MailChimp
If your business is online, then it has to manage how it sends email marketing campaigns directly to one place that nearly everyone checks: their inbox. Enter MailChimp, one of the most popular online tools with over 12 million users. MailChimp enables your business to create automated email marketing campaigns from templates and sign up subscribers to your mailing lists. Best of all, MailChimp offers free services for startups; new companies with less than 2,000 subscribers aren’t charged.
HubSpot
Looking for an all-in-one tool that can help you organize your online marketing efforts on one platform? If so, HubSpot should be at the top of your list. HubSpot is a software tool that handles marketing, sales and CRM software — which normally requires a multitude of tools, and interconnects them to minimize your time investment and maximize the efficacy of your efforts. HubSpot offers tools for blogging, SEO, social media automation, website integration, lead management, email campaigns, analytics, and much more. By using HubSpot, you don’t have to constantly switch between apps or ballpark your ROI; it’s all contained with HubSpot’s versatile platform. Best of all, you can automate your social media posts ahead of time, planning out weeks of content in just one sitting.
Trello
Do you work with your marketing team remotely or for the majority of the time online? If so, you may find it difficult to make sure everyone is on the same page, with all important memorandums read, and ensure assignments get finished on time with no overlaps. That’s where Trello, a project management tool, comes in handy. Trello allows you to assign work in various states of completion via its unique system of cards and boards, much like old offices where assignments were organized on corkboards and index cards as they were moved into states of completion (ex. “write an article – copyedit – publish”). This helps with version control, as others can review work in completion, add their contributions as the assignment progresses, and sign off on their work when completed, keeping employees in the know and accountable. After all, the previously predominant method of communication for team members before tools like Trello existed was email, where items could be lost or relegated to a spam folder when it should’ve been a high-priority item.
KISSmetrics
“What gets measured gets managed.” That famous Peter Drucker quote sums up the importance of online analytics today. If you don’t know how your marketing efforts are actually performing, how can you make informed decisions? With KISSmetrics, you can track the performance of your blog posts, analyze demographics related to which approaches are having the greatest effect, and optimize your business’ efforts to ensure that you’re not just shooting in the dark. KISSmetrics even goes one step beyond, offering recommendations for what your business should be aiming for instead of trying to come up with an answer all by yourself (after all, not everyone is a born-marketer). For example, you may want to see how many mobile-based searches are coming from your International toll-free numbers and who is specifically making those calls. With KISSmetrics, this is possible and can revolutionize your business. Of course, this comes at a steep price — KISSmetrics plans start at $120/ month (as of this writing), but the ability to derive such wide-ranging insight may pay for itself immediately.
