10 Best Free Marketing Software for SMBs in 2024

Canva is a highly popular graphic design platform. Before the platform, businesses relied on teams of designers or freelance graphic artists to create all their visual assets. Canva allows non-designers to create high-quality graphics for various social media platforms; and their paid ads, blogs, email, and print ads.

Why I Picked Canva: Canva is an excellent option if you don’t have the skills or experience with software such as Photoshop or Illustrator. The massive variety of optimized sized and built-in templates makes it quick and easy for anyone to create any graphics they want. You can also use the platform to collaborate with your team or clients by sharing a link for them to view the graphic and make any necessary edits.

Canva Standout Features & Integrations

Key features include a vast library of templates and design elements (25,000+ free templates, 100+ asset types), including graphics, images, fonts, and customizable layouts. You can create and design a variety of marketing materials, such as social media graphics, presentations, infographics, and posters. Everything is drag-and-drop, point-and-click, so you can adjust assets with much more ease than a platform like Photoshop.

Integrations include DataPocket, Wedia, Flowcode QR, Widen DAM, SharePoint, Dybder, Brandfolder, Smartmockups, Publuu Flipbooks, and other options centered around storing and sharing graphic assets.

Google Analytics helps your digital marketing team understand the best messages and channels that provide their ecommerce store with the best results. Google Analytics can give your teams insights that can help everyone understand your site’s users and efficiently evaluate your product’s performance. Small and large stores can use the software’s testing and conversion tools to create better customer experiences and maximize their digital strategy.

Why I Picked Google Analytics: Google Analytics provides your business with almost everything regarding business intelligence and data visualization. For example, in the software’s dashboard, you can monitor the average amount of time your visitors spend on your site. You can also see who’s on your site at the time you are on your dashboard in real time. Use this data to see where your visitors are coming from and how to get them to keep coming back.

Google Analytics Standout Features & Integrations

Key features include comprehensive tracking capabilities provide detailed insights into website traffic, user behavior, and conversion tracking, enabling marketing teams to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and website performance. It allows segmentation of data based on various dimensions, such as demographics or traffic sources, providing deeper audience insights. It also offers real-time reporting, goal tracking, and advanced analytics features like funnel visualization and attribution modeling.

Integrations include Shopify, WordPress, Facebook, Zendesk, and Marketo, plus others, as well as additional Google solutions like Google Ads, Google Cloud, Google Play, and Google Ad Manager.

Hotjar is a behavior analytics that can help your team see what your website visitors are looking at on your store. The platform provides you with product experience insights to show you what they feel strongly about your site. Your product teams can use this information to develop and deliver real value to them.

Why I Picked Hotjar: Hotjar is a powerful tool that can be highly valuable for marketing teams. It offers features such as heatmaps, session recordings, and user feedback, which allow marketing teams to gain deep insights into user behavior and preferences. By analyzing heatmaps, teams can understand how users interact with their website, which sections receive the most attention, and identify areas for optimization. Session recordings provide a visual playback of user sessions, enabling marketers to see firsthand how visitors navigate their websites.

Hotjar Standout Features & Integrations

Key features include click maps, heat maps, scroll maps, and visitor recordings. These let you see exactly what visitors are doing on your site, where they click, and how far they scroll. The platform also gives you options to help you analyze your sales funnel. You can also insert surveys and messages to show your site’s visitors.

Integrations include Slack, Optimizely, Hubspot, Shopify, and WordPress, plus others if you link up with Zapier, though that may require a separate paid plan.

Twilio is a cloud communications platform that enables businesses to integrate messaging, voice, and video capabilities into their applications, enhancing customer engagement and communication experiences. They do SMS, MMS, email, and call-based customer communications.

Why I Picked Twilio: Twilio excels in providing SMS marketing and customer support solutions by offering a robust and scalable platform that enables businesses to seamlessly integrate SMS functionality into their marketing and support workflows. With Twilio, businesses can easily send and receive SMS messages programmatically, leveraging its APIs and developer-friendly tools. This allows for personalized and targeted SMS marketing campaigns, as well as efficient customer support interactions through two-way messaging. Twilio's platform also provides features like message templates, automated responses, and delivery tracking, ensuring reliable message delivery and enhancing the overall customer experience.

Twilio Standout Features and Integrations

Key features include a global carrier network, allowing businesses to reach customers across the globe reliably and efficiently. With its extensive coverage, businesses can engage with their customers on a global scale. Twilio provides a suite of developer-friendly APIs and tools, enabling businesses to easily integrate SMS functionality into their existing applications and systems. Twilio's platform supports a wide range of messaging types beyond standard SMS, including MMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger

Integrations include Microsoft Teams, Emotive, Gladly, Telemarketr, Iterable, Leanplum, Sprinklr, Fastcall, CallTracker, Meya, PagerDuty, PingPilot, VoiceBase, Freshworks, and many other apps. You can access their API for other integration options.

Buffer is a social media management platform that simplifies the scheduling, publishing, and analysis of social media content for businesses and individuals. The free plan also comes with a landing page builder and an AI assistant.

Why I Picked Buffer: Buffer is an efficient and user-friendly social media management platform that excels in social media scheduling. With Buffer, users can schedule posts across multiple social media platforms in advance, ensuring consistent and timely content delivery. Its intuitive interface allows users to easily create and organize their content, add images or videos, and select the desired posting schedule. Buffer also offers features like content curation, where users can discover and share relevant content from trusted sources within the platform. Additionally, Buffer provides analytics and insights to track post performance, engagement metrics, and audience growth.

Buffer Standout Features & Integrations

Key features include their Optimal Timing Tool analyzes the engagement patterns of your social media audience and suggests the most effective times to post. Buffer offers a social inbox feature that allows you to manage and respond to social media interactions from various platforms within a single interface.

Integrations include Canva, WordPress, Feedly, and Pocket. You can use Zapier to integrate Buffer with thousands of web applications, such as WordPress, Feedly, Google Sheets, Trello, and Googe Calendar.

Mailchimp is an all-in-one email marketing platform that helps businesses create, send, and analyze email campaigns to engage with their audience and drive results.

Why I Picked Mailchimp: Mailchimp offers robust form building and customer survey features that allow businesses to gather valuable information from their audience. With Mailchimp's form builder, users can easily create custom forms and embed them on their website or landing pages to capture leads, newsletter sign-ups, or other marketing customer data. The form builder provides a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop functionality, making it simple to customize the form's design and fields. Additionally, Mailchimp's customer survey feature enables businesses to create and distribute surveys to collect feedback, opinions, or preferences from their audience. Users can design surveys using pre-built templates, and responses are automatically collected and organized within the v platform for analysis.

Mailchimp Standout Features & Integrations

Key features include that Mailchimp now goes beyond email marketing and provides users with an all-in-one marketing platform. In addition to email campaigns, users can create landing pages, run social media ads, build customer journeys, and integrate with e-commerce platforms. This comprehensive suite of tools allows businesses to manage their marketing efforts from a single platform, saving time and effort while ensuring a cohesive and integrated approach.

Integrations include 300+ apps, like QuickBooks Online, Shopify, Stripe, Yelp for Business, LiveChat, SimpleTexting, Zendesk, WordPress, Mixpanel, and Firebase.

Hootsuite helps digital marketing teams schedule social media posts, monitor trends, and engage with audiences through various networks. Your teams can also access Hootsuite for expert certification, training, and coaching in social listening, customer care, and social commerce.

Why I Picked Hootsuite: When using Hootsuite, you can schedule social media posts across several networks, such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Your team can manage paid and social content to monitor customer conversations. The platform also has a calendar or post planner view to help you plan your content and see what posts need approval and which are rejected. Hootsuite allows teams to track campaigns through various pre-built report templates they can share with the rest of the company or clients.

Hootsuite Standout Features & Integrations

Key features include their social listening capabilities, allowing users to monitor mentions, hashtags, and conversations happening across social media platforms. Users can set up customized streams to track specific keywords or topics, enabling them to stay informed about industry trends, track brand sentiment, and engage with their audience effectively. This feature helps users gather valuable insights, identify opportunities for engagement, and proactively manage their online reputation.

Integrations include over 150 apps, such as Adobe Stock, Google My Business, WordPress, Canva, HubSpot, and ZenDesk. It also connects to over 35 social networks.

Crowdfire is a free social media marketing solution that connects to all the platforms you would expect: YouTube, WordPress, Shopify, Ebay, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Through Crowdfire, you can schedule social media posts, have topics and images recommended to you, gather relevant hashtags to your product, and track followers of your company online.

Why I Picked Crowdfire: Crowdfire assists users in curating articles and images for their social media feeds through its smart content recommendation system. By analyzing the user's social media accounts and audience preferences, Crowdfire suggests relevant articles and images that align with their interests and engagement patterns. Users can discover and select content from a wide range of sources within the Crowdfire platform, including blogs, news websites, and image libraries. Additionally, Crowdfire offers features such as content curation queues, which allow users to schedule and automate the sharing of curated content across their social media accounts.

Crowdfire Standout Features & Integrations

Key features include hashtag recommendations for each of your posts by scraping social platforms for hashtags with high user impressions and engagement and connecting them to your posts with similar content and themes. Crowfire also offers unlimited images recommended for easy Instagram and Pinterest growth.

Integrations include Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Shopify, Etsy, Wordpress, Shopify, Vimeo, Twitch, and other social and content platforms.

SumoMe is a tool available on WordPress that provides users with tools to help grow an e-mail list. You can use the services it offers that maximize your social engagement, traffic, and conversion rate. It provides a central platform where everything it offers is available, and you can select the tool you need to build your list. The platform handles multiple vital tasks that might ordinarily need seven, eight, or nine separate plugins.

Why I Picked SumoMe: SumoMe is a powerful all-in-one suite of apps that can handle many marketing needs at once. SumoMe’s collection of apps falls into six main categories: list building, social sharing, on-site analytics, communication, traffic boosting, and ecommerce. The combination of all these tools can help you improve your site’s performance. Some of the features these tools provide ecommerce businesses include building pop-up opt-in forms, creating full-screen calls to action, web analytics, and allowing visitors to highlight content to share on social media. These powerful functionalities can help you grow an entire business, not just a website.

SumoMe Standout Features & Integrations

Key features include a suite of list building tools, including pop-ups, welcome mats, and scroll boxes, which help businesses grow their email subscriber lists. These tools are highly customizable and can be designed to match the website's branding. SumoMe's unique Smart Mode functionality adjusts the timing and behavior of the pop-ups based on user behavior, increasing the chances of capturing leads without being intrusive.

Integrations include ActiveCampaign, Aweber, BriteVerify, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, ConvertKit, Drip, Emma, Feedblitz, GetResponse, HubSpot, iContact, InboxFirst, Infusionsoft, Klaviyo, Mad Mimi, MailChimp, Wrike, and others with a focus on email and communications platforms.

Monday is a versatile work planning system that centralizes collaboration, project management, and communication, empowering teams to plan, track, and execute tasks efficiently. Almost every marketing team uses at least one project management app (monday, Asana, Airtable) to effectively organize, plan, and manage all marketing projects and campaign tasks.

Why I Picked monday: Monday can be effectively used by marketing teams to streamline their workflows and enhance collaboration. Marketing teams can create boards to manage various aspects of their projects, such as campaign planning, content creation, social media scheduling, and analytics tracking. They can assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress, ensuring everyone is on the same page and accountable. The platform's customizable workflows and automation features enable teams to automate repetitive tasks, send notifications, and streamline approval processes. With real-time updates, team members can collaborate, provide feedback, and communicate seamlessly within the platform, fostering transparency and efficiency. 

Monday Standout Features & Integrations

Key features include extensive customization options, allowing users to tailor their workflows and boards to their specific needs. With a wide range of templates and customizable columns, teams can create boards that align with their unique processes and workflows, ensuring maximum flexibility and adaptability. This level of customization sets Monday.com apart, as it enables teams to create a system that fits their specific requirements without being limited by pre-set structures.

Integrations are locked to paid plans only.