I am launching a startup which is currently a one-man operation. I am planning to develop content to drive inbound marketing. I have both Highrise and Hubspot trial/free accounts for CRM and am considering Wix for my web presence based on some of the great looking templates they have available. Curious to know what products & integrations others are using to get their marketing efforts off the ground?
You seem to be discussing tooling rather than channels.
Appropriate marketing channels vary distinctly by business type, development level and market positioning. Service vs. product, physical vs. digital, popular vs. specialist, early stage vs. validating vs. growth-phrase vs. stable, desired audience, phase of moon, etc.
In general tooling should be determined by the channel, not the other way around.
The advice given to me by a very successful CFO (many $Ms personal exit, multi-decade angel, now running an accelerator) on my first business was: "test each channel". That means: marketing spend per new prospect, conversion percentage, repeat customer percentage, customer lifetime or fixed-period value estimate, and maybe other channel properties like responsiveness, customer demographic or other data available, markets served, total available inbound volume. Try to keep the building of this data for objective channel-vs-channel analysis as your focus, and don't get distracted. Remember, you're being marketed to. ;)
If you're lucky, you'll find a strong channel. In most cases, you simply need to sink a certain minimum amount of capital to get your customer base large enough to get in the black. Take it from me - not having this war-chest can cost you the business (as it did my first). If you find yourself in that position, workarounds can include partnerships with established networks, acquisitions, pivots to SaaS-conversions ... but again it depends on the business. Good luck out there :)
That's awesome advice, thanks for sharing. I'm in a similar position to the OP as a one man band, can you recommend any books or blogs on exactly how to start testing each channel? A lot of the advice I've come across only mentions it in broad strokes. Maybe there's some foundation level knowledge I'm missing but I don't know where to look next to get up to speed. :)
Traction [1] is the book I can unreservedly recommend as it both lays out more channels than you were probably aware of, it also has a nice crisp framework for trying a few at a time and folding that knowledge back into your operations.
It's also very applicable for people where we're at (fellow one person SAAS founder here), which many other marketing books are decidedly not. This is important as now is not the time to be worrying about the proper branding position of your superbowl ad, etc.
One last thing: there have a Slideshare[2] that moves through most of the book content which is a great resource as well.
Also, I've got triggers in my app that spawn Trello cards. I feed Trello, then manually do stuff in the other systems. Ugly but I can switch out other tools easier. This lets me try new tools faster, and switch back too.
Crm - streak crm (http://www.streak.crm), nice crm that integrates with gmail. Used to categorize email communication.
Email marketing - listshine (http://www.listshine.com) cheap alternative to mailchimp, used to regularly email new and existing customers.
Appropriate marketing channels vary distinctly by business type, development level and market positioning. Service vs. product, physical vs. digital, popular vs. specialist, early stage vs. validating vs. growth-phrase vs. stable, desired audience, phase of moon, etc.
In general tooling should be determined by the channel, not the other way around.
The advice given to me by a very successful CFO (many $Ms personal exit, multi-decade angel, now running an accelerator) on my first business was: "test each channel". That means: marketing spend per new prospect, conversion percentage, repeat customer percentage, customer lifetime or fixed-period value estimate, and maybe other channel properties like responsiveness, customer demographic or other data available, markets served, total available inbound volume. Try to keep the building of this data for objective channel-vs-channel analysis as your focus, and don't get distracted. Remember, you're being marketed to. ;)
If you're lucky, you'll find a strong channel. In most cases, you simply need to sink a certain minimum amount of capital to get your customer base large enough to get in the black. Take it from me - not having this war-chest can cost you the business (as it did my first). If you find yourself in that position, workarounds can include partnerships with established networks, acquisitions, pivots to SaaS-conversions ... but again it depends on the business. Good luck out there :)