although this may be viewable at your local library for free – please contact your local library for more information) are tools where you can check for your press coverage in newspapers or magazines.
Or you can take a look at the types of articles the specific title writes about, so you can get in touch about a possible feature or news piece they may be interested in (readly covers magazines; pressreader covers 7,000+ newspapers and magazines)
3) #journorequest
This free service filters out twitter requests from journalists and bloggers looking for information on a particular topic. An email is sent by #journorequest with a daily digest of PR opportunities at 3pm UK time (or you can check out #journorequest in real-time on twitter to give you a longer time to get in touch with the contact).
Journorequest is ideal if you are looking to comment on a particular topic where a journalist is looking for a quote or additional information. Journorequests have enabled me to secure PR in national press and appear in major blogs for my clients.
Eight of the best free marketing tools
Here are eight of the best free marketing tools.
1) Moz.com
There are several free tools from moz, which help you work out how search engine-friendly your website is.
If I were to recommend just one tool, it would be to download the free Moz Bar in your Chrome browser, which gives you page metrics for any website you visit (or your own website), giving you the PA (page authority) and DA (domain authority) details.
It’s great for comparing the value of your own website score against your competitors’ sites!
2) Google My Business
Google My Business is a free tool that lets you create a free google profile for your business, helping your business and website be more visible on google.
You can add photos, offers and updates (such as links to blogs) to your profile. You can also ask customers to leave a review about your company, which will be visible on google.
It also comes with handy stats on how many clicks and views your profile received, so it’s a good way to gauge which posts receive the most engagement.
3) Answer The Public
The free version of Answer The Public lets you discover content ideas based on autocomplete data from search engines. So, if you’re short on ideas for your next blog, just type in a relevant keyword, and you’ll discover a whole raft of ideas! It also helps your business to answer the questions that people have already been searching for online.
4) Google Search Console
You may already have google analytics set up to track activity on your website. However, when you add google’s search console details to it, the data becomes even more useful.
For example, find out the exact phrases and keywords where your website has appeared in searches, which you can then work on to improve the click rate.
5) Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a new tool (with a free option), has been set up by Neil Patel, an SEO expert.
Fill in your details, and the tool will provide a free site audit, including an on-page SEO score, the number of backlinks to your website as well as a list of top SEO issues that you can fix, increasing your website’s SEO ranking.
6) Kapwing
Kapwing is a free editing tool that can trim your video, add subtitles, resize and add audio. So, if you are creating videos up to seven minutes long for your social media, websites, emails or YouTube Channels, this is a really useful website for you.
You can also create memes and remove a background from an image (to make it a transparent PNG).
7) Mailerlite
Mailerlite is a free email tool and is great if you have less than 1,000 subscribers. As an alternative to mailchimp, you can create your emails, send out surveys, grow your subscribers list and track the results all in one place.
8) Vista Social
Vista Social is a leading social media management tool (with a free option) and is trusted by top brands, agencies, and solopreneurs. They have a suite of products that support publishing, engagement, analytics, review management, social listening, and team collaboration across all major social networks and apps.
Their paid plan is only $3/social profile with unlimited users, social profiles, and post scheduling, keeping more money in your pockets.
Two of the best free organisation tools
Love to be more organised? Try these two free tools.
1) Airtable
Airtable is a free organisational tool that includes help with project management, a content calendar and a sales CRM. It even includes a new job hunting section to record all the companies contacted.
2) Evernote
In Evernote you can organise all your notes in one place. The handy mobile app and webpage sync so that all your information is in one saved place.
Plus, the handy Chrome toolbar makes it easy to save useful web articles to your evernote at the click of your mouse, which can then be sorted by tag. I regularly use it to quickly save useful articles I want to refer back to, so that they are all in one place.
Emma Estridge is founder of Mushroom Marketing & PR which offers both marketing and PR support to businesses and charities. To keep up with the latest insights and trends, click here.
