Published on December 3rd, 2016 | by Guest

Stand Out from the Startup Crowd with These 5 Marketing Tools

There are millions of startups trying to get ahead each year. The success depends on managing to stand out from the crowd. Sometimes creating a good product or offering an exceptional service won’t be enough. One of the most important factors that determines whether your company will sink or swim is marketing. With these great marketing tools, you don’t have to be an expert to create campaigns that will make your startup truly stand out.

Image source: Deposit Photos

A Good Internet Connection

We rarely think about our internet connection as a marketing tool. However, it is absolutely essential. Without a great internet plan like Charter Spectrum or the alike, you can’t start using the tools below to their full capacity.

You’ll be surprised to know that when it comes to content marketing, many companies complain the lack of bandwidth is one the major challenges they face. Startups are even more likely to dismiss the importance of a proper internet plan. In the beginning, you may not feel like you need a strong internet connection that much. You will need it eventually, and it’s much harder to upgrade later. So it’s better just to be prepared and lay the foundation of your marketing strategy from the very start.

Content Creation and Optimization Tools

The basic building block of any marketing campaign is the content. It requires creativity, insights and the ability to empathize with your audience to deliver what they want to see. It’s a lot of work, and it requires quite a bit of experience. Or does it? With recent creation and optimization tools, generating powerful and engaging content has never been easier.

Part of what made good marketers stand out was the ability to guess what their audience wanted to hear and how to deliver it. With these tools, you no longer have to guess. For example, you can assess the emotional impact of your headline using the Emotional Marketing Headline Analyzer tool available online for free.

When it comes to the body of your content, you can use a tool such as Moz that gives insights into what readers’ interests are and how you can reach out to them. SumoMe is going to help you develop and maintain your relationship with your clients. Of course, your own creativity and ingenuity are still your most important assets.

Developing a good SEO and content optimization strategy is key. These tools are going to make your life much easier. If you ever find yourself lacking inspiration, you can use the Content Idea Generator to help you get started.

Tracking Results and Analyzing Data

Sometimes the results of a good marketing strategy are not immediately apparent. Marketing does not equal instant sales. The benefits are difficult to quantify. However, it’s not impossible, especially if you have the right tools at your disposal.

The first thing you need is something that can help you collect data. Most companies use Google Analytics. It’s quite good, but if you want to get a competitive edge, you need to complement this rather basic analytics tool with something a bit more complex. Maptive, for example, allows you to analyze and structure data according to the location of the customer. It creates a custom Google map with all of the information you need neatly displayed on the map. The Fanplayr tool allows you not only to collect data but also helps you make sense of it and segment your audience according to the results.

Marketing Automation Solutions

For a marketing campaign to be effective, it has to reach a broad audience. This audience is not all in one place. There are many channels you can use to get in touch with your potential customers from social media to email to targeted ads.

With so many variables to account for you can easily find yourself lost and unable to keep everything in check. Or your marketing campaign doesn’t reach its goal, and you’ve missed out on an opportunity to spread the word about your brand. This is one of the reasons why you should consider embracing cloud technologies.

You don’t have to worry about doing everything yourself if you invest in a smart marketing automation solution. Buffer can help you keep track of all your social media accounts. You can post instantly on all your profiles with a single action. It can also help you schedule posts, and it’s basically like your own social media marketing assistant.

Collaboration Tools

Startups tend to be quite small in the beginning. A collaboration tool might seem unnecessary when there’s only a handful of people working. Collaboration tools may seem even less important as marketing tools.

Marketers need these tools more than anyone because they need to be able to communicate with a lot of different departments and people. They need to understand what a product is all about in order to translate that to the customers. Then they have to speak with the salespeople to assess results and adjust their strategies. A simple tool such as Trello or Slack can simplify the collaboration between marketing and the other departments in your company. It can also keep your marketing experts organized and efficient. As your startup grows, having a solid collaboration framework already in place is going to be immensely useful.

These tools are not going to guarantee your success, but they can greatly improve your chances to stand out from the crowd and establish your company as one of the leading brands in your field. What you do with that opportunity is solely up to you.

Author bio:

Michelle Baker (@michelle_m_bake) is a private business growth advisor and proud modern mother of two. She’s very much aware that a business cannot thrive without a brilliant marketing strategy so she’s doing her best to facilitate the process for each and every one invested in the SMB environment.

Tags: crowd, marketing, stand out, startup, tools