Digital marketing is one of the first things you have to nail in order to start reaching minimum viable product and product marketing fit. Check out this quick list of tools, that are mostly free, that should be set up early for your B2B SaaS startup. Enjoy!
Howdie!
I’m back with another blog and this time we are going to be talking about digital marketing tools.
Yes, literally every marketer boasts about “x” tool or swears by “y” software - and a lot of times they are justified.
But, just because it makes sense for their business doesn’t necessarily mean it makes sense for yours.
AND a lot of times the tools they are swearing by are pretty darn expensive and oftentimes are not worth it.
So in this blog we are going to walk through our basic tech stack and explain why this lean way of doing things for our company works well.
Let’s get into it.
Alright, so before you do any marketing, you will need to have a way to digitally connect with your users - and your website is the best way to do that.
It’s essentially the only way a prospect can visit your business for early stage SaaS startups.
So it’s really important to make a great first impression.
Using Webflow to create your site is likely one of the best decisions you can make to immediately impress your prospects with visually appealing, and keep them secure with a safe backend.
Wordpress sites are just not in anymore - security problems and boring interfaces make, coupled with weaker backend power than Webflow means that you should make the switch and be a part of the early majority.
Otherwise, you risk losing prospects.
For some of these tools, we are going to keep things simple - and Google Tag Manager is one of them.
Essentially, it’s vital to place this on your site early, that way you can efficiently tag your software on your site with little to no problems - and maintain your site’s structural backend integrity with a simple to view tag management tool.
Get your free analytics on your site fast by connecting your data stream to your Google Tag Manager.
Easy. Like super easy.
Make sure you connect your Google Search Console and have your website crawled by Google!
Not only is this important for your site to show up, but it also helps you rank for queries your prospects are searching for - AND allows you to track your performance in the search results.
For example, you can view what people searched for and if you site showed up as an impression, if someone clicked into your site from that search result, and the rate at which they did that.
Pretty cool. All free.
Although it is sunsetting this September (2023) - it is still the best free AB testing software on the market.
And it’s super easy to tag in your Google Tag Manger.
We will talk all about AB testing in the future - but for this blog, all you need to know is that Optimize is your best AB Testing tool.
AND
It’s free. Wow.
Hubspot is definitely not the best CRM out there - but it’s free and has a lot of integrations that make it really awesome.
For a myriad of reasons, we have chosen to use Hubspot as our CRM of choice - but primarily because it is cheap, and it offers a lot of functionality that most other CRM’s do not provide.
Create forms, simple automations, send emails, track your customers, companies, and deals all very quickly.
Pretty cool.
So here at Optimize, we personally do not use Typeform very much -
But
If you have trouble setting up a multistep form on Webflow (psst… we can show you how)
Then we would recommend simply embedding a typeform.
It’s easy, relatively free with a 10 response limit each month, and make’s prospect’s live’s easier when it comes time for them to contact you.
You thought we forgot about Heatmapping?
Of course not.
Make sure you get your free heatmapping tool on your site very early on, as well.
This will be beneficial for when you run ads and you’re analyzing behavior of your landing pages.
We are breaking into Airtable early to let you know that if you aren’t using it - you should start.
Pairing Airtable with your Webflow website can massively increase your SEO with programmatic SEO pages.
We have a lot of future blogs that are going to be walking you through this process but it’s awesome and allows you to create 100+ pages in literally just a couple hours.
It’s super cool.
A great segway from our Airtable to Webflow is Whalesync.
A relatively new software has made PSEO pages easier to create has been Whalesync.
This software is your marketing automation tool that can quickly link the Webflow CMS to Airtable with a 2 way sync.
Data changed in Airtable or data changed in Webflow can adjust in both platforms.
This means pairing Airtable tables with Webflow’s CMS can result in tons and tons of new pages.
Really cool. We will talk more about this later.
And it’s pretty cheap for $40 / month.
Not going to spend too much time here.
When you get started it’s vital to create a brand campaign for your B2B SaaS startup.
When someone searches for your name or your companies name then you want to make sure you show up in the search results.
Early on, you don’t have much search authority so Google Ads is a cheap alternative to bypass that.
Do the same on Bing. Bing is quickly becoming more popular with the eventual release of New Bing.
Plus, it’s super easy to quickly import all of your campaigns from Google Ads to Bing.
Again, a cheap alternative to bypassing SEO early on.
While you are creating your brand campaign, go ahead and set up your retargeting campaigns.
Retargeting pixels are on all your social media outlets and it’s easy to add them to your Google Tag Manager.
These audiences need to be at least 300 members large before your ads start to show - so setting up the campaigns early and making sure these pixels are capturing users is super important for your startup.
And by the time they do have enough members in the audience, it means that is worth showing those retargeting ads to those people.
Again, a relatively cheap way to capture some high intent audiences.
So you can definitely create some Hubspot reports and dashboards - and you totally should.
But since you set up all your ppc and social media campaigns, go ahead and set up some dashboards to track their performance.
You can get canva which is pretty great, and cheap… and will likely be the best choice for most people who aren’t graphic designers.
$10 a month or $120 a year.
Or you can Photoshop which is a lot more nuanced and harder to use - plus it is more expensive coming in at $20+ a month so $240 a year.
Your choice - but early on you likely will not have a graphic designer right by your side so you may need to make graphics on your own.
Get your free digital copywriting assistant to write your campaign slogans for you - especially if you aren’t really good at telling your story.
Although they won’t be perfect, they will get you very far with writing your content.
Not to mention the amount of time you will get to save using AI to solve some of these lower level problems.
There are definitely some other tools that we didn’t touch upon, but these are an amazing starting point for any B2B SaaS founder looking to drive results with some digital marketing tools.
Hope you found this helpful.
Until next time...
To your success,
Ian "Your Favorite Growth Hacker" Binek
We bring an analytical, and no BS approach to bringing A+ marketing to your B2B SaaS startup. Subscribing may be the best offer you have been made all day. Literally free, ninja tips that work. And I notify you when I make a new post. You tell me who is winning here. I'll wait.
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