Growing a business is never easy, especially when there’s so much competition and an avalanche of noise. That’s why the tools you choose to use in your business are so important, not just what you use but how you use them.

Not all of the 10 growth hacking tools mentioned below will suit your business, nor will most of them be relevant to your strategy. However, the key is to find the one that best suits your marketing mix and helps you gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Hatchbuck

If you run a small/medium sized business or startup then Hatchbuck might be for you. It’s a piece of software that allows you to:

• Automate your sales
• email marketing
• and sales automation

It’s the sort of tool that allows you to control all of your sales and marketing features in one place instead of opening different software tools.

Growth Hack – Contacts can be imported from Outlook, Excel, and LinkedIn, while leads can be captured from the company website.

Click to Tweet

Not often mentioned in the growth hacking space but a powerful addition to your arsenal – Click to Tweet is an easy way to get your content promoted by your readers.

You can insert a bit of code within your website that allows you to place a small graphic within your content asking for the reader to tweet any given quote you choose.

Even the likes of the mighty Content Marketing Institute use this great tool ;0)

Growth Hack – Getting readers to share your content is actually quite a hard thing to do. So, any tool that can help them do this is welcome.

The idea is to spread these quotes (not too many) between strategic points within your content and silently ask your readers to share it on Twitter.

You can choose any text, quote or paragraph (within Twitter character limits) that you like and use it on both your pages and posts.

Quora

Probably one of the most overlooked websites for growth hackers. Quora is a great website that can give you insightful details on how companies were able to grow so quickly.

Predominantly a question and answer website, a lot of founders and employees like to give back to the community by sharing the secrets to their company’s growth and success. Here’s just some of the examples that were used by these companies:

• Airbnb – Used Craigslist to grow. They contacted advertisers and told them they were interested in their apartment, condo, house and added a link back to their site when they advertised on Craigslist.

Growth Hack – They leveraged Craigslist’s largest database of accommodation advertisers (go where the market is)

• Facebook – Was one of the first websites to allow users to access their email address book and invite their friends and family to the platform.

Growth Hack – Leveraged the very best of referrals and recommendations to the max. Probably the best way to grow a business (existing clients promoting their site to friends and family)

• Hotmail – One of the first platforms to use a link in their signature line for all emails. They added “Get Your Free Email at Hotmail” tagline at the end of each email a user sent.”

Growth Hack – Freemium was born. They offered a top-of-the-line service for free – why wouldn’t you want to share it?

Qualaroo

A cheeky little piece of software that lets you target questions to visitors anywhere on your website. You can ask specific questions and receive valuable feedback.

Growth Hack – The best way to improve your products and services is to ask the people who actually use them. It’s the fastest way to bring new products to market or nip problems in the bud before they become larger, uncontrollable ones.

Optimizely

Probably one of the best A/B split testing tools online today.

Web Experimentation – Robust, easy-to-use A/B, multi-variate, and multi-page experimentation for any stage of the customer experience.

Web Personalisation – Deliver targeted content in real time. Make decisions backed by results you can trust.

Web Recommendations – Automatically add product, category, and content recommendations to any website.Experiment with algorithms, placement, and presentation to understand the best way to engage with your customers.

Mobile Experimentation – Experiment with onboarding, feature discovery, and re-engagement strategies to improve engagement and retention. Change your app’s behaviour in real time.

Experiment in any application – Run experiments on algorithms, pricing, re-designs, new architectures, launch new features in your iOS or Android apps to improve engagement and retention.

Optimizely X OTT – Deliver great over-the-top TV experiences by running experiments in any application built for tvOS or Android, such as navigation, app layout, site design, featured content or integrated message testing.

Hotjar

Wow! What a tool – not only does Hotjar allow you to see where your web visitors have been by using the very latest heatmap software, you can also:

• Identify usability issues by watching recordings of real visitors on your site
• Identify which page and at which step most visitors are leaving your site
• Improve your form completion rates by finding out where and when your visitors abandon them (this is powerful stuff)
• Similar to Qualaroo, you can strategically ask questions of your visitors to better understand their decisions.

Growth Hack – Data, data, data… You can never have enough data. The key to being a great growth hacker is obtaining a valuable insight into why your web visitors do what they do – not the easiest thing to do unless you have the right tools.

Usertesting

If you’re looking to implement changes to your website and want some feedback from your clients, then Usertesting is a great tool to use:

• Get video feedback – This is a great little feature where your clients can record in real time browsing your website. You also get detailed analytics to compare any data received.
• The users – You’ll be able to ask clients to view your website on different devices. Recruit by region, demographics, web expertise.

Growth Hack – This software works well for larger companies or, if you run an e-commerce site. Getting video feedback is analytics gold – it allows you to make changes to your website based on the feedback of real users.

Yesware

Ever wondered what happened to your emails after they’ve been sent? Then wonder no more… Yesware is a great piece of kit that allows you to track open-rates of your emails, find out when they were opened allowing you to optimise when you send them for better results.

It can be used in conjunction with:

• Gmail
• Gsuite
• Outlook
• Office 365

Brilliant if you want to A/B split test different elements of emails sent!

Growth Hack – There are a lot of companies that don’t use automation software for their email marketing campaigns. If you use any of the email providers above, you’ll be able to get the very same stats that you would using email automation.

If you use this tool with your CRM, you’ve got a powerful growth hacking tool allowing you to be efficient with the data at your finger tips.

Manageflitter

If you’re used to using social media automation software, then Manageflitter is probably the next tool you should use to ramp up your growth hacking strategy for Twitter.

Here are a few of its features:

• Powerpost – This allows you to see the best times to schedule your tweets – simply posting without knowing the best time your tweets get shared is a surefire to get nowhere fast!
• Probably the best unfollow tool I’ve seen as far as Twitter management goes – you can see who has not followed after 1,2,3,4 or 5 days. I personally set it for 4 days so if I follow someone and they haven’t followed me back within 4 days, then I unfollow them…!
• Find new people to follow with our comprehensive search facility

Growth Hack – This is probably one of the most powerful tools to manage your Twitter accounts. Some of the features are more advanced than other generic tools out there.

You can also purchase additional credits which allow you to have one of Manageflitter’s staff carry out some of the tasks for you. This is great for solopreneurs who just don’t have the time to get everything done.

Mixrank

Another great app tracking tool…

If you’re in the B2B space and want to find potential clients, Mixrank will allow you trawl through millions of companies and their contacts so you can qualify your future customers using filters across web, mobile, social, and display advertising.

Growth Hack – This is definitely a piece of software for larger companies since the cost is $500+ per month. However, I don’t know another tool that allows you to find potential clients with real-time updates and email and CRM alerts.

Conclusion

There are many thousands of growth hacking tools out there – I’ve just chosen a nice blend and mix for companies of all shapes and sizes.

The tool you choose will be based on personal preference, ease of use, price and only you can make that decision.

I personally like Manageflitter for Twitter automation. It’s a great tool that gives you a ton of flexibility and more advanced features than I’ve seen with other Twitter automation tools.

Which tools do you use in your business and have you used any of the ones mentioned?

10 Growth-Hacking Tools to Build Your Business https://t.co/kDrBUSCJLf @DesmondDreckett #GrowthHacking #Makeyourownlane #startup #defstar5 pic.twitter.com/s1bvxXtWCz

— Desmond Dreckett (@DesmondDreckett) 23 February 2017