22 must-have tools for every growth marketer’s toolkit

Being a marketer is hard work these days. There are more companies and more money fighting for less attention. New channels rise, fall and rise again faster than ever before. Finding new customers, retaining existing ones, and growing a new business or product require a herculean effort with no guarantees for success.

There is little relief in sight: Companies can’t afford to throw more people at marketing challenges, and many are skeptical of marketing’s ability to generate measurable value, making them reluctant to invest further.

This is the challenge marketers wake up to everyday.

To make matters worse, there are a sea of tools, technologies and providers clamoring for budget and attention from marketers who need just one thing: the right solution, right now.

Give ordinary people the right tools, and they will design and build the most extraordinary things. — Neil Gershenfeld

That’s why, today, I wanted to share 27 essential tools that I (and other marketers) rely on to do my job as a growth marketer and COO to grow my business. These tools range from analytics, optimization and testing, email and social media management, marketing automation, customer support, marketing know-how and more.

They’re so important that we’ve highlighted them in Hacking Growth, the new book that I wrote with Sean Ellis. Hacking Growth is the playbook for how fast-growing companies drive breakout success. In it we detail the mindset, process, organizational differences and tools that companies that grow use to win.

If you think other marketers might benefit from this info, please ❤️ this article.

The Tools (see them all listed here)

Analytics — the tools that help you understand the “what” to help you decide where to go next. Let’s face it, Google Analytics is great, but it’s not going to give you the detailed insights you need to make your best decisions.

• Kissmetrics — A person-based analytics platform that makes it easy to measure and track cohorts of people and their behaviors over time.
• Mode Analytics—an analytics platform built for analysts. Tightly integrated SQL, Python, and reporting tools give you the power and flexibility to answer any question and deliver meaningful recommendations.
• ChartMogul—Use metrics like MRR, churn rate, LTV and ARPA to understand your subscriptions, and tools like Cohort Analysis and Segmentation to make informed decisions.

Marketing Automation—smart marketers know that the most powerful campaigns are the ones that are targeted, relevant and keep working over time.

• Autopilot—A visual email marketing software for automating customer journeys.
• Drift—A sales communication platform that helps businesses generate more leads and close deals faster using messaging.
• Vero—Vero helps organisations turn raw data into meaningful customer messages.
• Mailshake—A simple solution for cold emails. Promote content, build relationships, and generate leads.
• Appcues—Build, test, and optimize powerful onboarding sequences right on your website or product without needing engineering to do so.
• Meet Edgar—Instead of publishing your social media updates just once and throwing them away, Edgar carefully catalogues them in a library that you build over time.
• Zapier—A powerful automation platform that makes it easy to connect services together for better marketing workflows.

Customer Feedback and Optimization—While analytics tells you “what” is happening, it can’t tell you “why”. That’s where these tools come into play—to give you the insights behind the numbers.

• Crazy Egg—Crazy Egg heatmaps are like a pair of x-ray glasses that lets you see exactly what people are doing on your website.
• UserTesting—Get videos of real people speaking their thoughts as they use Websites, Mobile Apps, Prototypes and more.
• Olark—Your customers want to chat with you. Answer their questions before they leave your website with Olark.
• Zendesk—Zendesk is the leading customer support and communication software on the Web. They help improve communication and make sense of massive amounts of data.

Growth Tools—These essentials support the rapid experimentation and learning cycle that keeps fast-growing companies learning and headed up and to the right.

• Unbounce—Build landing pages fast to get more conversions. Quickly build custom landing pages for any campaign, and use overlays to increase conversions on all your web pages.
• GrowthHackers Projects—GrowthHackers Projects is growth collaboration software for teams. Projects is purpose-built software for an agile approach to growth.

Know-How—All the tools in the world aren’t any good if you don’t know how to use them. That’s why we’ve included these essential courses and guides in the bundle.

• CXL Institute—CXL Institute brings you conversion optimization training program for mid-market to enterprise level marketers. Learn to build and run world class optimization programs and dramatically improve your skills.
• Skillshare—Skillshare is an online learning community where anyone can discover, take, or even teach a class. They have a huge focus on digital marketing and growth-related courses.
• Hooked: How to Build Habit-forming Products by Nir Eyal—Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model.
• Platform Scale by Sangeet Paul Choudary—A practical guide to building platforms: two-sided markets that are revolutionizing the way we do business.
• Facebook Ads for SaaS Startups by Aaron Zakowski—In this book, you’ll find a proven system that you can use to grow new user acquisition, amplify content distribution and increase user onboarding and upgrades.
• Product Analytics Playbook by Amplitude—Retention is critical for every product, but where do you start? Get the 155-page ebook to learn proven methods and strategies for using data to improve user retention.

Obviously, it takes more than just tools to drive growth, it takes a team executing on delivering real value to customers. In Hacking Growth, you’ll learn exactly how top teams like Facebook, Airbnb, LinkedIn and more do just that.