15 inexpensive and irresistible apps to keep your marketing on point

Updated on 27/11/2018

When it comes to apps, plugins, and other digital tools, we are spoilt for choice.

So, for the sake of digestion, here are some of my tried and tested favourites.

Best of all, they won’t break the bank!

Awesome Screenshots. Simply the most practical thing for screenshots – it sits on my Chrome as an extension and lets me capture a whole or part of a page in minutes. You can also do short screen recordings (under 30 seconds) for free.
Loom is Awesome Screenshots’ sophisticated older sister when it comes to screen-recordings. Free to use, intuitive, and makes sharing your recordings with clients incredibly easy. It also sits as a Chrome extension.

Click to Tweet – As you’d expect, this inserts a box into your blog which you can customize with an extract or a quote from your blog. It encourages people to share a link to your post that’s not the usual boring title + link. There are various plugins that do this and they all seem to work pretty similarly…
Co-schedule – I’ve heard about this for ages but didn’t get a chance to try it until recently. As well as their free headline analyser tool, it’s really practical way to organize your content planning and also schedule multiple social media updates for the same post. All in one place. It’s like having Trello, Buffer and Missing Lett_r rolled into one.
Icegram is a free tool for list-building and conversion. With it you can easily create pop ups on your WordPress site to invite readers to join your mailing list, as well as create other calls to action. You can tinker with the timings so that your readers aren’t faced with it from the moment they land on your page!

As a list-lover, Zenkit has become a quick favourite for me. It’s satisfying to use, integrates with Google calendar, and exists as a phone app too, which means I can keep my to-do lists organized and updated wherever I am. Completely free.
Another new one to me, Prospero makes it easy to create compelling project proposals that can exist either online or as PDFs. In its online version, it also tracks whether your clients has visited it or not.
Keep ahead of the competition by creating your own Facebook Chatbot – It’s Alive have got a free trial going for a Facebook Chatbot builder.

Quuu Promote remains a favourite for spreading content far and wide – read here about how it compares with far more expensive alternatives.
Slideshare is technically a social media channel in its own right, albeit one focused on sharing slides. Great for helping your content travel further, especially after you’ve given a talk.
Missing Lettr creates a year’s worth of social media updates for your blog post, with great engagement rates.
Hashtagify helps you search a hashtag’s popularity, as well as discover related ones.

Canva remains a firm favourite and is one of the few apps I happily pay for on a monthly basis -it’s just an easy way to not only create visual material but also translate it into other formats, making cross-channel campaigns incredibly easy!
Crello is a new kid on the block and looks a little similar to Canva. It’s free to use and I’m enjoying it’s alternative design options particularly for GIFs. Unfortunately, changing formats is not currently possible on Crello, and it’s focus is purely on social media images (whereas Canva also allows you to create presentations, magazines, and so forth) so I won’t be abandoning Canva just yet!
Lumen5 is an app I’ve praised enough times already – it’s an easy way to transform blog posts into videos, using AI for image suggestions! And yes, it’s free! Check out for example this one I made earlier based on this blog post: