Tried and tested free tools to support growth for tech startups.
As you try to scale your start-up, a solid go-to-market (GTM) strategy is crucial. However, developing a GTM strategy can sometimes be time-consuming, confusing, and expensive. Fortunately, there are lots of free tools that can assist early-stage founders with this process.
Before we dive in, let’s define the key term:
Go-to-market (GTM) strategy
A GTM strategy typically includes an analysis of the target market, customer needs, and the competitive landscape. Based on this analysis, you should be able to identify key marketing channels and tactics to reach your target audience. These tactics can include digital marketing, social media, events, and other forms of promotion, to grow your user base.
The GTM strategy also outlines the pricing strategy, sales strategy, and customer acquisition plan for the startup’s product or service.
- Pricing strategy– determining the optimal pricing for your solution, based on factors such as customer demand, competition, and cost of production.
- Sales strategy- identifying the best channels for selling your solution, such as direct sales or partnerships with other businesses.
- Customer acquisition plan- identifying the most effective ways to acquire and retain customers, such as referral programs, customer support, and loyalty programs.
In short, a go-to-market strategy should provide a roadmap for your tech start-up to effectively launch and grow by understanding all the elements above.
Now that we know what we’re trying to achieve, let’s take a look at some of the tools you can use to do just that.
Google Analytics
As soon as you create your website, we recommend integrating Google Analytics. This is a powerful tool that allows you to monitor and analyze your website traffic and provides an array of valuable metrics. This data is key in helping you understand user behaviour, where your visitors are coming from, and conversion rates.
Alongside Google Analytics, Google also offers other tools to support website analysis and optimization:
- Google AdWords Keyword Planner– a free tool that helps identify relevant keywords for your website and marketing campaigns. Simply enter keywords related to your business and receive suggestions for related keywords, to optimise your site content.
- Google Search Console– another free tool that helps you monitor and improve your website’s search engine performance. With Search Console, startups can track website rankings, identify search queries, and analyze website traffic.
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform offers solutions for tracking customer interactions, scheduling meetings, and sending targeted email campaigns. If customer support or business development is key to your business; you need a CRM to help build and maintain relationships with customers and ensure that they are satisfied with your product.
Notable mention for scheduling meetings: Calendly.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that can help you manage your social media accounts. For many tech start-ups, social media is a great channel to attract, engage and convert customers.
With Hootsuite, you can schedule posts for publishing, monitor mentions and comments, and track engagement. This social media management platform can help you stay organized and ensure that your social media presence is consistent and engaging.
You can onboard all your profiles (LinkedIn, Twitter, Meta) and lay out your content for automated publishing for up to one month. Once you have more capital, you could consider more robust paid tools like Agora Pulse.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is our favourite email marketing tool: you can create email templates, segment your audience, and track email performance. They offer a free plan that works great in the early stage of your business, and their subscription-based “pay-as-you-grow” model is fairly affordable and you can tailor the budget to meet your needs.
As a tech business, email may be a core driver for communication, and email marketing can enable you to reach your entire user base with pertinent information and offers.
Notable mention for email marketing: Sendgrid.
Canva
Canva is a graphic design tool that can make any amateur feel competent and comfortable when designing creatives. The platform is fairly intuitive and offers high-quality graphics and templates to create all manner of visual collateral. This includes custom infographics, social media posts, and even your pitch deck.
They have recently integrated AI tools (included in their free plan) that support drawing, writing, and editing, making it even easier to create graphics for your start-up.
We are yet to explore some other design tools, but looking forward to trying out some of the AI-powered options making waves in the space.
Notion
Here at The Baobab Network, we are all massive fans of Notion– an all-in-one workspace that can help with task, project and team management.
With Notion, you can create notes, databases, and task lists. You can also use Notion to create a knowledge base for your customers, providing them with valuable information about your product, hosted on the platform.
Notion recently integrated AI writing tools that are great for summarizing notes, drafting communications and automating tedious tasks.
Miro
This productivity management tool is another favourite of the TBN team. Miro offers digital whiteboards that can be used to facilitate collaboration among team members and ensure that everyone is aligned on the vision for the product or service. Miro has some excellent templates you can build on to map your user journey and figure out your user personas, as you develop a GTM strategy.
No current list of top tools would be complete without mention of ChatGPT– the AI-powered chatbot that has revolutionised how we work. The possibilities are seemingly endless when using ChatGPT to support you in your GTM strategy development. The key is engineering the correct prompts (more on this in another article).
You can ask ChatGPT to provide insights on your target audience, conducting market research, marketing tactics, and measurement. This open-source-based language bot can help you make data-driven decisions and optimize your marketing efforts for maximum impact.
We recognise, developing and implementing a successful go-to-market strategy can be a daunting task for a new founder, especially when you do not have a marketing/growth background. However, with the right tools, you can optimize your website, engage with your audience, and grow your user base affordably, even without onboarding a marketing/growth professional at this stage. This is not to say you don’t need one (the best tool is an expert to manage them all), but the tools outlined in this article can help build a solid foundation for your GTM strategy.
We have partnered with some of the brands above to offer our portfolio companies great deals on the pro versions of these tools to support them to scale. Interested in accessing this and more? Apply for the next cohort of our accelerator here.
Next time, we talk about product development tools to help scale your tech. Stay tuned!
