Establishing a startup can be very challenging, but it can often be tougher to take it up to the next level, given the severe resource crunch most entrepreneurs have to face. Fortunately, there a quite a few powerful but free to use digital marketing tools startup owners can use to consolidate and expand their businesses.
t is natural to think that since many marketing tools are free, there is no harm in trying them out. However, the problem is that most of these solutions ask for a lot of information from the user at the time of registration, which then becomes fodder for their aggressive sales campaigns that can make your life miserable with truckloads of spam and aggressive sales calls.
Some of the best tools entrepreneurs can use that are free of cost and deliver excellent results while protecting your privacy:
Smylelytics (for Monitoring Website Performance)
For online marketers, having a high-performance website can often be a vital difference between success and failure. Unfortunately, because there are so many metrics to be tracked for getting insights into the behaviour of the website and how visitors are interacting that it can be a nightmare for someone attempting to monitor it manually.
By using Smylelytics, business owners can generate a bi-monthly report of the traffic data of the website that can make the process of tracking vital metrics very easy.
A very user-friendly tool, it can also convert the numerical performance data captured from the site into personalized and entertaining photos that can easily inform you whether the website performance is steady, improving, or needs attention. Even though you need to have Google Analytics installed, you need not log into it anymore.
Smylelytics will translate the key performance indicators like visits, new visits, bounce rate, goal conversion rate, pages per session, and time spent on the site, like any other professional digital marketing agency.
HubSpot CRM (for Customer Relationship Management)
Managing your relationship with customers is one of the most effective ways of retaining customers and promoting conversions. Retaining customers is also far cheaper than acquiring new customers, according to https://www.inc.com.
However, keeping track of customer behaviour and catering to special interests is virtually impossible unless you automate the process with a CRM tool.
With HubSpot CRM you get a lot of useful marketing features for free. These include, customizable views, task and deal boards, drag and drop communicator, customer and prospect database, email connections, extensive capabilities for integration, templates besides scheduling and tracking.
The tool is very user-friendly with a simple interface that is easy to master.
The tool allows you to import and export contacts of prospects and existing customers into your custom databases, which can drastically cut down on the time and effort required of keeping your database updated.
Hootsuite (for Social Media Marketing)
In this digitally-connected world, it is no longer possible for a startup to ignore the benefits of communicating and engaging with customers on social media like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.
However, it can take a lot of time, effort, and coordination to research, write, and publish exclusive and top-quality content as well as engage followers on a one-on-one basis.
Hootsuite has the capability of integrating all the social media platforms, which helps you to manage all the activities on a single dashboard. The free version of Hootsuite has almost all the functions that a small business owner will require to manage his social media accounts.
These include publishing posts both immediately and as per a schedule set in advance, feed monitoring, liking, commenting and sharing posts from within the same dashboard, basic analytics, as well as integration with certain third-party apps for better management of social media.
Moz Local (for Management of Local Search Listings)
Local business is a significant source of revenue, especially for retailers or companies with a physical store with customers armed with smartphones seeking instant gratification.
However, in addition to getting listed in Google My Business, there are tons of other local directories from where traffic can be generated. Since managing these listings individually can be very tiresome, mainly because you have got to make sure that all the information is identical, leaving no room for confusion.
Using Moz Local, entrepreneurs can boost their competitiveness in the local markets.
The tool allows you to not only get data insights into how your business is represented across various online channels but also if there are duplicate or incorrect listings. Moz Local also provides marketers with competitive instrumental analytics, recommendations for SEO, keyword value and competitiveness, organic rank tracking, inbound and outbound link report as well as information on website crawls.
Conclusion
The tools you need to use will depend on your marketing priorities. You need to put into place a robust digital marketing strategy. Typically, you will do well to use a mix of these tools depending on the needs of your business and sector.
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