Top 21 Growth Marketing Tools Organized By Funnel Stage

Are you looking for the right growth hacking tools to scale your startup? If so, you are in the right place. 🙂

While there are tons of great growth marketing tools out there aiming to measure and automate your activities, choosing the best ones involves a lot of challenges and considerations.

In this blog post, I will not go through what considerations you should do in order to choose the best tools. I will provide an updated list and tips based on my personal working experience for the top 21 growth marketing tools organised by funnel stages. Most of them I have personally used in the past to grow the revenue of clients for startups and my personal projects. I hope these tips will give you a tangible boost in performance.

I’ve organised these growth hacking tools into the following categories:

• Social Media Management
• Conversion Rate Optimisation
• Automation and Scraping
• Traffic and Contents
• Email Marketing
• Customer Feedback

Are you ready? let’s get started!

Social Media Management

1. SproutSocial

Stage = Full Funnel

You’ve probably heard of SproutSocial! It’s an easy-to-use online social media management software for growing businesses. It helps to publish and schedule posts across accounts so you can schedule posts and analyse performance. SproutSocial offers also branding listening features and reporting making it easy to analyse the results on each platform and engage with your community.

2. Planable

Stage = Productivity 

Working remotely you might be looking for a social media management tool that helps to approve posts from senior managers, remote teams or clients. In this case, Planable is an end-to-end workflow tool that makes content collaboration fast and painless. It offers free plans to get started. It is also a good option for freelancers & startups with up to 3 team members

Conversion Rate Optimisation

3. Hotjar

Stage = Acquisition / Activation 

Hotjar is a great tool that shows where users scroll and click on your website telling you where users are dropping off along your sales funnels. You can get started for free capturing up to 1,000 pageviews/heatmaps. Conversion rate optimization is the most powerful input in driving growth for startups. The value of a holistic approach begins with the experience visitors encounter when they land on our website and then helps the customer focus on the right thing – As Jim Herbold said: “The CRO’s purpose is to align and optimize the entire customer experience with the aim of increasing revenue” 

4. VWO

Stage = Full funnel

VWO is an A/B Testing platform for a cloud-based solution that helps startups and more established companies create and perform experiments. I recommend using VWO instead of other tools like (Amplitude) if you work for early-stage startups with a tight budget. I reported in this blog post, my personal opinion and detailed comparison between three A/B Testing tools.

5. Google Analytics

Stage = Full Funnel 

Google Analytics is my personal favourite tool for growth marketing. It was launched for the first time on 14th November 2005, it has evolved a lot since then. The new Google Analytics 4 property measurement is event-based, with the principle that any interaction can be captured as an event. Events represent a fundamental data model difference between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 properties. With new integrations across Google’s marketing products, it’s easy to understand how users interact with your website, and where they come from to improve the ROI of your marketing.

Automation and Scraping

6. Zapier

Stage = Full Funnel 

Zapier is an automation platform that allows end-users to integrate the web applications they use with the aim to focus on their most important work and scale. It is a very popular software among marketers working in startups because with a few clicks, you can connect your favourite tools via a zap. The beauty of Zapier is that is possible to automate tasks by creating and customizing Zaps in minutes, let’s say by Google Spreadsheet, Gmail, Slack, and Google Calendar. Explore ways to use Zapier, here!

7. Madgicx

Stage = Full Funnel 

MadMagicx is an automation ad optimisation tool platform specialising in Paid media. It helps find the right audience and attribution solutions with split testing and autonomous optimization. It also predicts the best budget allocation across channels with the use of AI. Other competitors are: Smartly, AdEspresso and Adscook. I would recommend using Madgicx as it offers a free trial with very responsive account management support. Give it a try!

8. Phantombuster

Stage = Awareness / Acquisition 

Phantombuster is a no-code SaaS scraping and automation software that allows marketers to extract data & automate outreach on social networks. For example, it extracts professional emails from a Sales Navigator search, automatically sends social network requests and turns a LinkedIn search into a list of emails. I would recommend any brands do not overuse this tactic. However, this can be a great way for early-stage startups or marketing agencies to get started in the industry.

9. ManyChat

Stage = Awareness / Acquisition 

ManyChat helps to build chatbots for Facebook Messenger in no time. That way you can expand your audience, driving more leads and engaging prospects inbound marketing (marketing, sales, Social Networks and customer support). Besides, is possible to integrate ManyChat with CRM, Active Campaigns and Zapier. It has all the tools needed to engage your audiences in many verticals. Although ManyChat claims you can set up a new chatbot in about two minutes, I would recommend taking training to set up your first flows.

10. Landbot

Stage = Awareness / Acquisition 

Landbot is a no-code conversational tool that creates chatbots, landing pages, interactive surveys, and lead-generation bots. You can customise the customer flow intuitively. I love their tone and the possibility to customise chatbots with free GIFS and images. It is also compatible with WordPress.

Traffic and Contents

11. Answer the Public

Stage = Awareness / Acquisition 

Many of you should be already familiar with AnswerThePublic, an SEO tool popular in the online marketing scene, based in Brighton (UK).  I use AnswerThePublic in the discovery phase of new SEO/Paid Media topics and terms for new projects. The tool helps me discover new related terms and long-tail keywords. It’s a goldmine of consumer insight you can use to see what customers think, and what they looking for and then download visual content and charts.

12. SE Ranking

Stage = Awareness / Acquisition 

SERanking is an all-in-one SEO software providing keyword rank tracking for SEO and PPC competitive research, backlink checking & monitoring. Why I would recommend SE Ranking? If you work as a Growth Marketing Manager for early-stage startups with a tight budget you should appreciate their pricing options: The price for the Essential plan starts at €23/monthly (August 2021) which is way lower than its competitors.

13. SEMRush

Stage = Awareness / Acquisition 

This is a SaaS that needs no introduction. From SEO, content marketing, and competitor research to PPC and social media marketing in just one platform.  SemRush is one of the complete analytics software suites able to provide keyword research tools and external trends data in one platform. Plus, I recommend exploring their awesome Blog collections about SEO, Social Media and How-To-Guide.

14. SpyFu

Stage = Awareness / Acquisition 

SpyFu founded in 2005 in the US, is a competitive intelligence tool for SEO and PPC. Why should you use SpyFu? Type in a domain name to see all of the keywords it ranks for, any ads (if active) and competitors. Although SpyFu is an all-in-one platform, I would recommend using SpyFu mainly for competitive analysis, insights and reporting.

15. Influencity + Impact.com

Stage = Full Funnel

Influencer marketing is growing rapidly and it’s evolving on YouTube, Social Media and Twitch. Every Growth Marketing Manager should consider allocating a budget to influencer marketing and partnerships. Finding the right influencer might be tricky and time-consuming. However, thanks to Influencity with a few clicks, you can easily find your next partner. The company headquartered in Madrid helps to analyse and filter influencers by KPIs, verticals and social media in no time. Along with Influencity, I utilised Impact.com to track influencers’ performance across any property and device.

Email Marketing

16. Active Campaigns

Stage = Awareness / Acquisition 

Active Campaigns is a customer growth automation SaaS software company based in Chicago, Illinois. Automate conversations by email, Whatsapp, text messages, and Facebook segmenting audiences. A drag-and-drop automation builder lets you set up automated workflows in minutes.

17. Mailchimp

Stage = Full Funnel 

Founded in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Mark Armstrong Mailchimp is one of the most popular marketing automation platforms and email marketing services. Why it is so appreciated in the market? Because of its great user interface, the tracking setup autoresponders; its ability to create beautiful email templates and split test our campaigns. Also, it is compatible with WordPress through Free Plugins.

18. Hubspot – Sales Hub

Stage = Full Funnel 

Hubspot is a complete CRM platform with all the tools you need to grow your startup: to increase leads, accelerate sales, streamline customer service, or build a powerful website. In this case, I would recommend using “Sales Hub” if you are looking to outreach new customers by email. It provides Sales automation and Email sequences.

Customer Feedback

19. Typeform

Stage = Full Funnel 

If you are looking for a way to build simple surveys and questionnaires don’t look further! With Typeform you can easily create fun, beautiful, quizzes and surveys, for free. All you need to get started is an email address. Getting customer feedback has never been easier! Improve your startup and iterate your MVP making use of Typeform, an astonishing product headquartered in Barcelona.

20. Google Survey

Stage = Full Funnel 

Understanding customers’ requirements are the key to the success of every marketing team and startup. If you are looking for a customer feedback survey tool 100% free and able to be integrated with your Google account, this is the right choice you should make! Google Survey is a very powerful tool you can connect with Google Spreadsheet and your Google Drive account. Also, it works as a Google Chrome web browser extension.

21. Usability Hub

Stage = Awareness 

Because first impression matter! A simple way of using Usability Hub is through the “Five Second Test”. Optimize the clarity of your Above the Fold designs by measuring people’s recall and first impressions. UsabilityHub is a fantastic tool with a low barrier to entry, also affordable, as an alternative solution to more structured A/B testing.

Conclusions

In order to scale a startup, it’s crucial for entrepreneurs and growth marketing managers to market their products effectively. There are many challenges down the road, however, scalability is possible with the best growth hacking strategies and tools. A growth hacker is someone who is clever, original, and innovative. Thanks to the adoption of the right software, a successful system can be transformed into growth revenue and tangible results.

If you need help choosing tools for your startups I have the experience you are looking for! Get 30 mins free consultancy.