There has never been a more thrilling time to launch your startup.
America is currently in the throes of The Great Resignation, with millions of people already having quit their jobs and thousands of others planning to do so. There’s a lot of talent out there, and if you are willing to train, pay fair wages, and offer a great work environment, you can have your pick of the talent.
Plus, more people now than ever before are looking to start their own thing. With such colossal interest reinvigorated in being a startup founder, the market is experiencing a boom.
But this also means greater competition.
With companies large and small fighting for their share of the same pie, who’ll get the biggest or the tastiest slice? Or at least not go hungry?
Through this article, we are sharing a list of ten digital marketing tools that startup founders adore. These tools are intuitive, flexible, and great when you want to scale up. In addition, with these tools automating a lot of tasks for you, you are free to think of creative marketing strategies to overtake your competition and become your market’s go-to vendor.
Understanding Your Market: BuzzSumo
Get this: 42% of startups fail because they offer products or services that their target market doesn’t need.
What does that tell you? If you haven’t done your research, you might as well pack up and go.
BuzzSumo is the industry standard when it comes to research to understand your market. Fundamentally, it is a content marketing tool. But the way it performs that service, you begin to get an intimate understanding of the market you are serving. It gives you access to four key components of the market:
Discovery: you can see the content that your audience is loving and your competitor is producing
Research: you learn to identify data points that are relevant to your growth strategy
Influencers: it tells you who your market is listening to so you can create strategic relationships
Monitoring: keep track of your marketing campaigns and let the data guide you on your next strategy
When it comes to pricing, BuzzSumo has some great options for startups. There’s a 30-day free trial for every plan, and the pricing starts from $99/month, which is perfect for a small startup.
Branding Your Startup: LogoDesign
To make your mark on your audiences, you need to brand your startup. How it looks will represent what it stands for. A lazily-designed logo and poorly-chosen colors will tell your audiences what you think of your startup. And the impressions they’ll make will extend to your business, too, not just the design.
So, show off your most competent, professional, and highly-motivated side with an equally charming logo design.
Using this AI-powered online logo generator, LogoDesign, you can create a fabulously effective brand logo in no more than ten minutes. The tool offers a fertile template gallery to find the logo template you want for your brand. Then, using the helpful customization tools, you can make extensive changes in your template to make it into your personalized business logo.
This tool is effective because it is quick, budget-friendly, and offers enough flexibility that accommodate a growing startups’ many pivots.
Pricing starts at an attractive $3.97/month (billed annually).
Keyword Research: UberSuggest
Your digital marketing is only as good as your keywords. If you target all the wrong phrases on the internet, it doesn’t matter how great your logo looks or engaging your content. If you are a real estate company, for example, and all your primary keywords target the construction industry exclusively, you aren’t doing your job well.
UberSuggest is a great keyword finder tool that helps you connect with search phrases that your audience uses to find businesses like you.
Unlike more complicated programs, UberSuggest doesn’t require you to be a marketing pro to use this tool effectively. Instead, you can start at the beginning, and as your business grows, you use more of the tool’s features that align with your progress. It gives you access to keyword data, suggestions, content ideas, and the most comprehensive backlink data.
Pricing starts with $12/month, which is insanely attractive for a startup budget.
Email Marketing: Keap
Half of the world’s population uses email. That’s 4.3 billion users. So when you make email marketing an integral part of your overall digital marketing strategy, you make these 4.3 billion people your potential consumers.
Keap is a startup-focused email marketing software program that allows small businesses to have a fair chance in the fight. With features such as task automation, email templates, communication triggers, data syncing and organization, extensive integration, and agile monitoring, you get to create an email marketing campaign that’ll give the bigger guys on the block a run of their money.
Pricing starts at $56/month, with a free trial available for 14 days.
Social Media Marketing: MeetEdgar
You need robust marketing not only to get new clients in but to keep the existing lot happy. Social media marketing is how you do it. It keeps your brand alive to your audiences even during the days when they are not buying from you.
MeetEdgar is a tool of bottomless scheduling. Their founders proudly call themselves entrepreneurs-focused, so you know this tool is obsessed with startup success and understands what’s needed to get it there.
Unlike other scheduling software programs, MeetEdgar doesn’t force you to keep creating content libraries. If you forget to create a new calendar, for example, it’ll pull posts from your existing library and post on your behalf, keeping your social media alive and fresh. It also offers powerful features such as auto-generating variations of existing content, pulling post-worthy quotes from links and automatically generating social updates, and A/B testing your posts to show you what’s working and what’s not.
MeetEdgar offers a 7-day free trial, but if I were you, I’d immediately get to its pricing plans which start from $19/month to $49/month.
Chat Marketing: LiveChat
Do not let them coach you on your digital marketing strategy if anyone tells you that you don’t need a chatbot on your website.
Chatbots are the future. They’re quick and efficient, low-cost, and people love them.
LiveChat is an AI-powered chat tool that automates your customer services. For example, with a chatbot helping your sales goals, you can create conversations funnels and sales leads directly to conversions. In addition, LiveChat offers you features that support targeted messages, routing rules, chat transfers, file sharing, security and encrypting, and chat reports and analytics.
Combined, these features (and others) not only boost your customer services but also amplify your sales and marketing.
While the tool offers a free sign-up, no trial period is available, and the pricing starts at 16/month (billed annually). If you don’t want to commit, a $19 option is also available with month-to-month billing.
Influencer Relationship Management: NinjaOutreach
Influencer marketing is one of the most impactful ways to connect your product to consumer needs. However, it comes with that ‘vetted’ tag that most audiences are looking for. Unlike celebrity endorsements, a product endorsed and promoted by an influencer has more integrity attached to it.
But not all influencers are a good match for what you are selling. Finding the right influencer for your niche and your brand is a strategic exploration. It can take time, false starts, and a lot of money before you get it right.
Ninja Outreach is an influencer relationship tool that shoulders all this hard work and frees you to focus on more important matters. Access the most intimate influencer insights to find the master influencer that owns and incorporates the highest expression of your brand. Using geolocation keywords, the tool allows you to discover the nearest influencers to your target audience, hence more likely to influence their decisions.
No matter which country or which industry you are targeting, with over 25 million contacts of influencers on Ninja Outreach, the odds are in your favor. The tool comes with two pricing plans: yearly and monthly. The monthly subscription starts at $389, while the annual package costs $1860 ($155/month).
Marketing Project Management: Trello
While you need tools that handle the grit of daily marketing, you also need agile project management to supervise all those tasks. Trello can help you with that.
It is a prevalent project management tool that can help you stay on top of all your marketing campaigns at various stages of ideation and completion. It comes with boards, lists, and cards that you can customize and personalize according to your team’s needs. You can prioritize and organize tasks, so missed deadlines become a distant memory. It also allows you to set goals, timelines, and workflows to create a more efficient, cohesive, and collaborative work funnel.
Powered by AI, the tool supports no-code automation and organization and is available for free. However, if you want more features such as advanced checklists and custom fields, the subscription plans start from $6/month. Annual plans are also available for more committed users.
SEE ALSO: 13 Best Marketing Project Management Software Tools
Analytics: Google Analytics
To create a marketing campaign that delivers results, you need numbers. For example, how many people signed up in the last week? How many downloaded your eBook, and what triggered them to make that decision? How much money are people spending on your website? What new page visits did you get yesterday?
Google Analytics is a powerful and free web tracking tool that gets you answers to these questions and more. You can integrate it with any website and see how your users are engaging with your website in real-time. The data you get can be used to create a more streamlined funnel, a more focused marketing campaign, and a more optimized landing page. In addition, it can help you pinpoint your money-makers channels, show you patterns that indicate user behavior changes, and enable you to A/B test with more meaningful metrics.
So, are you ready to strengthen your tech stack?
Effective digital marketing is an all-hands-on-deck situation most of the time. Unfortunately, it also involves a considerable amount of repetitive administrative tasks that can take up a lot of time – you could be spending thinking about your next extensive campaign. This list of tools here is meant to help you automate, distribute, and organize most tasks in a way that frees you up for more creative endeavors. In addition, all these tools are startup-friendly and come with a price tag that’ll keep your finance team happy, too.
