Success in marketing means exploring new trends and tools in a continually evolving landscape — without breaking your budget. Using the right content marketing tools at the right time can mean the difference between a thriving business and a lost opportunity. The good news is you really don’t have to spend a lot of money to be successful, especially when you can take advantage of these five free marketing tools to help make you a better content marketer.

HARO, A Too-Often Overlooked Marketing Tool

As an independent journalist, HARO — which stands for Help A Reporter Out — is one of the content marketing tools I use a lot. Originally designed to connect news sources with the journalists seeking them, HARO has grown into a full-fledged platform for authority quotes and more. Subscribe for free and post your questions or outline a few lines you’d like to get a comment on. Requests are sent out to prospective sources who reply with their comments, and you choose which ones you want. You can also sign up to be a source and give your quotes on an issue. Because quotes build authority, you’ll establish yourself as an industry leader without spending a dime.

Typeform

You can’t be a successful marketer if you don’t know your audience; it’s essential to understand the concerns and issues impacting your ideal customer. And the best way to understand what your audience is thinking is by asking them directly. Typeform is a top pick among free content marketing tools because it takes the hassle out of surveys. You can also use it to create quizzes, contact forms or just to collect user comments. And if you are already using automation tools such as Zapier or MailChimp, you’ll appreciate Typeform’s simple integration features.

Other Content Marketing Tools

Did you catch that typo? It’s too easy for tired eyes to miss grammatical errors or skim jumbled letters — especially when you’re the one doing the writing. The best writing is error-free (or as close to that as you can get), and the best writers use an editor. Good editors are not cheap, but thankfully Grammarly offers a free grammar and spell-checker to help catch critical mistakes that would otherwise result in customers losing trust in your product or service. 

Grammarly

Grammarly works as a browser extension that checks your social media posts, emails, and text-based documents for misspellings, split-infinitives, plagiarism, etc., making it one of the most popular free content marketing tools in use.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo might share its name with Japan’s national sport, but that’s where the similarities end. This free content marketing tool is the best place to find out what’s hot right now — and that can help you come up with unique angles or new ideas for your product or service. Search by publication, industry, topic, keyword, etc., and see for yourself what’s getting the most engagement. You can also tailor searches by platform, country, language, and word count.

CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

If you could master one content marketing tool that would have the most impact on your reach, it would be the headline. I like CoSchedule’s free headline analyzer; they understand that good headlines pull readers in, and bad ones turn readers away. Whether they are email newsletters, search engine results pages (SERPs), social media posts, ads or e-books, without a strong headline, it doesn’t matter how compelling your content is — no one will read it. Type your desired headline into CoSchedule’s search bar, and it quickly goes to work analyzing your headline’s SEO level and length, showing how it will look on a SERP, and even scoring it to help you evaluate its potential impact. It’s not always easy finding low or no-cost ways to market your product or service. Luckily, there are free marketing tools like these that can help make your marketing life more manageable.