Justin Rees, founder of Talking Customers, shares the top 6 tools to help you market your tech startup.
Over the last few years I have met with many startups and unsurprisingly the most common thing they all want to discuss is how to generate leads for their fledgling businesses.
Lead generation is crucial for all companies. Whether you have a B2C money saving App or you are selling a high value B2B service, without a steady flow of customer enquiries you are going to come unstuck pretty quickly.
The good news is that there are a myriad of ways to generate leads and a raft of nifty tech solutions to help you get your product in front of people, manage those enquiries and track the results.
The following list could easily have been the top twenty tools but I managed to cut it down to just six that could potentially make a material difference to your customer acquisition efforts:
1. Taboola – paid content distribution platform
Google used to be the first port of call for any advertiser looking to start generating enquiries but over the last few years it has become increasingly expensive and complex.
Luckily the rise of content marketing has created a now ubiquitous ad unit that permeates the mobile and desktop web.
Nearly every major (and increasingly minor) online publisher carries a variety of sponsored content widgets on their web properties.
Companies like Taboola allow you to access this inventory for just a few pennies per click.
If you have a product or service that lends itself to content marketing them through Taboola’s self-serve dashboard you could be driving thousands of clicks and leads per week very quickly.
2. Leadbyte – lead tracking and distribution platform
Once you have started generating leads you need an efficient way to track where the leads are coming from but also make sure that the data is accurate.
If you are paying affiliates for generating leads for you this is even more crucial as you only want to pay for genuine enquiries.
Leadbyte provides a very simple yet comprehensive platform for doing all of this and more.
From the ability to validate a consumer’s phone number in real-time to setting up SMS auto-responders to help you increase contact and conversion rates you will soon wonder how you could have ever lived without it.
3. Iovox – call tracking Platform
The internet economy has ballooned over the last decade and many tasks that used to take hours or even days to complete can now be accomplished online with just a few clicks.
Our phones have virtually replaced our PCs and Laptops as the hub of all this activity and millions of us now do everything from online banking to booking our next holiday from the palm of our hand.
However, the fact remains that the smartphones can still make calls and you might not realise it but we make a lot of them.
A recent report predicted we would be making 162 billion calls each year to businesses from our smartphones.
That is a number that no company can ignore. So if you don’t track calls to and from your business then you are potentially missing out.
Companies like Iovox provide a powerful platform to track all call related activity to help you do everything from work out which of your ads generate the most inbound calls to setting up an IVR to ensure all your calls are routed to the correct teams.
4. AdRoll – re-targeting platform
No matter how good your marketing is and no matter how much you have optimised your landing pages the fact remains that only a small percentage of website visitors will ever convert immediately when they hit your website.
The ability to re-target these prospective customers over time can turn an average or poorly performing marketing campaign into a money making machine.
AdRoll provides one of the simplest ways to get started with re-targeting.
All you need to do is add some simple lines of code to your website, tell the system which visitors to re-target based on the pages they visit, upload some ads, set your budget and away you go.
5. Driftrock – Facebook marketing platform
I think it’s fair to say these days that if you don’t market your products and services on Facebook then you must be totally insane.
To borrow from a famous quote, a marketing plan that didn’t include Facebook would be like playing golf with only half a bag of clubs.
The problem with Facebook is that if you don’t know what you are doing you can lose a lot of money very quickly and to make it work you need a platform that can help you do the right things and make sure you can keep doing them at scale.
That is where Driftrock comes in. Their platform and tools give you a much better chance of getting it right from the start and will ensure you keep hitting your CPA targets as you increase your budgets.
6. AppsFlyer – mobile attribution analytics
The App is now fundamental to many businesses and in many cases it is the business.
Gone are the days though where you could launch a new App and rely on organic installs from the App Stores to get you hundreds of thousands of new customers.
The good news is that there are hundreds of networks and specialists to help you get new users for your App but you need a powerful and robust platform to track all of this activity both in terms of driving installs but also the crucial post install events such as registrations and sales.
AppsFlyer provides just the kind of platform that every App owner needs and what really makes them stand out is the fact they are already integrated with the majority of suppliers which dramatically reduces the time to get set up and start generating revenue.