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Today marketing department budgets and resources can run thin. The requirements for branding, social media, PR, trade shows, product launches, collateral, promos, and websites, can all be daunting. The list is just too long to mention them all. If you are a marketing professional, you know far too well, how difficult it can be to get things done. Marketers have more systems and more data to go through than most companies’ infrastructures can handle. Luckily as marketing evolves, technology does as well. I have gathered this list of marketing tools and apps to help your team complete its goals. Not all of them are the best, but they are free and can get the job done.

Monitor Your Brand
Competitive keyword analysis – Social Mention, Ice Rocket, Tweet Deck, Talkwalker, Google Alerts, Key Word Tool

Google Trends
Google.com/trends/ is a great tool that allows you to see current search trends. You can look up specific search terms and stories to understand how those terms have trended over time. See specific keywords or brands by region and date. Compare one term vs. another and see alternative keywords you may not have thought about.

Adwords
Performance Grader – Wordstream – Helps advertisers audit their PPC accounts and take action to improve the strength of their campaigns

Managing Social Media
Free can only take you so far, but these apps are pretty decent, Hootsuite, Tweet Deck, Likeable, Social Oomph. If you want more features, you can certainly pay for the upgrades. I prefer Hootsuite and Tweet Deck.

Curating Content
You can set up alerts on subjects that interest you for social media feeds. Create and grow your online presence in minutes by publishing curated content.  Scoopit, Storyzy, Feedly, and Google Alerts are places you can use to allow you to review news feeds and emerging trends.

Trending Hashtags
What are the best places to help you decide what hashtags to use? Twitter trending is an obvious start but here are a few others: Trendmap, RiteTag, Tagdef, Hashtagify.me, and Keyhole.co

Press Releases
There are several paid services such as PRweb and PRnewswire, but PRLog is free.

Spell and Grammar Check 
Proofreading tools that check text for grammar, punctuation, style, and contextual spelling checker plus plagiarism detector. The best tool is Grammarly, but there are many others, such as Ginger Software,  Small SEO Tools, and Polish My Writing.

Personas
Personapp is a great app to help you visualize your target customer by inputting their gender, likes, behaviors, and goals in a simple-to-read layout. You can share your newly created customer personas, which makes it perfect for sharing with teams and agencies. It has a pdf export feature.

Email
I like MailChimp a lot. It is easy to use with many templates that can be customized.

Computer Screen Video Recording
Need to show your computer screen for presentations or tutorials? Try Screencast-O-Matic.com or Screencast.

Survey’s
eSurveysPro, Kwik Surveys

Presentations
Prezi, Animoto

Cloud Storage
I’m sure you have heard of DropBox, Google Drive, OneDrive and a host of other cloud storage services but not many offers more then 5GB-10GB for free. Try Mega and its generous storage capacity of 50GB for free.

Free Stock Images
A limited selection but nevertheless free. Sometimes you are just better off paying for it. Freedigitalphotos, Free Images, Pexels, Freestockphotos, Stock Vault, imcreator, Stock Snap, Refe, Pixabay.

SEO Tools
Read this article: 10 SEO Tools to Analyze Your Website Like Google Does. and What is SEO. Here are a few other tools: MozPineberry, Alexa provides information about websites including Top Sites, Internet Traffic Stats and Metrics, Related Links, Online Reviews Contact Information, and Search. Webconfs is a search engine spider simulator and has utilities.

FTP Client Software
Fetch, and Filezilla will get the job done. Read this article for more options: The 7 Best Free FTP Apps for Your Mac

Transferring Files
We Transfer – Transfer files up to 2GB for free. A great service that I use all the time. Receivers do not need to install anything. They get an email with a download link. You will also receive an email indicating when the receiver downloaded your files.

Convert Photos or Scans to Vector Line Art
For the non-artist, this can come in handy when you do not have the original files. Convert your images to vector with clker, Autotracer. Vector files are made up of points, lines, and curves related to one another using mathematical formulas. Typical programs that make vector files are Illustrator, Inkscape, and CorelDraw.

Website Creation
WordPress is known for blogs, but it can also be great for regular websites. Here are some themes. There are plenty of quick website creation sites such as Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly. They tend to give you a little taste before you are forced to buy in their system.

Photo Editing
Pixlr Online image-editing tool that can be used with just about any Internet browser.

Graphic Design
Canva is for the graphically challenged. This site has templates you can modify to help you create marketing collateral. Everything from social media images to presentations, for free. You can store everything online and even access stock images to include in your work.

Meta Tag Generator
Meta tags in web pages are often required by search engines as a source of information to help them to decide how to list and rank your website. There is a debate if Meta tags are needed. This article explains: How Important are Tags in 2016 for SEO? Use this free Meta Tag generator, to help you make the most of your submissions.

Website Share Buttons
Addthis or Sharethis buttons

Broken Link Checker
drlinkcheck

HTML Tables and Forms
Mantis-A Templates, Jot Form

Sitemap Generator
A quick way to create a site map for your website. xml-sitemaps

Search Engine Website Submission
Not sure how well it works but it can’t hurt Freewebsubmission.

HTML Editor
Read this article: The Best Free Website Builder 2016 CSS editor – Stylizer

Website Browser Review
See how your site looks like in different browsers. Browser Shots

Website Graders
Online tools that grade your site against key metrics like performance, mobile readiness, SEO, and security. Hubspot Grader, Free Grader, Nibber, Woorank, 1and1, Talent Cupboard, Google Page Speed Insights. Read this article for many more graders: Top 25 free website grader tools

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