by Bella Howell, on July 13, 2020
.png?width=600&name=7%20(1).png)
Budgets are tight at the moment, that's a fact.
Going into the latter half of the year, no one will want to spend any money that isn't absolutely necessary. Beyond important tools like cloud security and backup, it's going to be harder than ever to get your clients to adopt new products.
A strong relationship between you and your customer will be the key to continued purchases. That said, if you're trying to sell something every time you talk to them, they'll soon get sick of that and you could get shut out.
Instead, give them something they're not expecting.
Call or email to find out how they're doing, see if there's anything you can help with and, as a cherry on top, recommend a tool that you've used yourself that you know they'll get a benefit out of without spending a penny.
There's no doubt that you already use a number of great free online services, but if you're looking for some more, we've compiled a list of some of our favourites:
For us, Canva is a holy grail product. A free design tools that requires no graphic design knowledge, it contains thousands of pre-built templates for any presentations, logos, newsletters, business cards etc. that you would ever want to make. Whether you're an expert or a novice, it's drag and drop interface makes it a dream to use and with built-in integrations with sites such as Hubspot and Pexels, there's nothing not to like.
Cost: FREE*
*Canva has a premium package that will give you access to extra templates and photos, but in our opinion, the free version gives you more than you could ever need anyway!
2. Pexels
Mentioned above, Pexels is a site that provides you with completely free stock images and videos. It's used by over 1mil creatives worldwide and has a large community of contributors, so there's always fresh content that's perfect for websites and marketing materials.
Cost: FREE
3. Notion
You may have heard of tools like Trello or Asana, but Notion pulls all the capabilities of these other task management programmes into one simple-to-use and effective platform. Giving you the ability to create wikis, notes, docs, projects and more, it's an easy way to organise both your personal and professional life, getting on top of tasks that may have otherwise gone forgotten. Compared to other similar tools like Evernote, we think it's the bees knees.
Cost: FREE for personal use, paid for team accounts.
4. Loom
When you don't want to schedule a full Zoom call and you know your Teams message will probably go unread, Loom is a fantastic alternative. A tool that lets you record anything that's on your screen as well as recording yourself through the camera, it's great for quick tutorials or messages to the wider team. For MSPs, this tool will be invaluable, especially as the free version allows you to send unlimited videos at no extra cost.
Cost: FREE, with a paid premium package available.
5. Hotjar
If you want to know what journey customers follow when they land on your side, Hotjar is the tool for you. It uses smart technology to behaviour on a certain pages, showing heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps and visitor recordings of the users' behaviour. It's an interesting programme that can give great insight into what is and isn't working for a website.
Cost: FREE for up to 2000 page views per day, so perfect for SMBs.
6. Hemingway
Hemingway is an online tool that works similarly to Grammarly, but we think it's better. Type or copy and paste any piece of writing into its interface and it'll tell you ways you can improve. Highlighting sentence structure, grammar, tone of voice etc., it works to make your words flow as freely as possible, so is a perfect programme to use before you send out any written communication.
Cost: FREE
7. Airtable
Airtable is a great tool to use alongside Notion (mentioned above). An all-in-one collaboration platform, it works as a kind of spreadsheet meets database, but is a lot more exciting than that description sounds. Completely customisable and flexible to your needs, it allows you to create sheets that can be interlinked and categorised, put in any order you want, and shown in the best view to suit you - be that table, calendar, gallery etc. It even has 100+ template to get you started.
Cost: FREE, with a paid plan available.
