10 Free Growth Hacking Tools for Marketing Your Startup

by Startacus Admin

The buzzword(s) ‘growth hacking’ has been floating around for a while, and anyone associated with business in even the vaguest way will have heard the term.

Basically, it means finding the best and quickest ways to grow your business, most often in the areas of audience and sales. A growth hacker looks for clever, inventive, and often original ways of attainting growth for a business. Before it became widely used, SEO to get search engines to give your website extra attention could be considered growth hacking. You could argue that if it is done particularly effectively, it is still growth hacking.

It’s a new term for something that’s been around for a long time, and it’s here to stay, whether it’s popular or not. And if you are looking for ways to growth hack your startup, here are some free tools to help you...

Google Keyword Planner

This is a keyword research tool that enables you to do research on keywords for your SEO. It gives you statistics of the historical performance of keywords used to search in Google, which can also tell you if the popularity of a keyword is a temporary trend or if it will be a reliable one to keep using.

Ubersuggest

An alternative to Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest combines other tools, like Bing, to bring up a list of keywords and keyword phrases based on anything you type in, allowing you to choose keywords that are most likely to work.

Keyword Density Analyzer

Google will actually penalise you if your web pages have too many iterations of a word, as it will see this as trying to game the SEO system. You don’t want that – especially if it is an innocent mistake. Keyword Density Analyzer will calculate the density percentage of your keywords to help you avoid this.

Google Analytics

You might think that a tool used by millions upon millions of business wouldn’t come under the banner of growth hacking, but Google Analytics gives you information like a visitor’s age, gender, and location, what device they are using to view your website, and what they are doing on a page. In short, it gives you useable insight without you having to do much work.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a useful tool for managing your social media platforms. You can connect 3 social networks on a free account and schedule posts to them as a group or individually from within the online tool. This can save a lot of time.

Click to Tweet

Click to Tweet creates a link that you can share in any way you want – on a blog post, email, newsletter or, indeed, via Twitter. When someone clicks on the link it will automatically paste a Tweet into their Tweet box…thing that you’ve already set up, and all they have to do is click to Tweet it. Run in combination with some kind of promotion for incentive, it’s a good way to get your business or product talked about (exactly how you want it talked about).

SumoMe

The most useful tool you can get from SumoMe is a customisable popup to collect readers’ email addresses. It can be set to appear after the reader has been on the page for a certain length of time, after they have scrolled to a certain point, or if the tool thinks they are about to leave the page. Although this can be annoying if not implemented well, it could also net you a lot of new followers for your newsletter.

BuzzSumo

No relation to SumoMe, BuzzSumo is a tool into which you can enter any term and in return be supplied with the topic’s most shared articles on social media. This can give you not only ideas for things to write about that are currently performing well, but can also get you some good contacts.

Inspectlet

Inspectlet allows you to see how visitors use your website, recording videos of their activity. The tool is only free for the first 100 recordings, but you can tailor what kind of visitor you are most interested in seeing activity for, which will cut down on wastage. Heat maps will also show you what your visitors are looking at the most and where they are clicking.

Visual Website Optimizer

This one is a bit of a cheat, as it isn’t strictly speaking free – it only has a 30 day trial. However, VWO is a powerful and popular A/B testing tool, so even getting 30 days worth of use out of it could greatly improve the impact of your website, or at least its most important pages. They do also have a few permanently free tools.

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Published on: 18th July 2016