Many business owners, especially those from the startup industry would need digital marketing tools for startups. When marketing a business, you have to have the best digital marketing tools for startups, because it is a platform for idea exchange and brand creation. With digital marketing tools for startups, you can make a mark in an industry quickly and efficiently, enhancing your online presence.
Startups have very limited resources, but they are often eager to implement an idea as soon as possible. They may not have worked on marketing projects before, yet they know the importance of marketing. The challenge of the startup is how to run an effective marketing campaign with limited financial resource. Here are some of the best marketing tools for startups. These tools are free, quick and easy to use for startups. It reduces marketing costs of startups significantly.
bootstrapped or not, marketing is essential. Without it, no one will know your product exists, no matter how good it is. For this reason, startups should leverage everything at their disposal and get the word out about what they have to offer. Here are our top 7 digital marketing tools to help you with your DIY marketing.
1. Google Analytics
Data is crucial in your marketing strategy. While many data analytics tools come with a hefty price tag, Google Analytics comes free, making it our first pick. Powerful enough to give you insights into where traffic on your website comes from, what they do there, and much more, Google Analytics is one tool every startup should have in their toolbox.
Source: Google
So why is data important in marketing? Data helps you understand your target audience better, which gives insight into what types of marketing campaigns will perform best. These days, people consume content on a variety of devices, so you’ll need to know which devices are most used by your target audience. Then, you can put more emphasis on those platforms.
Seasoned marketers will tell you that data has the power to greatly increase the return on investment (ROI) on your marketing. A good example of this: Mumzworld saw a 300 percent ROI on their ad spend thanks to insights from Google Analytics. Need we say more?
2. Hotjar
A leaking sales funnel can be frustrating. After all, it takes time, effort, and money to build one so it has to convert, right?
Plug those leaks with Hotjar. Like Google analytics, it’s a web analytics tool. But Hotjar goes further–it gives you data on activities visitors take on your website, like clicks and scrolls. You get insights into how users are interacting and, most importantly, where they drop off.
Source: Hotjar
While Hotjar is a paid tool, it’s affordable–pricing starts at $89/month for websites with up to 20,000 visitors a day. Not ready to commit? You can sign up for a 15-day trial. But if you’ve got a bit of money to spare, Hotjar is one of the best marketing channels to invest in.
3. Emma
Email boasts of ROIs of up to 4400%. Effective as this marketing platform is, it’s also affordable, particularly if you opt for a platform like Emma.
Source: Emma
Emma is a powerful email marketing tool that allows you to easily build an email list, connect to your audience on a personal level, and execute effective campaigns. With its ease of use and powerful features (like advanced segmentation and analytics tools), you can be up and running in no time. Emma’s high deliverability rates also ensure that the chances of your emails landing in the right inbox are close to 100%. Other features include:
- Emma HQ: Emma HQ allows for approval and monitoring of email campaigns across multiple locations.
- An analytics dashboard: Get insight into how people interact with your emails.
- A/B testing: Send the best email by split testing different elements of your emails and amalgamating the ones that perform best.
- Landing page builder: Build landing pages as easily as you would compose an email with Emma’s drag-and-drop landing page builder.
If there’s one thing you need to help you push your startup off the ground, it’s a targeted audience that you can pitch your product to. Email is the best platform to help you do that as it gives you direct access to your ideal customers. That’s why Emma ranks high on this list of the best marketing tools for startups.
4. KWFinder
Content marketing is another necessary (and cost-effective) marketing strategy. Content marketing simply means producing content to help people find you and your product online. To achieve your desired results, you need to conduct keyword research. This helps you learn what your ideal customers type into search bars when looking for the solution you provide.
This is where KWFinder comes in.
Source: KWFinder
KWFinder not only gives you keywords you should aim to rank for, but it also gives you insights into where your competitors rank with those terms.
Armed with that knowledge, you can create an effective content calendar and write high-ranking content that drives traffic to your website and boosts your bottom line.
5. Hello Bar
Hello Bar is a simple WordPress plugin that does one thing really well—website pop-ups that drive conversions. Whether triggered by exit intent or page and content interaction, Hello Bar can be setup to ensure you engage site visitors effectively and drive lead captures on your site.
Pricing
Plans start at $4.95 per 100 click throughs.
Alternatives
6. Snip.ly
Add a call to action on every link you share. Even if you are sharing a non-branded website, Snip.ly lets you display a branded call to action on non-brand websites, meaning you can engage customers and prospects with every piece of content you share with them.
Pricing
Plans start at $29 per month.
Analytics Startup Tools
7. Segment
Segment lets you collect data points from every platform, aggregate into Segment, and then send that data to hundreds of tools for marketing, analytics, and data warehousing.
With over 200 source and destination integrations, Segment makes it possible for your business to coordinate and draw insights across multiple business units and teams.
Pricing
Free, up to 1,000 Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs); paid plans start at $120 per month for 10,000 MTUs.
Alternatives
Urban Airship, Keen, Snowplow, Mapp
8. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a granular data collection tool that allows you to analyze each customer interaction across the entire user journey.
By capturing each user interaction, you can start to build touchpoints and customer journeys based on actual customer interaction history, leading to more personalized customer experience and increased conversion rates.
Pricing
Free, up to 5 million data points per month with limited features; paid plans start at $99 per month for 10 million data points per month with full features.
Alternatives
9. Bitly
Bitly lets you create short links that track every click, tap or swipe as they make their way across the internet. Branded links allow you to make sure campaign links have brand consistency, and you can integrate Bitly with most social media and campaign management tools to ensure all of your messaging is effectively tracked.
Pricing
Free; enterprise plans also available.
Alternatives
Shareaholic, Firebase Dynamic Links, Ow.ly
10. SharedCount
A simple application that lets you see where your site’s URLs have been shared online, SharedCount calculates the number of shares for a given URL across Facebook, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon.
Pricing
Free, up to 10,000 daily queries; paid plans start at $40 per month.
Marketing Automation Tools for Startups
11. Autopilot
Autopilot captures new leads from your website, app, or blog and then nurtures them with personalized messages. You can also use it to automate repetitive sales funnel tasks, such as lead assignation, appointment setting, and customer onboarding programs.
Pricing
Free 30-day trial; plans start at $1 per month for up to 500 contacts, with purchasable upgrades for premium support.
Alternatives
12. Zapier
Zapier is an automation tool that allows you to move data between your web applications, meaning lead generation flows and alert notifications can be seamlessly automated between your marketing tools.
Send form data to Mailchimp or HubSpot, and while on the way in, use Zapier to trigger automated email alerts with Sendgrid, validate visitor data using Full Contact or Clearbit, and trigger an alert to your sales team in Slack — all using Zapier. You can even connect Leadfeeder to Zapier.
Pricing
Free; paid plans start at $20 per month for more complex automation paths.
Alternatives
Conference Calls for Startups
13. UberConference
UberConference by Dialpad is the simplest way to set up dial-in conferencing for your sales calls. No pins; no software downloads; just send your prospects or clients to your reserved UberConference URL or dial-in number. They have everything you need to run non-disruptive, effective sales calls.
Pricing
Free; business plans start at $15 per user per month.
Alternatives
Content Marketing Tools for Startups
14. Medium
Medium is one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world, and is an effective tool for generating valuable inbound content and growing a community.
While Medium does not have the customizable design abilities of WordPress, it has a slick CMS user interface and has a strong built-in community, meaning any content you create on Medium can tap into pre-existing networks and communities.
Most importantly, you can have your own hosted blog, but also import that content into Medium: They use the rel=canonical tag, which passes the authority of the content to your hosted blog.
Pricing
Free; membership fees are for readers, not writers.
Alternatives
CRMs for Startups
15. HubSpot
For a free CRM tool, HubSpot provides a lot of value for startups and SMEs looking to effectively manage their sales pipeline. HubSpot also integrates with most lead generation and email marketing platforms, so your lead generation efforts can be amplified through serious automation and easy actioning.
HubSpot’s free CRM platform is also the foundation for their Marketing, Sales, and Service hub product sets, providing an end-to-end platform for lead generation, sales funnel management, and retention.
Pricing
Free for HubSpot CRM; paid plans for their product suite start at $50 per month per product.
Alternatives
Pipedrive, Salesforce CRM, Zoho CRM, Leadfeeder (we’ve written before about how you can combine Leadfeeder with other products as an alternative to Hubspot).
Design Tools for Startups
16. PlaceIt
Placeit is a design template website that uploads new designs and mockups every day making them the largest design templates online. With this tool, you can easily create branded images or videos in minutes for any industry. It is perfect for business owners, marketing teams, and startups. Plus they have free tools like their video cropper, image cropper, and video to gif converter.
Pricing
Free; paid plans start at $14.95 per month per user.
17. Canva
Canva provides a simple online interface to generate images to accompany marketing campaigns. Whether you’re creating images for social media, printed brochures, websites, product mockups, business cards, or online display ads, Canva is a tool anyone can use for marketing images.
Pricing
Free; paid plans start at $12.95 per month per user.
Alternatives
Email Marketing Tools for Startups
18. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing and automation platform that allows you to effectively grow and manage your newsletter and product subscribers.
Pricing
Free, up to 2,000 contacts with limited advanced features; plans start at $10 per month up to 500 contacts for advanced features.
Alternatives
Campaign Monitor, Drip, Active Campaign, Sendgrid
19. Litmus
Litmus is a third-party email testing and analytics platform. Litmus helps validate the delivery of your email campaigns, ensuring your design and formatting choices are consistent across multiple browsers and platforms, while making sure there is little chance of campaign emails ending up in the spam folder.
Pricing
Free 7-day trial; paid plans start at $99 per month.
Alternatives
20. Verify Email
Verify Email is a simple service that verifies your email marketing lists. It connects to the email server and checks if the email exists or not, which is useful if you are re-engaging old leads or contacts.
Pricing
Plans start at $14 per 50,000 email addresses tested.
Alternatives
21. Bananatag
Bananatag is a third-party email tracking platform for sales teams. It allows you to easily track all of your sales email campaigns to learn more about which leads are interacting with your campaign emails, which links they are clicking, and which leads are worth following up with. This includes Gmail and Outlook integrations, so it’s suitable for most sales teams and businesses.
Pricing
Plans start at $12.50 per month.
Alternatives
22. Good Email Copy
A simple tool from the team at Front, Good Email Copy does exactly what it says on the label — provides a repository for time-tested, effective email copy for campaign inspiration.
You can view email copy used for acquisition and onboarding campaigns from some of the most successful SaaS businesses in the world, so you know the examples have been instrumental in creating customer value and business success.
Pricing
Free.
Landing Page Optimization Startup Tools
23. Unbounce
Unbounce is an easy way to build high-conversion landing pages for campaigns and events. Using a simple drag and drop editor, you can easily build landing pages optimized for data capture and lead generation. You can also run AB tests to test out landing page copy and layout to ensure your pages are always optimized for lead capture.
Pricing
Free 30-day trial; paid plans start at $99 per month.
Alternatives
24. Google Optimize
Optimize is a part of the Google Marketing Platform and is a comprehensive website testing tool that allows you to run tests on your website copy, layout, and call-to-actions so you can make sure your site runs at its best for each and every visitor.
Optimize natively integrates with Google Analytics, so you can immediately start to draw insights about your website and run A/B, multivariate, and redirect tests to learn what works best for your site visitors.
Pricing
Free for Optimize; Optimize 360 pricing is custom.
Alternatives
Live Chat Startup Tools
25. Olark
Olark is one of the most popular live chat applications for businesses. If offers a no-fuss approach to live chat software, and has improved its design and offering over the past couple of years.
Olark also offers an extensive integration portfolio to ensure chat leads captured on your site are sent to the right tools in your marketing stack.
Pricing
Free 2-week trial, paid plans start at $17 per month.
Alternatives
26. Intercom
Intercom is a multi-product toolset that is all about lead generation and customer satisfaction. Its products span multiple categories, including Messages (for targeting in-app messaging and email campaigns), Inbox (for teams to manage chat, email and social), and Articles (for knowledge base and Wiki publishing). All of these products are built on their core Intercom CRM platform.
Pricing
Intercom CRM is free, pricing for all apps starts at $136 per month.
Alternatives
Search Engine Optimization Tools for Startups
27. Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool lets you find complementary keywords using Google’s autocomplete engine. Use as an alternative to Google keyword research — capable of building 750+ long-tail keyword combinations with the free version.
Pricing
Free; pro plans start at $88 per month for advanced features and granular data.
Alternatives
28. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a comprehensive backlink checker. While SEO and link-building strategies have changed significantly, it’s still a very important component of organic growth.
It’s crucial to understand where your audience is online, and knowing who links to the most heavily-trafficked sites in your industry is a means for building your own quality links.
Ahrefs uses crawling software to recreate how a search engine sees websites, allowing you to to see networks of incoming links and how you can tap into that traffic through better link management.
Pricing
7-day trial for $7; paid plans start at $99 per month.
29. SEMRUSH
An “all-in-one digital marketing tool”, SEMRUSH is a comprehensive workflow tool for SEO. The platform allows you to audit your SEO performance, track position for keywords, generate ideas for gaining traffic, as well as monitor competitors. SEMRUSH also offers analytics for paid online campaigns and social media, however their strongest offering is the organic analytics component.
Pricing
Plans start at $100 per month.
Alternatives
For Lead Generation
- Rapportive: Gmail plug-in that displays contact information via LinkedIn. Can also help to verify emails.
- Conspire: Networking tool that helps to find mutual friends with people you want to meet.
- Verify-Email: Insert and verify any email.
- PluckHQ: Track keywords on twitter & gather contact information for leads list.
- Clearbit.com: Enter basic information on a lead and get an entire user profile.
- Mode Analytics: A SQL editor, Python notebook, and visualization builder, all rolled into one.
- Grabby.io: Pulls email addresses from websites.
- ScrapeBox: Link building tool and blog commenting
- Audiense: Helps you identify influencers on social platforms
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator: A tool to investigate leads and find anyone on LinkedIn.
- Fakers.statuspeople.com: Audit Twitter followers to make sure partnerships are what they are.
- Charlie App: Automatically receive a one page email detailing all recent information about your contact before a meeting.
For Strategy
- KeywordTool.io: Helps you generate keywords based on actual search data.
- Survey.io: Survey your customers for free.
- WayBackMachine: See the old designs of any website.
- UseFomo: Adds a social effect to your website to create Fomo for your audience.
- Ahrefs: Understand traffic, back-links and keywords all in one place of any domain.
- SEMRush: See the keywords competitors are ranking for and what words they are bidding on.
- BuiltWith: Learn who uses what tools and where.
Conclusion
A startup business can be risky, but that’s also what makes digital marketing, paid advertising, and SEO options appealing. Digital startups are easy to launch, especially when they do not need to make expensive investments in large machinery, research facilities, or other operational assets.