Essential Start-up Marketing Tools (part 1)

by Lili Petkova | Jun 06, 2013

List of must use marketing tools for every start-up

Start-up marketing isn’t an easy job and it’s quite different from marketing for established and big businesses. Start-ups have limited resources: time, money, and people. Often, because of cost optimization, start-ups have to market their business by using free marketing tools as much as is possible – or they won’t have the opportunity to popularize it at all. Luckily, there are a lot of free tools out there, but investing your time means that at the end you’re still looking for results and ROI. Here’s a list of the most important tools for every startup’s marketing; and most of them luckily are free to use.

1.       Google analytics

The well known free Google tool for webpage analytics is a must use instrument for every business that has an online presence. You can gather and analyze a lot of important information in order to optimize your website, landing pages, content and online advertising costs. Learn some Google Analytics tricks and hacks (Link to Google Analytics Level: Guru).

2.       Optimizely

Optimizely is a paid instrument for A/B testing, but pleasantly inexpensive. It lets you test and optimize your website so that you drive more conversions. It’s easy to use and you don’t have to be a web developer to understand your test results and make changes on your home page, product pages or landing pages.

3.       MailChimp

E-mail marketing is cost-effective and essential for every start-up. Newsletter subscriptions and e-mail distributions are best managed through an instrument like MailChimp. It’s simple to use, has affordable pricing and lets you generate leads and keep your customers engaged in a great way. To see how to conduct successful e-mail marketing, read here.

4.       WordPress

If you want to keep your customers up-to-date with news about your business and you’re willing to have another instrument for popularization, having a blog is a great opportunity to accomplish this. WordPress is the most popular and maybe the most used open source blogging platform, and it has a free version. It’s the best choice for start-ups, but look at some pros and cons using WordPress.

5.       SurveyMonkey

Regular surveys for your customers are a great way to gather feedback and make your business better. SurveyMonkey allows you to quickly and easily set up a survey, get answers and analyze the results. It has free and paid plans, according to your needs.

6.       Salesforce

Having a CRM system is crucial for your sales and marketing campaigns. You can register leads; make efforts to convert them into customers and measure effectiveness. CRM is a must for B2B sales. Salesforce gives you the opportunity to choose from different services and plans, according to your specific needs and business. It’s maybe the best CRM you can get at relatively low cost – and it gives you everything you need to manage sales, clients and campaigns.

7.       Dropbox

Dropbox is an easy to use service for sending big files to customers, colleagues, partners or journalists, without the need to maintain your own FTP. It’ll save you inbox storage and it’s really useful for sharing files, documents, videos, etc. with your team without actually sending those files. Plus the service is free of charge.

8.       Olark

If you have an e-shop, live online chat is a must use tool. Olark is a paid live chat platform, but really affordable for start-ups and with a great ROI. With it you can help your potential customers and answer their questions before they buy. Then you can redesign your online store and content, so that users get the answers to those questions. The live chat tool will, in general, help you to more easily convert people on your website into customers.

9.       CrazyEgg

Web heatmaps are used to show which areas of a website are most frequently scanned by visitors. This helps you to optimize your website content and design. CrazyEgg is perhaps the most popular heatmap tool and has a free plan, if you have less than 5,000 visits per month on your website. Otherwise you will have to pay for a subscription, but CrazyEgg is the least expensive paid heatmap tool. Learn more about heatmap tools.

10.   XENU

Having broken links on your website is highly unprofessional and has a negative impact on your search engine rankings. Using broken links software prevents users from leaving your page just because they landed on a 404 page and helps you get more new customers through search engines. XENU is a great and completely free tool for broken links, so it’s the most suitable one for startups. Read more about broken links software

For 10 more must use marketing tools for every start-up business, come back and read Essential Startup Marketing Tools (part 2).