50 Free and Hot Online Tools for Marketing Agencies

If you ask marketing agency managers what tools they cannot do without, it would probably take them a while to limit their choice to a top five due to the numerous offers on the software market.

To avoid feeling overwhelmed, we sorted out the major free and paid tools for successful digital marketing into five categories that almost cover everything.

Content creation tools

You need to tell your audience the story behind your service to turn them into trusted customers, and content creation is what makes it happen.

The tools in the must-have marketing list include the following.

Lumen5

An ultimate choice due to fail-proof quality of video content that you will be able to create in several minutes.

Lumen5 is AI-empowered, which means you will get notified in your email on any post you made, with the suggestion of curing it for any format from the news feed to IG story.

Once you set the format and style, you can pick supporting media elements (short videos, GIFs, pictures, or uploads), music (themed or uploaded), and text to give the viewers a deeper dive into your post's content.

This feature is available in free and premium versions.

Simple, fast and elegant, to say the least.

Placeit

This platform can seriously help you if you prioritize creating high-quality content.

It enables producing mock-up designs and logos in a minute.

For $29 per month, a paid subscription gives you access to hundreds of video templates and unlimited downloads.

Placeit has a special category for those who want to make their YouTube presence meaningful by offering a video maker with wide functionality.

Playbuzz

It is designed as a perfect tool for storytelling, and with a piece of content appearing on Playbuzz every minute, you surely can expect that your marketing ideas, once smartly packed into a rich wrap of tests, polls, quizzes and templates that the service offers, will not go unnoticed by 3 million audience of this open network.

This tool enables the creation of content in various ways. It is fun, free, and ideally suited for small to medium-sized marketing agencies.

Stencil

We all love visual content, and Stencil is one of the best tools for creating it.

Its great popularity comes as no surprise: you can choose between a free and paid plan and design, applying unlimited resources smartly packed under several categories.

Either way, with Stencil, it will be easy to produce visuals and share them on social media instantly.

As an additional benefit, it is integrated with Buffer, which means that you can schedule social media posts according to your content plan.

Stripo

Stripo is an all-in-one email design platform. They enable clients to build emails of any complexity really fast. Integrated with 50+ ESPs/CRMs, which lets you push your emails to your marketing automation system with just 1 click.

A number of embedded micro-tools gives you everything you need for email production, from photo editors to banner generators, from timers to interactivity and real-time content.

Canva

Available in free and premium versions, Canva is the leader in online graphics tools due to its extreme simplicity of usage and large number of templates. Even if you do not have extensive design expertise, you can produce decent results and use Canva as a business productivity enhancer.

This content-creating tool is ideal for the needs of any size marketing agency as its functionality combines simplicity and effectiveness.

Grammarly

Generating content means thorough editing. With a tool like Grammarly, you can feel confident you did well when sending to publish. You can install it as a browser extension and enjoy one of the most accurate online grammar checkers.

Choose either a free or premium plan for the fail-proof quality of your proofreading. Now, you can enjoy working fast with instantly proofread content due to Grammarly integrations with your favorite apps.

Ginger

With this editing tool, you get fail-proof grammar and multi-platform support. Ginger lets you follow the essential rules of successful marketing and produce great content marked by excellence of spelling and impeccable style.

Either you apply it when you are getting ready with your social media posts or when you want to prepare emails, and you can be sure that you are producing content free of mistakes.

Thinglink

This is another great offer for marketing agencies that take content design seriously. The software is designed to present content in various ways, and you can add tags to your visuals and make your images interactive.

The content created on the platform can be instantly shared on social media. It is an innovative tech tool that enables marketing teams to work more effectively by applying options to embed audio, video, or media links directly into images.

Alitu

Podcasts are becoming more popular, so if you need to produce high-quality audio content without involving yourself in complex production, Alitu is a handy tool.

For $28 monthly subscription, this software automates cleaning up your audios of mistakes and silences, joining the recordings and adding music pieces.

Team collaboration tools

Suppose you want your marketing team members to be on the same page but avoid restrictions on their time and location. In that case, you will need reliable digital assistants that enable fail-proof collaboration.

The list of highly recommended software goes as follows.

TMetric

TMetric is an optimal tool for maintaining the accuracy of worktime calculations. Instead of wasting time and effort observing routine administrative procedures, you can now concentrate on your projects and marketing tasks.

Once you choose the workspace you work in, you get access to a full description of projects and tasks as well as reports on marketing team.

It works from any device and integrates with other apps. It guarantees distraction-free work and helps your marketing team stay accountable regardless of location.

Slack

Messengers for corporate and team communication let you switch from one-to-all to one-to-department and one-to-one communication, which makes their popularity grow.

Slack is one of the leaders among the team messengers, as its basic purpose is a multi-functional messaging platform.

Slack offers a detailed workspace directory for easy navigation among the diverse options, including the option to make calls within workspaces (available on the paid plans).

Trello

Ideally designed for marketing teams' needs due to the neat dashboard and easy-to-apply boards that incorporate many options.

Each list you create can contain as many cards as you need, and once you click on the card it will pop up on the screen delivering the full info on the task at hand.

Trello is free, which makes it extra appealing. Its integration list is also impressive, meaning new opportunities for optimizing your marketing team's workflow.

CoSchedule

This software removes the necessity of complex note-taking when it comes to scheduling corporate meetings as it automates scheduling. Its free version does not enable full functionality but still keeps lots of valuable scheduling options open.

In addition to a marketing calendar that instantly makes your marketing events visible to your team, there is also the option of team resource planning and a full-fledged work organizer.

Appear.in

Video conferencing plays a major role in the collaboration ecosystem. If you opt for Appear.in, you will get an easy-to-use tool that enables the flexibility of video meetings for marketing teams and their clients.

Appear.in boasts of providing the connection for over 10 million conversations in 2018.

Once you have created an address (link) for your virtual conference room, you can share that link with up to eight people to start a voice or video call.

Canto

Marketing teams manage huge file libraries every day. With Canto, you speed up the process and create an unbroken workflow. This software lets your digital resources be well-organized and easily handled in case you need to retrieve information on your digital assets.

Setting aside the opportunity to centralize storing and managing various files, you and your team get the powerful instrument of assets branding and team/remote team collaboration.

Wiredrive

One of the best tools in the category of media sharing, it can enhance marketing teams' collaboration and productivity. It is ideal for efficient media management, as it enables faster uploads.

This software is an imperative tool for creative teams that want to simplify their review routine by systematically archiving final media. This translates into best-allocating the marketing teams' finance and time resources.

Yammer

It is designed as a social network platform for fostering team collaboration. It provides real-time communication on-premises or offsite. It also helps marketing teams channel communication within smaller groups to collaborate on projects, edit documents, and share them.

With Yammer belonging to featured Microsoft Products, you can securely collaborate with your team and clients. Now it is available for iOS and Android.

Evernote

It is a top choice for marketing teams that prioritize ideas before starting an ambitious project and believe in the power of to-do lists. You can pick any plan to stay organized and follow your online and offline plans (available for premium users).

The best option for your marketing team will be a Business Plan that provides, among other benefits, a web clipper, templates, document scanning, and note sync.

Station

Over 900 teams worldwide showed appreciation for this software, which was named the product of the year by the Product Hunt review platform.

It enables the automatic grouping of your pages by applications.

To better concentrate on your work, you can customize alert notifications.

With Station, your virtual work zone is clutter-free, meaning you can find what you need quickly.

Customer engagement tools

Marketers' goal is to attract and engage customers with the advertised service or product. The tools in this category are imperative for better understanding customers' needs and improving service delivery.

To make and keep big marketing promises will be easier with the following customer engagement tools at hand:

Snov.io

Snov.io is one of the best solutions for sales automation for startups and small businesses. It works as a single platform for lead generation, cold outreach, and sales process management owing to its all-inclusive functionality.

Snov.io allows finding any email address of potential prospects from any business page including social networks such as LinkedIn, building and sending automated email sequences, tracking their performance, and keeping all sales data in one place.

WebEngage

If you wish to create happy customers, you will find WebEngage ultimately satisfying. It will collect valuable data pertaining to customers' expectations by asking simple questions that will help you create a new buying experience for them.

It results in a clear vision of your target audience and, thus, the optimal ways of reaching it.

Overall, it is a great business-to-customer automation tool for marketing agencies that allows them to predict marketing budgets with precision.

Hubspot

Successful marketing strategies are based on successful customer engagement. Hubspot might be the perfect software to address this issue, as it is an expert at creating strategically justifiable marketing messages.

It enjoys great popularity due to giving customers the opportunity to engage with you through their social media accounts with an engagement tool called 15Five.
It easily collects data upon surveying your customers and shows users' authentic engagement.

Uservoice

With Uservoice, you get access to the full info on customers' engagement. Users directly share their opinions and voice the pros and cons of interaction with your site in a single platform.

Prompt feedback is the source of valuable information. As an additional benefit, Uservoice gives you an opportunity to filter the info by relevance and importance.

The tool is suitable for any size team and allows you to save a lot of time collecting and processing customers' engagement data.

Appcues

This software creates a slot for you to fill with information on your customers' engagement with your service. Now, you can build client onboarding, NPS surveys, or feature announcements without wasting a single extra minute.

Using this tool may increase new user activation by 10% and significantly improve the rate of NPS responses.

Heap

This tool lets you portray your customer based on the featured set of data. Applying the Virtual Events option will assist you in choosing the ideal model for engaging customers in further campaigns. It keeps stats and creates reports on retention.

With this customer engagement solution, marketing agencies can define all the new events without code.

Rebrandly

This link management tool enables marketers to brand, track, and share short URLs using a custom domain name.

Branded links can drive a 39% higher click-through rate than generic links and increase trust and brand awareness – a must-have for any marketer.

This solution also provides a detailed analytics feature that allows you to learn about who’s clicking on your links such as what country the clicks are coming from, the most popular times and days and what social media platform the clicks originated from for example.

Provide Support

It is a powerful tool for real-time monitoring and filtering customer engagement and enabling proactive chat invitations, call transfers, canned answers, chat session logs, and encrypted chats.

It offers a free 10-day trial. Further pricing is customizable and depends on the number of required profiles and the choice of billing options.

Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is a SaaS-based platform that allows companies to gather customer feedback. You can customize and use many templates in the survey builder accordingly.

Peakon

To avoid disconnecting business with the customer, you need a monitoring tool that will guarantee that the bridge between service/product and the interested audience is open.

Peakon is a revolutionary platform that is designed to provide feedback from your clients in real time.

It results in preventing the lack of customer engagement. It delivers clear, insightful feedback from your customers. Applying it, you will reduce the project cost and maximize income.

SoGoSurvey

It is a web-based application that helps you create and distribute surveys. It is available with multi-lingual support. You can either start from scratch or use the templates that are offered. Streamlining the participants' experience has never been faster or easier.

Once you are happy with the content of your survey, you can customize its appearance and choose branding elements for better recognition. It provides service across any device and lets you go live instantly.

Phlanx

With social media's growing popularity, it comes as no surprise that marketers try to reach their audience through SM influencers. This tool helps you estimate whether advertising campaigns with their participation will yield a return on investment.

Phlanx ignores the visible numbers on the surface of profiles (which might be misleading) and calculates the engagement rate, which is meaningful in terms of your customers' effective engagement. Using this platform, you get accurate information on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube influencers' marketing potential.

EngageBay

One of the most satisfying tools regarding in-suite marketing solutions.

It helps increase the engagement rate by tracking the keywords, A/B testing, supporting landing pages providing full info on the contacts, establishing relations with prospects, and optimizing relations with existing clients.

It is an optimal digital automation tool for marketing teams. Its intuitive interface requires zero effort to understand the navigation, which means that your team can start using it immediately.

Email marketing tools

Even though it is 2019 and instant messages seem the preferable way of communication in everyday life, email marketing is the number one marketing communication channel.

It enables you to reach your customers ( both prospective and active) through email at a time convenient for them, which defines the long-lasting popularity of email marketing software.

MailChimp

Reaching your audience takes just a few simple steps: you create an account and set the sign-up form for your site. There are also lots of templates that you can use to send your business letters so that they look attractive and professional.

The algorithm works without fail: you import the subscribers and upon creating the letter, send them emails (additionally, there is a great scheduling option for sending letters later). Mailchimp integrates with the apps you use at work so you can check on the list and considerably speed up your workflow.

Constant Contact

This email marketing automation tool offers a rich set of features for those who want high-quality customer engagement in marketing campaigns.

It offers a 60(!)-day free trial to dive into the software's wide functionality, acting as a sophisticated template manager and ensuring successful drip email campaigns.

It is an optimal email marketing solution that fits small to medium businesses and is ideally tailored to the needs of dynamic marketing teams.

Autopilot

It is one-of-a-kind visual marketing software for effortless launching email marketing campaigns.

The distinguishing features include capturing leads from sites and allocating leads into different lists or folders. Contact management is also available for syncing users within CRM systems.

The product's usage covers multi-channel marketing (online, email, texts, and snail mail). Besides, this tool can be navigated easily thanks to a drag-and-drop interface, which results in automating your marketing teams' email campaigns.

Elastic Email

It is a full-fledged email marketing management platform. Suitable for any team size, it will enhance productivity regarding efficient email delivery. Its main features include subscriber management options, email validation, survey generation, template choice, and WYSIWYG email editor.

There are a free version and a free trial. The software is cost-effective as it offers the options provided by more costly rivals.

Convertkit

It is an email marketing solution that provides a bold tagline subscriber system. This system helps run automation effectively and enables the creation of dynamic emails with the option of merging tags.

The built-in visual automation is simple and effective. The application of ConvertKit implies the availability of various form types and a basic landing page builder.

It also offers a WordPress plugin so that you can have your site and ConvertKit email list work in a union. More suited to small-size teams.

Mailmunch

Using Mailmunch plugin can help you grow your email subscribers. It provides the tools for converting visitors to your blogs into potentially loyal customers. Optin forms Mailmunch offers are an easy way to subscribe via email to your/your customers' newsletter.

Moreover, new subscribers can be easily synced to MailChimp or Constant Contact.

Mailmunch is a service that works as an email list enhancer and integrates with all web platforms, including WordPress.

ActiveCampaign

This email marketing software is a powerful solution for turning contacts into your customers. It helps create targeted messages and provides full marketing automation by enabling communications through automated workflows based on people's unique interests defined thanks to ActiveCampaign features of email segmentation and more personalized content.

Your customers' journey will surely be smoother with this tool, which costs starting at $9 per month.

SendInBlue

It is an email marketing automation solution for launching email campaigns, handling transactional emails, sending SMS messages, creating Facebook ads, and retargeting ads. Its pricing plans get good reviews from long-term users.

Overall, it is a marketing solution suitable for any size marketing team.

Email marketing covers the opportunities for channel management, event-triggered actions, lead management, and multi-campaigns' launch.

It is a perfect combo of quality and service.

Retainly

This software offers an efficient marketing automation solution with a rich set of features and capabilities.

It enables multi-channel drip marketing campaigns incorporating support for SMS, email, and push notifications.

The platform allows marketing teams to engage clients and prospects with time-delayed email automation.

It seamlessly integrates with Intercom, Mixpanel, Segment, and Woopra, which means it automatically captures relevant customers' information.

MailerLite

It is an email marketing service provider characterized by simplicity of usage and sophisticated email designs.

It positions itself as user-friendly software that helps launch and track successful email campaigns instantly. Besides, it can help manage subscribers and create customized popups and appealing landing pages, to name a few.

Due to its impressive list of integrations, it acts as a workflow facilitator. Its distinguishing features include campaign reporting options, full email automation, subscribers' management, and email campaign results tracking.

Adestra

This cloud-hosted platform supports many marketers by assisting them at all the campaign stages, from launch to results track of the email marketing campaigns.

It provides data-driven automation and offers marketers a tool with advanced tracking functionality.

In addition, your team feels more efficient with the open list of multiple integrations, including analytics and project management software. It perfectly suits small and medium size marketing agencies.

It supports a quote-based pricing model that depends on the set of features your team's needs require.

Marketing analytics tools

Data is a buzzword, which comes as no surprise. Getting access to data enables tracking and analyzing customers' behavioral patterns and makes business forecasting more accurate.

The importance of marketing analytics is undeniable. You need tools to collect, analyze, and measure your marketing performance.

To empower your marketing team with tools that provide true insights into your marketing projects, you might want to consider the following software.

Awario

It is a cloud-based analytical tool designed for marketing teams of any size. It enables continuous data processing and is optimal for managing brand and product performance online.

Key features include customer engagement, impact scoring, influencer tracking, sentiment analysis, and more.

This ideal software allows marketers to engage with the target audience and distinguish market campaign success.

Loomly

It is a social media management tool to assist teams in creating engaging content for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ & LinkedIn, thanks to an intuitive interface and innovative toolbars that enable your access to generating appealing ideas, getting optimization advice, seeing previews, validating workflows approvals, creating reports and automating the posts schedule.

The software is available on the web and mobiles (iOS & Android). Its pricing is based on five subscription options, which give access to advanced scheduling and analytics (starting with $27 per month on the base plan).

NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is a software solution that monitors the results of marketing activity. It suits small to medium businesses and marketing teams embracing multiple social media channels.

It facilitates your work by automating customer service and analyzing project results compared with those of competitors.

NapoleonCat integrates with the most popular social media channels like Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest to process and deliver the marketing reports relevant to your teams' marketing needs.

Zoho Social

With this software, you can schedule an unlimited number of posts, track conversations within networks, and evaluate marketing performance with specific metrics. Incorporating this tool into the workflow of your marketing team will be like hiring a high executive with vast experience, as it features automation of complex analytics.

Zoho Social integrates with Facebook, Zoho CRM, Instagram, and LinkedIn, which allows you to get instant feedback on your marketing presence there and your team's social media performance.

Falcon

Falcon Brand presents a cloud-based social media marketing and analytics solution that incorporates options for social media monitoring and measuring engagement, as well as comprehensive customer data management.

It is a reliable assistant for marketers and marketing teams that creates personalized brand experiences.

Controlling all your social media channels might be a challenge. Still, by applying Falcon as a solution, you remove the hassle and focus on delivering monitoring results for more effective performance.

Buffer

This trusted tool not only saves time managing your social media content but also schedules, publishes, and analyzes all your posts within one workspace.

Buffer allows multi-account management and, at a relatively low cost, gives powerful analytical reports on your content performance on a weekly and monthly basis.

Its full feature set is available on the web and mobile for $15 a month as a starting price.

Google Analytics

It belongs to the classic marked as 'old but gold.'

Enjoyed by lots of marketing teams, this software provides quality reports on stats pertaining to page views, number of unique visitors, and average time spent on your site.
It answers one of the most important questions of how much profit you actually get for a dollar spent on marketing.

Lack of data training can cost your business accountability and return on investment, so implementing analytical tools like Google Analytics is essential.

Optinmonster

One of the best lead generation and conversion optimization tools for strategic marketing.

It is available on various platforms, including Wordpress. This software offers many templates that will help you grow your email list with several clicks. Whether you want a popping-up lightbox or floating bar, you can easily create a form customized for your marketing needs.

All you need is the form's title and the website where you will apply it. The pricing options depend on the plan you choose and the billing period. The Basic plan starts at $19 per month.

VisualIQ

It is a tool for strategic measurement of your marketing performance. The data is not only skillfully collected but organized into neat reports, which will help you identify the bottlenecks prospective customers might feel stuck in. It will also assist your team in establishing clear criteria for advertising campaigns' effectiveness.

Applying VisualIQ will increase revenue by enhancing your performance and getting most of your advertising.

Visitor Analytics

Implementing this software means you can eliminate confusingly complex stats and charts bloated with irrelevant detail.

Now you can find info on a visitor's history, referral and a path with just a click away and view the exact traffic coming from affiliate referrals and URL campaigns.

Overall, it can be considered the best alternative to Google Analytics in case you need to access key data on site visitors. The information is presented in a ready-made dashboard.

Marketingminer

You can choose the marketing data you consider relevant to work with. It analyzes service and product prices in price comparators and suggests keywords for analysis.

It also provides SEO assistance by identifying URLs that are not indexed and disclosing the reasons.

Now, you can easily obtain basic marketing data for insights into accurately and realistically evaluating your projects' performance.

Conclusion

To eliminate manual errors and save time on your efforts, you need to apply the smart marketing automation tools offered in the list above.

They will be great facilitators of your marketing teams' workflows at the stages of content creation, collaboration, managing email campaigns, and data analysis for further planning your marketing strategy.