What are the best startup marketing tools to help a company grow from a handful of customers to 100, 1,000, or 10,000 paying customers (or more)?
Below, we’ve compiled a list of the best startup tools we could find to help you grow your company. For each one, we’ve included a summary of the tool, pricing, and possible alternatives (when available).
We’ve organized the list as follows:
(Note: Want to see which companies visiting your website—even if they don’t fill out a form? Try Leadfeeder for free.)
Lead Generation Startup Tools
1. Leadfeeder
Rating: 4.3 stars on G2
Leadfeeder is a powerful tool that helps businesses identify and engage with their website visitors in real time. With Leadfeeder, you can track visitor behavior, gain insights into their interests, and use that data to set your sales team up for effective prospecting.
The platform offers a range of features, including live visitor tracking, versatile filtering, automatic lead scoring, powerful contacts insight, email marketing integrations, website forms tracking, and real-time notifications, making it the perfect solution for businesses looking to grow their pipeline with prospects that show high buying intent.
Whether you're an e-commerce business looking to increase sales or a B2B company trying to generate more leads, Leadfeeder product is the perfect tool to help you achieve your goals.
It's time to take your sales to the next level with Leadfeeder!
Pricing
Free 14-day trial; paid plans start at $99 per month.
2. Product Hunt
Product Hunt is now the go-to launch platform for startups and enterprises putting a new product into the market. It has a pre-existing community of testers and early adopters willing to try new products.
Adding a product is free, but the Product Hunt team also offers the Ship product, an all-in-one launch package that includes a landing page, email subscription tools, email messaging tools, analytics, A/B testing, and webhooks for lead captures.
Pricing
Free; Ship pricing starts at $80 per month.
Alternatives
3. Sumo
Sumo is a multi-app toolkit built to increase the ROI of your website. It offers a variety of pop-up tools designed to drive lead captures on every page of your website, including newsletter sign-up, special offers and lower cart abandonment rates through timely pop-up reminders during checkout. Sumo integrates with most email service providers to ensure your leads go straight to your lists.
Pricing
Free 14-day trial; paid plans start at $24 per month.
Alternatives
4. Fomo
Fomo is an application that lets you leverage the power of social proof to increase conversions. While customers and prospects are browsing your website, Fomo displays small notifications alerting your prospects about other visitors on the site as well as some of the purchases those other visitors have made.
By showing prospects what other customers are doing and purchasing, you instantly give your website and business credibility through social proof.
Pricing
Plans start at $39 per month.
5. Hello Bar
Hello Bar is a simple WordPress plugin that does one thing really well—website pop-ups that drive conversions. Whether triggered by exit intent or page and content interaction, Hello Bar can be setup to ensure you engage site visitors effectively and drive lead captures on your site.
Pricing
Plans start at $4.95 per 100 click throughs.
Alternatives
6. Snip.ly
Add a call to action on every link you share. Even if you are sharing a non-branded website, Snip.ly lets you display a branded call to action on non-brand websites, meaning you can engage customers and prospects with every piece of content you share with them.
Pricing
Plans start at $29 per month.
Analytics Startup Tools
7. Segment
Segment lets you collect data points from every platform, aggregate into Segment, and then send that data to hundreds of tools for marketing, analytics, and data warehousing.
With over 200 source and destination integrations, Segment makes it possible for your business to coordinate and draw insights across multiple business units and teams.
Pricing
Free, up to 1,000 Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs); paid plans start at $120 per month for 10,000 MTUs.
Alternatives
Urban Airship, Keen, Snowplow, Mapp
8. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a granular data collection tool that allows you to analyze each customer interaction across the entire user journey.
By capturing each user interaction, you can start to build touchpoints and customer journeys based on actual customer interaction history, leading to more personalized customer experience and increased conversion rates.
Pricing
Free, up to 5 million data points per month with limited features; paid plans start at $99 per month for 10 million data points per month with full features.
Alternatives
9. Bitly
Bitly lets you create short links that track every click, tap or swipe as they make their way across the internet. Branded links allow you to make sure campaign links have brand consistency, and you can integrate Bitly with most social media and campaign management tools to ensure all of your messaging is effectively tracked.
Pricing
Free; enterprise plans also available.
Alternatives
Shareaholic, Firebase Dynamic Links, Ow.ly
10. SharedCount
A simple application that lets you see where your site’s URLs have been shared online, SharedCount calculates the number of shares for a given URL across Facebook, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon.
Pricing
Free, up to 10,000 daily queries; paid plans start at $40 per month.
Marketing Automation Tools for Startups
11. Autopilot
Autopilot captures new leads from your website, app, or blog and then nurtures them with personalized messages. You can also use it to automate repetitive sales funnel tasks, such as lead assignation, appointment setting, and customer onboarding programs.
Pricing
Free 30-day trial; plans start at $1 per month for up to 500 contacts, with purchasable upgrades for premium support.
Alternatives
12. Zapier
Zapier is an automation tool that allows you to move data between your web applications, meaning lead generation flows and alert notifications can be seamlessly automated between your marketing tools.
Send form data to Mailchimp or HubSpot, and while on the way in, use Zapier to trigger automated email alerts with Sendgrid, validate visitor data using Full Contact or Clearbit, and trigger an alert to your sales team in Slack — all using Zapier. You can even connect Leadfeeder to Zapier.
Pricing
Free; paid plans start at $20 per month for more complex automation paths.
Alternatives
Conference Calls for Startups
13. UberConference
UberConference by Dialpad is the simplest way to set up dial-in conferencing for your sales calls. No pins; no software downloads; just send your prospects or clients to your reserved UberConference URL or dial-in number. They have everything you need to run non-disruptive, effective sales calls.
Pricing
Free; business plans start at $15 per user per month.
Alternatives
Content Marketing Tools for Startups
14. Medium
Medium is one of the most popular blogging platforms in the world, and is an effective tool for generating valuable inbound content and growing a community.
While Medium does not have the customizable design abilities of Wordpress, it has a slick CMS user interface and has a strong built-in community, meaning any content you create on Medium can tap into pre-existing networks and communities.
Most importantly, you can have your own hosted blog, but also import that content into Medium: They use the rel=canonical tag, which passes the authority of the content to your hosted blog.
Pricing
Free; membership fees are for readers, not writers.
Alternatives
CRMs for Startups
15. HubSpot
For a free CRM tool, HubSpot provides a lot of value for startups and SMEs looking to effectively manage their sales pipeline. HubSpot also integrates with most lead generation and email marketing platforms, so your lead generation efforts can be amplified through serious automation and easy actioning.
HubSpot’s free CRM platform is also the foundation for their Marketing, Sales, and Service hub product sets, providing an end-to-end platform for lead generation, sales funnel management, and retention.
Pricing
Free for HubSpot CRM; paid plans for their product suite start at $50 per month per product.
Alternatives
Pipedrive, Salesforce CRM, Zoho CRM, Leadfeeder (we’ve written before about how you can combine Leadfeeder with other products as an alternative to Hubspot).
Design Tools for Startups
16. PlaceIt
Placeit is a design template website that uploads new designs and mockups every day making them the largest design templates online. With this tool, you can easily create branded images or videos in minutes for any industry. It is perfect for business owners, marketing teams, and startups. Plus they have free tools like their video cropper, image cropper, and video to gif converter.
Pricing
Free; paid plans start at $14.95 per month per user.
17. Canva
Canva provides a simple online interface to generate images to accompany marketing campaigns. Whether you’re creating images for social media, printed brochures, websites, product mockups, business cards, or online display ads, Canva is a tool anyone can use for marketing images.
Pricing
Free; paid plans start at $12.95 per month per user.
Alternatives
Email Marketing Tools for Startups
18. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing and automation platform that allows you to effectively grow and manage your newsletter and product subscribers.
Pricing
Free, up to 2,000 contacts with limited advanced features; plans start at $10 per month up to 500 contacts for advanced features.
Alternatives
Campaign Monitor, Drip, Active Campaign, Sendgrid
19. Litmus
Litmus is a third-party email testing and analytics platform. Litmus helps validate the delivery of your email campaigns, ensuring your design and formatting choices are consistent across multiple browsers and platforms, while making sure there is little chance of campaign emails ending up in the spam folder.
Pricing
Free 7-day trial; paid plans start at $99 per month.
Alternatives
20. Verify Email
Verify Email is a simple service that verifies your email marketing lists. It connects to the email server and checks if the email exists or not, which is useful if you are re-engaging old leads or contacts.
Pricing
Plans start at $14 per 50,000 email addresses tested.
Alternatives
21. Bananatag
Bananatag is a third-party email tracking platform for sales teams. It allows you to easily track all of your sales email campaigns to learn more about which leads are interacting with your campaign emails, which links they are clicking, and which leads are worth following up with. This includes Gmail and Outlook integrations, so it’s suitable for most sales teams and businesses.
Pricing
Plans start at $12.50 per month.
Alternatives
22. Good Email Copy
A simple tool from the team at Front, Good Email Copy does exactly what it says on the label — provides a repository for time-tested, effective email copy for campaign inspiration.
You can view email copy used for acquisition and onboarding campaigns from some of the most successful SaaS businesses in the world, so you know the examples have been instrumental in creating customer value and business success.
Pricing
Free.
Landing Page Optimization Startup Tools
23. Unbounce
Unbounce is an easy way to build high-conversion landing pages for campaigns and events. Using a simple drag and drop editor, you can easily build landing pages optimized for data capture and lead generation. You can also run AB tests to test out landing page copy and layout to ensure your pages are always optimized for lead capture.
Pricing
Free 30-day trial; paid plans start at $99 per month.
Alternatives
24. Google Optimize
Optimize is a part of the Google Marketing Platform and is a comprehensive website testing tool that allows you to run tests on your website copy, layout, and call-to-actions so you can make sure your site runs at its best for each and every visitor.
Optimize natively integrates with Google Analytics, so you can immediately start to draw insights about your website and run A/B, multivariate, and redirect tests to learn what works best for your site visitors.
Pricing
Free for Optimize; Optimize 360 pricing is custom.
Alternatives
Live Chat Startup Tools
25. Olark
Olark is one of the most popular live chat applications for businesses. If offers a no-fuss approach to live chat software, and has improved its design and offering over the past couple of years.
Olark also offers an extensive integration portfolio to ensure chat leads captured on your site are sent to the right tools in your marketing stack.
Pricing
Free 2-week trial, paid plans start at $17 per month.
Alternatives
26. Intercom
Intercom is a multi-product toolset that is all about lead generation and customer satisfaction. Its products span multiple categories, including Messages (for targeting in-app messaging and email campaigns), Inbox (for teams to manage chat, email and social), and Articles (for knowledge base and Wiki publishing). All of these products are built on their core Intercom CRM platform.
Pricing
Intercom CRM is free, pricing for all apps starts at $136 per month.
Alternatives
Search Engine Optimization Tools for Startups
27. Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool lets you find complementary keywords using Google’s autocomplete engine. Use as an alternative to Google keyword research — capable of building 750+ long-tail keyword combinations with the free version.
Pricing
Free; pro plans start at $88 per month for advanced features and granular data.
Alternatives
28. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a comprehensive backlink checker. While SEO and link-building strategies have changed significantly, it’s still a very important component of organic growth.
It’s crucial to understand where your audience is online, and knowing who links to the most heavily-trafficked sites in your industry is a means for building your own quality links.
Ahrefs uses crawling software to recreate how a search engine sees websites, allowing you to to see networks of incoming links and how you can tap into that traffic through better link management.
Pricing
7-day trial for $7; paid plans start at $99 per month.
29. SEMRUSH
An “all-in-one digital marketing tool”, SEMRUSH is a comprehensive workflow tool for SEO. The platform allows you to audit your SEO performance, track position for keywords, generate ideas for gaining traffic, as well as monitor competitors. SEMRUSH also offers analytics for paid online campaigns and social media, however their strongest offering is the organic analytics component.
Pricing
Plans start at $100 per month.
Alternatives
Social Media Tools for Startups
30. Buffer
Coordinated social media marketing is one of the most effective marketing tools available to companies of any size. Social media management platforms allow you to automate and batch the entire social media marketing process.
Plan and curate your content calendar, compose and schedule your messages and then spread them out over the course of a day or week.
Buffer’s free plan allows you to have one profile from three networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest) and schedule up to 10 posts ahead of time for each network. The Buffer team also maintain an excellent blog, providing ideas for acquisition strategies and advanced social media marketing tips.
Pricing
Free (with paid plans for additional features).
Alternatives
Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Oktopost, MeetEdgar, Crowdfire
31. Livestorm
Livestorm is a webinar platform that is “GDPR ready and delivers a HIPPA compliant streaming technology.” All features are included in Livestorm’s pricing model. The only variable is the number of people who can attend your webinar.
The starter plan includes 100 attendees. Higher-level plans enable webinars of up to 250 and 500 attendees.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $99 per month.
Alternatives
Conclusion
We hope this list has given you some new ideas for tools that can help your startup grow.
We encourage you to check out our other resources that you might find helpful for startups, including articles on building a marketing automation stack for less than $300, how to gain more visibility into your web traffic, or a much expanded list of lead generation tools to grow your customer base.
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