Free Digital Platforms That Maximize Your Marketing Efforts

Canva

You don’t need to be a graphic designer to design beautiful, compelling marketing materials. With Canva’s optimized sized and built-in templates, you can quickly and easily create stunning visual ads and images for Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, blog posts, and many other channels. Over 2 million people use Canva for their DIY marketing campaigns, with amazing results. And while the tool does have a paid version with near-endless design opportunities, the freemium version is more than sufficient for everyday marketing needs.

Wistia

Wistia is an online video marketing platform that provides video hosting services for businesses of all shapes and size. The platform’s player is geared towards marketing your business. Rather than whisk potential new customers over to YouTube and potentially lose control over their next steps, Wistia either keeps viewers on your page or sends them to the next digital space of your choosing. In this way, Wistia helps you build your brand’s awareness and keep leads from slipping out of the sales funnel. All you need to do is upload your video, head over to the Settings section and add marketing elements, such as call-to-action buttons, email capture forms and more.

WordPress

WordPress is a great free platform for creating websites, blogs, landing pages and other marketing content for your locksmithing business. 20% of all websites on the internet currently run on the WordPress platform - because it’s extremely straightforward to use and generates great-looking, highly-effective sites. Don’t believe us - try it out for yourself!

Grammarly

Ensure your professional reputation is never tarnished by a misspelled word, run-on sentence or (gasp!) typo, with Grammarly. Grammarly is the free proofreading a plagiarism checker every small and medium business owner should use when preparing marketing materials. The tool’s online dashboard closely resembles that of Google Docs. All you need to do is open a new document in the dashboard, type or copy/paste your content into the doc and Grammarly will check your spelling and grammar in an instant. You can also install the tool as a plug-in for your browser. Once installed, Grammarly will automatically proofread every word, phrase and paragraph you type online, directly on the page you’re typing.

MailChimp

• Send great, professional marketing emails using MailChimp, an amazing campaign engagement tool with a high-quality freemium version. Deploy up to 12,000 emails per month to 20,000 subscribers, without spending an extra penny. The platform easily integrates with WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, Magento, Salesforce, ZenDesk, BigCommerce, Drupal, Mandrill, and Google Analytics (to name a few) and provides updated insights on your mailers’ success and failings. Note: because of the latter capability, MailChimp can also be considered a measurement platform.

Pixabay

There are tons of freemium stock photo databases online, but Pixabay makes finding and downloading great quality pictures for free as easy as can be. All you need to do is search, scroll and select your ideal image from a filtered results page and your website, social channel or mailer will be as visually pleasing as it is compelling.

Google Analytics

Knowing how your customers find and use your website is extremely important, as it enables you to optimize your content and marketing strategies to boost traffic and conversions while preventing churn. Google Analytics is a free website analytics service offered by Google that does just that. With Google Analytics, you can sift & sort your visitors according to dozens of dimensions. You can also integrate other useful Google products like your Ads account & Search Console into your website and tag & track any advertising, social, PR or any other kind of campaign you may be running. Top measurements include audience location, behavior, engagement, bounce rates, traffic sources, and more.

Hubspot

Note: this platform can easily be included in the above creative platform category, but its superior measurement capabilities led us to place it here. HubSpot is the all-in-one marketing solution your locksmithing business cannot live without. HubSpot is a free, comprehensive platform that helps you manage your marketing automation, SEPO, website, landing page, social media, email, content, analytics and more - from a single, unified place, so you can reel customers in and drive them through the sales funnel with ease. The platform’s built-in CRM takes the hassle out of lead management, so you can establish your brand’s online reputation, without having to complete an advanced degree in IT. With Hubspot’s built-in analytics, reports, and dashboards, you can measure the performance of your entire marketing funnel, from one single, unified place.

Facebook Insights

Facebook Audience Insights is an analytical tool that allows you to track your page’s reach and performance. It will tell you how many likes a post got, how many people are chatting about your page and other useful metrics. Use these metrics to understand just how well (or how poorly) your marketing efforts are paying off on Facebook and optimize accordingly. As such, it is ideal for measuring your Facebook Business page’s success – abandonment rate, how many pages users typically view and for how long, potential reach and more.

Conclusion

These are just some of the many free tools you can use to promote your locksmithing business online. With no payments required, you can easily experiment with the different platforms to find the solutions that best meet your marketing needs: no losses - endless possible gains for your business and your bottom line.