Monday, March 6, 2017

Use These 8 Marketing Tools to Grow Your Startup 🚀


Oh, startup growth. It seems so many of us are looking for an ever-elusive formula for growing our user base cheaper, better, and faster. In the end, there’s no substitute for putting in the time each day to build your community and customer base meaningfully and sustainably. But, there are products that make the process easier (thank goodness). Here are eight that we love—created to help you scale your startup more quickly (and on a limited budget). We’ll take one of each, please!

1. Upcall

Create outbound call campaigns in less than 5 minutes.


Making outbound calls are perhaps one of the most time-consuming marketing/sales efforts you could possibly engage in. With Upcall, now it doesn’t have to be (woot!). All you have to do is choose the list of people you want to reach, and add any custom scripts/questions. Then, select from thousands of “Upcallers,” who are matched to suit the exact needs of your call campaign using factors like: language, geography, expertise, and more.

You can collaborate with and coach your callers directly, as well as analyze the results of your campaign in real-time. This is a highly scalable solution if outbound calls are part of your growth plan; you can call 100 or 1,000,000 people in just a few hours on a pay-per-use plan.


2. Automated Spreadsheets

Stop manually aggregating ad data. Automate any spreadsheet.


If you’re advertising on multiple platforms (Google AdWords, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, DoubleClick, etc.), and wish you had a cross-channel reporting tool, you’re in luck. RTB Media created a series of automated spreadsheets that will give you access to daily and weekly email insights, optimization advice, and smart alerts. Try out templates like: monthly campaign and platform breakdowns, financial reporting by platform, and campaign/client time interval comparison analysis.

This is a fantastic tool for building out attribution models, assessing which paid advertising platforms are working best for your company, and keeping track of your weekly progress in a more automated way. Definitely worth trying if paid ads are part of your marketing strategy.

3. Lead Flows

All-in-one conversion pop-ups for your website.


Lead Flows, created by the team at HubSpot, is an all-in-one conversion pop-up. You can easily turn visitors into leads with the pop-up widget, which is highly customizable. It essentially puts your CTA, form, and deliverable all in one little pop-up widget.

There are a number of cool things you can do with this tool, like target visitors with the right content at the right moment by designing pages and triggers that work best for your company and product. One of our favorite elements of this free tool? It makes it easier to measure and manage your leads. Once someone converts, you can track their page view and form submissions history, learn about their interests, and more. Such a useful tool for your marketing and sales efforts.

4. Hotjar

Learn how your visitors are really using your site



This tool is kind of exactly what every marketer is looking for. Hotjar is essentially a conversion rate optimization solution, helping businesses truly understand how web and mobile visitors are using a site. You can look at heatmaps (to see where visitors are clicking and scrolling), funnels (to understand the points at which people are leaving your site), forms (to gain insight on and optimize completion rates), and a lot more.

This is an invaluable tool for tracking and optimizing how your marketing efforts convert. There’s a free version, but you can also upgrade to “pro” or “business” if you want something more robust.

5. Boost

Buy and sell with a hashtag on Instagram/Twitter/SMS & more.



Well, this is certainly a clever new way to sell (and buy) products. Boost is a #hashtag activated buying and selling tool. If you’re a brand, all you have to do is set up a unique purchase hashtag through the site and use it on your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram posts to make it super easy for your fans and followers to buy your products. If you’re a buyer, all you have to do is set up your billing and shipping information once, and then just use the hashtag every time you want to make a purchase from a Boost retail user. You’ll get a text to confirm your purchase—easy as that!

This is an interesting solution for getting rid of the buying friction between brands and potential customers on social media platforms. Certainly worth testing if you’re looking to sell product(s) via social.

6. Bounce Bar

Add a welcome banner bar to your site in seconds.


Bounce Bar is a script that allows you to publish eye-catching banner bars on your site without any code. You can target these CTA bars to users based on what site they came from and whether they’re blocking your ads. You can also set up different bars for different web pages, which is really useful if you want to highly tailor your CTAs throughout your site. This is such a simple tool, but it has the potential to greatly impact your conversion rates—no matter what you want your visitors to do. Definitely worth giving this a try.

7. Effin Amazing UTM Builder

Add UTM tags to your links from a Chrome extension.


Well, shoot. This is a pretty awesome Chrome extension for all of the marketers out there. If you need to create a bunch of Google Analytics tracking links (i.e. UTM tracking codes), now you can do it without ever leaving your Chrome browser. Now, you can set up the name of your Campaign, Medium, Source, Term, and more to get your UTM codes up and running quickly. One of the best features is the ability to save templates so you don’t have to keep copy-pasting the same data over and over again.

A few of the features of this extension include: URL auto-populated in to form field, shortened UTMs with Bit.ly integration, and saved presets for your most-used terms. This is one of those tools that makes you wonder why no one built it ages ago—but we’re so glad it exists now.

8. Growth Tools

A curated collection of growth hacking tools.


If you’re looking for a more robust set of tools meant to help you grow your startup, Growth Tools is the curated resource list you should be eyeing. You can find everything from smart analytics products to content marketing optimization tools, the list goes on, and includes all the tools and techniques for the type of growth hacking you’re thinking.

Within particular sections you can filter down the options by subcategories, which saves a lot of time when starting at a list of similar things. For instance, if you’re looking for a CRO software product with A/B testing functionality, you can slice the list down. Even if you aren’t looking for more tools, browsing this site might give you some growth strategy ideas you hadn’t thought of before.

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