The HMM Team's Favorite (Free) Marketing Tools: Our Go-To Recommendations for Every Business

Claude

Claude excels at nuanced, long-form writing and complex reasoning tasks where context matters. It handles detailed instructions exceptionally well and maintains consistency across lengthy documents, making it ideal for content creation, editing, and strategic planning.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT shines with its massive ecosystem of plugins, custom GPTs, and integrations. It's particularly strong for tasks that benefit from visual generation through DALL-E and has the most recognizable brand, meaning clients and team members likely already have some familiarity.

Gemini

Gemini's standout strength is its deep integration with Google Workspace—it can pull from your Gmail, Drive, Docs, and Calendar to provide contextually relevant responses. This makes it exceptional for users already embedded in the Google ecosystem.

Grok

Grok differentiates itself through real-time access to X (Twitter) data, making it uniquely useful for understanding trending conversations, sentiment analysis, and timely cultural references. It also has a more unfiltered, conversational personality.

Perplexity

Perplexity is purpose-built for research, providing cited sources with every response. It's the best AI tool for fact-finding missions where accuracy and attribution matter—think market research, competitive analysis, or tracing claims.

Pi AI

Pi stands out for its warm, emotionally intelligent conversational style, making it excellent for brainstorming sessions, working through ideas verbally, or when you want an AI that feels more like a supportive thinking partner.

Semrush

Semrush is the Swiss Army knife of SEO platforms, offering comprehensive keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink auditing, and site health monitoring tools all in one dashboard. Its competitive intelligence features are particularly strong.

Also Asked

Also Asked visualizes the "People Also Ask" questions from Google in a branching tree format. This makes it invaluable for content planning, FAQ development, and understanding user intent at different stages of the buyer journey.

Google Search Console

Search Console is the only tool that shows you exactly how Google sees your website—which pages are indexed, what queries drive impressions and clicks, and any crawl errors. It's essential and free.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Bing Webmaster Tools provides the same essential indexing and performance insights as Google Search Console but for Microsoft's search ecosystem. With Bing powering search for various AI assistants, it's worth monitoring.

Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is non-negotiable for local businesses—it's the single most important factor in appearing in local map packs and "near me" searches. It gives you control over your business info and reviews.

Google Merchant Center

The gateway to getting your products displayed in Google Shopping results, image searches, and Shopping ads. It allows you to upload your product catalog, manage feeds, and ensure your inventory appears accurately.

Google Manufacturer Center

Designed for brand owners who want to provide Google with authoritative product information that retailers may not include. This helps your products appear more completely across Google surfaces.

Freepik

A massive library of vectors, photos, icons, and PSD files that's particularly strong for social media graphics and marketing collateral. The AI-powered search makes finding on-trend assets fast.

Really Good Emails

The best curated collection of email design inspiration. It's invaluable for seeing what successful companies are doing with their email marketing and sparking ideas for your own campaigns.

Unsplash

Provides high-resolution, professionally shot photography that's completely free to use without attribution. The quality consistently rivals paid stock sites, making it ideal for blog headers and websites.

unDraw

Offers free, customizable illustrations in a consistent, modern style—and you can change the accent color to match your brand before downloading. All illustrations feel cohesive together.

Behance

Adobe's professional portfolio platform where designers showcase their best work. Excellent for finding design inspiration, discovering trends, and researching potential freelancers or agencies.

One Page Love

Curates the best single-page website designs, making it the go-to resource when building landing pages, portfolios, or simple business sites. Tightly focused on one-page use cases.

Landingfolio

Breaks down landing pages into component sections (hero, features, pricing, testimonials), letting you study how successful pages structure each element piece by piece.

Site Inspire

Curates sophisticated, design-forward websites filtered by style, type, and subject. Ideal when you need inspiration for elevated, editorial, or artistic web design.

Blush

Offers customizable illustrations where you can mix and match elements to create unique imagery. This customization is its superpower for creating inclusive visuals that reflect diverse audiences.

Illustrations.co

Provides a growing collection of open-source illustrations that are completely free for personal and commercial use. The library includes diverse styles and categories.

Iconmonstr

Offers over 4,000 free icons in a clean, consistent style with simple licensing—no attribution required. Fast SVG/PNG downloads make it easy to find and use icons.

WAVE

A free accessibility evaluation tool that identifies WCAG compliance issues directly on your pages. Essential for ensuring websites are usable by people with disabilities.

Figma

The industry-standard collaborative design tool. Browser-based and powerful, it allows for scalable, consistent design across projects and real-time teamwork on UI/UX.

Canva

Democratizes design with intuitive drag-and-drop editing and templates. Ideal for teams without dedicated designers who need to produce social media graphics and marketing materials quickly.

HubSpot

A great tool for small and large teams alike, offering a remarkably capable free tier that includes basic automation, booking calendars, and a functional CRM. Its strength is the all-in-one ecosystem.

Attio

A newer CRM platform focused on automated processes with AI-powered data enrichment. Its modern interface and flexible data model make it adaptable to various workflows without the bloat of legacy CRMs.

Mailchimp

A simple email platform with an intuitive campaign builder and reliable deliverability. Doubles as a basic CRM, though best suited for newsletters and marketing emails rather than complex sales pipelines.

Google Analytics 4

The standard for website analytics, providing free, comprehensive tracking of user behavior and traffic sources. Its event-based model offers flexibility, though the learning curve can be steep.

Mixpanel

Excels at product analytics and user journey tracking, making it ideal for SaaS companies. Its cohort analysis and retention tracking are more robust than GA4's out of the box.

Matomo

The leading open-source, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. It offers complete data ownership with no sampling when self-hosted, making it attractive for privacy-conscious organizations.

Microsoft Clarity

Provides free, unlimited heatmaps and session recordings that show exactly how users interact with your pages. The "rage click" and "dead click" detection surfaces usability issues automatically.

Google Tag Manager

Centralizes all your tracking codes in one container, letting you manage tags without touching website code. Dramatically speeds up implementation of analytics and remarketing pixels.

CookieYes

Simplifies cookie consent compliance with an easy-to-implement banner that automatically scans for cookies and adapts to major privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Semrush Listing Management

Distributes your business information across 70+ directories from a single dashboard, helping maintain NAP (name, address, phone) consistency that's critical for local SEO.

GoDaddy

Offers an all-in-one solution for domain registration and hosting with 24/7 customer support. The brand recognition and beginner-friendly interface make it a comfortable starting point.

Namecheap

Provides domain registration at consistently lower prices than competitors with free WHOIS privacy protection included. The interface is straightforward and avoids aggressive upselling.

Webflow

The best website builder for simple designs to complex enterprise builds, offering visual design flexibility with production-ready code output. Ideal for professionals wanting control without writing code.

Shopify

The best eCommerce platform. Full stop. It handles payment processing, inventory, and shipping, with a mature app ecosystem that extends functionality for virtually any use case.

Wix

Easy to navigate for beginners but scales well with recent performance updates. Includes fantastic built-in SEO tools that guide small businesses through optimization step by step.