As we approach the end of the year, one of the questions every marketing department will be tackling is how to lower their marketing budget and increase effectiveness.  Below are 6 tools I would recommend for anyone leveraging Internet Marketing Strategies:

  • Google Analytics – One of the better analytics programs on the market, and yes, it’s free.  With this tool, you can automate reports, have them sent to your email on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis.  The downside to this tool is the lack of real-time analysis.  Reporting can be delayed as much as several (6+) hours.  If you need real-time tracking for your site, you’ll want to investigate some of the “for fee” analytics programs.
  • HootSuite – HootSuite is a web-based tool to help manage your Social Networking capabilities.  There are several benefits to using this tool: it works with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Ping.fm; you can have multiple users managing one account (multiple authors); you can schedule messages to send at a later date; you can use it to push an RSS feed (like a blog) to your social network…just to name a few.  The only thing I don’t like about this particular tool is that it does not give any notifications when new messages have arrived.  If you need real-time notification, you’ll want to look into a tool like TweetDeck.
  • Google Business Apps - There are two versions of the Google Business Apps, one is free and one you pay for.  If you go with the free version, you get 7GB of storage, as opposed to 25GB for the “premier” version.  Also, if you go with the free version, you don’t get the level of support the “premier” users will, and there’s additional security available.  If you’re on a tight budget and 7GB is enough for you, the free version should be just fine.

While most of these are well-known to the larger Internet Marketing community, I still run into to people who are not familiar with these.  All of these are free for use, and are just as powerful as “for fee” services.  The difference is the level of support received.  If you need real-time support, you’ll want to look into products that charge.