21 Free or Almost Free Marketing Tools for Startups (that they actually use)

David Baeza
Jul 25, 2017 · 2 min read

I work with quite a few early stage venture backed tech startups so I have a very good perspective in terms of the tools. And in most cases, I’m choosing the tools for them.

The ones I list below are in no particular order and most companies select a handful to use depending on their growth stage.

Hubspot: Robust but affordable sales/marketing CRM

Drip: Light weight marketing CRM

Zapier: Integrations

Slack: Community and chat

Mailchimp: Email

Coschedule: content management

Trello: Light editorial and project management

Moz: Inbound link profile for content development

Buzzsumo: content performance

SEMRush: Competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic, paid search, and link building.

Tweetdeck: Social monitoring

Hootsuite: Social monitoring

Buffer: Automated content publishing

Heap: Comprehensive web and mobile customer analytics

Google Analytics: Basic web analytics

Owler: Competitive information

Lead Pages (landing pages)

99Designs (freelance design work)

Clearbit: Data enrichment

Drift: Web and in-app messaging bot

The most important takeaway is that the tools alone will not make you successful. The tools require fuel, and the fuel is amazing content.

If you put most of your efforts into content development and syndication, you’ll materially increase your odds of success.

If you like this please Share.

Have questions, hit me up @davidbaeza on Twitter.

David Baeza

Written by

@DavidBaeza is CEO at Buttered Toast, a marketing agency that works with venture backed tech startups. Entrepreneur, speaker and consultant.

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