In today’s world, when every business is dependent on good marketing skills, it is necessary to be mindful of what tools to use. In this blog post, we will discuss the testimonials of entrepreneurs about the marketing tools they use and how they can benefit your business. If you’re struggling with finding the right tools to market your product, then read on!
The Must-Have Marketing Tools for Entrepreneurs
Marketing tools cannot be one size fits all. You may recognize some marketing tools listed here, but others could be new to you because we gathered the top recommendations from entrepreneurs who experimented with many marketing tools before finding one or two that worked for them.
Hubspot CMS Tool
According to Gregory Yong, Chief Experience Officer of Convincely, the best marketing tool he uses is HubSpot CMS Hub. Let’s see why it’s valuable for his software company, Convincley.
HubSpot’s CMS Hub helps you host all of your content on a single integrated platform, and makes it easy to create a personalized website experience for every one of your visitors. It expands on this digital experience with adaptive testing, which is a way to determine how small changes to your page can affect its performance over time. You can select up to five-page variations at once, which means that you can be sure about what your audience responds best to and what they’d like to see.
The best part about this feature through the lens of marketing is that it removes the need for guesswork. All your crucial campaign decisions will be completely data-driven to drive the most amount of conversions. HubSpot’s CMS is designed to make website building simple, so you can truly focus your efforts on marketing that moves people. The service is just $25 a month, which is a small price to pay for a deep, data-driven understanding of your target market and a seamless on-site experience to boot.
Review Tracker Tool
According to Chris Campbell, CEO of Review Tracker, their software empowers businesses to understand their customers better, build more trust, and find the insights that move their business forward.
Asking for reviews from customers is one of today’s most powerful customer acquisition and retention strategies. That’s because online reviews can do wonders for your company.
They help build your online reputation, bring a lot of brand credibility, and provide the kind of social proof needed to influence consumer behavior.
Having more reviews is much better than having fewer reviews — unless, of course, the majority of your reviews are negative. Having a few reviews is better than not having any at all. According to the Online Reviews Survey, 4 in 5 Americans read reviews before making a purchase decision. Reviews are also one of the biggest factors influencing a company’s local SEO performance.
From this perspective, it makes business sense to learn how to ask for reviews from customers and ensure a steady stream of more and better reviews. After all, when you’re already delivering experiences that customers love, they won’t hesitate to vouch for you. All you have to do is ask. Often, this is the best way to get more reviews.
This online review management tactic holds whether your starting point is zero or a hundred reviews. Asking for reviews from your customers — as long as you’re not doing it in an overly aggressive way or in exchange for a reward (quid pro quo) — is a strategy that can benefit businesses of all types and sizes.
Ahrefs Marketing Tool
According to Eden Cheng, co-founder of PeopleFinderFree and a SaaS business owner, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical part of SaaS digital marketing, and it is essentially the aspect of creating content in a manner that allows online search engines like Google to rank your website highly on its search results. And since Google’s algorithms are being updated constantly, the use of SEO marketing tools is important in helping one to stay on top of these changes and ensure that we can keep on generating organic traffic to our SaaS platform. This is the tool that I use for marketing
Ahrefs is essentially a comprehensive SEO tool that allows us to effectively punch up our website traffic. It helps us to come up with the most relevant keywords and marketing strategies that we need to continuously rank higher. And it also provides us with a good amount of competitive analysis, which means that we can accurately assess exactly how well or how poorly our online marketing campaigns are performing, in comparison to our direct competitors, which ultimately allows us to quickly identify key weaknesses in our content areas as well. Furthermore, the tool also allows us to track our website’s DA metrics, which helps us make sure that we are consistently improving our website’s level of authority in Google’s eyes.
And conveniently enough, Ahrefs features a Website Authority Checker that happens to provide us with the opportunity to easily gauge the impact of our link-building strategies and measure how our website’s level of credibility is steadily improving over time, all for the sake of improving our brand’s awareness and presence online.
According to Gerald Lombardo, Co-Founder of The Word Counter, SEO is no doubt vital for the long-term success of the company. Indeed, whereas digital ads allow you to rent space online and attract the highest bidders, SEO is owned space that accrues and expounds over time. The Word Counter is a dynamic online tool used for counting words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, and pages in real-time, along with spelling and grammar checking. We can build our site from 0 to 600,000 visitors a month. This is what Gerald would like to share:
SEO is owned space that accrues and expounds over time. In other words, SEO is the gift that keeps giving. Thus, a company needs to make sure its SEO campaign is well implemented and managed over time if they want to remain competitive in the long run. However, this can be a daunting task given how many moving parts must be considered. I highly recommend using Ahrefs for SEO.
Luckily, there are some basic guidelines that you should stick to get started on your SEO campaign. They include:
- Consistency in your content. One of the biggest mistakes I see online is how many websites are all over the place when it comes to the tone of their writing.
- Perhaps one day they are super dry and formal, while other days they are informal, personal, etc. Yet if you want people to come back to your site, read through your blog posts, or take them seriously — then you need to have a consistent tone across the board. The point is, choose an appropriate writing style that fits with what you’re trying to achieve & stick with it – otherwise, readers will be confused.
- Keywords in your URL title tags: This goes along with consistency (above) but should be noted separately because it’s another crucial element.
- In brief, when you add a new blog post or page to your site, the URL title tag allows you to write a few words that both describe what your article is about and help it rank. This should be done cleverly while still being descriptive enough for people to understand what they’re going to get into upon clicking on your link — all the while throwing in some keywords too.
- Optimized metadata: The content of your website is extremely important but so are the non-text elements such as images, video, etc… in other words, there’s more than just content online!
- For example, if you have a product page then you will want to include information from Amazon or wherever you’re selling the products from. Similarly, if there are any related articles you’ve written then you should link to them along with relevant images to help your site’s overall SEO ranking.
- Link building: While it is certainly important to have high-quality links on reputable websites pointing back at your own domain — one must also recognize that not all links are created equal!
In other words, just because you linked out to another website doesn’t mean that Google will process this as a vote for your website – particularly if it is an irrelevant or less prominent page. So remember, links are powerful but they need to be both relevant & contextual which is why the keyword element comes into play once again.
Zapier Automation Tool, Satismeter, Customer.io, Capterra & G2 Crowd
According to Olivia Tan, co-founder of CocoFax, there are numerous marketing tools that help them manage different marketing functions These are some of the valuable tools they like to share.
Satismeter is an NPS service, which allows us to prompt our customers inside the app to rate us from 0 to 10. We’ve automated all the possible responses to their ratings (using Zapier for the automation part). If the customer adds a comment with their rating, we send that to our product management app productboard to file it as a product request.
If the customer gave us a high enough rating (8+/10), we automatically send them a follow-up email with Customer.io asking them to give us a rating on public software comparison platforms like Capterra and G2 Crowd. If the rating was negative, we automatically create a ticket on Intercom so that our customer reps can follow up and ask what didn’t go well and try to find a solution to make it right with the customers.
This process has helped us gather valuable feedback, gain positive reviews, and also enables staying in touch with disappointed customers.
Mailchimp
According to Mike Chappell, Founder of Formspal, an online platform that supports communities and individuals regardless of their gender, age, nationality, or religion by offering high-quality legal forms online. This is what Mike prefer for its marketing:
Entrepreneurs utilize email marketing as a critical marketing tool. An email marketing tool aids in the creation of emails that are tailored to the customers you want. Mailchimp is an example of a helpful tool. You may design and generate an email that is consistent with your brand using Mailchimp. It’s also beneficial in determining how many individuals have opened your email. You can discover what kinds of materials are effective and which are not.
MobileMonkey Tool
According to Teo Vanyo, CEO of Stealth Agents, Automation tools are best for marketing as they allow you to do most of the tasks with perfection. Stealth Agents is a virtual assistant service company that can significantly minimize overhead costs for businesses. We have a solid foundation, built on advanced technology and a highly trained workforce. Our number one priority is to provide all clients with incredible results. This is what Teo would like to share with our audience.
MobileMonkey is a must-have chat marketing automation platform that allows customers to speak with you while also allowing you to chat with them. Because it links to all of your consumers’ favorite messaging channels, including Instagram DMs, SMS text messaging, live chat, and Facebook Messenger, MobileMonkey is a terrific choice for marketing and support. Everything you need for client conversation is in one place with MobileMonkey, from Instagram marketing tools to Facebook messaging lead ads to live chat.
Not only can you read and respond to all of your messaging accounts’ incoming messages in one inbox, but MobileMonkey also makes it simple to build up automation to respond, collect lead information, and push leads directly into your other marketing platforms.
MixMax & Ahrefs Tool
According to Tomek Młodzki, CEO at PhotoAiD, Tool can make your life easier, the same as Mixmax which helps our brand a lot. PhotoAid is a fast-growing start-up that aspires to become a game-changer in biometric photography. This is what we would like to share with our audience
One of the most valuable marketing tools is MixMax. Trust me, it can make your life easier!
In business, you must put importance on communication and engagement. And what is the tool most frequently and widely used? Email is the answer.
Whether conducting an email marketing campaign or improving customer experience, sending emails plays a significant role in business. Thanks to this marketing tool, you can save time and energy!
For instance, using templates, you don’t have to copy and paste your logo, signature, and contacts every single time. Moreover, if you are conducting an email marketing campaign, you can schedule sending emails at a precise moment or according to recipients’ peak activity.
Then, you can track your outcome, analyzing the impact of your work. Finally, this tool is not “isolated”. However, it is an extension of Gmail and can interact even with other apps. It is extremely useful!
Another fundamental marketing tool used in our company is Ahrefs. SEO is essential for the business, therefore, it is necessary to know how SEO tools can obtain the best results.
Through keywords research, for instance, we can increase organic traffic. We can also have a look at our competitors’ keywords and how much traffic bring to them. Or analyzing keywords according to their difficulty score or also rank for functions.
Ahrefs is commonly used even for researching backlinks. Content Explorer section allows you to easily find out websites (and thanks to filtering, relevant websites) useful for our business. It means that those websites use the same keywords, and consequently there is a higher opportunity to get a backlink.
To conclude, what is relevant is to focus on a few efficient tools and know in-depth how to use them. Only when you know what tools are perfect for your business and your strategy, you can start to use them.
Simplify Tool
Tal Shelef, a Realtor and Co-Founder of Condo Wizard, would like to share some insights about the marketing tool that is valuable to them.
Simplify is software that has the world’s first AI generator which greatly streamlines processes for you when you are marketing your products or services. For copywriters out there or even businessmen who are doing things on their own, their copywriting tool is very helpful. They say a generator cannot replace a human copywriter. True enough, it can’t. But *why should you turn your back to a *helpful app? It helps you get things done easier, but it doesn’t mean you completely rely on it.
What I love about it is that I don’t have to *think about content *all the time. You only have to input keywords that they use to generate content ideas. From there, you ought to edit it out according to your brand tone and voice, and how you want to relay it your way.
So yes, it doesn’t replace a human copywriter. But is it a great marketing tool that makes things easier for you? Yes, it is!
Replyify Tool
According to Ryan O’Donnell, Co-Founder of Replyify, you need a top-of-the-funnel cold email platform like Replyify for your sales. Take a look at the most valuable marketing tool that Ryan shares:
You’ll need a dedicated top-of-the-funnel cold email platform like Replyify.com for your sales and business development team to email contacts who have current subscriptions or even ones who have not opted in. Email marketing initiatives are important for SaaS companies to be tightly connected with their customers. Product upgrades and innovative features should well converse with your clients.
Replyify allows you to track the emails you sent from detecting bounced emails to notifying you with ones that have been read. It automatically customizes emails with the prospect’s info to make it seem personalized and not a one size fits all email that sits on spam. It also allows you to connect directly to your existing email services provider like Gmail, G Suite, Exchange, Office365, or anything with an SMTP. With an automation tool that doesn’t sell like a robot, your sales team won’t have to waste time manually sending intro and follow-up emails one by one and they can now send enough outbound emails which will maximize your potential
revenue.
Brand24 Tool
According to Rafal Mlodzki, CEO of Passport-Photo Online, the most critical marketing tool each entrepreneur or business should use is a solution for brand, product, and social media monitoring. Passport-Photo Online is a biometrical photography startup based in Poland. Here are Rafal’s thoughts on one of the most valuable marketing tools they use.
One of the most critical marketing tools each entrepreneur or business should use is a solution for brand, product, and social media monitoring. Why is it important? Because if you want to be successful in any business, people simply have to know you exist and you are trustworthy!
Media monitoring tools help build brand awareness, work on your reputation, react to adverse opinions, know and understand your competitors, influencers and effectively measure your business’ or product’s performance.
For those purposes, I use Brand24. It is a complex media monitoring and PR tool for tracking what people think about my startup. It is not the most popular, the most complex software of that kind. Probably it’s not the best. But I use it because of a great sympathy towards Brand24 founder Michal Sadowski. And, what’s more, it is a professional tool providing me with all necessary business insights. As for my business purposes, Brand24allows me to:
track mentions from social media, forums, blogs, news, podcasts, and so on, analyze the quality of those sources, identify influencers with the biggest impact on your targeted audience, analyze sentiment and thus, identify problematic areas.
Hootsuite Tool
According to Austin LaRoche, CEO of ATAK Interactive, Hootsuite is a marketing software that saves you time and effort when promoting across many channels. ATAK Interactive is an Agency located in Los Angeles, California. When B2B companies need to outsource marketing, creative, and development resources to support their sales operation, ATAK provides unique and innovative tools that get results. With their proven products, such as Purposeful Marketing, businesses never have to ask why again. Every action is clear. Every initiative can be measured. Every dollar is accounted for.
Every plan is pointed to growth. If your company would benefit from a simplified and results-focused approach that integrates strategy + execution into real business development, ATAK is a helpful solution. Take a look at Austin’s insight below:
Hootsuite is a social media management application that lets you schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. While more expensive than Buffer, it allows you to plan at every stage of the plan. Hootsuite’s free plan now allows users to manage up to three social accounts and schedule up to 30 posts at once. Its design offers you a dashboard where you can manage all of your social profiles in one location. When you upload content, offers, or product promotions, they are automatically shared across all platforms using Hootsuite. This marketing software saves you time and effort when promoting across many channels.
Toggl Tool
According to Shiv Gupta, CEO of Incrementors Digital Marketing, Toggl is very effective for project management, tracking, and is used to protect that all projects occur on time. Incrementors Digital Marketing is an agency that provides a wide range of services from SEO, Web Development, Web Design, E-commerce, UX Design, SEM Services, Dedicated Resource Hiring & Digital Marketing Needs. Here is Shiv’s insight below:
Toggl can help boost productivity, it is -The smoothest time tracker to help you learn things set. Ideal for teams, freelancers and companies. All you require to do is push a button. Toggl will quickly break down the numbers and the data is located out at your feet in a clear, easy-to-understand format. Plus, the Toggl Button browser extension effectively allows you to track your time in over 80 online tools. Once all the data is available and you know where all your time is spent, you can modify it as you need. It is also very effective for project management and tracking, and it will be used to protect that all projects occur on time.
Ahrefs and Hotjar Tool
According to PJ Taei, Founder and CEO of Uscreen, user experience is one of the most important metrics for the business. Take a look at PJ’s insight below:
As the owner of a business, my top priorities (aside from my team) are my product and the customer. Now, assuming you have an excellent product, the customer is where you need to be focusing to get them to that excellent product. In other words, user experience is one of the most important metrics out there.
You’re probably thinking, “okay cool, but what does that mean?” Think of it like this. A customer walks into your store and they can’t find what they need, couldn’t find anyone to help them, and had an overall poor experience. Those people aren’t likely to come back. And the ones who do decide to make a purchase might not be a recurring customers after a bad experience – they’ll churn.
The marketing tools that I’ve found to be the most valuable for myself, my team, and my company allow us to focus on the experience of the customer. With these tools, we can quickly optimize our website and focus on doing what we do best.
Ahrefs, hands down. If you’re looking for one tool to help you grow an online business, this is the one you need in your back pocket. Particularly for CEOs, Ahrefs is an excellent tool for regularly assessing overall website health. I appreciate the efficiency of a dashboard view to do quick checks and make the most of my time. Not to mention, if you want to grow as an online business, SEO is key. We also use Ahrefs to track our SEO performance and find new topic ideas for content creation.
My runner-up for favorite marketing tool would have to be Hotjar because we can easily track how our audience engages with our website. The customer/user experience is king when it comes to running an online business.
Both Ahrefs and Hotjar allow us to optimize our website so that our users get the best possible experience with Uscreen.
Active Campaign, Pictochart, and Unbounce Tool
According to Dmytro Serheeiv, co-owner of PDFLiner, Active Campaign, Piktochart, and Unbounce are the most valuable marketing tools he can recommend very much. Dmytro is a professional tax specialist with more than 10 years of experience. He has work experience in the private, public accounting, and government sectors. Coming from a hardworking Ukrainian family, Dmytro arrived in the US to study International Business, Trade, and Tax Law at Northeastern University.
After almost 7 years of working for consulting companies, Dmytro decided to become a self-employed tax consultant. He is also a co-owner of PDFLiner, a versatile online PDF editor with a slant on IRS tax forms. Here are Dmytro’s insights below:
As a SaaS owner, I want to recommend the following tools very much:
Active Campaign – it’s a very popular, affordable, and, what’s more important, effective marketing automation platform that allows you to set up your email marketing campaigns using a library of market-tested templates, segment your email list, automate sales, and many more. The platform also supports simultaneous multi-channel marketing campaigns with the use of social networks, Google Ads, and more.
It’s cross-integrated in WordPress, SalesForce, Shopify, and over 850more third-party solutions, which makes it a perfect marketing hub if you use a lot of apps in your campaigns. You can choose workflows tailored specifically for your kind of business, including SaaS as a standalone category.
Piktochart – Sometimes you have too much text that is very difficult or even impossible to squeeze anymore. But what should you do if you can refuse to deliver this information to users? Create visuals to convert daunting amounts of text into engaging infographics and reports for your email and social campaigns.
Piktochart is an online service that will help you with that. The platform includes a pro-grade set of features for the quick creation of wonderful digital designs. It was created with non-designer users in mind too, so anyone in your company will be able to create a compelling visual presentation of a product or anything else using Pictochart. It’s full of ready-made templates that are not shameful at all for any company.
Unbounce – Landing pages are very useful when you need to create some bright sales pages and product presentations for your email campaigns. People love landings and tend to buy more if you use them from time to time.
Unbounce is currently the simplest way to quickly create landing pages with good-looking visual design and logic. It’s much easier to use than Microsoft Word, doesn’t require any coding knowledge, and supports quick HTML integrations and APIs.
EngageBay Tool
According to Perry Zheng, a software engineer, founder & CEO of real estate syndication software called Cash Flow Portal, one of the most valuable SaaS marketing tools that can help grow a business is EngageBay. Perry lives in Seattle, where he owns six single-family properties and started a real estate syndication three years ago. Today, he has more than 1500 units, raised over $16M, and is a lead syndicator on two deals totaling 580 units. Previously, he worked with Lyft, Twitter, & Amazon. Take a look at Perry’s insight below:
Engagebay is a marketing software that provides leaders with a holistic view of their company. Not all tools focus on the bigger picture but only on specific elements of marketing. EngageBay combines the multifaceted sales and marketing departments onto a single platform so that leaders can make well-informed decisions keeping their long-term goals in view. It is an all-in-one software with marketing automation, email, chat, and a built-in CRM.
EngageBay also has design features for your website on top of landing pages and website lead generation, making it truly an all-encompassing tool. You can get the software as a whole package or standalone features, whichever best suits your needs.
Google Analytics Tool
According to David Bitton, Co-Founder & CMO of DoorLoop, Google Analytics is the most beneficial and cost-effective marketing tool that any marketer should have in their marketing stack. DoorLoop is a property management software for the real estate PropTech industry that has raised over $10M. David is a 5X entrepreneur with firms in tech, events, and services. Here is David’s insight below:
The most beneficial and cost-effective marketing tool that any marketer should have in their marketing stack is Google Analytics. The fact that Google Analytics is free while still providing rich data and relevant information sets it apart. Google Analytics gives us valuable data that enables us to improve the efficiency of our business. We may use it to track the success of our marketing strategies, get data on user experience, and generate new marketing ideas.
Assess user behavior: Using Google Analytics, we can observe how our audience interacts with our website, providing valuable behavioral data that allows us to make improvements. Behavioral data enables us to optimize our website to be easy to use, suitable for all devices, and compelling enough to keep people coming back over time. This allows us to generate leads and drive a large amount of traffic to the site.
Develop solutions by analyzing historical data: Analyzing data acquired by Google Analytics offers us opportunities to grow and optimize the business for success. Both new and historical data are critical in ensuring that we can create and test effective solutions. Google Analytics reveals visitor traffic changes over long periods, allowing us to detect trends. We may use this information to evaluate and identify which of our marketing strategies were successful and which were not. It assists us in developing effective strategies for all of our future marketing initiatives.
Bounce rates:* We can use bounce rate statistics to determine whether we’re delivering relevant content if the quality of what we post is excellent and whether we’re employing the proper keywords. For example, a healthy bounce rate indicates that we’ve chosen the right keywords to target and that we’re delivering relevant information to our audience.
Conclusion
As discussed in the points above, it is safe to say that good marketing skills can take your business from its lowest point to its highest in a short period. If you know how to market your business, there’s nothing that can stop you from boosting your business! We hope that our readers benefit from this article and make the most out of the tips shared by successful entrepreneurs. Stay tuned for more SaaS content, meanwhile, give our blog 15 SaaS Content Marketing Tools for Growth a read. Until next time Rocketeers!