Category: Digital Marketing

How To Build a Competitive Digital Marketing Strategy in 2020?

January 8, 2020 No Comments

More than 290,000 published statuses and more than 136,000 photos are uploaded on Facebook every 60 seconds. More than 500 million people post on Instagram Stories every day, over 350,000 tweets are tweeted every minute, and more than 40,000 people are searching on Google each second.

Without any doubt, a tremendous amount of content is created daily and delivered via Social Media, Blogs, and other online channels. Apart from that, the competition is becoming intense to get visibility and to rank high on search engines.

Why is Digital Marketing More Important Than Ever?

With so much content marketing material published online every day, it’s necessary to start developing plans on how to craft the best digital marketing strategies to highlight your business and overcome competition. In the end, digital marketing plays a crucial role, no matter the industry or the size of the company – it’s the way to build and grow a business, so mapping an effective Internet marketing strategy should be a priority since the beginning of each business journey.

Of course, creating a strong digital marketing strategy is a multiple steps process that requires time and resources. The process should be strongly correlated with your business’ core and identity so that your digital marketing goals could be achieved.

To keep up with digital and industry trends, companies need to figure out which digital strategies are best for their business and still relevant to consumers in 2020. Nowadays, more than ever, businesses and, in particular, digital marketers have to adjust to new ways of “doing things online” even from one year to another. Moreover, in today’s digital world, it’s not anymore about merely being present on different online channels – but on building qualitative content and creating a unique identity. That’s the reason why businesses have to stay connected to the digital transformation that the online world is experimenting in recent years and figure out which are the directions to follow to develop their brands.

The digital marketing scene is the roughest ocean, and to learn to sail through, you need to make sure that you’re using the right and relevant digital marketing tactics that will guide you in the right direction. Shortly, it’s essential to have a proper digital marketing plan and to focus on what’s relevant for your industry and business. Otherwise, you’ll get lost in trying different digital marketing strategies technics that don’t apply to your business – while wasting resources without any result.

So, nowadays, if you’d like to make the most of your digital marketing efforts, then one of your focuses should be on the fact that the online world is extremely competitive and business from all industries are more aware than ever that digital marketing is a path that directs towards success if it’s done right.

Here are top 8 powerful digital marketing strategies that businesses can follow to achieve their digital marketing goals. The following steps help marketers to create a solid digital footprint by underling the digital marketing trends for 2020.

Let’s dive deeper into details and see exactly what to do when it comes to creating a competitive digital marketing strategy.

Top digital marketing strategies for 2020

RESEARCH AND EVALUATE YOUR COMPETITORS

Identify and evaluate the competition

Researching your competition will provide you valuable insights into what your next steps should be. Analyzing competitors’ online presence will help you to underline their weaknesses, but also their strengths. Also, it will help you to focus on your opportunities on the market, based on their results – you can always learn from your competitors fails, success and you can identify what to do to improve your strategies.
Identify your top three direct competitors (direct competitors provide similar product/service as you do; share the same audience as you) and start monitoring their activity to better understand your position on the market.
Use competitor monitoring tools to track competitors marketing strategies
Figuring out what marketing strategies are your competitors applying online will help you to differentiate your business strategies and to create a unique approach. Gathering information about all your competitors’ online actions can be a hard task. Still, fortunately, you can use monitoring tools that do the job for you, saving you time and resources.
Start tracking your competitors’ online activities and uncover their content strategies – identify which Social Media channels they are using more often; how frequently are your competitors publishing content, which type of material (images/video); what newsletters are they sending; what are they writing on their blogs and more. Also, you can have a closer look at how they are engaging with the audience and which are the results – the number of followers/subscribers and engagement details per post.
Gathering all this data can help you to identify your gaps and figuring out what you should focus on from now on. Monitoring your competitors Social Media activity, analyzing their content strategies and Email Marketing strategies gives you valuable details so you won’t start crafting your strategy from scratch. Keep an eye on your competitors’ examples and learn from their mistakes or apply their version of success but in your way.
Find competitors keywords
When analyzing competitors’ content, particularly on their blogs, look for the keywords they use and see how they rank for each keyword or use an online tool to get an overview of your competitors’ keywords.
Uncovering your competitors’ SEO strategies will help you to see what keywords they are using for their campaigns, for what keywords/phrases are they ranking well, and you don’t, as well as the keywords your direct competitors are targeting but failed to rank for.
Finding your competitors’ keywords allow you to plan or improve better SEO strategies for your business and gain a competitive edge in the search results.

OUTPERFORM YOUR COMPETITORS

Know your brand and goals
Learning from your competitors is, without doubts, a step in developing or improving your business digital marketing strategies. Analyzing your current situation and putting clear on a paper, all your weaknesses and strengths are not just steps, but the foundation of your digital success.
After gathering competitors’ insights on their digital marketing activity, as Social Media content strategies; Email Marketing strategies; SEO strategies; Website strategies focus on your marketing efforts and analyze your digital path to understand what you’ve been missing out; what your competitors are doing better than you currently do; what you can improve or further develop. Have a realistic perspective and try to understand why customers/users could go for your competitors’ products or even why they are choosing your product.
Also, underline your top priorities and the kind of goals you want to achieve, so you’ll know exactly which digital marketing tactics to apply and execute.
Choose the right digital marketing channels
After analyzing your competitors’ digital marketing channels, you might have an idea about which channels could be suitable for your business, too. Keep in mind that what works for others may not work 100% for you, but it’s worth giving a try.
If, for example, your top one direct competitor is very active on Facebook, post frequently, and each post has a good organic reach, then you should focus more on this channel and try to apply his example.
Don’t get stuck with digital trends – your business doesn’t have to be on Pinterest or Instagram if it’s not relevant for your case. Focus on relevant channels, especially on those where your targeted audience is.
Focus on content
After figuring out which digital marketing channels are a good fit for your business, and analyzing your competitors’ content marketing strategies, it’s time to focus on creating new and quality content frequently for the chosen channels.
Also, after you’ve researched your competitors, you might already have an idea which is the type of content that you’re targeted audience is usually engaging with, which kind of articles are your competitors posting on their blogs and which are the keywords that generate traffic for your competitors. Those keywords will help you to attract more clicks to your domain, to build brand awareness, and to …
Boost your SEO
Search engine optimization is continually changing, so it’s a continual challenge to rank higher in Google. Evaluate what keywords are your competitors using and compare their list with your keyword’s list to see if you’re missing out on something that you might use. Also, frequently adding new articles on your blog, updating your homepage or landing page, or getting backlinks to your website will help you yo rank a higher position on Google.
However, keep in mind that your focus should also be on optimizing your blog and website, delivering high-quality content to boost conversion, and gain a competitive advantage, not just ranking a high position on Google’s search results.
Make it personal
How many general newsletters are you receiving each day? How many Facebook posts catch your attention during the time you scroll on your feed? In today’s digital world, business is not seen anymore as a rigid environment – so craft a unique and personal way of communication with your targeted audience, which can help you to build authenticity and brand trust. Send a personalized video to welcome your new users; personalize each newsletter with users’ details – have a friendly way of connecting with your audience, and don’t ignore the power of personal engagement or storytelling.

In conclusion, in 2020, digital marketing is not just about “being online,” but about giving your business a personality and providing value while keeping an eye on the competition and staying relevant on the market.

Top 50 digital marketing tools launched in 2019

November 19, 2019 No Comments

Are you a fan of discovering the latest digital marketing tools on the market?

Here a list of top 50 DM tools that were launched in 2019 – tools that can help you to make your job easier, to create better digital campaigns, or to organize your tasks smarter. Keep in mind that being aware of what’s new on the market and using the right digital marketing tools will give you a competitive advantage, so you’ll be one step ahead of your competitors.

Top 50 DM tools launched in 2019

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Take your marketing strategies to the next level and discover the following 50 digital marketing tools every marketer should hear about and check out.

Marketing Examples
Get as close to the “real world” with Marketing Examples, a collection of marketing tactics used by successful startups, and learn how to perfect your cold email, boost referrals or improve SEO. The main idea is to browse the case studies and get inspired, so you can improve your own digital marketing techniques.
Luego
This digital marketing tool will help you to collect your customers’ testimonials in a single place, so you’ll have an overview of what your customers think about your product or business. You simply add customers to a dashboard and create an automated workflow to collect your testimonials. The platform looks friendly and the setup is very easy – worth to try!
Previewmojo
Not happy with your social media preview images? Previewmojo it’s a DM tool that auto generates unique and appealing social media previews images for every page on your site, helping digital marketers to attract more engagement and to deliver content in a more attractive way.
Square Marketing
Square Marketing helps digital marketers to create, send, and track email marketing campaigns in minutes. The email marketing software allows you to easily design custom email, set up automated campaigns, and analyze your marketing efforts.
Dubb 2.0
Dubb is an all-in-one video sales and marketing platform that lets you create, share, host and track videos of all formats to help grow your business. It helps you to send personal videos to your customers and create unique onboarding experiences.
Gist Platform
Unified marketing, sales, and support platform with live chat, help desk, email marketing automation, and more – an all in one platform that helps you in provide a smooth onboarding process, and easy communication with your users.
Content Strategy Checklist
Have you just started your content marketing journey or simply want to improve your skills? Content Strategy Checklist is a free 7-step guide that will walk you from research to planning, launching and measuring – all you need to know for your digital marketing journey.
Visual Funnels Maker from Customerly
This DM tool helps you to create powerful marketing behavioral funnels, to send messages and email-based on your user behavior and recover inactive customers.
Missinglettr V3
Missinglettr is a digital marketing tool that helps you to create clever social media campaigns for your blog posts that run for an entire year, driving traffic to your website.
Plai
Plai presents itself as “a free marketing team” in your pocket. In short, with Plai, you can get the answers you need, fast from Google Analytics. Take action with targeted YouTube & Google Search Ads, find trending content across the web in seconds or learn new marketing tips.
Hippo Video
Hippo Video is the first cloud-based DIY video personalization platform that helps you to create and send personalized video campaigns, manage sales workflows and track them to close sales effectively.
SendFox
SendFox is an affordable email marketing tool designed for content creators — bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, and more.
Immerj
Wondering “how to get started?’ in your marketing career? What steps do you have to do, how to plan your strategies? Immerj it’s an interactive marketing planning tool designed exclusively for B2B start-ups and ‘solopreneurs’ – a DM tool that will help you to create your next marketing plan in minutes.
OptiMonk 2.0
OptiMonk is a free conversion optimization digital tool that helps you to turn your traffic into sales and email/Messenger subscribers. It allows you to create, personalize and launch popups, sidebars, notification bars, and full screens, without coding.
Full Page Screen Capture
The tool helps you to generate a full-length web page screenshot for free and will give a shareable link for handling screenshot image sharing easily.
Competitors App
Competitors App is a monitoring tool that helps marketers and agencies to automatically track marketing strategies of other businesses in the industry in one place, with minimum effort and little time investment.
The cloud-based app monitors competition Newsletters and Emails, Social Media posts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube), Social Media Performance & Activity (Engagement details, Posts frequency, Most popular posts), Blog posts, Reviews from more than 60 reviews websites, Website changes, SEO strategies, Keywords rankings, Google and Facebook Ads. and sends user’s notifications whenever a competitor makes a move, plus daily and weekly reports.
Zest Enlight
A personalized knowledge-building machine that every digital marketer must have in his pocket. These are the main features: AI-guided learning path; Determining the quantity of the content you want to be exposed to on a daily basis; Tailoring your knowledge-building sessions so that they fit your schedule; Full tag customization.
GrowthList
Get inspired by GrowthList – a crowd-sourced list of actionable, proven Growth hacks sourced by the community, and find actionable advice and learnings to take your projects to another level.
Magnify
Magnify helps you to push out beautiful website announcements in 10 seconds and drive traffic to your relevant subpages. So if you want to announce a new blog post, an upcoming event, a new product feature or a webinar, Magnify could be a useful tool.
Shade
Shade is beautifully designed Bootstrap based HTML templates to help startups build professional landing pages easily. One new free landing page template will be added every month to Shade collection. Get inspired by the collection of templates, promote and grow your startup in no time.
Mutiny 2.0
Want to personalize your website for each visitor? Mutiny platform makes it easy to deploy personalization and helps you do it well by telling you which segments to personalize for and how.
Easter Eggs by HoverSignal
The digital marketing tool helps digital marketers to boost engagement & SEO with hidden presents on your website. Add gamification to your website or online store, hide Easter eggs across your website and reward those who found them all with a discount coupon in exchange for their email addresses.
ReferralMagic
With Referral Magic you can turn your users and customers into referral magnets. This digital marketing tool helps you to set up various referral campaigns that run simultaneously, so you can give away rewards to referrers and invitees.
Growthhacklist 2.0
The core of Growthhacklist is methods, ideas, and tutorials about useful growth methods, marketing ideas or guides about how to use a service. The main goal is to provide insights and help on how to start to grow your online business.
Abyssale alpha
Abyssale is a simple and powerful platform enabling you to generate advertising banners for your company. The tool enables you to spend more time optimizing your budget & marketing strategy.
Loomly 3.0
Loomly is a social media calendar to help you make better content, by keeping you and your tasks organized. The DM tool helps marketing teams create posts with a wizard-style interface; review and approve posts as a team, thanks to automated mock-ups; schedule, target and boost posts natively; respond to comments from your audience (fans & followers) and measure the content’s success.
Remote Tools 2.0
The digital marketing tool helps you to discover remote-first products and gives you the possibility to learn from remote companies. Digital marketing tools can connect with remote work evangelists, product makers & fellow remote workers.
Flick
Want to grow your Instagram account with quality hashtags? Using AI, Flick will suggest the best hashtags to use on Instagram and it will help you to organically increasing the reach and engagement of your Instagram posts and reach your target audience.
Phrasee
Phrasee is AI technology that uses your email subject lines as a language laboratory. Linguistic elements combine to discover a language model that’s tailored to your brand.
The result? More opens, clicks, and conversions
Campaigns by Dashly
Dashly is a digital marketing tool offering you ready-made campaigns and templates for boosting the funnel. Triggered chat messages, pop-up windows, and email templates – everything you need to raise the key metrics of your funnel and to save time without the need to craft your campaigns from the sketch.
Hunter Campaigns
We all know that follow-ups emails can take a lot of time, especially when this task is done manually. Hunter helps you to compose, personalize and schedule follow-ups from your Google account, so you save time by keeping a personal touch to every email. The DM tool is available for free!
Aiden.ai
Aiden is a AI platform for marketers that provides three main features, customized optimizations recommendations across all your ads; single-click implementation of Aiden’s recommended changes, and unified view of your paid marketing, including campaign monitoring and editing.
Quuu
Quuu is a DM tool that hand-curates content in over 500 interest categories, helping you to create relevant content strategies, and posts to share with your audience on social media.
SiteKit – Promotion Bar & Popup
SiteKit can help you capture all your potential customers, by collecting their emails via its popups and smart bars. Discover their coupon popups, Win Wheels – special spin-to-win popups and turn traffic into leads and customers.
Lumen 5
It is a dedicated social video creator built for businesses and marketing teams. The DM tool enables people to quickly and easily create videos for social media without any technical expertise.
Modash Influencer Search
Nowadays, a digital marketer should be strongly connected with the phenomenon of “influencer marketing” and to have an overview of who’s crushing it on Social Media. This DM tool will help you to easily identify Instagram’s influencers and twitch streamers, so you’ll know with who to collaborate for your projects.
Social Media Tools Comparison
Social Media Tools helps you to compare 150+ social media management tools’ plans, so you’ll figure out which tools are the best fit for your needs.
VEED’s video editor
Add effects to your videos in realtime with this digital marketing tool.
Product Marketing Gallery
A gallery of over 100 product marketing examples, case studies, videos and examples of great in-product marketing to improve adoption.
Felix AI
The DM tool turns your blog posts into videos, stories and audio clips, so content marketers can maximize the value from the created content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=158&v=2ftiHFBCaRo&feature=emb_title
Hemlock
Hemlock helps you to keep an eye on all that your competitors do online and lets you analyze and explore the data through a simple, calendar interface including social media shares, videos, blog posts, podcasts, and email campaigns.
Email Taco
Email Taco is a free email countdown timer for expiring offers. Use real-time countdown timers to increase urgency and clickthrough in your emails before a discount or an offer expire.
Wispform
Wispform is a simple form builder for creating forms, surveys and quizzes.
Adduco
The tool will help you to discover customer personas through your data. The tool surfaces the traits, actions, and customer personas, build better campaigns and deliver personalized experiences.
CTAs by RightMessage
The tool helps digital marketers and business owners to drive more engagement and conversions – a must for any brand! RightMessage surveys and segments visitors, personalizing their experience on the website.
Dibz
Dibz is a DM tool that automates link building, guest post, influencers & bloggers outreach. By combining multiple API’s, custom spam factors and unique algorithm, Dibz filters your query searches while providing you with top-notch opportunities – on autopilot – a time-saver for every SEO specialist or link-builder.
Free Gmail eCards by cloudHQ
Free Chrome extension to create ecards directly within Gmail.
Find Better Questions
Find Better Questions is a simple tool that gets you a list of matching questions along with their stats like views, followers and weekly views – all you have to do is to insert a Quora URL, like “https://www.quora.com/topic/Prod…” and the tool gets you a list of matching questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=150&v=ZwwMKk3_iw4&feature=emb_title
Adzooma
Adzooma helps you manage and optimize Google and Facebook Ads faster and gain a competitive advantage, focusing on what really matters. Add automation rules to save time every week and improve your campaign’s performance.
Timeular 2.0
Timeular helps you to track your time at work and to understand what you could improve so you have more time for the important things.

How we’ve got 1000+ upvotes on ProductHunt

August 3, 2019 No Comments

After more than a year of work and 1500+ users that helped us improve, last week (Thursday 25th) we officially launched Competitors App on Product Hunt (PH) As Răzvan (Founder & CEO Competitors App) posted on his Facebook account, being featured on PH is a significant moment in an entrepreneur’s life, so we had to do our best to take advantage of this day.

In the tech world, Product Hunt is the best destination for product discovery. It’s like the Eiffel Tower for tourists – once you’re in Paris, you can’t skip it, it’s a must. So, once you’re part of this tech-focused community, launching your product on PH is a “to do” on your list.

For any startup, launching a product on PH means gaining media attention and users, and not only on their launch day. Our primary goals in launching Competitors App on PH was to receive feedback from the tech community, to see what’s our position in the market, and to get new users.

How did we prepare for the launch?

1. Networking

Planning to launch your product soon? Then start growing your network!

Be active on PH (starting with months before your launch), upvote your favorites, start discussions, and interact. Networking will bring some benefits to you and your business, not just for the launch but also for your entire carrier. When Răzvan and I had a chat the next day after the launch, we underlined many times that “networking” is an essential key in those kinds of “racing games.”

In our case, more than 80% of the votes come from our networks, so be prepared to ask for support and even to beg for it – I know, sounds dramatic, but you’re not every day featured on PH.

2. Take notes

Read and learn how to launch your product and how to make the most of it. Some weeks before the launch, we started to document ourselves about other PH launches’ experiences, read step-by-step guides on how to launch on PH, and we began to prepare our version of launch.
Make sure that you keep an eye on PH blog posts regarding the launch of a product, the “KIT,” tips & trips, do’s, and don’ts.

3. Make a plan

Make sure you have a clear plan before the launch.
It will help you to optimize your work and to structure it before the big day.

When planning to launch on PH, make a short analysis of your product. Our advice is to don’t launch on PH too soon. As mentioned above, we waited 1.5 years and 1500+ users until the launch. Maybe it was too late; perhaps it was too early – this is questionable. But launching too early may not get you enough attention from the PH community. Also, when you plan your launch, make sure that you have a clear definition of your ideal customer so you can adapt communication and your Unique Selling Proposition to your targeted audience.

4. Prepare everything in advance!

Product Hunt Kit, Social Media posts, etc.
Also, have a list of groups from your industry (FB, LinkedIn, etc.) in which you can share the news and receive support.

Here are some groups where we posted our launch:
Product Hunt upvote exchange (FB); SaaS Products & Marketing (FB); Product Hunt Romania Fb), The Content Marketing Forum (LinkedIn), Reddit Upvote Exchange (Reddit).

During the launch – BIG DAY IS HERE

Good mood and good Wi-Fi connections are a must, so make sure you have them both. And some good sleep the night before because the “race” takes 24h and you may want to be on guard. At 10 AM, on Thursday, we were live on PH, hunted by Răzvan. Initially, we planned to launch on Wednesday, being haunted by a PH hunter, but in the end, we decided to launch ourselves, one day later.
We were already in the mood for it, so we didn’t want to wait anymore.

1. Pass the news on Social Media – ASAP!

We covered FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, and our blog.
During the day, we’ve also sent a newsletter and consistently posted “live” updates on Social Media regarding our position on PH.

2. Start networking!

While I was covering our Social Media channels and scheduling the next posts for the day, Răzvan started already to message his network about the launch. We first sent messages to Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, technology influencers, and share the news in groups.

After almost 1h30 from the launch, we were #5 Product of the day, but still not on the homepage, mentioned as Popular Products. We assumed that, even if we had votes, we did not have the same chances of exposure as products haunted by a famous hunter from the PH community.

Our advice is to talk everywhere, to everyone! On Facebook & LinkedIn groups, on Reedit channels, and your social networks. Pass the news, share the link to your PH product, and ask for support and feedback, respond to comments, interact with the audience, especially on your PH page.

At midday, 2h, after the launch, we were #3 Product of the Day.

During the rest of the day, we spread the news, find and join new tech/marketing groups and, we explore new sources from where you can gain support and feedback. After 24h, the race has ended, and the #2 Product of the Day was ours.

After the launch

1. Feedback

Customers’ feedback is essential to us. Gathering and analyzing user feedback gives us a much clearer picture of what our platform should deliver to satisfy our customers’ needs.

We received feedback on each post related to our launch on PH. In total, over 300+ comments, new ideas to implement, and a lot of support. We thank you for that!

2. New users

Starting from the launch, approximately 700+ users signed up on Competitors App. Since that day, the number of unique users coming from the PH community is still increasing.

Regarding the number of users converting to Premium, we had no expectations, taking into account that users from the PH community sign up for new tools every day, for a testing purpose or to see what’s new on the market. To our surprise, the audience liked us and some users representing big, but also small companies became Premium users right away.

By the end of the week, we got #4 Product of the Week, with a total of almost 1,100 votes.
So during those days, we were constantly up-voted. Thanks for this, too!

Best Marketing Automation Tools for your Business

February 27, 2019 No Comments

Marketing automation has been a popular topic for a while now, yet not everyone seems to be taking full advantage of it. As advanced tools become more and more available, it’s only a matter of time before automation completely changes the way marketers work. It may be worth to start thinking about using proper marketing automation tools in your strategy – and here’s how to make that happen.

What is marketing automation?

Automation means improving and to some extent, even replacing manual or intellectual labor by machines. In the case of marketing, this becomes possible thanks to relevant marketing automation tools. Such software allows you to automate repetitive tasks, optimize your efforts, reduce human error, and as a result, make your job as a marketer much easier while optimizing your digital marketing strategy.

The main idea behind marketing automation goes way beyond that, though. It’s all about reacting to people’s behavior once you caught their attention, and make sure you keep them engaged – preferably through the whole marketing funnel. The more you (and thus, the marketing automation software) know about your web visitors or users, the better you can serve them. That’s precisely why proper marketing automation tools take advantage of machine learning and predictive analytics to be able to draw conclusions from the data available and suggest or even execute the best possible action. With such software, you can easily manage all your communication channels, personalize messages, and eventually turn your visitors into your clients.

What can you automate and optimize, exactly?

Email marketing

With email marketing, you can easily target and reach the right audience with relevant content. Apart from sending out mass emails, you can even define specific triggers to respond to your recipients’ actions right away correctly. Luckily, many tools can let you automate your email marketing campaigns. Take OutreachPlus as an example. You can easily send personalized e-mails on a scale, track the results of your campaigns, and even influence the acquisition of new potential customers. Once you’re at it, it can also be beneficial to monitor your competitors’ email marketing strategies.

Social media management

If you own a lot of profiles across social networks, having a social media marketing automation tool will help you manage them properly. Yet again, there are many tools created for that purpose, even though the majority has pretty much the same features. When searching for the best option to suit your needs, though, it’s worth to select the one that stands out and offers something more. Something that you could use not only for drafting, scheduling, and keeping track of all posts but also for automating the whole process even further, such as Kontentino.

Speaking of social media, though, there’s also another activity worth automating – social listening, especially if you want to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. Luckily, Competitors App monitors both Facebook and Twitter to give you valuable insights. You can read more about monitoring and analyzing the moves of your competition on social media.

Landing pages

With proper tools, you can easily create well-designed, interactive landing pages that will allow you to capture more leads (or serve any other purpose of your choosing). Unbounce, for example, is a compelling landing page builder that has some great features in store. It can even automatically replace some keywords on your landing page to match specific phrases that your prospects search for.

Lead generation

Speaking of capturing leads, you can also engage with your visitors via push notifications to encourage them to leave their contact details or perform a specific action. It’s also a great way to keep your web visitors informed about any exclusive deals, offers or updates, as well as deliver your content to those who could genuinely be interested in it. PushPushGo is an excellent example of such a tool, as it allows you to track and analyze user behaviors on your site, and target the right audience at the right time.

Plus, if you need to retarget specific groups of customers, try doing so with RocketLink. You can not only set up push notifications with this app but also target people who have shown interest in your content by clicking on the link (which is shortened, by the way). What’s game-changing about that? Most likely, the fact that you can link to other websites while still using a relevant Call-to-Action that will drive traffic to your site, landing page, or a specific form.

Pretty much everything

Certain all-in-one marketing automation tools can serve most of your inbound marketing needs: building landing pages, capturing leads and creating databases, sending out email marketing campaigns, scheduling social media content, hosting and publishing your blog, analyzing data, and integrating it with your sales team. They come with a price, though. Advanced marketing automation software has tiered pricing, which means that its price grows along with your business. Still, Hubspot is definitely worth taking a closer look at if you’re interested in such a solution and able to afford it.

What to take into account when choosing a marketing automation tool?

If you’re considering to invest in marketing automation, it’s always a good practice to establish your needs first. Then, compare pricing, usability, and integrations with your existing software. Naturally, you may want to go for a powerful all-in-one marketing automation tool at first – but it may turn out to be too expensive. At the same time, you might not need to take advantage of that many features daily. That’s why it’s important to know what to look for when doing your research.

Choose your marketing automation tool wisely

Rapid technological development changes the way marketers work. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, though. By taking advantage of marketing automation, you can save a lot of time and often money as well. Especially since collecting and segmenting your databases, effective planning, and even analyzing your actions are now easier than ever. It’s all possible thanks to advanced marketing automation tools that become more and more available.

It’s important to remember that seasoned marketers should remain in charge, though, carefully observing the results of each campaign and drawing conclusions themselves. That’s precisely why digital solutions can’t entirely replace human labor. And rightfully so.

13 Best free tools to manage and grow your startup

October 22, 2018 No Comments

Founding your startup can be hard and challenging. Exhausting and time-consuming. The biggest reason why startups very often isn’t a bad idea. It’s a lack of knowledge and experience. That’s the reason why we have created a list of the best free tools you can use to manage and grow your startup.

The startups fail mostly because their foundation is crushed down. Foundation of your startup can be two things:

Business Model
Team

If either of these foundations fails, your startup will, in most cases, fail too.

But what are the biggest reasons why will your business model fail?

I started my journey when I was seventeen. I was so lucky that I had a great mentor. The biggest lesson I learned from him is:

“Time and money are equally important resources.”

This is mindblowing!

If you have time, but no money, you will don’t go so far. Also, if you have money but no time, you will fail very fast.

This is the reason why we have created an ultimate list of the [number] best free tools that will help you to manage and scale your startup.

We will start from the beginning, and the first tools which will we mention will help you to organize your team and yourself better.

Organization tools

Organization tools help us to plan better and be flexible. With excellent planning skills, we will never forget some task or pass the deadline.

1. Google Docs

Google docs are one of the best tools for your work. Personally, in the previous few months, I saw a significant amount of people who are using Google Docs instead of Microsoft Office.

Before all, the reasons for this are:

Access everywhere on any device
Multi-user editing, writing and commenting
Free to use with your Gmail account

Google Docs is suitable for your everyday writing and planning your marketing, sales, and business.

For your tables, data, lead generation, etc. – you can use Google Sheets. For your presentations, Google Slides will work very, very fine!

2. Trello

Trello is an excellent tool for planning your and your team’s workflow. They have a “free forever” plan, which will satisfy your needs very good at the beginning.

Trello is mainly used for task planning and scheduling your workflow. It’s mainly based on a KanBan methodology, which means that you can create boards and items/cards inside of them. Later, you can move your items from one column to another one.

In Trello’s free plan, you can invite as many team members as you want.

Trello will help you to schedule your tasks better, never forgot some assignments, and monitor your teams’ responsibilities.

3. Evernote

Quickly, Evernote can become your best friend. It’s a note-taking tool.

With Evernote, you can easily see all your notes on all of your devices. You can write notes wherever and whenever you are.

Evernote has a lifetime free account, which will be enough at the beginning. With your free Evernote account, you can sort and filter all of your notes, so you can later easily find what you need.

4. Calendly

Calendly allows you to schedule all of your meetings and appointments easily.

Just create your calendar with your free time, share the link with your prospects or business partners, and they will choose which time suits them best!

5. Slack

Slack is a free communication tool. It allows you to communicate with your team in private channels, and channels with different topics.

You can invite as many people as you want, and you can create whatever topics you want.

6. Dropbox

I supposed everyone heard about Dropbox, so there is no big need to explain what’s its’ main purpose.

Dropbox allows you to share files among your team members within seconds. You can access all of your files both from your computers or mobile phones.

Everything you need to do is to drag your file in your Dropbox desktop folder, and all of your team members will see it!

Tools for Business Growth

If you want to build an enduring business, you will need to grow. Every month, you should see at least a few percents of your income growth. Here are a few ways how can you grow your business:

With excellent Customer Development.
Understanding your customers’ behaviors.
With offering a great service
Providing Value
Better sales

So, here are a few tools which can help you to grow your business:

1. Typeform

Typeform is an excellent tool for customer development. With Typeform, you can create amazing and engaging customer surveys with cutting-edge design.

Typeform will help you to get attractive and valuable data about your customers’:

– Satisfaction

– Behaviors

– Problems

– Needs

– Your product feature and improvement ideas

2. ConvertFox

ConvertFox is a free customer messaging platform. With ConvertFox, you can see all the data about your customers (for example: when was the last time they have used your product).

You can use your customers’ data to segment your customers by the following rules:

– Paying customers

– Active trial customers

– Customers who finished their trial but didn’t continue with a paid plan

– Customers who just signed up for their trial, but never used it,

– And a list goes on and on.

ConvertFox will also help you with communicating with your customers.

Their free plan supports 500 customers, which is remarkable enough if you are at the beginning.

3. Agile CRM

Agile CRM is suitable for small and medium businesses. With their free plan, you can have up to 50 000 contacts and companies in your database!

Agile CRM allows you to plan your sales, track and gather your prospects, and, best of all, to see who is a hot lead and who is not!

Agile CRM is a great software for you since its’ free plan has everything you need when you are at the beginning.

4. Poptin

Poptin allows you to convert your website visitors into leads and customers easily.

To set up your Poptin account, you need a few minutes. After that, Poptin will show your website visitors appropriate messages at the right time!

For example, if you have an e-commerce shop and your website visitor is just about to leave your check-out page, Poptin will show them a message with a 20% discount on the item they are interested in.

5. Freshdesk

Ah, we all hate customer support, but in business, it’s essential. Excellent Customer Support is what makes a good business. Very often, companies are using Customer Support as their competitive advantage.

Freshdesk is one of the best customers that support helpdesks out there. It’s super simple to answer questions, and half of the processes are automatic.

In Its’ free forever plan, you will have everything you need till you don’t scale your startup!

5. Grammarly

If you are planning to write content, then you can’t write it without a Grammarly.

No matter how good your English knowledge is, Grammarly must be an inevitable part of your daily routine (I’m using it right now).

Grammarly will point on your mistakes and make its’ suggestions to correct them. It will improve your English knowledge. At least, it doesn’t let you look like a fool. 🙂

The most important free tool you will surely need.

All the tools I have mentioned above are perfect for your business. If you want to scale your company, then you will probably need to use them.

But there is one tool which is most important of all of them.

It’s your attitude.

Your attitude is what can make you either successful or not.

Work hard, and always have hope.

Read other competitive articles for your business

Competitive Intelligence Business – Competitive intelligence (CI) is a term you may have come across before. Like many industry buzzwords, it isn’t immediately apparent what CI is and how it can be useful to your business. But don’t worry, because we’re going to explain the ins, outs, pros, and cons of CI.

BEST COMPETITORS GUIDES

Monitor competitor website changes
You can get alerted when your competitors are making changes to their website.

Find competitor keywords
Finding your competitors’ keywords is essential for your business. It means that you focus your entire website on targeting high volume, quality keywords.

Track Social Media Pages
Social media competitive analysis is the constant monitoring and analyzing the moves of your competition on social media.

Competitor Email Monitoring
Tracking your competitors’ emails takes some time, but it’s well worth it!

How to do competitor analysis
One important step is to conduct an effective competitive analysis to evaluate your competitors’ brands.

Category: Digital Marketing

Why is Digital Marketing More Important Than Ever?

Top digital marketing strategies for 2020

RESEARCH AND EVALUATE YOUR COMPETITORS

Identify and evaluate the competition

Use competitor monitoring tools to track competitors marketing strategies

Find competitors keywords

OUTPERFORM YOUR COMPETITORS

Know your brand and goals

Choose the right digital marketing channels

Focus on content

Boost your SEO

Make it personal