What’s the most effective marketing software your business uses?
This was the question StartupNation asked of 11 successful entrepreneurs. The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Infusionsoft
We use Infusionsoft to handle our CRM, email marketing, referral partner relationships, product sales and more. It’s a great all-in-one option that keeps us top of mind for leads and prospects while not requiring us to spend all day worrying they’ll fall out of contact with us when they’re interested, but not quite ready to buy.
– Patrick Conley, Automation Heroes
2. HubSpot
We use HubSpot for inbound marketing, and it makes all our efforts in distributing content and getting traffic to our sites so easy. HubSpot is perfect for optimizing all your content and understanding what actions are bringing you the best ROI. It also makes the marketing automatization easy.
3. Vocus
The main marketing challenge for any company is gaining visibility. If nobody knows about you, you’re not going to grow your business. Vocus enables us to reach a wide audience with monthly press releases and get placement with a targeted selection of media outlets. We can then compare distribution, full-page reads and more for each story. Vocus gives us the platform we need to share our story.
– Grant Gordon, Solomon Consulting Group
4. GroupMail
We’ve gotten quite a bit of mileage out of the GroupMail email marketing tool by Infacta. It’s a workhorse that does what it does well. It’s saved us a lot of money in email marketing expenses.
5. Marketo
We use Marketo for complex marketing automation funnels, and it is the linchpin to marketing efforts.
6. KISSMetrics
KISSMetrics makes it easy to dig down into the specific actions customers take. We’ve been able to uncover insights that would be impossible without it.
7. Moblico
Mobilco is like a CMS for apps. We used it to build a point and loyalty system in the process of gamifying an app. It saved the founders about $30,000 in development with the built-in features their developers were able to drop right in. More importantly, it gave them a great admin portal to manage the deal system.
– Blake Miller, Think Big Partners
8. Open Site Explorer
We use Open Site Explorer to see all new inbound links, and we talk about them at our weekly marketing meeting. They pick up links that Google Analytics won’t show us since we can only see those on clicks. It also finds the long tail of sites that aren’t indexed on Google News.
– Ryan Buckley, Scripted, Inc.
9. Mandrill
Mandrill has been getting a lot of attention and for good reason. It’s easily scalable, and the analytics side is hard to beat. Our tech team loves the tools. Anything that allows you to more effectively reach your audience and evaluate the effectiveness of your outreach is a vital tool in your entrepreneurial box.
10. Intercom
We use Intercom to record all the activities users produce when they’re on our platform. We can then send automated messages based off of those activities to users. Therefore, customers will only get messages that relate to them. This results in customers getting customized messaging and higher open rates.
11. iContact
iContact is our email newsletter service. It allows us to keep in touch with clients and prospective clients in an efficient and effective manner.
– Elizabeth Saunders, Real Life E®
