Are you looking for free or low-cost marketing tools that will dramatically change how you market online?

This week at MarTech Europe, Matt Lerner, Distro partner for 500 Startups in London, shared 10 of the best marketing tools that his organization’s growth hackers use for marketing.

500 Startups is a Silicon Valley-based venture firm and accelerator for technology startups. Over the last five years, it’s invested in more than 1,200 companies across 50-plus countries.

One of the secrets behind the company’s success is its team of marketing growth hackers who help startups gain traction through smart marketing tools and techniques. These same tools could potentially be applied to your own online marketing projects to help get results faster and within budget.

Matt Lerner

Matt Lerner of 500 Startups.

The following is a rundown of the tools that Lerner discussed:

Breakdown of tools

1. BuiltWith

BuiltWith analyzes websites and displays a list of the technologies used.

They have a database of more than 250 million websites.

You can enter in one website name or run a filtered report on a group of them.

Understanding what technology your potential customers or competitors are using is very useful. You can generate some potential leads, and you can also analyze trends in terms of typical technology used.

2. Import.io

Import.io is a free tool for scraping content from websites.

For example, if you wanted to grab a group of Twitter addresses, instead of typing them in, you could use Import.io to grab them as a CSV.

No coding skills are required.

3. AdEspresso

Facebook has quite a good advanced ads tool called Power Editor.

But…

If you want a more advanced tool for Facebook ads, AdEspresso is an excellent tool. It allows you to do very advanced multivariate testing and automated design.

You can also do advanced testing in creative, audience demographics, time of day and ad location (mobile, Web and more).

4.Monitor Backlink

If you are doing link-building campaigns to help with ranking on Google, you’ll need to monitor the status of backlinks — for example, new backlinks you gained, what you lost, which ones are good/bad and so on.

Monitor Backlinks does all this monitoring and more.

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a really useful content marketing research tool.

When you’re creating content based on a topic, you can research to find similar content based around the same theme. You can find the most shared content related to that topic and use this information to help you produce the best content, headlines and so on.

6. Hotjar

Hotjar is website-tracking tool that can track activity such as:

  • Heatmaps
  • Individual session recordings
  • Funnel and exit tracking
  • Form analytics
  • Polls and Surveys

7. UserTesting

UserTesting provides a community of people willing to test out your software based on your instruction.

This independent view from someone who probably has never seen your product before is extremely valuable.

8. Unbounce

Unbounce is a fantastic tool for quickly creating landing pages. You select a template, customize it and publish.

You can also easily set up split testing on the different variations of this marketing tool and adjust based on results.

9. Kickbox.io

Drag your list of emails into Kickbox, and it validates your emails.

By sending approved emails, you’ll improve open rates, reduce bounce rates, have fewer chances of getting blocked and experience many other benefits.

10. Mail-tester.com

Send Mail-tester.com a copy of your email, and they’ll let you know if it’s likely to get flagged as spam and will provide recommendations to improve.

Summary

Being smart about the tools you use for marketing can make a massive difference to your results. Lerner shared 10 great tools — which ones are you going to try out? What tools do you use?


This post, 500 Startups At MarTech: 10 Tools You Need For Your Marketing Stack, was first published on MarketingLand.


(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)