Launching a business without a well-thought-through marketing strategy is like recording music and not releasing it for public consumption. No one will know about it, and your efforts, no matter how creatively brilliant, would have been in vain. It is, therefore, essential for startup owners to employ a vertical-relevant planning strategy that includes a thorough SWOT analysis in order to understand their target audience, and how to best engage them for increased sales, retention, and overall brand awareness.
In this blog, we discuss why startups need marketing tools, highlight a few marketing tools with sales and brand-enhancing properties as focal points, and let you in on how the Giftsenda platform can help startups ignite their ROI campaigns and reach their sales and brand familiarity objectives.
Why Startups Need Marketing Tools
In order to understand the relevance of marketing tools and how these play a pivotal role in brand awareness, catalyzed growth, and enhanced sales pipeline activity, it’s paramount to look at the business landscape as a system made up of smaller elements:
- The Idea: Based on research and founded on an identification of a need where adequate supply is still pending.
- Founding personnel: The people involved in the creation and execution of the idea.
- Plan of action: A plan stipulating how you will go about implementing your strategies.
- Capital/ resources: Means to execute the idea.
- Marketing Tools: Platforms and processes that enable the creation and sharing of messaging about the idea, its philosophy, what needs and wants it addresses, and how people can buy into the idea.
Ideally, the above elements cannot function in isolation due to their interdependence, and of all, marketing tools play a prime role in introducing the idea to the masses. That is, it is through a business’s marketing efforts that potential buyers are introduced to a brand, understand its objectives and what it stands for, and finally, buy into the brand. Therefore, without such efforts, a business is as good as nonexistent, as far as the buyer is concerned.
Five Marketing Tools For Startups
1. HubSpot
Thanks to its Inbound marketing features, Hubspot enables seamless deal exporting, pipeline forecasting, and is a robust digital marketing solution that helps startups and marketing teams visualize their efforts without manual labor. The platform also plays a role in helping attract potential customers through valuable content marketing. That is, buyer behavior is influenced by well-themed content streamlined and driven through the Hubspot interface, with additional reporting functions that enable response and engagement-rate tracking.
Thanks to its ease of integration with other marketing enablement tools, Hubspot places itself as the preferred CRM, deal management, and overall marketing enhancing tool.
2. MailChimp
If your startup were tasked with highlighting the benefits of launching email marketing campaigns, you’d return with scrolls upon scrolls of stats backing the efficacy of such campaigns – especially given the fact that emails are central in driving core business comms. For this reason, employing the services of MailChimp will cut down on the admin involved in manually sifting through email addresses and after clicking send, anticipating responses while unsure of delivery, receipt, or viewing. Mailchimp helps you analyze the data from the billions of emails they send to give you personalized recommendations for improving your content, targeting, and automations. They also have an easy-to-use email builder to ensure that your emails make the impact that you want them to. This platform is particularly great for startups, because of the free plan that is available.
3. Google Analytics
The greater the traffic, the better the conversion rate, and that’s where Google Analytics joins the party. From monthly sessions to sources of traffic, the number of new users vs. the old, and search locations, Google Analytics collates all the data your startup relies on to measure potential return on investment, and the service, depending on the magnitude of use, may come at no cost to your startup.
So, if you’ve discovered your niche, and have curated the content to match and launch continuous engagement, awareness, and conversion campaigns, then Google Analytics is the tool to integrate with the rest of your marketing tools. Simple to use, accessible, and data-friendly.
4. Hootsuite
Though traditional marketing still returns with good tidings and a healthy harvest in due seasons, especially when the targets are traditional and non-millennial consumers, digitally enabled marketing tactics are taking over, forcing brands to shift into a more digital approach when it comes to product introduction and marketing. As such, integrating a social media marketing tool such as Hootsuite will give strides to your steps, and allow you to centrally manage all brand-related content across a plethora of social media platforms. With Hootsuite, you can create, schedule, manage and monitor content, all on the same dashboard. What’s more, you can engage your users and respond to queries as they come.
5. Giftsenda
Giftsenda is an international corporate gifting platform designed to enable marketing, sales, and CX teams to break through the noise and make meaningful business connections through high-quality gift experiences – resulting in more revenue, conversions, and improved ROI. Our gifting and direct mail platform provides ultimate access to a wide variety of specially curated gifts in more than 200 countries, coupled with intuitive automation tools, Google mail, and Hubspot, amongst others.
The idea behind launching well-planned and themed corporate gifting campaigns stems from the desire to cause positive disruptions in the way startups communicate with their clients, prospects, and associates. While generic pitch-enhanced emails are the order of the day, reward-driven emails are seldom received. So, when recipients receive gift invites, a psychological reciprocation impulse is triggered, resulting in returned mail and consequently, increased conversion and better relationships.
- You need not have recipients’ addresses on hand as they are given the liberty to decide when and where to receive gifts.
- Recipients can either accept, swap, reject or donate the proceeds of the gift to a platform-listed charity.
- You can choose from themed and price-curated collections that can be shared using gift links, and allow recipients to choose from a selection of items.
- Your funds are only utilized when gift invites are accepted by recipients.
- Reporting is a breeze thanks to a dedicated campaign monitoring dashboard.
- Integrate your CRM with our platform for easy gifting.
Ready to get started with corporate gifting on a global scale? Book a 30-minute demo with one of our Gift Campaign Managers to see how our gifting platform works and to create an account.
