Growth Marketing Tools for 2018

Ultimate List: Growth Marketing Tools for 2018

This list is broken down into sections based on the Pirate Metrics (AAARRR).

Awareness – Awareness is when the customer first discovers your service/product. So everything related to getting that user to land on your website / app. Acquisition – When the user is on your website, it’s time to convert or at least make them sign up for a news letter or come back at a later point. Don’t make them forget you. Activation – Once the user has shown some type of interest it is time to make sure they become a more active user, i.e paying or upgrading. This is usually done after they have signed up for a free trial in SaaS products. Make sure they don’t leave. Usually highly correlated with Product Market fit. Referrals – If the user like you enough you should have a mechanism for inviting their friends. It could also just be sharing options on your website. Organic referrals are however not the strongest, so here are some tools for creating referral campaigns. Retention – After you have activated the user, you want them to stick around. It is hard to manufacture retention if your product is mediocre, you will know if you have a leaky bucket, but there are some ways to re-engage and also to understand your users better. Revenue – Tools to make sure you get your hard earned money. These will just make your life a bit easier.

Extra: Outsourcing – Added this extra section, you don’t want to do everything by yourself so here are some great places to find extra muscles.

Let’s dive in!

Awareness (Traffic, SEO, Content Marketing)

Buzzsumo – it’s the most used tool for marketing your content and SEO campaigns. This tool allows you to keep track of your content and how it’s doing online (shares) as well as that of your competition (or any site for that matter). It allows you to find influencers on any particular keyword or topic and it’s very easy to use. They have a free chrome extension that allows you to see the number of shares on any website you visit.

SimilarWeb - See where your competitors get their traffic and much more.

SemRush - Another great tool for spying on your competitors, see how they rank on different keyword and what they spend on ads etc. Really useful.

Moz – the right place for SEO and digital marketing insight. Moz is the SEO toolset that’s got it all: keyword research, link building, site audits, and page optimization insights, in one.

AnswerThePublic - Find out what questions and queries your consumers have and what they're searching for in Google and YouTube.

SurveyMonkey – The leaders in online form and web-based survey solutions. They have been around for a while and offer a robust tool for any of your data gathering needs.

TheStocks.im – Royalty free stock photos to use in your emails, website and other marketing collateral. This site aggregates some of the best free stock photo sites under one umbrella making your photo searches a breeze.

Narrow – works by interacting with Twitter users that are talking about subjects relevant to the audience you want to attract.

Canva – creative and engaging, Canva lets you build stunning visuals for your business proposal and everything you might need, all with the power of drag and drop. You don’t have to spend big bucks on Adobe software for image editing anymore. If you need to add a quick headline or filter to an image, this can help.

RivalExplorer – Look and search for all emails ever sent to people by your competition.

CoSchedule – Plan, organize, and execute every content marketing project in one place. If you are into inbound marketing then having a healthy content calendar and plan in place is key to your success.

BuzzStream – A great tool for influencer and blogger outreach. It lets you track email opens, save templates and keep organized lists for a productive outreach campaign.

Buffer – makes it super easy to share any page you’re reading and schedule posts to go out from all of your major social media channels.

SocialPilot - similar to Buffer. Has worked better for me than Buffer, which kept disconnecting my accounts all the time.

Quuu – lets you handpick social media posts that interest you and your followers, great tool to keep quality content in your social media feed.

Revfluence – It’s a platform for marketers who value efficiency. From discovery and outreach to tracking and payment. Revfluence streamlines the influencer marketing process.

Audiense – Audiense delivers unique consumer insight and engagement capabilities. Super easy segmentation of followers. Terrific tool.

Snip.ly – Put your cta on any link you 3rd party share, and you can even track them together with your facebook pixel.

CLkim – With Clkim you can extract more value from the links you share online, social, sms or email.

MassPlanner - automates all your social media channels. Runs on windows, and you might want to set it up on amazon web services so it can run 24/7 unless you have a windows server available.

MixMax.com – Track, automate, and enhance your emails with the essential productivity suite for Google Inbox. Awesome tool!

MailShake.com – Perfect for cold emails using a CSV-file with leads. Create follow up sequences based on the actions (or no actions) the receiver do.

RevealBot – Set up automation rules for your Facebook and Instagram ads and let the bot manage and improve your ad performance for you.

Prospect.io – Switching gears a bit from general business automation to sales automation, we have prospect.io which is a cool platform for modern sales teams. It helps you find leads on Linkedin, prospect and send drip email campaigns in a few minutes.

Acquisition (Landing Pages, CRO, Analytics)

Drift.com – Driftbot is able to understand the conversations your customers are having with your company, and help get the right message to the right person at the right time.

Grammarly – checking your text for grammar errors, typos and punctuation so that your content is flawless before posting it on all your social media account.

UseFomo.com – Fomo is a one-click plugin that creates urgency by displaying key customer behaviors in real time.

SimplyCast – it’s the right tool for automating marketing campaigns. They cover anything from email, SMS, forms, live chat, surveys and other ways to do online marketing. They focus on small and medium enterprises providing great value for your money.

PageCloud – PageCloud will make the entire process of creating a website seamless and easy using their drag and drop technology.

Unbounce – Easy to use and good if you want to easy set up a landing page and do A/B testing.

Usertesting – Let’s you get out of those discussions with your marketing team about what you think it’ll work and instead it puts it to the test. Select the target audience that matches that of your business, configure a few test plans (what you want them to achieve) and then wait while the site matches your project with potentially hundreds of people. Once they go through your site, you’ll be able to see how they interacted with it giving your tons of useful information you can use to improve your site.

5secondrule – Similar to Usertesting, this tool allows you to query a pool of unknown people to get their real feedback. A five second test is great for understanding and measuring people’s first impressions on your business/website/brand.

LeadPages – Generating landing pages and lots of them to test out your creative and content are some of the great ways to improve conversion rates for your business. LeadPages is one of the leading tools out there that allow you to do this quite easily.

SumoMe –these guys arm you with a suite of site-growing solutions to help you get more traffic, build a following, and track your success.

Import.io – extracting info from web pages can become a great source of raw data that can be later re-purposed and presented to help you come to important conclusions and decisions.

Dexi.io – web data processing tool for professionals, lets you scrape almost any website.

Crazy Egg – website analytics presented to you in a visually clear and understandable way. Heat maps for most clicked locations in your site? Check!

Showbox – Create amazing videos in your browser. It helps save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in making videos. Granted, these are not going to have actors in them, but through illustrations and other images you can make a 30 second explainer video here for a fraction of the price.

Loom – Great tool to create short but impactful videos from your browser. Stop making “one-pagers” that people won’t read and start creating quick videos that explain what you do. It also has webcam and screen recording capabilities. Free chrome plugin available.

SmartPixel – A video capture and editing software that is both easy and affordable.

AlltheFreeStock – Free stock videos to include in your production. They also feature free stock photos.

VideoScribe – High definition whiteboard like animation video.

Segment – collecting data from your systems and customers and sending it wherever you need it. Connects with everything,

Google Analytics – analyzing website visits and tracking every change for you.

MixPanel - Like Google Analytics but on a user level, good for connecting a website visitor to a user and follow user journeys in funnels.

Amplitude - Easier interface than MixPanel for in-app user behavior tracking. Find “aha-moments”, why do users stay, why do they churn etc.

Optimizely – offers you the possibility of heavily experimenting to keep up with every whim of your users.

Google Optimize - same as Optimizely but free.

HotJar – A very comprehensive tool that gives you analytics on your website as well as an in-depth view of how your app or website is used. This means visitor recordings, heatmaps and even in-website surveys.

FullStory – offers detailed info on your visitor’s behavior while on your site.

Marketfox.io – marketing automation tool to convert more visitors into customers with machine learning and automated marketing campaigns.

Activation (Make a free user a paying user)

LeadChat – live chat agents 24/7 might be best for those of you whose service is time-dependent and your business’ success depends on how swift your response to a query is.

RaffleCopter – Giveaways, if done well, can often bring your business a lot of awareness and even leads. Rafflecopter lets you run online giveaways and embed them on your site without an IT.

Awario – Know thy enemy. This app helps you scour the web and find out what your competitors are posting, as well as mentions of your business of course.

Referrals (Virality)

ReferralCandy – If you would like to leverage your customers to sell more, consider starting a referral program that rewards people for their actions. This particular tool is great if you do e-commerce in your business.

Vyper.io – Referral campaigns as a competition with leader boards and prizes.

Maitreapp.co – Similar to Vyper, works well for initial launch to grow an email list for instance.

Retention (Email/Messaging, Automation)

Datanyze – provides you with insight based on your technology choices. Especially if your business is tech based, this might be just what you need.

ConvertKit – if you’re a professional blogger, this is the right email marketing tool for you.

Drip – is another automated email marketing tool that help you build workflow and infographics for your emails and newsletters.

Rare.io – A smart email marketing platform that works best for online businesses that do ecommerce.

Curated – as its namesake suggests, this app helps you put together an appealing newsletter or weekly digest so you can engage and keep your community interested and informed.

Gnowit – Real-time media monitoring for your business that uses artificial intelligence.

Klipfolio – The ultimate business dashboard. Monitor the health of your business while this dashboard connects to potentially all your online tools, giving you a full and unified picture of your business.

AutopilotHQ – the tool for automating your customer journeys. They cover anything from email, SMS, in-app messages, and postcards.

SatisMeter – helps you collect customer feedback and eliminate churn while accelerating growth.

Intercom – makes communication with your customers easy. Live chat, customer support, they have everything you need.

Packs By Startup Threads – You choose what you put into the boxes, this tool takes care of its delivery until it reaches your clients. Neat right?

MailLift – Sending out handwritten letters is still not that out of style. You can send one anytime using this service. Choose a template, MailLift will write it by hand and deliver it to your customers. Adding a great touch to your customer experience.

Zendesk – creates software for managing your relationship with your customers. UserVoice – decide on a roadmap for your product, while backing every decision with qualitative and quantitative feedback from your previous customers. GoToMeeting – offers you online HD video conferencing, making your communication that much easier. TypeForm – creating online, decidedly human forms. Customer.io – triggers multichannel messages according to customer response to each of them.

Zapier – One of our favorite tools from this list. It allows you to hook up pretty much every other tool together and create awesome automation that saves you time and money.

Process.st – Simple task and workflow automation. Similar to Zapier but different. Here you can create checklists that can then trigger automation tasks. Very cool.

IFTT – is a free web-based service that allows users to create chains of simple conditional statements, called “applets”, which are triggered based on changes to other web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Revenue

Gumroad – brilliant payment and distribution system for anything that can be sold, a physical product, a drip campaign, or a digital product.

Recurly – enterprise-class subscription billing management for thousands of businesses worldwide.

AlignCommerce – Forget about wire transfers. Use AlignCommerce for making global payments from the comfort of your browser. No accountants needed.

HubDoc – A tool that automatically collects receipts from all your tools and sends them right into your accounting software of choice. No more chasing receipts or getting nagged by your accounting team.

Xero – online accounting software for your small business.

Chart.io – cloud based data exploration and website analytics for everyone, made easy.

TradeGecko -Inventory management software for eCommerce and wholesalers

UpCounsel – easily hiring attorneys for your business’ needs.

Toggl – timetracker and employee sheet software.

Zirtual – virtual assistant service matching busy people with dedicated assistants.

RescueTime – Time management software for staying productive.

WaveApps.com – Create and send professional invoices, receipts and more.

Versature – If your business requires lots of phone interactions, look to Versature for a solid VOIP system.

Flyta – Smarter and cheaper international shipping.

ChangeJar – If you run a business in the food or hospitality industry and have customers that pay you using a POS, ChangeJar allows you to provide rewards and collect money in a way that will save you money.

Extra: Outsourcing

Upwork – was built after the merging of oDesk and Elance, the first and second biggest freelancing platforms on the internet. The result? Getting work done!

Crew.co – Hire top of the line creative freelancers. Based out of Montreal but with freelancers across the globe.

Scripted – almost exclusively for writing, editing and proofreading, you can get some great writing works out of this site.

Fiverr – offers small freelance services for only $5. Might be just what you’re looking for, and at a cheap price at that.

99designs – find and work with the best graphic designers online. Logos, websites, ads, what have you, they do it!

PeoplePerHour – here you can find freelancer for things like translations, writing, designing and programming.

WriterAcess – connects you with all screened, US-based pros, star rated by customer reviews.

Guru – you can either look for jobs, or post things you need done and get offers.

Gun.io – the place where you can look for verified freelance developers.

Gigster – they bring together the best developers, designers, and product managers from Silicon Valley and the world to form elite development teams.