The Growth Marketing Tools Funnel —29 Growth Tools and When to Use Them

This is how the Marketing Technology landscape looked like 5 years ago.

There were only 350 marketing technology companies.

This is how the landscape looked like in 2017.

Over 5000 marketing technology companies offer us tools. Yes, that’s right, we are overloaded with marketing tools.

Tools have being marketer’s best friend, helping us achieve what we wouldn’t be able to do without the help of developers. Though, the overload of them has brought us a problem. How to decide when to use which marketing tool.

With the Growth Marketing Tools Funnel we solve this problem by selecting the most useful tools for using growth marketing strategies. We have grouped and segmented these tools into the stages of the Pirate Funnel, making it easier to select the right tool.

But wait, why use the Pirate Funnel ?

Well, the Pirate Funnel gives us the perfect framework of our customer lifecycle. This allows you to select the right strategies, depending on the stage in which your customers are, and determine where you should put your marketing efforts.

If you take your persona, and ask yourself — in what stage of the customer journey is she? Does she know about my company ? — If the answer is no, then, awareness should be your focus. In this way you can focus your limited resources in the right direction.

Within every stage of the pirate funnel, you can improve your metrics depending on your business model. The funnel helps you to figure out what metrics you should put your marketing efforts on at the right moment.

The Growth Marketing Tools Funnel

For using the Growth Marketing Tools Funnel I recommend following the 5 steps below.

If you are eager to apply some growth tools, you can skip this part and take a look at the review of each tool, broken down by growth stage after these 5 steps.

5 Steps For Using The Growth Marketing Tools Funnel

There are basically 5 steps you should follow in order to know what tool to use within the growth marketing tools funnel.

1. Define your company’s stage. That’s where you will focus your efforts.

2. Design your company’s strategies & growth experiments.

3. Select the right tool using the Growth Marketing Tools Funnel.

4. Run experiments.

5. Analyse results and adopt or reject the tool.

   
   

To first understand your company’s needs, you need to define steps 1 and 2. After this, you are ready to run experiments and try out some growth tools.

1. Define your company´s efforts focus

First of all, you need to define in what stage of the funnel your company will focus its efforts.

It´s all about defining what is the most efficient way of where to put your efforts. Would it be awareness to gain traffic? Or, would it be retention by improving the subscription process to achieve better retention rates?

Remember, you have limited resources and limited time. So, choose wisely. Otherwise, the startup limbo is awaiting you.

2. Design your company´s strategies & growth tactics

After defining in what stage you are, it’s time to define your strategy. Draft a plan with all your strategies and prioritise them.

Your tactics should be in line with your strategic plan.

For instance, if your strategy is to increase your page’s awareness by paying per click (PPC) — strategy — you should first define what are the best channels to get your customers — tactics— and afterward, define what campaigns you should use to target them — experiments— .

By the way, here’s my favourite growth tactic’s playbook:

Remember, the best way to grow your company is with a sustainable growth strategy. Stop trying quick wins. Go for the long run success.

3. Use the Growth Marketing Tools Funnel to select the right tool

Use the right tool for the right funnel stage. In fact, using a tool that’s not made for your company’s stage, can cause you huge pain. Every tool is specialised in its own niche. For instance, a small startup — counting 5 to 10 persons — trying to get traction, should not use complex tools recommended for medium-sized startups — 50 to 100 persons — .

This means you should be very careful. Get a solid understanding of the former 2 steps.

4. Run experiments

Real growth is the result of a well established and data-driven process. Take your time creating a calendar for this process. Then run your experiments bearing in mind your death-lines.

5. Analyse results and adopt or reject the tool

Ask yourself: am I willing to spend time and effort to adopt this tool? Or, is it time to try another tool from the stack? Analyse your results and decide if this is the right tool for you and your team. Adopt or reject it.

Tools Review Per Funnel Stage

29 growth tools, one by one, separated by growth funnel stages.

Check them out:

Awareness

The awareness stage can be split in two:

• Inbound marketing tactics or organic traffic

• Outbound marketing tactics or paid traffic

To increase your product’s customers by inbound marketing tactics, use the following growth tools:

1. SEMRush — SEM

SEMrush Competitive Data for Digital Marketing Professionals. Analytics Reports — Get insights into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising, organic and paid search, and link building. Tools — Cross, combine, and visualize SEMrush data to compare competitive domains and estimate keyword difficulty with a few clicks

2. MOZ — SEM

Inbound marketing is complicated. Moz’s software makes it easy.

3. Google Analytics — Analytics

Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.

4. Hubspot — Content Marketing

HubSpot allows users to integrate marketing tools to build a marketing and sales platform. Offerings include analytics, CRM, blogging, social media, landing page creation, and call-to-action testing.

5. Buffer — Content Automation

Buffer is the easiest way to save time on social media. Simplify your social routine by scheduling posts on all of your social media networks. the best way to drive traffic, increase fan engagement and save time on social media.

6. Sniply — Content Automation

Share Content. Drive Traffic. Attach a call-to-action to every link you share. Allows you to share other people’s content and still easily bring them back to your own content.

7. BuzzSumo — Content Marketing

Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.

8. Colibri — Content Marketing

Colibri IO shows you where your customers are engaging online so that you can insert yourself into relevant conversations.

To increase your product’s customers by outbound marketing tactics, select from the tools below.

9. Google Adwords — PPC

Take advantage of online advertising to improve your internet marketing efforts. Learn how Google AdWords can meet your marketing goals today.

10. Google Adwords Keyword Planner

Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Plan your Search Network campaigns and learn what your customers are looking for.

Acquisition

During the Acquisition stage, your user should truly understand the value of your product and feel sparkles while discovering it. Let them feel the AHA moment right off the bat.

These tools will definitely help you achieving this:

11. Hotjar — Analytics

Hard to place this tool in one part of the funnel. This all-in-one tool will make you understand your costumer behaviour better than ever.

All-in-one Analytics and Feedback. Hotjar is a new and easy way to truly understand your web and mobile site visitors.

12. UsabilityHub — User Behaviour

5 Second Test and User Video Recordings are the most relevant features of this amazing tool. It helps you get into your user’s mind, without being physically with them.

Remote user testing tool that help’s you make confident design decisions.

13. Unbounce — Landing Page Builder

Build, Publish & A/B Test Landing Pages Without I.T. -The Unbounce “code-free zone” means you can easily build a high-converting landing page, then publish to the web in a single click — all without any knowledge of HTML.

14. Lead Berry — Lead Generation

Leadberry is a web based B2B lead generation software that converts website visitors to sales leads. Powered by Google Analytics.

15. AdRoll — Remarketing

The Global Leader in Retargeting. Do more with your data. AdRoll Retargeting is the only unified platform that helps you reach customers intelligently across devices on Facebook, Twitter, Apple iAd, and millions of websites.

Activation

This stage measures how many users take a specific action, to get value out of your product.

Set up proper Analytics. In this stage, I encourage you to follow your client through the whole customer journey. Get more insights about your user’s actions. Best tools for getting this job done:

16. Segment — Analytics

Segment is a single hub for customer data. Collect your customer data in one place, send it anywhere. Power all your apps with the same data

17. Mixpanel — Analyti

The most advanced analytics platform ever for mobile and the web with the ability to learn more from your data by being able to ask increasingly important and complex questions

18. MailChimp — Email Marketing

Send Better Email. Our features and integrations allow you to send marketing emails, automated messages, and targeted campaigns.

Retention

Retaining costumers is vital for the sake of your business. You don’t want your marketing efforts to be bleeding dollars.

Spend time improving your retention rates. Understanding who your retain costumers are.

This can bring you several benefits. You will be able to attract similar audiences, improve your customer’s LTV and spend less in marketing efforts.

19. Google Optimize — A/B Testing

Google Optimize offers AB testing, website testing & personalization tools for small & large enterprises to help deliver engaging customer experiences.

20. Optimizely — A/B Testing, CRO

Test, Personalize, and Optimize in one easy to use platform for the web and mobile apps.

21. Intercom — Customer Feedback, Live Chat

Customer communication made simple. Intercom is one place for your entire business to see and talk to customers. Have live conversations and send targeted messages to website visitors and users of your app.

22. Typeform — Customer Feedback, Forms Builder

One simple mission: Make forms awesome. Create beautiful, next-generation online forms with Typeform, the form & survey builder that makes asking questions easy & human on any device.

For mobile, your efforts should be focus on Retention. Given that you only have one shot subscribing on the app stores.

23. Splitmetrics — ASO

SplitMetrics –A/B testing and analytics platform. It allows mobile developers optimise the conversion rates of their App Store and Google Play app pages

Referral

Referrals are one of the most crucial components of a successful growth strategy. There is no more outstanding way to grow a business than through a viral campaign. But only if it’s done in a systematic, organised way.

The following tools, when implemented correctly, can give you that growth punch you need.

24. Kickoff Labs — Viral Marketing

Awesome landing page and viral referral creation tool.

25. Viral Loops — Referral Tool

A revolutionary referral marketing solution for modern Marketers!

26. Sumo — Automation Marketing

Tools to Grow Your Website’s Traffic and yes, they work on any website. Increase your daily email sign-ups by 20%. See where your visitor are clicking. Get more shares, on web, mobile and everywhere.

27. Pay with a tweet — Automation Marketing

PayWithATweet is your Social PayWall. Grant access to your content,special offers, or digital goods for the price of a post or a tweet.

Revenue

Depending on your business model, revenue strategies can be implemented before or after the activation stage. That’s why there’s a thin line between Revenue and Activation tools usage. It depends on your revenue model whether the tools apply sooner or later in your company’s strategic plan.

Though Revenue it’s all about business model, there are a few tools that can help you boost income.

28. Funnelytics — Funnel Improvement

Discover Your Key Tactics & Strategies To Increase Your Profits & Sales BEFORE Spending any Time, Money & Resources

29. Stripe — Payment Automation

Stripe is the best software platform for running an internet business. We handle billions of dollars every year for forward-thinking businesses around the world.