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Startup marketing can feel like a never-ending item on your to-do list. There are new strategies to pursue, tactics to try, channels to join, and audiences to engage—and even enterprises with massive teams and budgets don’t always get it right.
Fortunately, you’re not alone. Whether “marketing” is one of your many hats or you’re building out a small team, you can find plenty of low-cost (and free) marketing tools to help scale your startup. Below, we’ll walk you through the best marketing tools for startups in 2023 and how each can help grow your business.
With so many marketing tools to choose from, finding the right one can feel like looking for a polar bear in a snowstorm. Use the following criteria to narrow down your selection and accelerate your decision-making process:
Marketing is an expansive field. It entails everything from outreach to branding to communications to design to automation—and more. Below, we’ve identified the most powerful, low-cost tools to help you with just about every aspect of your marketing function.
Twilio helps power your conversations with customers across email, SMS, voice, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and chat. It provides scalable pricing that grows with your business, keeping itself affordable at every stage of your startup’s progression. Create a free account to unlock thousands of hours of contact center access, hundreds of monthly emails, and thousands of upfront notification requests.
Buffer is a social media management tool that helps you consolidate and manage all your channels from a single dashboard and calendar. It streamlines planning your content calendar and engaging with your audience. Buffer’s free plan lets you manage up to 3 channels with basic publishing tools and integrations.
Canva is an easy-to-use design platform that provides you with drag-and-drop tools, templates, and graphics to create everything from social media posts to presentations to downloadable PDFs. The tool is free to use, and you might never find a reason to upgrade to a premium account.
Whether you’re a seasoned wordsmith or a reluctant writer, Grammarly can help catch typos and mistakes and improve your overall sentence and paragraph structure. It’s a must-have for any marketing team, especially if you don’t have a full-time editor.
Find non-stocky stock images for free with Unsplash. You’ll find it loaded with thousands of high-resolution photos that don’t require attribution or royalties. Use these images to spice up your branding and give your website pages a splash of life and color.
IFTTT (short for If This Then That) is a free-to-use no-code tool that helps automate your programs and devices. Want to post to social media whenever you publish a new article? It can help make it happen. Want to automatically save Gmail attachments to Dropbox? IFTTT can get the job done.
Slack is a peer-to-peer and group instant workplace messaging platform. It’s become the golden standard for easy-to-use communications and requires little-to-no setup time or learning curve. Many businesses use this communication tool, helping you connect with partners, clients, and your team from a single platform. Slack’s free plan limits your conversation history to 90 days, but it’s the perfect solution for startups and businesses at scale.
Keep you and your team organized and on track with this project management software application. Manage your projects, tasks, and to-do lists using Asana’s simple user interface. Asana’s free plan lets you collaborate with up to 15 team members and gives you access to all the basic tools you need to start working together.
Store documents, organize files, and start sharing with your team using a free Dropbox account. You’ll get up to 2 GB of storage from the get-go with scalable pricing as you exceed that capacity. Dropbox has a beautiful user interface that’s easy to learn and navigate.
Track user engagement, customer acquisition, time on page, and more by enabling Google Analytics on your website. Google Analytics is robust, free, and popular enough to have extensive documentation for building out whatever reports you need to track business growth.
Segment is a customer data platform that lets you connect your applications to Segment to collect, clean, and use your data. It gives you a complete, up-to-date view of your customers, empowering you with better targeting and personalization. Free Segment users get data on 1,000 visitors per month with up to 2 sources.
Track your time to become more efficient, document projects, and monitor workloads with Toggl. Toggl’s free plan lets you track unlimited time, projects, clients, and tags with up to 5 users.
Trust our powerful (but simple) cloud solution so that you can spend less time digging through documentation and more time building your business. We ensure your bills are predictable and affordable with pricing that scales with your startup.
Sign up for a DigitalOcean account to start building your product on DigitalOcean’s virtual servers, databases, and more.
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