My Top 10 Free Tools as a Digital Marketing Student
By Hailey Kim | Sep 16, 2026
Summary Table: Top 10 Free Marketing Tools
I’d like to share my top 10 free tools that I used for my work as a digital marketing student. You can also check out [my digital marketing skills] to learn more about the tools and skills I use.
Here’s a summary table of the top 10 free marketing tools I recommend. If you’re interested in organic marketing, you can also explore [How To Do Marketing Without Money].
1. Editing Short-Form Videos: Edits & VLLO
For short-form videos such as Instagram Reels, TikTok videos, and YouTube Shorts, I recommend two free apps: Edits and VLLO.
Between the two, I’d like to focus on Edits and explain more about how it works.
Edits
Edits is a free video editor optimized for creating and editing short-form videos for social media. It’s especially designed for Instagram and iPhone users because it offers Instagram-specific fonts, design elements, and layouts.
In addition, you can upload a video you’ve just finished editing to your Instagram account right away by clicking the Instagram button on the editing page in Edits. When you click the button, you’ll be taken to Instagram, where you can continue writing your caption and adding a CTA (Call to Action), hashtags, and other details.
If you’d like to learn more about creating engaging content on social media, check out [5 Tips for High-Engaging Instagram Reels].
2. Designing Visual Posts & Content: Canva & EPIK
When it comes to visual posts and content rather than videos, I recommend Canva and EPIK. Their features are more tailored to editing photos and designing social media posts.
I’d like to explain more about Canva and how you can use it to create social media content.
Canva
Canva is already well known as a tool for creating various designs and presentation slides while collaborating with multiple people at the same time.
However, beyond creating slides, it also offers a wide range of templates and practical tools for designing social media content, such as Instagram posts.
As you can see in the picture, you can easily find a variety of templates in different styles and sizes, along with various tools for creating social media posts.
3. Keyword Research: Semrush, Wordstream, Ahrefs
If you’re working on SEO or keyword research, this will be a valuable resource for you! Don’t miss these free useful SEO tools for keyword research. You can use Semrush, WordStream, and Ahrefs, so let’s take a closer look at Semrush.
Semrush
Basically, Semrush is one of the most useful and well-known SEO tools that you can use for free every day. WordStream and Ahrefs are more focused on keyword research, while you can use Semrush for various purposes, including keyword research, competitive research, site audits, finding backlink opportunities, and AI Visibility Toolkit.
If you’d like to learn how to use Semrush and understand what SEO is, you can take free certification courses offered by Semrush. You’ll find clear, step-by-step explanations along with walkthrough checklists, which are especially helpful for SEO beginners.
4. Basic Site Audits: Screaming Frog
When it comes to Screaming Frog, it’s a pretty practical tool for crawling and site audits. Specifically, it can help you analyze and identify technical SEO issues on a website, and that’s why it’s also called an SEO website crawler.
You will be able to check issues on your website, such as broken links, missing or duplicate titles and meta descriptions, missing H1 tags, image issues, and redirects, which can affect how effectively Google crawls your website.
5. Email Marketing Campaign: Mailchimp & Hubspot
For email marketing, you can get started with these two tools. They offer free plans that allow you to send emails in bulk and track campaign metrics, so you can manage your email campaigns and analyze customer behavior.
Difference between Mailchimp and Hubspot
First of all, Mailchimp is more specialized in email marketing. It allows marketers to create email campaigns, manage templates and automation, and analyze campaign performance, for overall email marketing.
On the other hand, Hubspot is an all-in-one marketing platform. It offers more than just email marketing, including CRM (Customer Relationship Management), marketing automation, and sales tools. This allows you to manage CRM, marketing, and sales activities in an integrated way and connect your email marketing with customer data and other marketing campaigns.
These top 10 free tools can help you get started with digital marketing without spending a lot of money. Try the tools that best fit your needs and see which ones work best for you!