Free vs. Paid Marketing Tools

Last week, Sama and I were thinking about the right marketing tools to use for our application. The decision is not easy. There are an increasing number of marketing tools available in the market, each one serving different purposes for marketers.

This chart attempts to provide an overall view of the number of tools available, and the complexity of selecting the right options for your strategy. In general, we can say that we found this chart to be a good representation of our current feelings.

Source: http://www.curata.com

Find more marketing tools here.

However, if we break our findings between free and paid marketing tools, and then we evaluate the performance: the decision seems to be less difficult.

Now you must be wondering why. So we found that paid marketing tools are easier to use, the interface is nicer, and offer more extra cool features. However, regarding the functionality and performance, paid tools do not add much more value indeed.

For instance, SEMRush is a paid tool that allows you to track keywords across both paid and organic search campaigns. SEMRush also provides additional information such as: search trends, competition, and campaign spend. However, its limitations are:

• Local data is not always available, which is terrible for us, as our project needs data with focus on the Chicago market.
• It only offers a limited list of keywords because SEMrush only analyzes the first 20 Google search results.
• SEMrush is not an analytics tool. Therefore, it offers traffic and ads spend estimations that can be very inaccurate.

Now, Google Adwords can give you Keyword information and generate a list of related keywords using local dat. All for free. In addition, Google analytics provides accurate traffic information.

Another example is Hubspot. This is a great paid tool that allows you to plan and execute end-to-end a marketing campaign. Most of its attractiveness is because it offers landing page templates, form templates, email templates call-to-action templates, etc. All these resources make marketers’ life easier… But having used this tool, we can say that this tool is not helpful enough, because marketing is about originality and differentiation, and templates constrain your ability to create something new.

In addition, we still need designers and developers to work on the templates and campaigns. Sometimes, trying to adapt the campaigns to these templates, results in more work, cost and worst performance. In conclusion, as this article states, you have to be very disciplined and create a lot of content in order to see the value of this tool. Otherwise, it is better that you use several free marketing tools combined according to your needs.

In conclusion, before engaging with a paid marketing tool, we recommend evaluating your needs and goals, and based on that, select the right marketing tools. In our case, we don’t believe it is necessary to pay for SEMrush. However, the basic plan of Hubspot might be worth a try, as it offers all the functionalities that we need, we have previously worked with this tool, and we expect to save money by automating our campaigns.