Jack Preece, June 2, 2019 3 min read
With so many tools out there to help you measure, test and evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing activity – from predicting the success of an email subject line to improving your messaging with the help of AI – it can be difficult to identify what you really need.
Learn how to avoid buying expensive tools you don’t need and get recommendations on your marketing stack.
Disclaimer: Before you start downloading and testing the below tools, make sure you don’t just use them for the sake of it, they should always be solving a specific problem you are tackling with your marketing strategy – helping you to find out something specific that you need to know rather than distracting you with data you don’t need.
Google Analytics allows you to measure the performance of your website/product/app all in one place. You can monitor how users interact with your platforms, allowing you to take data-driven actions to improve their experience. New to analytics? Don’t worry, Google have created a learning hub to help get you set up.
Metabase allows you to create, organise and share collections of data. Great for reporting to potential investors, stakeholders or colleagues. Learn how fintech company N26 uses Metabase to measure KPIs across different departments.
Mailchimp is a fully featured email service, allows you to run html campaigns, plain tests, split-tests, and automated campaigns like drip campaigns that send specific messages over time. It’s free to start, for up to about 2000 subscribers.
If Mailchimp has too many bells and whistles and you find yourself getting distracted, try TinyLetter. It is simpler than Mailchimp, allowing you to focus on writing great content and building up your subscribers.
Emails may seem simple and mundane, but if you get it right, they can really work for you. Below, Rob Fitzpatrick gives us some more insights into permission marketing and newsletters for startups today.
There are different reasons to want to inject your content with a little traffic. You may want to give a blog post a kick-start, or test a landing page so you can split-test different options before you promote them more widely. One of the most convenient ways to do this is to utilise websites where you can build your own following.
Sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest are all great for this.
Building up a following may take some time, but it’s a worthwhile asset. Not sure where to start with your social media plan? Take our beginner’s guide to social media course.
You can’t ignore the iTunes Store. It’s the number 1 podcast directory out there. There is, however, a great tool to use if you’re new to podcasts and overwhelmed by all you have to learn to produce one. PodBean tries to automate some of the tools that other podcasts require you to learn, especially for audio and editing.
You could spend your whole week researching and onboarding dozens of marketing tools, but it’s essential to always keep in mind what it is you’re actually trying to achieve. Don’t spend time creating a promotional podcast if you don’t have a clear purpose and audience in mind, as well as a strategy to get it in the headphones of the right people once you’ve created it. And not all channels need to be treated equally. Lean into the ones that are working for you, while also ensuring to keep a mix of activity to maximise audiences, reach your customers from multiple angles, and make sure you’re resilient to changes in consumer habits.
Access a list of recommended tools on our digital business academy, from awareness and acquisition to conversion and bigger picture thinking tools.
