It still astounds me the amount of money spent on marketing/sales enablement tools when there are some perfectly good free options available. To close out 2015 here are a few of my favourites...

  1. Picnic Metrics - free and simplifies Google Analytics reports. 
  2. Mixpanel - free marketing automation tool up to 25k data points. Perfect for an individual in sales or a small business. Don't delay and sign up. Great company too. 
  3. Streak - free CRM. Again, for a start-up or small business can be a great way to track contacts. Scalable licensing. 
  4. Calendly - free calendar tool that syncs with your calendar to help arrange meetings with individuals rather than sending a long list of possible times that go out of date within 5 minutes.
  5. Norbert - find email addresses of prospects by simply including the name and domain - free.
  6. Email Hunter - find bulk email addresses for specific domains. Up to 200 free searches per month. 
  7. Charlie App - Quick briefing of people before calls or meetings for free! 
  8. Content Marketer - searches your latest blog post and finds twitter handles of all mentioned and sends a tweet to notify them for free! There is a paid services with far greater functionality. 
  9. Google Labs - if you use Gmail there is a tab within settings called 'Labs', these are turned off by default but some great additions to your UI in Gmail that can be switched on. 
  10. Hotjar - understand your website visitors using heatmap, user activity recording, feedback, etc. The starting plan is free.

The obvious and why they are not obvious:

  1. LinkedIn, groups and saved searches. Find relevant groups to your audience and post discussions. How do you find these? Find 5 top prospect, scan their current groups and follow the most common. Saved Searches; on the basic LinkedIn package you can create an 'advanced search' and save with an alert for daily, weekly or monthly. You calculate the time ROI. 
  2. Twitter, remember when you opened all your emails (I don't)? I have calculated I have a 82% response rate when sending through direct messages on twitter. Tip: try it at events when you see a prospect tweet. Simply ask to take this 'offline'. 
  3. Facebook, further to my post earlier this quarter, Facebook has now made posts searchable to anyone. It is well worth the extra time (in some tools a matter of seconds) to publish content with Facebook since it might just be the competition to Google soon.... 
  4. Google Analytics, the data is endless and using a range of other tools can really provide valuable insight.
  5. Google+, a few extra important Google ranking points can be achieved and with tools such as Passle it is one additional click to distribute within Google+
  6. Passle, we are currently running a free trial(extremely scalable plans beyond) and would highly recommend taking a look. You are in good company with our clients who provide their expert-led, timely and digestible opinion using the tool which is then distributed with ease across your website, social networks. The result is becoming the 'go-to' expert in your niche and substantially increasing website traffic with relevant leads. 

If you have a favourite I would like to hear from you! Please send me a tweet @dkirk2012 or email me on david@passle.net 

Happy New Year!