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By Ryan Haynes, Director at Haynes MarComs.
Building a successful start-up is challenging. But the best digital marketing tools will give you an edge over your competitors and the best chance of success.
Marketing has to be at the heart of any business strategy. But for start-ups it is vital. After all, no one yet knows how indispensable you are. Start-ups simply cannot succeed without a successful digital marketing approach.
High failure rate
Starting a business is notoriously hard. Around two out of 10 start-ups fail in the first year and nine out of 10 eventually go out of business. But the best digital marketing tools could give you a flying start over less technically savvy competitors.
Start-ups often have limited budgets and investing time and money in digital marketing can feel like a luxury. But it doesn’t have to cost a fortune. Many of the best tools are free, or don’t cost huge sums. Here is our guide to the best digital marketing tools.
Users can create personalised websites using simple tools and templates. It’s easy to get to grips with for someone without marketing experience, for juniors or for freelancers. The drag and drop website builder does not require any web design skills or experience, plus they have lots of marketing, SEO, lead generation, email automation and website analytics tools. Wix provides a helpful guide for each feature, plus with so many small businesses using it, it’s easy to find help on Google.
A fantastic design tool that does not require a high level of technical expertise. With so many high-quality free templates and image features, very little can go wrong. Canva really helps make social media posts, banners and newsletters look more professional without incurring high costs.
Depending on the client we use either. They are both great tools for creating self-build newsletters and working with their templates. The analytics provides great insights into the performance of email campaigns, plus there’s no need to pay until you’ve surpassed your contact threshold.
A social media post schedule tool which works 7 even social media platforms including TikTok and Pinterest. The free version allows you to use it by connecting 3 social media channels and it can be integrated with link shortener platforms like Bitly. It saves time, and for a startup, only 3 channels are needed.
One of the most important tools for measuring website traffic and user behaviours. It has various tracking metrics such as the number of visitors, the time they spend on the website, and how they interact with the pages.
A very useful tool to track the SEO performance. It provides the number of impressions, CTR, position, and all the keywords and demographics of the company’s website that are listed on Google searches. It really helps to improve the general SEO of the website.
It is very important to measure the performance of digital campaigns. With Bitly, you can create campaign URLs and shorten those links to make an accurate measurement on website analytics platforms such as Google Analytics. It also shows the real number of link clicks as some of the social media platforms like Facebook can’t show the accurate number of clicks due to privacy settings on some devices.
A useful tool to track people’s behaviour on the website. It records all the users’ mouse movements such as scrolls, hovers and clicks. It shows the highest and lowest interactions in a heatmap of the web page.
Since Google changed their algorithms in their search engine, it is important to check the page downloading speed. The fastest downloaded pages are ranked on the first pages. PageSpeedInsights runs a full diagnostic of the website and shows the diagnostic report. It makes recommendations to improve Google Search Engine rank.
This tool is great for distributing podcasts. It connects to all major channels, provides embedded media items and keeps track of the performance of your channels, audience and individual episodes.
More automation
Marketing plans a big role in the success or failure of any business. Smart owners will get on top of the digital tools as fast as possible. These tools will help save time and money, introduce more automation and scale your marketing.
Proceed with confidence
Any combination of the tools above can serve as a foundation for an effective digital marketing strategy. But it’s a good idea to play around until you decide on the best ones for your business and budget. Once you’re sorted your tools, you can proceed with confidence knowing your marketing has the best chance of success.
Speak to us to find out how we can help you move to the next stage of your business evolution, whether you’re a start-up, a medium-sized enterprise or VC-funded going for growth.
