Save yourself! Use marketing tools to make your marketing easier, better, and smarter.

By Robin Anderson

Working in a startup means you are spending the bulk of your time trying to solve a problem. Your time and effort is focused on building technology solutions to make the lives of others better. Isn’t it ironic then that when you look at your calendar and the long list of what needs to be done throughout the week you realize that YOU have a problem? A problem that is overwhelming. As a marketer in a startup, you have a ton of communications that need to be written, shared and monitored. How do you solve YOUR problem?

There are technology tools that have been created to help solve this exact problem with the goal of making your marketing more efficient, effective, and intelligent. Tools that allow you to easily scale while minimizing repetitive tasks - giving you some time back to focus on more important, strategic issues.

As a startup, it’s important to be accessible and to share and communicate with your customers frequently. It’s really hard to do without enlisting the support of technology. Many tools are free or available at a nominal cost. They are worth it when you are trying to reach and connect with a number of prospects. Take advantage of the plethora of marketing tools available to help you track, automate and simplify your job. There are tools for every element of marketing that you can imagine. From advertising, social media, SEO, video marketing, lead generation, CRM, email, collaboration and more.

For simplicity purposes, I’m going to focus on a few fundamental tools to get started. These include tools for project management, content delivery platforms (social media & email), and tools to track the results of your communications, campaigns and website traffic. They are all worth taking a look and freeing up some of your time to take care of other business.

Project Management

Project management tools are designed to help you and your team manage your product development process or marketing campaign creation and execution, enabling everyone to collaborate, stay on track, with the goal of meeting deadlines.

The benefits of using a project management system:

1. Allocate resources to maintain budget

2. Define tasks, responsibilities, and prioritize

3. All communications are accessible by all

4. Keep a project on track to meet deadlines

5. Collaborate easily as all the information is in one place

6. Solve problems or issues as they arise

7. Keep everything organized

There are a number of project management tools available. It’s important to determine which features are most important to you when selecting a tool such as ease of use. Here are a few examples of project management tools designed for teams:

• Trello: A visual productivity and task management tool. Trello utilizes tickets that consist of one task per ticket in a column to track the progress from beginning through completion. It’s a great tool for teams to help keep everyone on the same page.

• Monday: An agile project management solution to visually manage a variety of projects utilizing a column format with color-coding for ease of progress tracking, and customizable for each project. It is interactive for teams as you can see individuals assigned to a task and where they are in the timeline easily.

• Asana: A cloud-based project management tool where project managers can assign tasks, subtasts, milestones. It lists the information in a row format, enabling multiple work views to collaborate or track milestones.

With more and more people working at home, using a project management tool can improve communications, speed development and minimize complications due to lack of clarification within the communications or development process.

Content Delivery

Content delivery tools help you to share your content without having to be present at the time of delivery. The purpose of utilizing marketing tools is to automate the process which allows you to maximize your effort with minimal cost, to increase engagement with your prospects, test the effectiveness of your communications, and to extend your reach easily.

In 2021, an average of 51% of companies are currently using Marketing automation and 58% of B2B companies are planning to adopt this type of technology. Moreover, Research and Markets anticipated that the global Marketing Automation will reach USD 8.42 billion by 2027.

The benefits of using content delivery tools:

1. Track & report

2. Cost-effective

3. Target and personalize

4. Manage time

5. Optimize social media efforts

6. Organize with use of a calendar

A few examples of content delivery tools include:

• Buffer: Ability to schedule your social media posts into multiple social media accounts, while gaining an analytical view as to how they are performing

• Mailchimp: A marketing tool, designed to help you reach your customers and engage with automated emails and newsletters. Use their analytics to gage performance. You can also create campaign landing pages, and some social ads.

• HubSpot: An integrated marketing and software tool from CRM to market automation. From hosting your website, to keeping track of each interaction with your customers, to delivering content and analyzing the results. If your startup is on the path of scaling quickly, an all-in-one market automation tool may be your best investment.

Analytics

Using analytical tools for marketing gives you insights into your customers, their preferences, and their journey. It enables you to make data-driven decisions as to the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. You can test, track and analyze the results of a specific campaign or your overall marketing efforts.

A recent Salesforce survey of 6,700 people found that 76 percent of consumers expect marketers to anticipate their needs. 

Marketing analytics will help you understand your customers’ experiences and their behavior to better help to meet their needs.

The benefits of using content analytic tools:

1. Campaign optimization

2. Personalization

3. Understand each stage of your customer journey

4. Measure your traffic across your social media channels and compare this to your competitors

5. Learn how effective your marketing is to connecting your audience with your website, such as:

Best traffic source (where did they come from)

Page Views (which pages do they look at)

Time (how long did they spend on your site)

Conversion Rate (capturing information via a form, or making a purchase from your website)

A few examples of analytic tools include:

• Buzzsumo: a social media research tool that enables users to find the most shared content or topic on any website - see the type of content that works best for each social network, along with the most popular influencers on a social network

• HubSpot: all-in-one marketing and sales tool that offers social and email market automation, customer journey workflows, landing pages, bots, CRM, in addition to an easy to use dashboard

• Google Analytics: Free online tool to monitor your traffic, where they come from, what webpages they spend the most time on, bounce rate, and conversions.

As mentioned earlier, there are many tools available. It depends on what you need the most. Think strategically. There are tools for SEO, video, chat, and many more. Take advantage of those that will help you to optimize your marketing.

No one set of tools works best for all startups. It’s important that you incorporate tools that work best for your company, with the way your company works. The right tools for you will be the ones that help you and everyone get the work they need to get done, freeing them of mundane tasks, enabling everyone to manage their work and minimize burnout.

Need help with your marketing or product development efforts? Contact us today for a free 30 minute consultation.

FunFact Friday

When it comes to companies using data analytics for advertising, Netflix is one that has been utilizing the data since the beginning. As a subscriber, you have likely experienced the feature of movie suggestions based on your viewing habits. They use your viewing history to determine what additional movies or programs may be of interest to you, then offer recommendations to keep you watching on their platform.