Don’t believe me?
A few years ago, I wouldn’t have, either.
After all, the concept of a free martech stack flies in the face of a lot of business plans. There are a slew of vendors out there charging big money for their marketing products. And some make great stuff!
But in today’s world of democratized tech, you can get pretty much everything you need for $0.
The short answer: Yes, you can get the marketing tools you need for free.
The long answer is a bit more complicated.
High-end providers rarely give away full-featured versions of their products for nothing. So if you’re looking for all the bells and whistles, you’re going to be shelling out some cash. But if you’re OK with some limits, you can create a full martech stack for free.
This plan is mostly for smaller companies and startups, particularly in a B2B space. B2C lists and needs can be more robust, particularly around personalization. Either way, though, free marketing technology and adtech is pretty cool.
Need more? Check out our dream marketing tech stack. You’re getting into products like Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot and Salesforce there.
Want features that fit in a budget? Here are robust marketing automation platforms for under $1,000/month.
Savvy marketers need a lot of technology in 2020. At a minimum, you’re going to require:
Yes, you can add more. There’s no end to how many marketing platforms and adtech solutions you can use. But that marketing tech stack is the definition of what most businesses need.
Yep. That’s a full martech stack – 100% for free. Let’s dive in.
WordPress started as a blogging platform. Today, it’s much, much more.
More than 75 million websites – 35% of the internet – are built on WordPress. It’s not just the biggest open source content management system in the world. It’s the biggest CMS in the world, period.
There’s a reason for that.
Pound for pound, WordPress is the best CMS we’ve ever used. A big part of that is the fact that it’s open source. The global development community delivers awesome stuff every day. If you have a problem with WordPress, there’s a good chance someone’s already solved it.
The other great thing? It’s free forever.
What We Love About WordPress
What to Watch Out For
Yoast offers a bunch of resources for SEO novices and experts. Its courses and conference are both top-notch, but they can be costly.
Where Yoast really shines is its free WordPress SEO plugin. Yoast SEO is hands down the best tool for “scoring” your content as you write it. Get “green” for the right keyword and there’s a good chance you’ll rank.
The plugin looks at your content and evaluates it for ranking factors. In the free version, these include:
It’s an excellent “last set of eyes” before you publish a webpage or blog post. Definitely a great addition to your free martech stack.
What We Love About Yoast SEO
What to Watch Out For
Annoying podcast commercials aside, Mailchimp has carved out a great niche for itself. It’s the default email marketing provider for SMBs and startups.
Mailchimp does go beyond email. It now pitches itself as an all-in-one marketing platform. For a free martech stack, though, you’re really looking at it as an email platform.
In terms of free email marketing, Mailchimp does what you expect it to. You can build emails using a drag-and-drop editor. Start with a template or from scratch. Segment your list. Automate sends. And after the email goes out, you can view basic analytics.
If you’re just starting out in B2C or B2B marketing, that’s all you need.
What We Love About Mailchimp
What to Watch Out For
Shotzr is a new player in the free stock photo game, but it’s come on strong.
Shotzr presents a number of advantages over Unsplash, Pexels and the others.
Its free images – in the “Social” tier – are actually … good. Like, Instagram-worthy good. No dead-eyed models or weirdly pointing businesspeople here.
Plus, the metadata on Shotzr photos is tremendous. It’s the only free stock photo site we’ve found that gives good location data. That means you don’t find photos from a city. You find photos from your city. When you’re trying to personalize marketing, that means a lot.
Need more? The paid Premium tier gives you 72 million royalty-free images from Getty for under $100/month.
What We Love About Shotzr
What to Watch Out For
What do you need to say about Google Analytics?
Most of the web uses it. You probably use it. It’s a full-featured, customizable web analytics platform … for free. If you’re in the U.S., there’s really no reason to use another analytics solution.
If you only add one item on this list to your free martech stack, make it Google Analytics.
What We Love About Google Analytics
What to Watch Out For
Lighthouse is the second of three Google tools you need to build a free martech stack. It’s the newest of them, and it’s making waves.
Google has a vested interest in sites delivering a better UX. It wants users to have a great experience when it links them to a website.
And the way your site performs – particularly on mobile – is a big part of that experience.
Lighthouse looks at site speed and delivers actionable recommendations to make it faster. It also examines accessibility factors, security and SEO basics.
What We Love About Lighthouse
What to Watch Out For
The last of our Google trifecta makes it easy to show and interpret your marketing data in a dashboard.
By this point, everyone knows the value of data visualization. It’s one thing to look at a spreadsheet. It’s quite another to see the data plotted out in a way that makes sense.
Google Data Studio makes this possible – for free. Compared to traditional enterprise BI solutions like Tableau, that’s quite the deal.
What We Love About Data Studio
What to Watch Out For
Think of Zapier like a universal API for web-based applications. It lets you effortlessly transfer data and kick off tasks in just about anything.
(That includes most of the apps on this free martech stack list, BTW.)
We couldn’t work a day without Zapier. No exaggeration. Think of everything you do that goes cross-platform.
Without Zapier, you’re at the mercy of native integrations and APIs. If you’re not a developer, that’s not great. But Zapier makes you feel like one.
What We Love About Zapier
What to Watch Out For
Is Slack really part of a free martech stack? Maybe yes, maybe no. But we don’t know a single large marketing team that doesn’t use it.
Slack has become the gold standard in office collaboration. What AOL Instant Messenger was to college in the 2000s, Slack is to today’s corporate environment.
Slack pitches itself as “replacing email inside your company.” When it comes to intra-office communication, that’s actually pretty true. It keeps information organized and out of threads, which is a godsend.
What We Love About Slack
What to Watch Out For
Loom takes the pain out of screen capture videos. It’s an all-in-one platform to capture screenflows, audio and webcam footage. Even better: It hosts videos itself, without forcing you over to YouTube.
If you’re building a free martech stack, why do you need screen capture software?
Do you ever write how-to blogs on web applications? Or need to offer descriptions of complex topics? Or collaborate on designs?
Loom is a fit for all that – and more.
What We Love About Loom
What to Watch Out For
We’ve covered Hemingway on our blog before. In fact, we write our blog in Hemingway.
The app forces you to “make your writing bold and clear.” It flags passive voice, adverbs and sentences that are too long. This drives down the reading level of your content, making it better for users and search engines.
What We Love About Hemingway
What to Watch Out For
Airtable is half Excel, half low-code app dev … and all awesome.
Imagine a spreadsheet with a database back end and customizable view options. Oh, and it can take attachments. And you can share it with one click. And custom formatting and filtering is just as easy.
That’s Airtable.
You can do a ton with Airtable. So it’s a little daunting at first. Thankfully, they offer templates for marketing calendars, campaign tracking, editorial calendars and more.
If you want to get more organized, add Airtable to your free martech stack.
What We Love About Airtable
What to Watch Out For
If social media is part of your B2C or B2B marketing mix, you need to be able to schedule posts. Doing it by hand is a non-starter in 2020.
That’s where Hootsuite comes in. The free version of the social app leader is basic. And that’s fine. You get a few profiles, and you can schedule out 30 messages.
If you’re a startup or SMB, do you really need more? That’s probably at least a few days’ of work, all done at once.
What We Love About Hootsuite
What to Watch Out For
So, is it possible to create a martech stack for zero dollars? In 2020, it sure is!
You won’t get every bell and whistle. But if budget matters when it comes to marketing technology, do you really need them?
Follow this list and you’ll be up and running with high-end tech in no time.
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