An average person would say that at least 2 to 5 friends of them attempted to start their own company. Though, think about the number of people you know, who started their own business at least more than a year ago? After a brief assessment, you will realize that an overwhelming majority of those who challenged themselves to start a business never made it past the first year. Very often the main reason is the absence of managerial expertise of the team. Often, the problem lays in the field of difference between developing a working set of code lines and the actual start of online business. That is why, even when a product is developed flawlessly and the team has a clear vision on the future of the product – they still may not succeed.
Very often, the main question which one should ask before starting a company is “ How to start an online business?” and, what’s more important, how to make it profitable. The first and most crucial thing you need to do is to set up a digital marketing funnel of your website. This will give you a realistic picture of where your business is now – Is it interesting for the target audience and how they interact with your brand online.
Even if you plan to sell cakes or provide welding services – you need to be present online. And the online presence of a business lean on 3 main pillars:
- Someone said that “a company is dead if it’s not present online”. The logic here is simple – if you don’t have a website for your let-it-be welding company then people will never find your services on the internet;
- If you have a website, then you’re closer to your visitors and get to know them better. Their behavior, page view patterns and other information will help you adapt the strategy to support your target audience when they would need it badly;
- The main idea here: without being tracked on the web you won’t be able to benefit your website and turn your visitors into clients.
Though, what do you need to set up before launching the website of your business to a wide public? You’re right – digital marketing funnel and analytical tools.
These 3 FREE tools will help you and fulfill the most basic needs of your company’s lead generation.
Google Tools for Startups
Google is always the key. You can’t make your company visible on the internet and easily searchable in Google if you will ignore Google tools. You won’t be able to see a number of visitors of your website and their path to conversion from regular visitors to leads and clients, track conversions and see insights on ROMI and profitability of certain actions. In other words, lead generation is impossible without a minimal set of Google tools that will help you analyze and understand the data necessary for your marketing and operational activities. In our previous article, we’ve already told you how to set up the best Google Tools for marketing by RGray.
The minimal necessary set includes the following:
- Google Tag Manager,
- Google Analytics,
- Google Search Console
- Google Business.
This “fantastic 4” is the first thing which you need to install on your website if you’re really serious about making your business work.
MailChimp – automated email funnels for your clients
Okay, with Google tools installed you will be able to see the analytics of user behavior on your website, assess “searchability” of your brand (both on maps and in Google Queries), and many other things. Though, still, your digital marketing funnel is weak – it’s very hard to measure the conversion of a website visitor into a let-it-be offline store visitor, or an online purchase request, which occurred a month after the first visit. Though, what helps you to facilitate the process and make the conversion from visitor to a client more smooth and easy is an emailing tool. If your website content, topic, or product are really marvelous – then people would sign up to keep tabs on your development.
Here is where a proven market leader in email automation – MailChimp comes in place. With relatively small efforts, you can set up the simplest emailing sequence for visitors of your website, which will welcome all the subscribers and send an email with all the brand information, products, and a special promo. MailChimp has an option of a free account, so you won’t have to pay anything for the basic functions and low volumes of emails sent. You will be offered thousands of email templates for every goal and taste – so you will definitely be satisfied.
Though, what’s next after the email? Some people would really like to talk with you in person about the details of your product. It’s a perfect opportunity to convert them into a client. Eventually, you might want a proper solution to track sales, deals, and prospects of your business.
HubSpot – CRM & inbound customer retention management tool
In fact, HubSpot isn’t purely a Customer Relation Management (CRM) tool. HubSpot’s full platform can close all the tasks with social media planning and posting, content management, CRM/sales and many others. Hubspot is promoting Inbound marketing, which proves to be far more effective than direct sales.
RGray supports the principles of Inbound marketing and adopts the principles of Hubspot Though, in this guide, we’re reviewing the free version of the HubSpot platform to showcase that even at the beginning of your company’s path, there shouldn’t be any excuses for not processing the inbound leads which come across your website.
HubSpot will require some specific knowledge to set it up properly. Though, what is good about it is that they have a HUGE amount of guides and predefined strategies for small businesses as well as insights on digital marketing funnel tracking and set up.
One of the killing features in the free subscription of HubSpot are:
- Embed Lead Generation forms to your website which will collect leads and process them accordingly (with the help of Mailchimp);
- Store and process contacts in a convenient way
- Personalized meeting links, which will allow choosing any available meeting time from predefined time ranges and selected duration and are integrated with the calendar, so there is no chance to have 2 meetings at the same time;
- Chat Bots, which you can install on your website and work over all possible support requests of your visitors.
What’s next?
Do your job and do it perfectly. Your company now has a primary set of tools to astonish the first visitors of your website or business, grab their attention and emails, and nurture these guys into clients and even brand ambassadors. Obviously, the proposed set of tools isn’t an ideal one and you will have a lot of limitations using only free accounts. Though, you won’t have the feeling that you’re missing the opportunities, while not tracking who is visiting your website and not grabbing their email. Just launch your website and see where the path of your company will take you, doing updates to your digital marketing funnel on your way – and one day you will be an owner of a successful company.