
Welcome to the $0 Marketing Stack
A free yet powerful stack of tools, platforms and integrations to transform your digital marketing and creative technology pursuits.
You can find a more comprehensive account detailing my full suite of recommendations for building your own $0 Marketing Stack by clicking on the button below.
Or scroll down to see the tools
Photo by Jeff Fielitz on Unsplash
The Zero Marketing Stack is a curated list of handpicked tools and platforms that can collectively supercharge your marketing capabilities. It is not a comprehensive directory of all the free marketing tools out there. If you’d to recommend a tool/service that you think belongs here, drop me a note and I’ll be happy to consider it.
Brand Building
Brand Name
- Namelix: AI assisted name generator
- Shopify’s Business Name Generator: Generate a name and register a domain in seconds
Brand Voice
- Take a brand personality quiz to define your archetype.
- Copywriter Chanti Zak also has a nifty brand voice quiz on her website which I found rather useful.
- A more comprehensive resource would be Hubspot’s guide for developing a brand identity.
Colour Palette
- Coolers (Recommended)
- Colormind
- Adobe Color Wheel: Upload an image to extract its colour palette
- Color Palette Generator from Canva
Logo
- Hatchful by Shopify
- Canva’s free logo maker
- Logo creator by Squarespace
Brand Story
- Hubspot’s guide to building a brand story
- Creative Supply’s Brand Story Canvas (includes a downloadable template)
- Storytech: An interactive brand story crafting platform. Not free but worth the $999
Miscellaneous
- Google Fonts is a great place for free fonts.
- Zippy Pixels: Brand guide boilerplate template
- Styleguides.io: 100+ tools to help you make your own style guide
Setup & Execution
Marketing Automation
- Hubspot Marketing Hub: Contact Management, Deals, Ticketing, Forms, Ads Management, Email Templates, Reporting Dashboard and much more.
- MailChimp: Up to 2000 contacts with email templates, landing pages, sign-up forms and a marketing CRM
Customer Relationship Management
- Hubspot CRM: Company Tracking, Deal Tracking and Pipeline Management along with a customisable reporting dashboard.
- MailChimp: Holistic views of audience, segmentation tools, personalisation and a mobile app
- MailChimp also offers a free CRM solution
Search Engine Optimisation
- SEM Rush: Identify keywords, analyse backlinks, run technical audits and track SERP positions *Free trial
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: Find broken links, discover duplicate content, generate XML sitemaps, and create a rich visual website architecture.
- GrowthBar: A powerful SEO plugin for Google Chrome that provides keyword suggestions, backlinks, google ads support and keyword tracking
- Yoast: Optimise WordPress websites for keywords/keyphrases, find high performing keywords, add structured data blocks, implement canonical links, provide technical SEO fixes and much more.
Influencer Engagement
- Upfluence Analytics: Analyse potential influencer profiles for key performance metrics such as engagement rate, reach, audience demographics, etc.
- The Upfluence blog resource to help incorporate influencers into your marketing strategy
- HypeAuditor: Influencer analytics platform, reports hub includes audience quality score, demographics and language insights, engagement analytics, etc.
- Influence.co: Connect, engage and collaborate with a global community of influencers
Marketing Strategy
Research
- Surveys: SurveyMonkey (Recommended)
- A guide for building effective surveys from the XM blog
- Free survey templates from Qualtrics.
- Observational Research: Analyse behaviour and user experience
- Social listening
- Talkwalker: Social Media Search
- Facebook Audience Insights: Real time social media insights from
- Socialmention: Social media search and analysis
- Google Trends: Trending topics
- Alexa: Find new opportunities to grow and engage your audience.
- Google Alerts & Talkwalker Alerts: Get notified when a new website, blog or forum mentions a topic you’re monitoring
- Interviews: Google Forms (Recommended)
- Use this guide to analysing open-ended questions (includes a template)
- A quick start guide to market research
- Competitors research:
- SimilarWeb: Analyse competitor’s web/app traffic
- Ubersuggest: Reverse engineer your competitor’s content marketing
- Moat: Analyse competitors display ads,
- Facebook Ads Library: Analyse competitors social ads.
Personas, prospect-customer lifecycle, user journeys.
- Customer personas and journey maps platform from Cubb
- Step by step instructions to create personas using Hubspot’s Make My Persona Tool
- Generate effective personas and map them to user stories using Userforge
- Step by step guide to building a customer journey map from Hotjar or this one from Hubspot which includes examples and templates
Messaging and content
- Guide to building an audience-centric brand communication strategy from Hubspot
- Uhuru Network’s guide to crafting a powerful marketing message
- Brand messaging framework and brand matrix templates from CoSchedule and one from Column Five
- Content marketing messaging architecture tool from CMI
Customer Experience (CX)
- This guide from Qualtrics on designing a CX Strategy lays out how to conduct customer experience research, mapping customer experience and building the future state.
- Qualtrics Survey — Create, distribute and analyse customer insights through well-designed surveys (refer to the previously suggested guide for building effective surveys from the XM blog)
- Hubspot Service Hub — A Customer Intelligence tool to help identify best-fit customers for effective targeting and provide a frictionless customer experience. The free plan includes features such as Contact Management, Ticketing, Live chat and more
- Segment — a Customer Data Platform to collect, unify, clean and control customer data
- SurveyMonkey — Create and send surveys to track and measure your customers’ experience
Measurement & Reporting
Data Analytics & Visualisation
- Google Analytics: Website analytics, cross-device/cross-channel campaign performance tracking, reporting, etc.
- Lighthouse: Improve the quality of web pages – audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO and more
- Hotjar or CrazyEgg: Identify most/least engaged parts of websites using heat maps, analyse user funnel, etc.
- Google Data Studio: Build interactive dashboards and beautiful data visualisations
- Facebook Analytics: View customer journey across mobile/web, drive growth to website/social, etc.
- Quantcast Measure: Real-time insights into audience demographic and psychographic, understand motivations how they engage with your website content
Miscellaneous
Learning & Development
- Hubspot Blog
- Neil Patel’s Blog — Especially this blog article which shares marketing techniques that cost you time, not money
- Google Primer
- Think with Google
- Product Hunt — The best new products in tech
Assets Creation
Concept, Prototypes, Wireframes, Design Systems
Building a Website
- WordPress is one of the most powerful and customisable website platforms used by 39% of the internet:
- WordPress.com free account includes dozens of free themes (Recommended)
- Set up and host WordPress using the forever free tier of Google Cloud Platform using the GCP setup guide from TerminalBytes, or this step by step instructional video from Utechpia.
- Download the installer package directly from WordPress.org and set it up on your own web server.
- Medium: Powerful blog publishing tool, captive audience of users and great search engine visibility for your work
- Substack: Publish blogs and build a subscription pool
- Webflow: Build professional, custom websites in a completely visual canvas
- WebsiteBuilder.com: Intelligent site builder, unlimited storage, SSL, CDN, direct integration with Unsplash, email marketing and online shopping
- Weebly and Wix: Drag and drop website editors, 500 MB storage, SSL, SEO features, lead capture forms.
Free Resources for you Website
- Icons: Thousands of free icons which you can configure as you see fit on Iconmonstr, and Font Awesome
- Stock Images & Videos: Many high-quality resources at Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay
- Fonts: Beautiful typography at Google Fonts,
- Hosting: There is a service for free hosting without ads which is literally called Free Hosting No Ads.
- Free Cloud Services: An assortment of services in the free tier from Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform
Content Planning & Development
- Content Research — BuzzSumo: Find content that resonates with your audience, Identify potential influencers, etc.
- Writing Assistants: The Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear. Grammarly eliminate grammatical errors, improve the quality of your writing – integrates with browsers
- AI-Assisted Copywriters: Some tools which are not entirely free but offer full feature trials include Copysmith, Copy.ai, InferKit with a live demo.
- GatherContent: Content planning and collaboration – 30-day full-feature trial.
- CopyBlogger: A wealth of resources to create compelling and effective content
Social Media
- Canva or Pablo: Craft beautiful and engaging social media posts
- Hootsuite or Buffer: Scheduling, publishing, calendar management, reporting
- Facebook audience insights or socialmention: Listening & analytics — Real-time social media search and insights
- Social Bakers’ suite of free social media tools: Facebook & Instagram performance quadrant reports, Social media benchmarking, Facebook ads performance prediction, etc.
Emails & Ad Banners
- Beefree is one of the best drag and drop editors to create beautiful, mobile responsive emails.
- Bannnersnack is a powerful tool to quickly make original ad banners automatically adapted to all standard sizes
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