Top 7 Branding Tools for Startups and Solopreneurs

Securing the right digital marketing tools for your brand is half of the battle for the place under the Sun. According to most professional branding services for startups, to set the clients on the success trajectory and achieve their prime long-term goals, they use knowledge, experience, talents, and time-tested startup marketing tools.

Indeed, the benefits of using brand identity tools are enormous, because they:

• facilitate sophisticated segmentation of data that leads to more effective solutions,
• identify campaigns that better resonate with the target audience,
• increase user engagement,
• optimize web platforms,
• boost search engine rankings,
• channel the right traffic into the company,
• drive lead generation and sales,
• minimize expanses,
• make the most out of budget.

With the right branding platform at hand, organizations may show their hidden potential, demonstrate the value of the product, and, most importantly, hint about future revenue, which helps find investors and proceed with the venture more effectively. This is crucial for young companies and entrepreneurs that are tight on funding.

Let us consider the top seven marketing automation tools for startups that are regarded as valuable assets and highly recommended to have in every arsenal. Though, first things first, how business tools for startups can be classified?

There are over thousands of services and products in the marketing World. Every day a dozen of new SaaS tools for startups replenish this niche. It seems impossible to keep up with them all, but making the most out of them is real. How? Fill gaps in your marketing strategy with crucial assets by understanding classification that helps you decide what you need.

Even though there is no strict classification, since some tools have features and functionality that are in common, however, still they can be broken into these general categories:

• Brand Reputation Management
• Search Engine Optimization
• Website Optimization
• Content Creation
• Social Media Management
• Customer Relation Management
• Lead Capture and Conversion
• Customer Loyalty Programs
• Online Advertising
• Email Marketing
• Event Marketing
• Video Marketing
• Marketing Automation
• Data Reporting
• Analytics

Plus, such essential tools as Team Communication and Collaboration, and Project Management.

With such a vibrant classification and hundreds of tools inside each group, it is hard to identify exactly what to use. Consider these four crucial factors to facilitate this task:

• The scale of the company. If you are a small startup or solopreneur, you do not need all the hustle and bustle of huge multifunctional platforms.
• Target audience's preferences. If your audience does not use emails or social media platforms, you may avoid these sectors.
• Marketing skills. While most tools fit the non-tech-savvy crowd, there are still platforms that require a professional approach. If your team does not feel comfortable using the service, it is better to avoid it.
• Integration with other products and platforms. Many marketing automation tools for startups do not live in a vacuum: they are used in tandem with others to produce maximum effect. Therefore, finding a platform with the best integration potential is essential.

Here are the top seven effective marketing tools that marketers believe to be of top priority.

Google Analytics

We will start our collection of the best tools for startups with one of the most famous instruments in this niche. It lives up to the trust of millions of entrepreneurs across the globe and can be seen in every project that serves the target audience.

Google Analytics provides in-depth insight into your website performance and critical online business metrics. For instance,

• it tracks online traffic;
• it breaks online traffic into channels that are easy to control;
• it offers insights into bounce rate, exit rates for pages, and all sorts of behavior metrics;
• it provides data reports and marketing analytics;
• it monitors conversions;
• it exports data directly into a spreadsheet for better organization;
• it allows benefiting from team collaboration.

What's more, it easily integrates with other Google-based solutions, so you can extract the maximum benefits from the platform.

The best part is that this service comes free of charge for small businesses. As for advanced features that are crucial for mid-sized companies, they are available at a pocket-friendly recurring fee.

Ahrefs

You can hardly find a marketer who has never heard about Ahrefs. Although it may sound strange for young entrepreneurs, according to recent studies, it is one of the most popular tools in the SEO niche.

Proven by time and approved by million teams, this all-in-one toolkit has changed the SEO landscape by allowing companies to accomplish such crucial tasks as:

• identify keywords,
• track rank of the platform,
• check backlinks,
• audit site and content,
• explore organic traffic and paid traffic.

Unlike Google Analytics, Ahrefs does not have a free plan, though it offers limited webmasters tools without charges. The starter subscription costs $99 per month. The price is a bit steep; however, this tool may bring substantial revenue to the company in the right hands.

Hotjar

It is hard to find free branding tools today. However, you still may push your business forward by using premium solutions since most of them come with free trials and free plans. Hotjar is one of them.

Created to give startups and mid-sized businesses a boost in the website optimization tasks, the platform has numerous helpful features. It monitors and analyzes heatmaps, gets live playbacks of users on the site to understand their movement and behavior, receives direct feedback, and creates and uses targeted surveys.

The basic plan is free.

Buffer

Started as an idiot-proof scheduling service, today, it is a must-have branding tool for managing social media platforms. Buffer helps marketing teams to do such vital tasks as:

• share content on the go;
• upload custom images and videos;
• access complex analytics;
• track content's performance across various distribution channels;
• schedule posts;
• collaborate with the team;
• reply to posts.

The great thing is that the platform works with the major social media platforms, including Instagram, which is in trend these days.

As for pricing, it is reasonable. For instance, startups may use it for $5 per month. The team offers a free plan, which covers publishing tools and a landing page builder.

Mailchimp

If you have ever wondered how e-commerce projects retain and nurture their clients, saving their money on acquiring new customers, you are in the right place. The answer to that is email marketing. And if you want to try it out, you should start with Mailchimp, a leading instrument in this sector.

Mailchimp is a multifunctional platform for creating and running professional email campaigns. You can segment your target audience, create and schedule campaigns, and even analyze the behavior of your subscribers to improve your current strategy. That is not all.

Positioning itself as a platform that gives startups a boost, it also lets do such important things as:

• build social ads;
• design and host landing pages;
• send postcards;
• launch a website to sell products;
• manage audience.

On top of that, it has all sorts of in-built marketing tools that help improve the company's brand identity.

Mailchimp is a premium service; however, it comes with a free plan, which you may use to get a solid start in email marketing.

Iconosquare

Do you know that according to recent studies, Instagram has over 1.22 billion users onboard? And this number is growing. More and more startups and solopreneurs discover their potential to reach the target audience and generate leads.

If you want to keep up with the current mainstream or your target audience's age is between 18 to 34, you need a tool to make the most out of it. This tool is Iconosquare.

If you have never heard about it, you certainly miss a lot.

• First, it provides actionable insights on optimizing and improving social media strategies.
• Second, it works with platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok, whose popularity grows daily.
• Third, it lets you manage all social media profiles from one place.
• Finally, it has a scheduling tool to publish content automatically to reach the right people at the right time.

The price starts at $49. However, you can test drive the platform for a month free without sharing any sensitive information about your credit card.

Salesforce

Our list will not be complete without Salesforce, one of the world's most famous CRM software and cloud computing solutions. Although it is considered tricky due to its professional nature, the time will come when your business will need it to reach a new level in its development.

As the nameplate of this platform states, Salesforce has been created to generate conversions and leads, thereby increasing the company's revenue. It is a CRM tool; therefore, you might use it for such tasks:

• manage interactions with customers and prospects across their entire lifecycle;
• improve customer service;
• streamline processes;
• build customer relationships;
• follow customer activity;
• automate communications with stakeholders and passers-by;
• create reports;
• increase sales;
• boost profitability.

Salesforce is a premium service, but you can try it for free and enjoy its features for a month.

Building a strong brand identity that provides a foundation to move forward regardless of fluctuations in the market and the toughness of the competition is one of the most challenging tasks. It underlies crucial marketing strategies and campaigns that ensure the venture's success.

There are many ways to meet this challenge. And using marketing tools is one of them. They define the right target audience, show possible ways to beat the competition, forecast future needs of the market, design unique strategies, automatize analytical systems, unlock the team's hidden potential, and maximize effort. The great thing is that many of these tools are low-cost and sometimes even free; therefore, every startup, regardless of its funding and budget, may take advantage of them.

We have handpicked the top seven best tools in this niche. They are highly-recommended assets to have in your arsenal. However, that is not all. The web is teeming with numerous solutions that may take your business and strategies to the next level. Some of them are long-standing platforms, while others freshly-released products. To secure the right tool, analyze them, read feedback and choose those that meet the above-listed criteria and your expectations and requirements.