When it comes to marketing in a startup, finding customers is only half of the battle. Getting to know the basics like their age and location is not quite enough. What’s more important is, for example, the challenges they are facing, how they make decisions, why they buy this, that, or the other thing. Understanding customer’s needs is the simple key to meeting them with your product or service.
Establishing that we need to get to know the customers is one thing, but figuring out how to achieve it, is another. In this blog, we want to introduce you to some of the best free or low budget online tools to get to know your customers better!
Typeform
Typeform is an online software as a service company that specializes in online form building and online surveys. Its main software creates dynamic forms based on user needs. Typeform’s software has been used by Apple, Airbnb, Uber and Nike. It allows you to easily build questionnaires for your customers. There you can, almost directly, ask your audience about opinions, needs and preferences.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a powerful tool that reveals the online behaviour and voice of your users. By combining both Analysis and Feedback tools, Hotjar gives you the big picture of how to improve your site’s user experience and performance/conversion rates. It helps you understand how users are really experiencing your website, without drowning in numbers and spreadsheets.
HubSpot
Hubspot is a marketing, sales, and service software that helps your business grow without compromise. Their motto says “good for the business should also mean good for the customer” and we couldn’t agree more! With HubSpot, you can attract visitors, convert leads and close customers. This includes content creation, social media sharing, workflow automation, lead capture, customer relationship management, sales pipeline mapping and performance tracking.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel gives you detailed, real-time insight into how people interact with your products. Trusted by over 26,000 companies incl. Uber, Twitter. Mixpanel is a business analytics service company. It tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications and provides tools for targeted communication with them. Its toolset contains in-app A/B tests and user survey forms. Data collected is used to build custom reports and measure user engagement and retention. They also offer basic free plans!
Google Analytics
If you work in marketing or simply for a startup, you probably have heard about Google Analytics already. Google itself does not need an introduction, right? However, despite everyone knowing about Google Analytics, some still struggle to understand the tool.
Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your website traffic, Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications. It’s also used to look up trends and general traffic performance. Have all the free tools you need to analyze data for your business in one place.
Here we have some useful guides for beginners that will help you get started with the tools. Semrush perfectly explains the Google Analytics dashboard and how to set it all up. If you already had a scroll through Google Support articles on this subject and still need some help, check out their explanatory video. We can also recommend this Ultimate Beginners Guide on YouTube by Ranking Academy.
Matomo
Matomo, also known as an alternative to Google Analytics, is a free and open-source web analytics application that runs on a PHP/MySQL webserver. It tracks online visits to one or more websites and displays reports on these visits for analysis. They value data protection and customer’s privacy.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is an advanced product and marketing analytics tool. Their Customer Engagement Automation is another alternative to Google Analytics. Analyze, segment and engage all in one place with easy to read reports and a friendly user interface. While Google Analytics only tracks anonymous data, Kissmetrics ties every action on your website to a person. It’s useful, for example, when the same person uses different devices and browsers.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg uses heatmap technology to analyse which part of your website or landing page is more engaging than others. It’s mainly used to improve your website but it also allows you to get a better understanding of your audience’s interest.
User Testing
Being able to share a relatable testimonial while launching your product can be very a big contribution to your startup’s success. We all know how hard it is to find those first customers and then also persuade them to share their insight on the product that can be used for promotional purposes. That’s where User Testing steps in.
User Testing provides you with real-life customers using your product or service and giving you feedback. This can be not only useful for marketing but to better understand how your product works in practice.
Tower Data
If you have a long list of subscribers to your email newsletter but you missing more information on their segmentation, Tower Data is for you. Learn who your customers are, what they’re interested in and their preferred point of contact with Email Intelligence. Get higher response rates by engaging your customers with better targeted, relevant content. Learn more about your audience demographic, activity or purchase behaviour.
Insightly
Insightly is a unified CRM platform where you can align Marketing, Sales and Project teams around one view of your customer. Grow your business faster by building lasting relationships with your customers, through every step of the customer journey. It’s a simple solution for data entry or post-sale customer’s satisfaction.
Social Media
This list wouldn’t be complete without a simple mention of social media in general. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Reddit, each one of those channels offers so many different ways of connecting and understanding your audience.
Try using a surveys tool, for example on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram story, to ask valuable questions to your audience. Find out what they like and what they need the most, then share the results for more engagement.
Build a community by creating a Facebook or LinkedIn group. Get better access to your customers and start a dialogue. Eager them to share what they are interested in and what they like in the group to learn more about them.
Engage with users! Message and comment on your follower’s account to build a relationship. Get in touch with some influencers relevant to your industry. Connect with their followers and learn about them from their profiles!
Observe! See what your audience shares, what aesthetic appeals to them. Do the same with your competitors and industry colleagues. Learn from those with a bigger following, see what works for their audience.
Join the conversation! Engage in existing topics on Reddit, Facebook groups and Twitter. Stay on top of Twitter trends and Instagram’s trending hashtags.
Join our community! At PitchMe we care a lot about our online community, trying to bring valuable and engaging content useful for Startups and companies hiring through our platform. Check out our latest blogs or follow us on social media for more useful tips!