For a startup, working efficiently is a must. Freeing yourself from repetitive manual tasks by automating them will make you more productive and will help you focus better on the more challenging aspects of your business. Marketing is essential, but apart from writing the content and developing the campaigns, everything can be automated. In fact, the more you automate the better. Marketing efforts can be very time consuming and they have a special way of pulling you in and making you get lost in possibilities and ideas. As important as it is, you should treat it as a tool to help you spread the word about your business and increase sales. Let’s dive into some tools for startups just like you who are looking to automate.

I. Marketing tools for startups

Social media

a. Hootsuite

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  • Price: Plans start from 16 £ / month. Trial: 30 days
  • Zapier integration: Yes

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that offers quite a few automation options. You can categorise and manage inbound messages with automatic tagging, you can automatically send incoming messages to members of the company, You can schedule content on various Social Media platforms track performance and increase audience growth using Hootsuite’s analytics reports.

b. Buffer 

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  • Price: Plans start from 15 $ / month. Trial: 14 days
  • Zapier integration: Yes

Buffer is at the top of the list when it comes to popular automation tools for startups. It is a very useful and smart tool that allows you to schedule social media posts across different platforms. Moreover, it offers a browser extension so you can curate web content, social media analytics and it has a image creator that you can use to upload visuals.

c. SocialPilot 

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  • Price: Plans start from 41.66 $ / month. Trial: 14 days
  • Zapier integration: Yes

SocialPilot prides itself with being one of the very useful tools for startups looking to manage social media, schedule social media posts, improve engagement and analyze results.  

d. Mavsocial

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  • Price: Plans start from 19 $ / month. Trial: 14 days
  • Zapier: No 

MavSocial is another social media management tool that promises to help startups with everything Social Media: publishing, monitoring, engaging, and measuring success. The Social Media Platforms you can connect to it are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Tumblr.

Email Marketing

a. Postmark

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  • Price: Plans start from 10 $ / month. Trial: a free developer plan of 100 test emails per month
  • Zapier integration: Yes

Postmark is a straightforward and easy to use specifically app that helps you send and receive transactional email with zero maintenance. 

b. MailChimp

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  • Price: Paid plans start from 9,99 $ / month. Trial: They offer a free basic plan for an unlimited period. 
  • Zapier integration: Yes

MailChimp is a highly versatile, multiple use marketing platform for small businesses. They are a very popular choice among business owners and marketers all over the world. It’s a start among the common tools for startups.

c. ConvertKit

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  • Price: Plans start from 29 $ / month. Trial: They offer a free basic plan for an unlimited period. 
  • Zapier integration: Yes

This is an email marketing platform that is highly useful for startups who are content focused. You can create email sequences, tag subscribers, grow your list, and automate your email marketing.

d. Wishpond Email Marketing

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  • Price: Plans start from 49 $ / month. 
  • Zapier integration: Yes

Wishpond offers email marketing tools for startups that simplify sending newsletters, automating your auto-responses, creating email drip campaigns that help turn your prospective customers and leads into sales, and sending internal emails.

Content and content marketing

a. Long Tail Pro

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  • Price: Plans start from 25 $ / month.  
  • Zapier integration: No

Long Tail Pro offers a software that helps SEO beginners discover good and profitable keywords to use in their campaigns. Most importantly the tool can also calculate Keyword Competitiveness for almost any niche.

b. BuzzSumo

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  • Price: Plans start from 99 $ / month. Trial: 7 days
  • Zapier integration: No, but they do offer API’s

BuzzSumo is a gold mine for marketers who want to create relevant content. The tool helps identify what type of content is working best for competitors, it helps identify relevant influencers and monitor everything happening online on subjects of interest.

c. Autopilot

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  • Pricing: Plans start from 49 $ / month. Trial: 30 days
  • Zapier integration: Yes

Autopilot’s greatest plus is that it is a very visual marketing automation tool. It can help you organize your customer information in one place. It can segment your customers, sync information from the CRM, capture leads, track customer activities, collaborate with the team, add creativity to the canvas, manage social media and optimize email campaigns for mobile phones.

d. Mautic

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  • Price: Plans start from 100 $ / month. Trial: No trial, no free plan.
  • Zapier integration: Yes

This is a great tool for startups to streamline marketing campaigns, achieve consistently high performance and produce engaging content. It has a comprehensive dashboard with A/B testing, mobile optimization, search tracking, lead management and nurturing, event management, social media management, SEO analytics, and workflow capability. 

e. Sendible 

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  • Price: Plans start from 19 $ / month. Trial: 14 days.
  • Zapier: Yes

Sendible is a platform that enables you to manage your Social Media channels, engage with your audience and offers valuable analytics. 

Sales

a. Prospect.io

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  • Price: Plans start from 79 $ / month. Trial: No trial. The service provides a 30-day money-back guarantee.
  • Zapier integration: Yes

Prospect.io is a platform that allows you to automate sales and increase the productivity of your sales team. It is something designed specifically with startups in mind. The software effectively handles lead nurturing, prospecting, lead tracking, optimizing campaigns, email verification, email tracking. In addition it shows when emails were opened and it offers analytics to track clicks and replies from the prospects.

b. FindThatLead

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  • Price: Plans start from 49 $ / month for one user. Trial: Basic plan is available for free
  • Zapier integration: Yes

FindThatLead, as its name states, allows you to find potential leads for sales. It is a combination of prospecting tools for startups like Prospector, Email Verifier, Lead Search, Bulk, Domain Search, and Social URL Search. For startups, using FindThatLead translates to speeding up the process of making new deals and finding targeted prospects across geography.

c. SalesSeek

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  • Price: Plans start from 67 $ / user / month. Trial: No.
  • Zapier integration: Yes

This is another valuable entry on the tools for startups list. It was created specifically for startup software companies. If you are one, you can use it to manage your marketing, sales and business workflows. You have pipeline management, automation, email marketing, web analytics, lead generation, tracking, sales funnel management, business deal optimization and much more.

d. ZoomInfo

Simplify part of your go-to-market with technology, integrations, and automation. With ZoomInfo you can easily find prospective customers for your products. It offers access to customers’ email addresses and information regarding their location, job title, job function, industry, company revenue, company size, and more.

CRM

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a system that helps you manage your relationships with your startup’s clients. This type of tool holds everything relevant about your customers and it synchronizes between business units (marketing, sales, administrative, customer service). Above all it can be a great asset not only in terms of saved time, but also in terms of saved revenue. 

a. HubSpot CRM

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  • Price: Plans start from 36.80 € / month. Trial: No. There is a free version available.
  • Zapier integration: Yes

Hubspot has one of the most popular marketing & sales automation platforms. It offers detailed reports on sales activity, productivity, and individual performance. This means you can always see how your team is tracking toward quota, and where and what to improve. It is a valuable asset on the list of tools for startups and it is worth a try. 

b. Salesforce

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  • Price: Plans start from 25 $ / month / user. Trial: 30 days.
  • Zapier integration: Yes

Salesforce is another good option if you are looking for a customer relationship management tool. It offers scalability and integration. In short it could be your team’s best ally in the long run. 

c. Zoho CRM

  • Get it here
  • Price: Plans start from 12 € / user / month. Trial: 30 days. There is also a free version available.
  • Zapier integration: Yes

Zoho CRM is one of the simple and more affordable solutions. Moreover, they focus  on rather small businesses which makes it a great fit for our list of tools for startups.

d. Pipedrive

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  • Price: Plans start from 12.50 € / user / month. Trial: 14 days. 
  • Zapier integration: Yes

One of the very straightforward tools for startups, Pipedrive focuses on sales processes and optimizations. You can manage deals and leads, track communication, access data and reports, and automate repetitive administrative tasks.  

e. Insightly

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  • Price: Plans start from 29 $ / user / month. Trial: Yes. 
  • Zapier integration: Yes

Insightly is more than just a CRM tool. With startups and small to mid businesses, they offer project management, workflow automations and robust reporting capabilities. Another plus is that it features a lot of integrations. 

It is a comprehensive list of tools for startups looking to automate their marketing and sales efforts as we wanted to include an option for any kind of business. Our advice is to try them and settle only on those which best fit your team. As with any tool, it is a trial and error process and we’ve tried many of them before ending up with our current setup. But once they were in place, our productivity and processes have improved greatly. If you are looking to automate the operational side of your business, you can see some useful tools here. 

  Zapier Segment Integromat Microsoft Flow IFTTT
Hootsuite Yes No Yes No Yes
Buffer Yes No Yes Yes Yes
SocialPilot Yes No No No No
Mavsocial No No No No No
Postmark Yes No Yes No No
MailChimp Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
ConvertKit Yes No Yes No No
Wishpond Email Marketing Yes Yes No No No
Long Tail Pro No No No No No
BuzzSumo No No No No No
Autopilot Yes Yes Yes No No
Mautic Yes No Yes No No
Sendible Yes No No No No
Prospect.io Yes No No No No
FindThatLead Yes No No No No
SalesSeek Yes No No No No
ZoomInfo Yes No No No No
HubSpot CRM Yes Yes Yes No No
Salesforce Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Zoho CRM Yes No Yes No Yes
Pipedrive Yes No Yes Yes Yes
Insightly Yes No Yes Yes Yes