Best Digital Marketing Tools for Start-ups with Low Budget

 What exactly is a start-up? Ah! Not talking about the literal meaning!

But every start-up founder knows that it is synonymous with tight finances and time constraints. Every penny and second counts.

And unless you use some digital marketing tools, you will struggle with finances and time for your important business activities.

However, the condition is that the tools you use must be free/low budget ones and easy to handle.

Luckily, you need not spend hours searching for such tools, but only minutes to read this post. Because’ we have done the job for you!

So, let’s take a look at the best business tools for start-ups!

Note: For the sake of convenience, we have divided the digital marketing tools based on their purpose!

Best Digital Marketing Tools for Start-ups

• 1. Start-up Launch tools
• 2. Best Business and Marketing tools
• 3. Best Finance Management Tools
• 4. Team management Tools
• 5. CRM tools
• 6. Design and Development tools
• 7. Customer Experience collecting tools
• Conclusion

1. Start-up Launch tools

• Product Hunt – It’s a brilliant platform for product-based start-up. You can showcase your new and amazing products, mobile apps, tech, and other creations. Free for sign-up, Product Hunt operates on a system of comments and votes from its users, who can share, discuss, and give feedback on your products.

• Cloudways – For pricing as low as $10/month, Cloudways offers website hosting, mentorship, and growth tools through its Start-Up Program.

• Beta List – It is a pre-launch system for start-ups where entrepreneurs can present their start-up idea to an exceptional community of business enthusiasts, and gather valuable feedback from them. This helps start-ups to better understand their customers and create the right product for the right audience. Check out its pricing here.

• Press Kite – Press Kite helps to create a press kit for your start-up which you can send to the journalist for press coverage whenever the need be. You can start with its Free plan or Premium plan for as low as $9/month.

2. Best Business and Marketing tools

• Google Alerts to keep yourself updated about your industry and your competitors. This is imperative to know the latest trends and adapt your business accordingly. Plus, it’s free to join.

• Social media sharing tools like Hootsuite and Buffer help you schedule your social media posts for a few days and save time for other activities. You can schedule up to 30 posts across any social media on its free plan, and also measure the ROI on your social media campaign.

• Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner are free tools to know what your customers want, what they are searching for, and then answer their questions with your content.

• Mailchimp for email marketing. The tool not only allows you to create influential newsletters and emails, but also forms and pop-ups for your website that serve as great lead generation tools. Further, you can segment your email list based on preferences, behaviour, location, etc. to target specific audience.

• Slack for instant messaging to your customers. This is crucial as emails might get lost in their inboxes. Slack allows you to send direct messages, photos, and documents while organizing your team’s conversations into private or public channels.

• Mangools for keyword research. Content of your start-up has to be SEO-optimized, and there’s no tool better than Mangools as it combines the power of 5 SEO tools – KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, LinkMiner, and SiteProfiler. Besides finding the right keywords, you can analyze the search results in any location, compare yourself with competitors, track your keyword positions, and boost them with powerful backlinks.

• Google Analytics is a free tool to track your website traffic and identify what’s working and what’s not. This continuous data evaluation helps you create better digital marketing campaigns for your business and increase the conversion rate.

• Hunter.io helps you in finding business emails connected to any particular domain within seconds. This helps you to connect with the relevant experts for your business.

• CallHippo is a great and powerful Voice-over-internet- Protocol service provider. In simple terms, business phone numbers to help you connect with relevant audience.

• 3dcart is a tool that helps you build your online store with ease, update stock amounts in real time, process payments, and display product information in an eye-catching manner. It offers a free trial for 15 days and the most popular plan comes with a price of $40/month.

• OptinMonster helps you monetize your website traffic by helping you create a compelling incentive to target the website visitors and convert them into your customers.

• Linkedojet for automating your LinkedIn marketing and outreach campaigns. LinkedIn is at the heart of B2B marketing, but you can’t afford to spend hours on searching and connecting with your target audience on it. Let Linkedojet take over with its automation and you focus on other important tasks of your business.

3. Best Finance Management Tools

• Hubdoc – Hubdoc allows you to take pics of all your receipts with your smartphone and upload it on the app to convert it into a usable data. Thus, all your financial documents are secured at one place.

• Float – Float app helps you with cash flow management by offering a real-time financial dashboard. Thus, you can create a budget for your business and keep track of the cash going in and out.

• FounderSuite – It’s an amazing tool to raise funds for your start-up by bringing speed, structure and efficiency to fundraising and investor relationships. It offers a CRM tool for managing your investor funnel, a searchable venture capitalist database, and an Investor Updater tool that helps in creating monthly progress reports. Basic plan of FounderSuite is free.

• Gust – Yet another fundraising start-up, Gust helps entrepreneurs build investable startups with the assistance of mission-critical business tools, powerful performance benchmarks, and trusted fundraising recommendations.

• FreshBooks – FreshBooks is an all-in-one start-up invoicing and accounting software to ensure fast, convenient, and secure bookkeeping. It automates financial tasks such as organizing expenses, invoicing, tracking payments, and following up with the clientele. Pricing starts from $15/month.

4. Team management Tools

• TSheets – Irrespective of the number of employees in your company, it’s crucial to keep track of who is doing what at all times. TSheets app allows you to handle time tracking and scheduling from any device without wasting time on paper cards and complex spreadsheets.

• Trello – A user-friendly project management app, Trello allows you to create boards, lists, and cards to organize projects and collaborate with team members.

• MVP tools – These are for entrepreneurs involved in creating web and mobile apps. MVP tools help you understand the Minimum Value of your product, and experiment with your ideas in your preferred industry.

• Just in Mind – Just in Mind is an all-in-one prototyping solution for web and mobile apps. It allows to apply fully-interactive prototypes from scratch and bring them to life with a click. It also offers a complete range of web interactions and mobile gestures to help you build delightful user experience with your product. Pricing starts from $19/month.

• Balsamiq – It is a low-fidelity wireframing software accessible to entrepreneurs, managers, analysts, developers, agencies and anyone who’s into UX. It provides extensive docs, assists in improving the software with the latest releases and provides support through multiple channels. Check out the pricing here.

5. CRM tools

• HubSpot – A great pick for start-up owners, HubSpot centralizes your contact list and helps you by automatically logging customer interactions and extract data from the web about your potential customers. You can begin by using its free version and upgrade gradually.

• Intercom early stage – It offers you user-friendly products to acquire, onboard, and engage with your potential customers in a personalized manner. You can use Intercom to:

• Improve website conversions with targeted visitor messages and live chat
• Send behavior-based push and email messages to onboard new clients
• Track and segmentize prospects based on persona and the action they take on your website.

• Salesflare – It’s integrated with both Gmail and Office 365 to gather information from your Inbox, meetings, track email opens and clicks, and offers powerful email templates. Their pricing is simple and fair for start-ups offering lucrative discounts.

6. Design and Development tools

• Mockplus – It is a web-based collaborative designing tool with a free basic plan

• Logodesign – It’s an online logo maker tool to give a compelling visual identity to your start-up. With an array of unique logo templates from various industries which are customizable designing your company logo becomes easy and cost-effective. Check out the pricing here.

• Unsplash – A free digital marketing tool that offers high resolution images to design visually appealing promotions and campaigns for your brand.

• Canva – An online graphic designing tool which you can use to design your social media posts, social media head covers, ad campaigns, and others. And good news is that the basic plan is free to use.

• Visme – A powerful designing tool to create amazing presentations, infographics and other forms of visual content.

• Github – One of the best development software for start-ups where development engineers can collaborate and host/review their codes together.

• WordPress – A free, open-source content management system based on PHP and MySQL offers responsive designing, SEO, multiple page styles, and much more to build your websites.

• BuildFire – With BuildFire, you can develop apps for your start-up for both Android and iOS devices with ease and quickly. Several pricing plans are available to choose from.

• DragDropr – DragDropr helps you create your own website with requirement of very little technological background.

7. Customer Experience collecting tools

• Retently – After converting a customer, it’s important to know their satisfaction level with your product/service. Retently uses your Net Promoter Score to judge your performance, how likely your customers will become repeat customers or recommend your product to others, and suggests ways to earn more customer loyalty. The basic plan comes with a free trial.

• Say2b – The software allows to generate return customers by offering them gifts and discounts. And that’s a great way to reward people for coming back to your business, all for a low monthly price.

• WPforms – A tool perfect for WordPress users to develop forms by customizing the template with drag and drop of items in place. It also comes with great features like being able to track your leads, easily collect payments, spam protection, and being mobile-friendly. Best of all, it’s affordable!

Conclusion

That’s it! A list of the best digital marketing tools curated after thorough research and consideration. Each of these tools is beneficial to keep your business operations quick, convenient, and efficient. They can maximize your potential and increase your ROI.

Did we miss out on any digital marketing tool/resource? Feel free to mention it in the comments below!

This content originally appeared here on: https://linkedojet.com/blog/digital-marketing-tools-start-ups/

Boost your Lead Generation Efforts with AI-powered Inbox Management

Do you know how many messages are received by a person in his LinkedIn Inbox per day?

Well, it’s somewhere between 30-40. This means nearly 200-250 in a week.

But every message in your Inbox doesn’t carry the same value. And Inbox overload leads to overall information overload, impeding your concentration and productivity.

That’s why you need to segregate them based on priority and your business value.

Now, you may think! Dealing with stuffed inboxes is crucial, but dealing with them manually? Is that workable?

Absolutely not!

Then, what’s the solution? That’s what we’ll tell you in this post- Smart Inbox management on LinkedIn. So, stay hooked!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered Inbox Management

AI-powered tools, be it chatbots, smart cameras or machine-guided proofreading, are being increasingly used around the world.

Now, the same AI can be helpful in your LinkedIn Inbox management. Linkedojet has added a new AI feature to its LinkedIn automation.

This AI tool automatically and intelligently categorizes the replies you receive in your LinkedIn Inbox as positive, negative, or neutral. So, it takes away the trouble of dealing with stuffed Inbox and segregating valuable responses manually.

Let’s understand this with an example.

You run an outreach campaign on LinkedIn about your new product targeting the pharmaceutical companies across India. You reach the decision makers of major pharmaceutical companies, persuading them for a free trial of the product.

Now, when you message hundreds of people on LinkedIn (using LinkedIn automation to save time), you will not receive the same message in your Inbox.

Some messages will read “Interested”, some ‘Not interested’ while some just pay regards to your greetings and reply in the same tone. So, how will you segregate these responses and continue with your campaign with only those who show an interest in your previous message?

Linkedojet’s AI feature comes to your rescue. It will detect the type of response received based on few keywords and tag them as positive, negative, and neutral. This way you need not manually segregate your LinkedIn Inbox messages and save lots of time and efforts in replying to them.

Plus, with Linkedojet, you can reply to the positive ones within the tool’s dashboard, keeping all your campaign activities organized.

Linkedojet goes a step ahead to help you in LinkedIn Inbox Management. It allows you to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts from a single dashboard.

That means AI-powered Inbox management of not just one, but multiple LinkedIn accounts; all from a single place.

How does that sound? Great, isn’t it?

So, what’s the bottom line?

Bottom Line

With LinkedIn Inbox getting more and more stuffed per day, AI is the only promising solution to handle the overload. It helps in sorting out the relevant and valuable messages in your LinkedIn Inbox, thus reducing the time spent on reading irrelevant messages.

Therefore, AI-powered LinkedIn Inbox management definitely is a smart way to focus your attention on important messages and minimize harmful effects on your concentration and productivity.

This content originally appeared here on: https://linkedojet.com/blog/ai-powered-inbox-management/

 

How to become a LinkedIn Influencer

 A thought leader or an industry leader in a particular niche is referred to as a LinkedIn Influencer. Probably, it reminds of you of personalities like Melinda Gates, Daymond John, etc. who have million followers on the platform.

However, any individual or B2B brand can become an influencer by positioning themselves as experts in their domain. You must be a value provider to your audience, build and maintain a meaningful relationship with your followers.

But the question arises, why to position yourself as an expert? Why to become a LinkedIn influencer?

How to Become a LinkedIn Influencer in 2022?

• Note its benefits:
  • 1. Reach key decision makers
  • 2. Grow your network
  • 3. Easier promotion of your brand
  • 4. Increase followers on your page and website
• How to become a LinkedIn influencer in 2022
  • 1. Define your brand
  • 2. Create a company page on LinkedIn
  • 3. Create content consistently
  • 4. Grow relationship with your audience through drip campaign and personalized messages
  • 5. AI powered LinkedIn Inbox management
• How to Become a LinkedIn Influencer – Mistakes to Avoid
• List of LinkedIn Influencers
  • Bill Gates
  • Arianna Huffington
  • Satya Nadella
  • Neil Patel
  • Jeff Weiner
• Conclusion

Note its benefits:

1. Reach key decision makers

Influencers are followed by CEO, CFO, and key decision makers in businesses, increasing the visibility of your posts and improving your brand awareness

2. Grow your network

By having some of the largest networks on LinkedIn, it gives you an opportunity to build and grow your own community. Networking is the primary goal of every person on LinkedIn, but it takes time. However, as an influencer, you can grow your network much more rapidly.

3. Easier promotion of your brand

Being a public figure on LinkedIn increases the engagement on your LinkedIn posts, more relevant audience for your LinkedIn webinars, and when you promote your brand/product on the platform, it has higher views and engagement.

4. Increase followers on your page and website

Higher engagement of posts on LinkedIn translates to increased traffic on your website, lead inquiries, and increased followers of your company page.

So, now you’ll be interested to know how to become a LinkedIn Influencer!

C’mon then let’s get to the steps you need to take!

How to become a LinkedIn influencer in 2022

1. Define your brand

If you already have a personal brand, optimize your LinkedIn headline and profile image to showcase it.

Defining your brand on LinkedIn means how people perceive you, the type of content you create, and how you position yourself.

Finding it difficult to define your brand?

Here’s the ticket!

Use LinkedIn automation to scan through 100s of profiles of influencers in your niche and see how they have written their LinkedIn headlines. Use these ideas to create your own.

2. Create a company page on LinkedIn

Building trust with your audience is the key to become an influencer on LinkedIn. The more you build trust, quicker you’ll grow your following.

So, creating your company page on LinkedIn is the stepping stone. Use your company page to:

• Share information about people in your company
• Share company news with your own views and opinions
• Share case studies and your success stories

3. Create content consistently

People follow influencers to stay updated on latest industry news and trends. Therefore, you must have a regular content calendar and keep your followers updated.

Post content that is helpful and solves problems for your target audience. Share your opinion on industry news to build a reputation as an influencer.

There’s another advantage of LinkedIn automation to exploit. Use it to scan through content in your niche and get ideas for your content.

Few tactics to make your content stand out are:

• Use humor and personality in your posts
• Shock, entertain, and educate your audience with your content
• Create content no one else is creating in your niche

Besides just creating, share your content across other social media platforms and publish on LinkedIn Pulse too!

4. Grow relationship with your audience through drip campaign and personalized messages

LinkedIn offers a maximum of 30,000 first-degree connections. More your number of connections, wider your reach and impact. So, building as many high-quality connections as possible will solidify your brand as an influencer.

Best way to grow your connections on LinkedIn quickly and efficiently is through Automation.

LinkedIn automation through Linkedojet allows you to send personalized messages with connect requests, and connect through a series of drip campaigns.

5. AI powered LinkedIn Inbox management

Yet another advantage of using Linkedojet is to use AI powered management of your LinkedIn Inbox.

Newly launched, this feature categorizes replies from your potential prospects as positive, negative or inquiry, and helps you filter out active leads to engage with and grow your network quickly and efficiently.

How to Become a LinkedIn Influencer – Mistakes to Avoid

Now, when you know how to become an influencer on LinkedIn, you must also watch out for any of these mistakes:

• Using hashtags poorly– Hashtags help you reach new audiences on LinkedIn. However, never load your posts with hashtags just to show up in searches. Compile a set of key industry hashtags and use just one or two of those on each post. Mix up popular hashtags with less popular ones to improve your visibility in searches. Also, create a branded hashtag for your business.

• Not posting regularly – To become a thought leader in your industry, plan out a content calendar to post two to three times a week, and stick to it. Focus on quality rather than the quantity of content.

• Not automating LinkedIn tasks – Doing it all manually on LinkedIn is the biggest mistake. From posting valuable content to reaching out to new connections and responding to messages, every task can be automated.

So, automate as much as you can to save time and speed up the process.

List of LinkedIn Influencers

One of the best ways to learn about being a LinkedIn influencer is to have a look at the profiles of current LinkedIn influencers going viral.

So, let’s look at some of the authority figures on LinkedIn:

Bill Gates

Bill Gates has over 35,023,000+ followers as of now. His content is related to both his personal brand and his worldwide philanthropic ventures.

Arianna Huffington

She is the Founder of Thrive Global and shares content on entrepreneurship, media, start-ups, health, and more. Following her on LinkedIn will help you discover the type of content people engage with.

Satya Nadella

As a CEO Of Microsoft, he shares articles and videos on the current happenings in the world and from Microsoft blog. You must follow him to learn how to use business content related to what people care about as an influencer.

Neil Patel

Labelled as the top influencer on web by the Wall Street Journal and one of the top 10 marketers by Forbes, Neil Patel is worth following on LinkedIn to learn A-Z of digital marketing.

Jeff Weiner

With over 10,600,000+ followers and being an Executive Chairman at LinkedIn, it’s worth to follow him on LinkedIn to learn the type of content influencers share that resonates with their audience and gain a ton of engagement.

Conclusion

Becoming an Influencer on LinkedIn is an art. It takes time and consistency with your marketing efforts to establish your brand as an industry leader.

So, note the steps outlined in the post. Follow the few influencers mentioned above to get ideas for your own content, and establish your identity as an influencer on the platform.

Get started with LinkedIn automation as soon as you can. Schedule a demo with us here.

This content originally appeared here on: https://linkedojet.com/blog/how-to-become-linkedin-influencer/