The times are tough for small businesses and agencies. With surveys indicating 35% of small businesses are fearing complete closure and 65% of them opting layoffs and other cost-cutting measures, we believe your conference room is also filled with the ideas of mitigation, amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
So while you are buckling up your disaster policy and shifting to remote workforces, cost-cutting on marketing tools you have been using, and shifting on their cheaper alternatives will also help you save money.
At SocialPilot, we have gathered the list of 50+ most cost-effective marketing tools you can alternatively use to maintain your business continuity in the time of this pandemic.
We have divided these cost-effective tools into categories that every marketing team utilizes.
With the bulk of tasks and team members to manage, it is easy for you to lose your train of good ideas and also mishap the management. So if you are looking for efficiently managing your big projects or individual task and hoping to save time to jot down new ideas along the way. We have gathered a list of multiple cost-effective tools that can enhance your productivity and manage your tasks efficiently.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Task Management | Trello ($9.99/M)
Trello is the Fun, Flexible and Free Way To Organize Plans, Projects & More. |
Procezo (Free)
Say good bye to expensive task management tools. Procezo is a free for life digital workspace. |
| Project Management | Basecamp ($99/M)
Trusted by millions, Basecamp puts everything you need to get work done in one place. |
Sendtask.io (Free)
Sendtask is the easiest way to collaborate with your team, clients, and suppliers in one place. |
| Calendar Scheduler | Calendly ($8/M)
Find the perfect meeting time with super easy online appointment scheduling. |
Google Calendar (Free)
Manage your time effectively with shareable calendars that integrate seamlessly |
| Time Tracking | Hubstaff ($20/M)
Simple yet powerful employee work time tracker with screenshots, timesheets, & more |
TMetric ($5/M)
Time tracking app with task and project management, powerful reporting and vacation tracking features |
| Note Making | Evernote ($7.99/M)
Capture and prioritize ideas, projects and to-do lists, so nothing falls through the cracks. VS
|
Google Keep (Free)
Makes it easy to capture a thought or list for yourself, and share it with friends and family. |
| Communication | Slack ($375.00/M)
Make work life simpler, pleasant and more productive. |
Flock ($135.00/M)
Organize all your conversations, productivity tools, and apps in one place. |
| Business Communication | RingCentral ($39.99/M)
Make work life simpler, pleasant and more productive. |
CallHippo ($16/M)
Packed with advanced features, CallHippo is a cost-effective yet powerful business phone system |
| Lead Finder Tool | LeadFuze ($132.30/mo)
Find market and account-based contacts and effectively reach out to them. |
Instant Checkmate ($35.12/month)
Get comprehensive information related to prospects including email IDs and contact numbers. |
| Sales Tools | CloudTalk ($25/mo)
Reach your customers anywhere and anytime with outbound call center software. |
Salesmate.io ($12/month)
Reach more prospects with a personal touch. |
To grow in the game of the internet, you need a solid SEO strategy. Your business needs a well-audited website for the crawling and indexing phase, the right keywords targeting your niche market, and high-quality links pointing to your website. The list of free SEO tools mentioned below will help you in doing all of that to increase your domain authority.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO | Screaming Frog ($180/Year)
The industry leading website crawler for Windows, MacOS and Ubuntu. |
Merkle SEO Pagination Testing Tool (Free)
Technology-enabled performance marketing agency to maximize the value of customer portfolios. |
| Keyword Research | SEMRush ($99.95/M)
SEMrush — creating the best competitive intelligence solution for all digital marketing spheres. |
Bing Webmaster Tools (Free)
A free service engine to add your websites to the Bing index crawler and monitor its performance |
| Rank Tracking | Bright Local ($79/M)
Make every marketer’s job better by tracking local rankings, build citations, monitor and grow customer reviews. |
Google Search Console (Free)
Measure your site’s Search traffic and performance to shine on Google search results |
| Content Optimization | ContentKing App ($89/M)
Keep track of all your content changes and optimize it VS
|
Plugin SEO (Free)
Get more traffic by checking for problems in your content and optimzie it. |
| Backlink Analysis | Ahrefs ($179/M)
Grow your search traffic, research your competitors and monitor your niche |
SEO Weather’s Bulk Metrics Checker (Free)
Bulk check the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) of your URLs. |
| Video SEO | TubeBuddy ($19/M)
Higher your video rankings and get more views with its Video SEO features |
Social Blade (Free)
Tracks the YouTube platform, and provides analytical information of other social media platforms. |
| Link Building | Whitespark ($40/M)
Build Citations, earn reviews and track your rankings to win customers |
Domain Hunter Plus (Free)
Build broken links and scan for the dead links easily. |
Implementing multiple social media marketing strategies on a large scale requires a lot of time, effort, and resources. This is why your business needs tools to level-up your social media marketing on the go. The below mentioned pocket-friendly social media marketing tools will help you schedule and analyze your social posts, opt automation, create recognizable short links and simplify your social media marketing to get better results.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Social Media Scheduling | Hootsuite ($129/M)
Enhance social media management with features like scheduling and analytics |
SocialPilot ($30/mo)
Create, schedule, publish and monitor your social media posts under one roof. |
| Social Media Monitoring & Listening | Awario ($89/M)
A social listening tool giving brands insights of customers, market, and competitors. |
Google Alerts (Free)
Monitor the web for interesting new content. |
| UTM | UTM.io ($59/M)
UTM.io is the best way to build, share and sync your UTMs with your team. VS
|
Google Campaign builder (Free)
Easily add campaign parameters to URLs and track Custom Campaigns in Google Analytics. |
| Link Shortner | Bitly ($29/M)
Educating the world about how links drive business results. |
TinyURL (Free)
Are you sick of posting long URLs in emails? Then you’ve come to the right place. |
| Chatbots | Drift ($400/M)
The new way businesses buy from businesses. Try this conversational marketing & sales tool |
TARS ($99/M)
A drag-and-drop chatbot builder to create website chatbots. A must-have tool for your marketing and lead generation. |
| Social Media Management | Buffer ($6/M/channel)
For professionals who use publishing, analytics & engagement tools. |
Social Champ ($29/M)
Scheduling, seamless publishing, and insightful analysis across nine major platforms, in a unified dashboard. |
| Social Media Analytics & Reporting | Social Status ($29/M/channel)
A social media analytics tool for organic, paid, and competitor performance on all the main social media channels. |
Meta Business Suite (Free)
Meta Business Suite is a one-stop free platform where you can manage all your marketing and advertising activities on Instagram and Facebook. |
| Social Media Growth | PathSocial ($25/M)
PathSocial is essentially an Instagram growth tool, which helps you grow organically by with the help of AI. |
KickInsta ($69/M)
Kicksta enables you to attract new Instagram followers by targeting those who already follow the accounts that you select. |
| Influencer Marketing | Social Cat ($49/M/channel)
Social Cat matches brands with relevant influencers in the industry, saving both time and resources. |
Storyclash (Free)
Storyclash is a free Instagram influencer search tool with basic search filters for brands with a tight budget. |
While it is true that to create engaging content you need a human brain behind it, but having some tools in your arsenal will only strengthen your content marketing more. Get the below-mentioned inexpensive content marketing tools to help you in writing quality blogs, stirring away from plagiarism and finding inspiration for new content with the help of content curation tools, without leaving a hole in your pocket.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Proofreading | Grammarly ($12.50/M)
Make your online writing clear, effective and mistake free. |
Slickwrite (Free)
Fix your writing for grammar errors and potential stylistic mistakes. |
| Plagiarism Checker | Copyscape (3c / search)
Detect plagiarism and check your own text originality with precision. |
smallseotools (Free)
A complete tool for checking plagiarism, rewriting an article, and spell-checking. |
| Content Curation | Feedly ($18/M)
Content aggregator to compile the feeds from your selected sources and help share them around. |
Quuu (Free)
Content curator for various formats like videos, podcasts, blogs and presentations. |
| Content Management Software | WordPress ($25/M)
Grow your business, built a website with custom plugins and themes VS
|
Joomla ($199/year)
Create powerful websites and applications with wide range of extensions and templates |
| Writing and Editing | Office 365 Business ($8.25 user/M)
It is an amalgamation of multiple apps and services helping you grow your business |
Google Docs (Free)
Write, collaborate and edit remotely without spending a single dollar. |
| Content Marketing | Jasper ($39/M)
AI-powered content marketing tool for impactful, engaging writing |
AIContentfy ($5/per blog post)
AI-powered content creation for SEO-friendly blog posts with automatic links, images, and direct posting to Hubspot, Webflow, and WordPress. |
| Content Approval | Planable ($11/M)
A solution tailored for streamlining marketing content creation, planning, and approval process for large-scale projects. |
Celum ($24.9/M)
An approval workflow solution that covers the whole content supply chain. |
| Paraphrasing | Quillbot ($9.95/M)
An AI-powered paraphrasing tool that rewrites your text to enhance clarity and readability. |
Editpad (Free)
A free paraphrasing tool by Editpad helps students and writers to rephrase text accurately. |
| Digital Asset Management | Adobe Experience Manager (Request quote)
Create and share asset collections and connect to the DAM from within Creative Cloud apps using Adobe Asset Link. |
Brafton (Request quote)
Filter and find in just seconds any piece of collateral ever created. You’ll never lose a document again. |
A well-designed video and photo holds more power to communicate and simplify a marketing idea than a text. So to send a clear and engaging message through your marketing campaign you can create visually-appealing marketing videos, presentations, images, and illustrative landing pages easily by shifting to these budget-friendly designing tools.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Graphic Designing | Photoshop ($20/M)
The best imaging and graphic designing software for just about every creative project. |
GIMP (Free)
Refined tools for every graphic designer, photographer, illustrator. |
| Video Editing | Premire Pro ($19.99/M)
Convert your marketing footages into polished films and videos |
Da Vinci Resolve (Free)
Multi-user collaborative software to move between editing, color, effects, and audio with a single click. |
| Screen Recording | Camtasia ($249/M)
Simply record your screen and add a few effects. |
ScreenPal ($15/year)
Capture your screen, add a webcam and use it for narration in your video. |
| Stock images | Shutter Stock ($249/M)
From illustrations to vectors, perfect stock images for your website or blog. |
freepik ($11/M)
High-quality illustrations, photos, icons, and presentations templates |
| Video Maker | Lumen5 ($199/M)
Simple drag-and-drop interface to create professional video content in minutes. VS
|
InVideo ($20/M)
A video creation platform to create video ads, promo videos and social media videos. |
| Image Making | Stencil ($15/M)
Designed to help you create beautiful images faster than ever before. |
Canva ($9.95/M)
Design presentations, social media graphics, and more with thousands of beautiful layouts using drag-and-drop. |
| Photo Editor | Kapwing ($17/M)
Kapwing is a collaborative platform for creating images, videos, and GIFs. |
Colorcinch ($3.99/M)
With Colorcinch you can quickly adjust exposure, contrast, color, etc., as well as create a range of graphic design projects. |
| Presentation Maker | Visme ($12.25)
Create professional presentations, interactive infographics, beautiful design and engaging videos, all in one place. |
Google Slides (Cost-Effective)
Cloud-based office suite by Google that helps create, edit, and collaborate presentations sorted by date and are saved automatically. |
Creating a successful PPC advertising campaign, from designing to implementing and analyzing its performance, can be very time-consuming for a marketers. So we have gathered a list of advertising tools to help you optimize your PPC campaigns, spy on your competitors’ paid-ads and achieve centralized control over digital creatives with CMP.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| PPC Management | Adstage ($399/M)
Connecting marketers to the data they need to analyze, optimize, and report on paid media campaigns. |
Wordstream ($159/M)
Create, optimize, manage and measure high-performing paid search and paid social campaigns. |
| PPC Competitor Tracking | iSpionage ($84/M)
Competitive research and monitoring platform for digital marketers. |
SpyFu ($58/M)
Learn competitors’ PPC & SEO tricks and avoid their mistakes. |
| Creative Management Platforms | Celtra (Not-disclosed)
Empowering digital creatives for agencies, media suppliers, and brand leaders. VS
|
Smartly (Based on your ad spending)
Unlock greater performance and creativity on Facebook, Instagram & Pinterest. |
| Display Advertisement | Criteo (Contact for Price)
Best-in-class advertising technology solutions. |
AdRoll (Try for Free)
A performance marketing platform using the largest advertiser data co-op in the market. |
Analytics are the yardsticks that enable businesses to evaluate their performance and determine where they stand. Using these cost-effective analytics tools given below you can monitor your growth and market changes by analyzing your business, users, and website analytics.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Market Intelligence Platform | Quid (Not disclosed)
A platform that searches, analyzes and visualizes the world’s collective intelligence |
Clootrack (Starts-$500/M)
A platform that discovers and measures brand perception metrics that matter. |
| All-in-one Analytics Dashboard | Databox ($99/M)
Business Analytics platform built to help you understand your business. |
Cyfe ($89/M)
The all-in-one business dashboard for all of your key performance metrics. |
| User-Behaviour Analytics | Staffino (Not disclosed)
It is software designed to help you enhance customer experience by analyzing feedback. VS
|
UXtweak ($59/M)
Is a specialized User Experience (UX) research platform that delivers key insights into user behavior. |
| Pre-launch Analytics | EyeQuant (€249/mo)
offers design evaluation and optimization services. VS
|
AttentionInsight.com (€129/mo)
helps optimize designs before implementation, reducing potential rework costs and maximizing user engagement. |
| Website Analytics | Rebrandly ($99/M)
With Rebrandly you can track and optimize all your marketing in one place. |
CrazyEgg ($49/M)
Use Crazy Egg to see what’s hot and what’s not, and to know what your web visitors are doing. |
| User feedback | Usersnap
Built for product teams to collect screen recordings, voice feedback, screenshots with annotations, and user satisfaction (CSAT, CES). Analyze and manage them from one place. |
Userback
Specialized in visual feedback (screen recordings, screenshots) for agencies and developers. |
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing solutions for small businesses. But for better conversion rates you need a tool to set up an automated drip campaign, which is also reputable for faster deliverability. Using these amazing pocket-friendly email marketing tools you can run a hassle-free email marketing campaign from finding professional emails, cold- emailing them to set up automation.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Email Marketing Automation | ActiveCampaign ($149/M)
Automate your campaigns in minutes with no tech or design background required. |
SendX ($9.99/M)
Intuitive, Feature-Rich and Affordable Email Marketing Software. |
| Cold Emailing | Mailshake ($59/M)
Automate your campaigns in minutes with no tech or design background required. |
Lemlist ($49/M)
Intuitive, Feature-Rich and Affordable Email Marketing Software. |
| Email Finder | Hunter ($99/M)
Hunter is the leading solution to find and verify professional email addresses. VS
|
Snovio ($69/M)
Find emails, verify them and run your email campaigns within minutes. |
| Survey | SurveyMonkey ($75/M)
Create simple to sophisticated surveys online & turn data into business results. |
|
| Automated Sequences | Reply ($60/M)
Sales Engagement Platform to reach prospects using multi-channel automated sequences. |
Salesmate CRM ($24/M)
All-in-one CRM & Automation Platform with Sequences. Plug in texts for better reach! |
Getting the attention of your on-site-visitors with the help of lead generation tool is a first step in building a long term relationship. Lead generation tools help you in making effective and engaging landing pages, pop-ups, and push notifications. So we have gathered a list of cost-effective lead generation tools you can shift on to get more return to your investment.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Landing Page Builder | Unbounce ($199/M)
A landing page platform that gets you more leads, more sales, and more customers. |
Landingi ($79/M)
Create, publish, optimize your landing pages and run A/B tests by yourself! |
| Popup Builders | Popupsmart ($129/M)
A better popup builder for conversion optimization and customer engagement. |
Poptin (Free)
Best lead generation software for marketing agencies, bloggers, eCommerce websites, and any small business. |
| Interactive Content | Outgrow ($14/M)
This tool helps you create quizzes, surveys, etc. that are both engaging and effective in generating leads |
Typeform (Free)
Fix your writing for grammar errors and potential stylistic mistakes. |
| Push Notification | OneSignal ($99/M)
The world’s leader for Mobile Push Notifications, Web Push, and In-App Messaging. |
iZooto (Free)
Audience marketing platform to help you build your audience and keep it engaged via Web Push Notifications. |
You got it, every business in your building got it and the flower man living two blocks from you got it. We all got a website hosting tools running our websites. But now is the time to get web hosting on a much cheaper rate. Shift on to the below mentioned low-cost web hosting tools to get faster and reliable hosting solutions, and make your business discoverable around the world.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Godaddy ($7.99/M)
Register your domain name, build a website for it, and get it on the web – all in one place. |
Hostgator ($6.95/M)
Hosting solution with 99.9% uptime guarantee, free SSL certificate, easy WordPress installs, and a free domain for a year. |
| Hosting | Siteground ($11.95/M)
Siteground offers an extremely Reliable and noticeable faster hosting solution for wordpress, web, woocommerce, and cloud. |
iPage ($7.99/M)
Simple hosting solution for individuals and small businesses to create a professional online presence. |
| Hosting | Bluehost ($10.99/M)
One of the few recommended hosts for WordPress, this platform offers free domain, SSL, CDN, and comes with numerous templates. |
Hostinger ($6.99/M)
Powerful hosting solution comes unlimited bandwidth, SSL, free website builder, domain, and email. You can host up to 100 websites on it. |
| Hosting | Cloudways ($11/M)
Cloudways powers fast, reliable, and scalable online experiences, trusted by 80,000+ users for WordPress, WooCommerce, among other PHP apps. |
HostPapa ($2.95/M)
Friendly control panel, fast response, unlimited free SSL certificates for life. |
| Hosting | Namecheap ($9.48/M)
Namecheap allows both to buy domains and use their vps, shared, WordPress hosting options. |
Ultahost ($3.29/M)
High-speed, safe, and user-friendly website hosting to power your successful online ventures, offering up to 20 times quicker page loading, along with unlimited bandwidth and a complimentary cPanel license. |
No small business owner enjoys working up the sheets to manage payrolls, invoicing and taxes. So we have gathered a list of cost-effective accounting and invoicing tools to help you with account / invoicing management. Whether you want to quickly create proposals or handle billings, accounting, and inventory management from one centralized place, the below-mentioned tools do that efficiently and economically.
|
Category |
Most Used VS
|
Cost-Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Accounting and Invoicing | Quickbooks ($12/M)
Helps businesses of all sizes manage expense, income, payment, and payroll from one place. |
FreshBooks ($6/M)
Fully featured suite of online invoicing, billing, accounting, and much more. |
| Accounting and Invoicing | Xero ($9/M)
Accounting software with all the time-saving tools you need to grow your business. |
Waveapps (Free)
Makes your accounting and invoicing easy with features like recurring billing and automatic payments. |
| Accounting and Invoicing | Refrens (Free)
Popular invoicing solution used by freelancers to make, send and track invoices on the go. |
Billdu (Free)
Top rated Invoicing software on IOS for small businesses to create professional invoices, orders and estimates |
| Payroll and Human Resource Management | Paycom
Streamline your HR processes to improve productivity, reduce compliance risks, and make better-informed decisions faster. |
Sage HR
HR software company that streamlines human resource management for customers in over 1,200 cities worldwide. |
| Contract Management | Docxpresso ($21/M)
Docxpresso is a software package that greatly simplifies the generation of dynamical documents in a web server. VS
|
Contractbook (Free)
Create, sign and store all your legal documents digitally in one, safe place to increase your efficiency and gain full overview. |
| E-Signature Software | DocuSign ($40/M)
The most widely used eSignature and digital transaction management platform |
CocoSign ($15/M)
Sign documents with CocoSign and speed up signing workflow with legally binding and secure eSignatures. |
| Proposal Management | Qwilr ($66/M)
Quickly create proposals, sales and marketing documents as beautiful, responsive webpages. |
Better Proposals ($49/M)
Send professional looking proposals in half the time with better proposals. |
| Document Management | HubSpot ($50/M)
Share documents from your Gmail or Outlook inbox and track your document process easily |
Jotform Sign (Free)
Automate your document process by collecting legally binding documents from your signers and store them securely. |
| Expense Management | Expensify ($4.99/M)
Develops an expense management system for personal and business use |
Fyle ($6.99/M)
An expense tracking software with real-time data feeds on credit cards you already have. |
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