5 Free Tools to Level Up Your Small Business
Are you doing your best to stay ahead of social media, marketing, and managing your small business? You’re not alone! While it can seem like every tool designed to help you out is too expensive, there are some fantastic free tools out there that can support you in growing your business—many of them have more features that can be unlocked when you pay, but payment isn’t required for the basic functionality.
Planoly
Uses: Social media scheduling for Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.
Sick of manually posting on social media? Planoly’s free plan allows you to add one social set—which means you can link one Instagram, one Facebook, one Pinterest, etc. You can upload 10 images per month, which may not seem like a lot, but it’s a great start! When you think about it, that’s still more than two posts per week, each month. Your scheduled posts automatically post on your selected day and time.
2. Monday.com
Uses: CRM, sales management, inventory, project tracking…the sky is the limit!
We need to write a blog post that’s just about Monday.com…seriously, this software is so underappreciated and, once you wrap your head around it, relatively easy to implement. It’s gonna look like a lot, but we have helped countless clients implement Monday and we have heard nothing but good things!
We use Monday.com in our own business. We track projects and deadlines, manage our sales leads, and more, all in this one software. If you’re a business that is in need of more in-depth management capabilities, definitely consider upgrading to a paid plan. And if you get a free or paid plan and need some help setting up your dashboard, just contact us!
Plus, there are tons of free videos out there that can help you get the gist of things.
3. Pexels
Uses: Stock Images
Need some nice stock images for your website, social media, or flyers? Check out Pexels! The website is easy-to-navigate, and all of the photos are free. It makes it so much easier to find high-quality photos, especially if you find a photographer who’s in your niche, as they often will continue to add new photos. Of course, we always recommend hiring a photographer to get your own brand images (we work with an amazing local photographer, Alexa, and recommend her to all of our local clients!), but there will often be cases where you need a simple texture or placeholder image that matches your brand, and Pexels consistently delivers.
4. Canva
Uses: Design, social media post creation
Now, if you do any social media management, posting or marketing already, you’ve probably heard of or used Canva, but for those of you who haven’t, Canva is a great software for everyone—it’s beginner friendly, but it can be utilized (with limits of course) by professionals. Now, it doesn’t hold a candle to Adobe Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop, but it’s also free sooooo… just make sure you understand the limits with copyright etc. when creating on Canva. Overall, we love it for social media post creating and creating visual how-to guides for our customers.
5. CreativeMarket
Uses: Fonts, graphic elements, creative assets
CreativeMarket is just what it sounds like…it’s a market for creative things. Whether that’s presets, textures, brush packs, stock images, and more, CreativeMarket has amazing, low-priced options. But it’s their Free Downloads every Monday that get them onto this list! Every week, they’ll send you an email with free assets you can download. We’ve downloaded amazing brushes, stock images, templates and font packs, all for free.