What exactly is a start-up? Ah! Not talking about the literal meaning!
But every start-up founder knows that it is synonymous with tight finances and time constraints. Every penny and second counts.
And unless you use some digital marketing tools, you will struggle with finances and time for your important business activities.
However, the condition is that the tools you use must be free/low budget ones and easy to handle.
Luckily, you need not spend hours searching for such tools, but only minutes to read this post. Because’ we have done the job for you!
So, let’s take a look at the best digital marketing tools for startups!
Note: For the sake of convenience, we have divided the digital marketing tools based on their purpose!
1. Start-up Launch tools
- Product Hunt – It’s a brilliant platform for product-based start-up. You can showcase your new and amazing products, mobile apps, tech, and other creations. Free for sign-up, Product Hunt operates on a system of comments and votes from its users, who can share, discuss, and give feedback on your products.
- Cloudways - For pricing as low as $10/month, Cloudways offers website hosting, mentorship, and growth tools through its Start-Up Program.
- Beta List – It is a pre-launch system for start-ups where entrepreneurs can present their start-up idea to an exceptional community of business enthusiasts, and gather valuable feedback from them. This helps start-ups to better understand their customers and create the right product for the right audience. Check out its pricing here.
- Press Kite – Press Kite helps to create a press kit for your start-up which you can send to the journalist for press coverage whenever the need be. You can start with its Free plan or Premium plan for as low as $9/month.
- VenderUp - VenderUp helps you launch, grow, and manage your online store right from your phone. You don't need any programming or design experience to start your online store, but can quickly launch your own online store in minutes with VenderUp and sell anything from collectibles, handcrafts, tickets, clothes and jewelry. You can connect your PayPal to accept payments and offer other methods like Cash, Venmo, Cash App and Zelle.
2. Best Business and Marketing tools
- Google Alerts to keep yourself updated about your industry and your competitors. This is imperative to know the latest trends and adapt your business accordingly. Plus, it’s free to join.
- Social media sharing tools like Hootsuite and Buffer help you schedule your social media posts for a few days and save time for other activities. You can schedule up to 30 posts across any social media on its free plan, and also measure the ROI on your social media campaign.
- Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner are free tools to know what your customers want, what they are searching for, and then answer their questions with your content.
- Mailchimp for email marketing. The tool not only allows you to create influential newsletters and emails, but also forms and pop-ups for your website that serve as great lead generation tools. Further, you can segment your email list based on preferences, behaviour, location, etc. to target specific audience.
- Slack for instant messaging to your customers. This is crucial as emails might get lost in their inboxes. Slack allows you to send direct messages, photos, and documents while organizing your team’s conversations into private or public channels.
- Mangools for keyword research. Content of your start-up has to be SEO-optimized, and there’s no tool better than Mangools as it combines the power of 5 SEO tools – KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, LinkMiner, and SiteProfiler. Besides finding the right keywords, you can analyze the search results in any location, compare yourself with competitors, track your keyword positions, and boost them with powerful backlinks.
- Google Analytics is a free tool to track your website traffic and identify what’s working and what’s not. This continuous data evaluation helps you create better digital marketing campaigns for your business and increase the conversion rate.
- Hunter.io helps you in finding business emails connected to any particular domain within seconds. This helps you to connect with the relevant experts for your business.
- CallHippo is a great and powerful Voice-over-internet- Protocol service provider. In simple terms, business phone numbers to help you connect with relevant audience.
- 3dcart is a tool that helps you build your online store with ease, update stock amounts in real time, process payments, and display product information in an eye-catching manner. It offers a free trial for 15 days and the most popular plan comes with a price of $40/month.
- OptinMonster helps you monetize your website traffic by helping you create a compelling incentive to target the website visitors and convert them into your customers.
- Linkedojet for automating your LinkedIn marketing and outreach campaigns. LinkedIn is at the heart of B2B marketing, but you can’t afford to spend hours on searching and connecting with your target audience on it. Let Linkedojet take over with its automation and you focus on other important tasks of your business.
- Pribox is a tool that helps increase the deliverability and open rate of your e-mails by optimizing sender reputation, warm up your domain and avoiding your mail from being stuck in the receiver's spam.
3. Best Finance Management Tools
- Hubdoc - Hubdoc allows you to take pics of all your receipts with your smartphone and upload it on the app to convert it into a usable data. Thus, all your financial documents are secured at one place.
- Float - Float app helps you with cash flow management by offering a real-time financial dashboard. Thus, you can create a budget for your business and keep track of the cash going in and out.
- FounderSuite - It’s an amazing tool to raise funds for your start-up by bringing speed, structure and efficiency to fundraising and investor relationships. It offers a CRM tool for managing your investor funnel, a searchable venture capitalist database, and an Investor Updater tool that helps in creating monthly progress reports. Basic plan of FounderSuite is free.
- Gust - Yet another fundraising start-up, Gust helps entrepreneurs build investable startups with the assistance of mission-critical business tools, powerful performance benchmarks, and trusted fundraising recommendations.
- FreshBooks - FreshBooks is an all-in-one start-up invoicing and accounting software to ensure fast, convenient, and secure bookkeeping. It automates financial tasks such as organizing expenses, invoicing, tracking payments, and following up with the clientele. Pricing starts from $15/month.
4. Team management Tools
- TSheets - Irrespective of the number of employees in your company, it’s crucial to keep track of who is doing what at all times. TSheets app allows you to handle time tracking and scheduling from any device without wasting time on paper cards and complex spreadsheets.
- Trello - A user-friendly project management app, Trello allows you to create boards, lists, and cards to organize projects and collaborate with team members.
- MVP tools - These are for entrepreneurs involved in creating web and mobile apps. MVP tools help you understand the Minimum Value of your product, and experiment with your ideas in your preferred industry.
- Just in Mind - Just in Mind is an all-in-one prototyping solution for web and mobile apps. It allows to apply fully-interactive prototypes from scratch and bring them to life with a click. It also offers a complete range of web interactions and mobile gestures to help you build delightful user experience with your product. Pricing starts from $19/month.
- Balsamiq - It is a low-fidelity wireframing software accessible to entrepreneurs, managers, analysts, developers, agencies and anyone who’s into UX. It provides extensive docs, assists in improving the software with the latest releases and provides support through multiple channels. Check out the pricing here.
5. CRM tools
- HubSpot – A great pick for start-up owners, HubSpot centralizes your contact list and helps you by automatically logging customer interactions and extract data from the web about your potential customers. You can begin by using its free version and upgrade gradually.
- Intercom early stage – It offers you user-friendly products to acquire, onboard, and engage with your potential customers in a personalized manner. You can use Intercom to:
- Improve website conversions with targeted visitor messages and live chat
- Send behavior-based push and email messages to onboard new clients
- Track and segmentize prospects based on persona and the action they take on your website.
- Salesflare – It’s integrated with both Gmail and Office 365 to gather information from your Inbox, meetings, track email opens and clicks, and offers powerful email templates. Their pricing is simple and fair for start-ups offering lucrative discounts.
6. Design and Development tools
- Mockplus – It is a web-based collaborative designing tool with a free basic plan
- Logodesign – It’s an online logo maker tool to give a compelling visual identity to your start-up. With an array of unique logo templates from various industries which are customizable designing your company logo becomes easy and cost-effective. Check out the pricing here.
- Unsplash – A free digital marketing tool that offers high resolution images to design visually appealing promotions and campaigns for your brand.
- Canva – An online graphic designing tool which you can use to design your social media posts, social media head covers, ad campaigns, and others. And good news is that the basic plan is free to use.
- Visme – A powerful designing tool to create amazing presentations, infographics and other forms of visual content.
- Github – One of the best development software for start-ups where development engineers can collaborate and host/review their codes together.
- WordPress – A free, open-source content management system based on PHP and MySQL offers responsive designing, SEO, multiple page styles, and much more to build your websites.
- BuildFire – With BuildFire, you can develop apps for your start-up for both Android and iOS devices with ease and quickly. Several pricing plans are available to choose from.
- DragDropr – DragDropr helps you create your own website with requirement of very little technological background.
7. Customer Experience collecting tools
- Retently – After converting a customer, it’s important to know their satisfaction level with your product/service. Retently uses your Net Promoter Score to judge your performance, how likely your customers will become repeat customers or recommend your product to others, and suggests ways to earn more customer loyalty. The basic plan comes with a free trial.
- Say2b – The software allows to generate return customers by offering them gifts and discounts. And that’s a great way to reward people for coming back to your business, all for a low monthly price.
- WPforms – A tool perfect for WordPress users to develop forms by customizing the template with drag and drop of items in place. It also comes with great features like being able to track your leads, easily collect payments, spam protection, and being mobile-friendly. Best of all, it’s affordable!
Conclusion
That’s it! A list of the best digital marketing tools curated after thorough research and consideration. Each of these tools is beneficial to keep your business operations quick, convenient, and efficient. They can maximize your potential and increase your ROI.
Did we miss out on any digital marketing tool/resource? Feel free to mention it in the comments below!