It’s tough being a startup — budgets, growth, and hustling everyday to make that change that you dream about.
As the Digital Marketing Manager, it’s my job to get Sinch — a cloud based communications platform for developers to add calling and messaging to their apps– found online and to get our visitors to signup for our service. It’s hard, but rewarding work that involves competitor research, thinking outside the box, and using data to validate ideas and digital marketing solutions for future plans.
Needless to say, I love tools. They’ve made my job easier and have made me more effective and productive. For that reason, I have built a good collection of tools that helps me track all of our digital initiatives, from online communities to our daily signup performance.
Here are some of my favorite tools that can help anyone looking to boost productivity and solve their digital marketing needs.
Google Analytics
I am a massive Google Analytics fan and have been for years. For Sinch, I started to experiment with custom dashboards for a real time view of our website performance.
I track real time visits, signups, pages, and anything that shows us what our users are doing right now. I have shared the custom dashboard I use for you to use. I warn you, it’s not pretty.
SEMRush
To get a better understanding of how our SEO is performing, we use SEMRush to track a number of keywords that are important to us, as well as how we perform compared to our competitors.
Buffer
All of our social sharing is done through Buffer. We link up all of our social channels so that we can share anything from our blog or from the other websites we read with one click. It’s super easy and very helpful. Plus, because everything is scheduled, it means our Twitter followers don’t just get a huge pile of Tweets at one time. Instead, we can roll it out over the day.
Buffer also deals with all our UTM codes and analytics for social, so we get all our social data straight into Google Analytics. UTM codes are a great way to track website traffic per campaign so you can see what posts work well. You can use something like the Google URL builder to append your links with campaign data, and then track this in Google Analytics under the Acquisition/Campaigns tab.
FollowerWonk
Mix FollowerWonk with Buffer for ultra-performing tweets. FollowerWonk will find the best time to tweet based on your specific audience, and then share this data with Buffer to post your tweets at the optimum time.
Stockup
When writing new blog posts, we always need a kick ass image. Stockup is like Google for these kinds of stock images in super high quality and perfect for the theme we are going for.
Statista
Statista is great if you are writing a blog post and need some data to back up your points. Google Trends is good, but Statista lets you find really specific data and facts, such as the growth of WeChat year-over-year, or how many apps there are in the Google and Apple app stores. Statista offers helpful stats from some fantastic sources in CSV and other file formats for your own data analysis.
Mention
To get a quick overview of what people are saying about Sinch online, we first used Google Alerts. The issue with this was that we only really got results when Google crawled pages and found new info. Google Alerts are not real time and often not even very up-to-date or relevant.
Instead, we started using Mention. This gives us a much clearer and up-to-date overview of what the developer community is saying about Sinch — everything from retweets to Stack Overflow threads. I also have the Mention app on my iPhone, so I always know what is going on and can react quickly, if not immediately.
Editor: Further reading
Looking for more startup ideas and advice. Visme wrote this guide detailing 24 tools and resources to help get your startup humming!
So that’s my startup toolbox. If you have any tools that you want to share, I would love to chat about them in the comments!
