If you are a solopreneur, you’re constantly wearing all hats running a one-person show.

Understandably, the last thing you need is to drown in endless options for apps that all claim to be “game-changing” when you’re looking to streamline your workflow.

To save you this hassle, this guide equips you with handy digital marketing tools that are also all wallet-friendly enough to keep your budget singing happy tunes.

Because I understand every solopreneur's journey is unique, I've also included alternative options for certain tools to ensure you find the perfect fit for you.

Before we dive in, here’s a quick peek into the apps In this guide for you:

Ahrefs for SEO and Competitor Analysis
JasperAI for Writing [+ Alternative]
Grammarly for Proofreading & Editing
Canva for Graphic Design & Image Generation
Runway for Videos
Hootsuite for Social Media Management [+ Alternative]
Brevo for Email Marketing [+ Alternative]
Wordstream for Advertising
Hotjar for Website Heatmapping
Zapier for Workflow Automation

Ahrefs for SEO and Competitor Analysis

Price: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools are free for any website owner and consist of Site Audit and Site Explorer tools. There’s also a range of other things you can do in Ahrefs for free.

Subscription plans are categorized into Lite, Standard, Advanced, and Agency tiers. Monthly subscription options start at $99 for personal use and $999 for agency usage.

Ahrefs stands out in the realm of SEO tools as a premium rank tracker.

It also offers subscription options that are relatively more affordable compared to its other premium competitors like SEMRush and Moz Pro.

As an SEO tool, Ahrefs offers features such as keyword research, backlink analysis, content analysis, rank tracking, and more.

This can help you improve your website’s visibility and performance on search engines.

Plus, it lets you perform site audits to gain insights into technical SEO issues that you may need to pay attention to.

The platform also easily enables you to keep tabs open on specific web pages or domains to see how they rank for keywords over time and what SERP features they’re winning.

Knowing this will help you make more savvy decisions and increase your chances of landing on the coveted front pages of Google.

Another thing that quite clearly sets Ahrefs apart is its capability to conduct an unmatched backlink analysis.

Through this, you can uncover the web pages linking to your competitor’s sites and conduct assessments of the quality and relevance of these links.

This can help you identify opportunities for high-quality link-building and outreach to improve your domain authority.

Apart from assessing organic traffic, Ahrefs also facilitates the analysis of paid search campaigns.

It helps you determine whether your competitors use paid search and identifies the sources of their paid traffic, such as Google or Facebook ads.

All in all, if you’re keen on ramping up your organic search performance as a solopreneur, Ahref’s smarts are worth tapping into.

JasperAI for Writing

Price: JasperAI offers three pricing plans: Creator, Pro, and Business.

The Creator plan costs $49/month, the Pro plan costs $69/month, and the Business plan is custom-priced.

It also comes with a free 7-day trial for the Creator and Pro plans.

A major ChatGPT competitor, JasperAI’s specialty is its ability to account for tone and nail the vibe you’re after.

This makes it a great tool for generating articles, social media posts, and other types of written content that scream “you”.

It also comes with impressive linguistic prowess, allowing you to translate your content into 30 languages if you’re looking to reach a much wider audience.

Of course, you can also use ChatGPT itself, although it sometimes feels a bit... well, vanilla.

It requires arcane prompts to generate content that matches your tone and you will, more often than not, end up rewriting most of it, anyway.

However, it’s great and free to leverage if you already have a written piece that requires some tweaks.

As a writer myself, I opt for this approach and usually just use ChatGPT to generate “paraphrasing inspos” that I can use to enhance specific parts of my text.

Another noteworthy aspect of JasperAI is that it can be merged with Surfer SEO, another prominent SEO tool like Ahrefs that can help optimize your content for search engines.

Surfer’s starter plan comes at a lower price than Ahrefs and costs $89/month, so you might want to consider subscribing to it if you’re going to use JasperAI.

To make a more informed decision, this comparison might help.

If you’re still looking for an alternative for JasperAI altogether, however, Anyword is another excellent option with very similar elements.

In comparison to JasperAI, the application's key feature lies in its ability to predict content performance, giving you great insights into what resonates with your target audience.

It’s ideal if you’re strongly focused on marketing and content performance and can be a great sidekick if you’re looking to specifically write copy for your ads, website, emails, or social media, while JasperAI is usually better for writing longer pieces like articles and blog posts.

Anyword offers four pricing plans: Starter, Data-driven, Business, and Enterprise.

The Starter plan costs $49/month, the Data-driven plan costs $99/month, the Business plan starts at $499/month, and the Enterprise plan is custom-priced.

It also comes with a free 7-day trial like JasperAI.

Generally, both JasperAI and Anyword have the same pricing for their starter plans, so it might be a good idea to take advantage of their free trials to figure out which one suits your needs best.

Grammarly for Proofreading & Editing

Price: Grammarly offers a free plan with many of its basic features.

The premium plan costs $30/month when billed monthly, $20/month when billed quarterly, and $12/month when billed annually.

A business plan is also available and starts at $15/month per team member.

Grammarly is an AI writing partner built specifically to keep the grammar police in you at bay.

It diligently spots typos, grammatical and punctuation errors, and even awkward phrasing.

You can set it up to run in the background as you type in other apps to make sure your input remains polished as you go.

In my experience, it’s especially good at pinpointing minor spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors, but only moderately good at making useful suggestions to improve your style.

Over-reliance on its style suggestions usually ends up sucking your writing’s personality dry, but the good part is that it easily allows you to accept or ignore these suggestions as you see them.

The best part is that Grammarly offers a solid free plan with all the basic features like grammar, spelling, and punctuation checking.

It’s enough if you usually just want to ensure your writing is clean and navigate publish-day panic by catching those pesky typos and all the commas-gone-rogue.

On the other hand, Grammarly Premium provides more advanced features such as paraphrasing, tone adjustments, citation suggestions, and an AI-powered writing assistant.

It also comes with genre-specific style suggestions and a plagiarism checker, making it a valuable sidekick if you’re doing technical writing, for example.

In a nutshell, if you’re keen on keeping your mind at peace, which I’m fairly assuming you are, you should do yourself a favor and sign up for at least the free account.

Canva for Graphic Design & Image Generation

Price: Canva offers a free plan and two paid plans, a Canva Pro plan for individuals that costs $14.99/month, and a Canva for Teams plan that costs $29.99/month.

Warning: Canva obsession overload ahead. And no, this is by no means me doing any kind of affiliate marketing; it’s just that this tool is so worth the hype!

Obviously, Canva is and probably always will be my ultimate favorite tool.

It’s as close as it gets to a one-stop shop for your graphic design needs and provides you with all the essentials required to bring your visual concepts to life and maintain visual consistency.

It covers social graphics, document design, presentations, and a whole lot more, and can help you create your brand’s visual identity from scratch, from your fonts and colors to your logo and on-brand materials.

Canva also makes it easy to repurpose your content by providing pre-sized templates specifically designed for various purposes and platforms.

You can simply choose your preferred format, drop in your existing content (text, images, videos), and resize, edit, or swap out elements with intuitive tools.

This saves you so much time you could have possibly spent agonizing over pixel dimensions (God forbid!).

The best part is that it has also introduced its AI-powered Magic Studio in 2022, and it’s magical, to say the least.

It offers a range of features, including Magic Switch for instant format conversion, Magic Media for text-to-image and text-to-video generation, Magic Design for effortless, on-brand content creation, and more.

It’s incredibly fun to explore and experiment with, and the results are mostly pretty neat.

In short, Canva, my friends, Canva! If you haven't checked it out yet, you're missing out! (Just ask all the people I've already convinced... )

Runway for Videos

Price: Runway offers a free basic plan. Subscription plans are categorized into Standard, Pro, and Enterprise tiers.

Monthly subscription options begin at $15 for standard use and $95 for unlimited use. The Enterprise plan is custom-priced.

Just like a painting depends on the artist's skill and not as much on the brush, Runway works best when you know how to use it well.

This platform combines machine learning with art and design and aims to make the capabilities of artificial intelligence available to everyone.

While it presents an extensive range of possibilities, allowing you to generate images and videos based on text prompts or even on other images and videos, achieving desired outcomes hinges largely on how you leverage them.

In other words, Runway demands dedication and exploration to unlock its full potential.

However, while it might not give you instant results, especially with video generation, mastering it can eventually lead to truly jaw-dropping outputs.

How quickly you can learn to use the tool depends on you, but, again, it’s essential if you’re keen on utilizing it that you set some time aside to get to know all the ropes.

Runway makes this a lot easier by providing clear explanations and practical examples to ensure a smooth learning curve.

Runway’s user interface resembles that of a professional-grade video editing tool, though it remains navigable without the overwhelming complexity of a big boy like Adobe After Effects.

Hootsuite for Social Media Management

Price: Hootsuite offers three pricing plans: Professional, Team, and Enterprise.

The Professsional plan costs $99/month, the Team plan costs $249/month, and the Enterprise plan is custom-priced.

It also comes with a free 30-day trial for the Professional and Team plans.

Hootsuite stands as a top choice for many people for good reason.

This long-standing tool can be used to manage Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Pinterest, all in one platform.

As an all-in-one social media toolkit, it enables you to schedule messages, create and manage your posts, monitor all your inboxes, run boosted social media advertising campaigns, analyze your competitors’ social media presence, engage in social listening, and pretty much anything else you would want a social media management app to do.

Additionally, it offers a pretty neat AI-powered writing assistant, OwlyWriterAI, that does everything from offering inspiration, to repurposing your top posts and writing new ones for you, to turning your other types of content, such as blog posts, into posts suited to your social media platforms.

With Hootsuite Analytics, you also get to conduct a comprehensive competitive analysis across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Twitter by tracking a number of competitors over time depending on the pricing plan you opt for.

This grants you thorough insights into various metrics, such as your competitors’ posting frequency, engagement rates, and audience growth.

With other features like post-performance analysis, trending hashtags, and post-length insights, it's also a valuable tool for quickly fetching inspiration for what to publish next.

On a side note, they also provide a range of free tools to help you generate captions and relevant hashtags that could be really useful once you’ve finished your competitor research.

Hootsuite also goes the extra mile by incorporating statistics from other businesses in similar industries.

If you're eager to gauge your performance against the broader industry landscape, rather than just individual competitors, this tool is tailor-made for you.

While all of these features might be available in other social media management platforms, Hootsuite really wins on finesse.

It’s not really what it does but how it does it that sets it apart.

However, If you’re looking for a much more budget-friendly option that still covers most of your social media management needs, SocialPilot would be a good choice.

It comes with a free 14-day trial and its starter plan costs $30/month, allowing you to manage 10 social media accounts.

Social Pilot stands out not only for its affordability but also for its user-friendly dashboard, making it an invaluable tool for scheduling and managing social media posts across various platforms. From Facebook to TikTok and everything in between, it covers all the bases.

Plus, it offers the essential features you'd expect from a top-notch social media management app, including an AI assistant to streamline tasks.

Ultimately, SocialPilot is the better option for those who prioritize affordability and TikTok integration, which isn’t available in Hootsuite.

However, Hootsuite empowers exploration and analysis by providing more advanced reporting, diverse content curation tools, and a wider range of integrations, including YouTube.

Thankfully, indecision is so last season with free trials that enable you to discover the details that matter most to make up your mind.

Brevo for Email Marketing

Price: Brevo offers a free plan, which includes email templates, automation workflows, unlimited live chat, and up to 300 emails per day.

Paid plans start at $25 a month for 20,000 emails.

If you happen to be looking for an email marketing platform that allows you to upload unlimited contacts without being charged for it, Brevo is your one.

Brevo is essentially a custom relationship management suite offering a slew of handy tools to connect with customers via email, SMS, chat, and beyond.

You can use it to plan and execute everything from drip campaigns to bulk text alerts.

Plus, it comes with an unexpected bonus for a newsletter service in its price range: top-notch workflow-based automation.

This means you can set up campaign actions triggered by your visitors' email and website engagement behavior, assign lead scores, send transactional messages, and more.

Additionally, the app provides a range of templated automation flows tailored to your specific goals, which makes it easy to automate your emails without feeling like you're wrangling a room full of toddlers (yes, that’s what it often feels like for me).

So, whether you're aiming to boost engagement, drive traffic, increase revenue, or strengthen relationships, Brevo has the workflow to help you achieve it.

Unlike HubSpot and most other email marketing service providers really, it charges based on the number of emails you send, not the number of contacts you have.

It’s also worth noting that there is a pay-as-you-go option (Email Credits) available for customers who do not send newsletters every month.

For many solopreneurs, this ticks two boxes: budget-friendly automation for relatively low-volume email campaigns.

While Brevo’s free plan is already generous and the subscription options relatively affordable, Sender beats this if you’re looking for an even more budget-friendly email marketing solution.

The free plan from Sender is seriously generous, offering up to 2,500 subscribers and a whopping 15,000 emails per month.

You get the pay-as-you-go option, as well, like you do in Brevo.

Plus, you are granted full access to advanced features like automation and audience segmentation.

While the selection of email templates may not be as extensive as it is in Brevo, Sender still provides nearly 40 options, most of which are of decent quality.

It also doesn’t come with pre-built workflows like Brevo, but it’s still user-friendly and comes equipped with a dozen standard triggers to get you started.

Solopreneurs can perfectly utilize it to get their business off the ground, but Brevo is probably the better option if your business is already thriving.

The good part? You can try out both for free and see what works for you.

Wordstream for Advertising

Price: The price of the WordStream Advisor, the company’s flagship product, is undisclosed on their website. WordStream still offers a range of valuable free tools, including Ad Performance Graders and a keyword research tool.

Wordstream is one of the biggest names in the digital marketing game and they’re on a mission to bring the power of online advertising to organizations of all sizes. It uses AI algorithms and machine learning to generate simplified and actionable suggestions to optimize Google Ads and Facebook campaigns.

While the WordStream Advisor might be out of budget for most solopreneurs and is better suited for small and medium-sized businesses according to various sources I reviewed, Wordstream still offers quite useful AI-powered tools for FREE that could help you optimize your next ad campaign:

The Google Ads Grader: This grader provides a thorough audit of your Google Ads account whenever you need it. The assessment grades your account against seventeen key metrics, leaving you with useful insights to improve your campaigns. The generated free report also includes an overall grade as well as individual grades in four key areas of pay-per-click marketing: wasted spend, quality score, impression share, and account activity.

The Facebook Ads Grader: Similar to the Google Ads Grader but for your Facebook Business account, this tool can help you create ad sets, track conversions, optimize your bids, and more. It provides a baseline for your account’s health and future optimization options, as well as data on the average performance of competitors within your industry who have similar budgets. This allows you to see how your Facebook ads stack up against competitors targeting similar audiences.

The Keyword Tool: If you want to research the most relevant and profitable keywords for your ad, the Keyword Tool can readily help with that by providing suggestions, search volume data, and competitive metrics.

Hotjar for Website Heatmapping

Price: Hotjar offers a free basic plan and 3 paid tiers: Plus, Business and Scale. Plus costs $39/month, while Business starts at $99/month, and Scale at $213/month.

Hotjar is an established player and a relative old-timer in the UX tool scene, offering a comprehensive user feedback platform that combines diverse analytics tools and feedback options.

Known for its accessibility amongst its users, even those without technical expertise, Hotjar makes testing websites and apps a breeze and helps you understand how people really interact with your business.

It excels particularly in heatmapping, offering heat maps that visualize where users click, move, and scroll while using your website. It can even determine where “rage clicks” happen to pinpoint the most popular features and potential areas for improvement.

Additionally, Hotjar lets you compare user behavior before and after making changes to your website or app to help you identify underutilized features and make them better or swap them out for something cooler.

Hotjar also offers a free survey tool for creating targeted surveys for users and members of online communities if you’re keen on receiving ideas and suggestions for improvement or simply want to understand your users better.

With its Feedback tool, you can also create a customized feedback widget to get direct customer feedback on your website or mobile app.

All in all, if you’re keen on peeking into the minds (and clicks) of your users, Hotjar is one of the ultimate OGs in the UX scene that lets you do exactly that without having to be a data nerd.

Zapier for Workflow Automation

Price: Zapier offers a free basic plan and 4 paid tiers: Starter, Profesional, Team, and Company. The Starter plan starts at $29.99/month, and the Team plan at $103.50/month.

Zapier is like the ultimate Lego of your tech stack and workflow integration needs. It allows you to effortlessly link up all the apps and services you use, including a lot of the software I mentioned throughout this post, and create powerful automations that do the heavy lifting for you. By customizing and automating your workflow, you can streamline your processes and save yourself precious time and effort.

Zapier also makes it very easy to get started and set up your automation with its drag-and-drop interface. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their handy pre-made "Zaps," you'll be up and running in no time.

Zaps are basically automated workflows made up of a trigger and one or more actions. Zapier will monitor the connected applications and once a certain event occurs, it will run its respective actions based on the automation you set up.

Let’s say you set a Zap for a custom LinkedIn post that goes out for every blog post you publish on your website. In this case, publishing the blog post would be the trigger event, and the custom post on LinkedIn is the automated action that follows.

Generally speaking, the idea behind Zapier is pretty simple: it's here to help you craft a smarter, more customized workflow. The goal? To save you time and allow you to focus on what really matters in your work. And since everyone's got their own set of apps and tools they rely on, Zapier hooks up with a ton of different destinations. So if you're wondering whether your go-to app is in the mix, just check out Zapier's list of integrated apps.

Concluding Words: You Got This!

Being a solopreneur is like juggling flaming chainsaws on a unicycle – exhilarating, yes, but sometimes downright terrifying. But just like that unicycle, these tools are here to (hopefully!) help you find your balance in the digital marketing game.

Needless to say, this guide isn't a rigid rulebook, but rather a good starting point for you to experiment, explore alternatives, and get creative with confidence. Remember, the best tools are the ones that fit your unique style and workflow, and the simplest of tools can go a long way as long as you have a solid strategic approach.

In short, don’t overwhelm yourself with endless options. Start small, monitor your results, and skip to the next tool if you’re unhappy with them. In time, you’ll have just the right tools to make your life easier. You got this!

10 Budget-Friendly Digital Marketing Essentials for Solopreneurs [A Handy Guide]