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After years of working with over 100 startups and businesses of all shapes, sizes, we know many organizations don’t have access to the marketing tools they need to help them grow.
It’s a problem we’ve had to get around ourselves. Our clients want results, and they want them fast. So we evolved up our own marketing stack – a list of 55 marketing tools that we use to help businesses grow.
In this post you’ll find:
Let’s get started!
First, we’ll dive into one of our most important marketing tools — one that we developed internally out of a need for streamlined, impactful analysis.
It’s called Spotlight and it enables our strategists to quickly spot growth opportunities and resource optimizations. We even use Spotlight to win clients – tapping into its automated growth audit tech to immediately illuminate blindspots across the entire business funnel.
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
Ladder strategists start every relationship with a full growth audit – a deep-dive into all analytics, website, ad accounts, and competitor properties. Growth audits are crucial to increasing the success rates of your strategy. We even wrote 100-page guide on how to manually perform your own (yes, the resource is free).
Now, these audits used to take us up to a week to complete thoroughly. With Spotlight we can generate a growth audit in just a few minutes! This dramatically increases our access to impactful insights, giving us actionable snapshots of our growth levers whenever we need it.
We also built the Ladder Planner – which we developed internally out of a need for better workflow, collaboration, and reporting functionality for our tests. The Planner enables our strategists to run smart monthly marketing sprints for our clients. Not a workday goes by without Ladder strategists poring over tests, marketing tactics, and funnel analysis in the Planner.
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
At Ladder, we have a very robust growth hacking process. It drives everything we do for clients on a weekly basis. It’s essentially a smart process based on years of work and thousands of campaigns that lets us handle a massive weekly workload.
But that massive workload would still be impossible without proper tracking and reporting for clients and easy-to-use marketing tools for strategists to do their jobs. That’s why we created and keep iterating on the Ladder Planner. Everything we do on a weekly basis starts and ends here:
Use Cases:
That’s where we start and end every workday. But while the Spotlight and the Ladder Planner let us manage our entire growth process in one place, it’s the marketing tools we use outside the portal that then implement our monthly marketing sprints.
Check them out, starting with…
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
Google Analytics is the basis for all website traffic information we use to make intelligent marketing decisions. From understanding which traffic sources convert at a high rate to determining the performance of ad campaigns and more, Google Analytics helps us understand the audiences that work well for the businesses we work with.
Knowing who our clients’ audiences are, how they behave on their website, where they find out about their businesses, and how they interact with the site’s content tells us what we need to do to drive growth. Whether you’re implementing other marketing tools like Sumo to decrease bouncing traffic with exit intent modals or creating Facebook ad campaigns because Facebook traffic converts at a high rate, all that data can be tracked with Google Analytics.
Use Cases:
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
We use Google Tag Manager to set up other marketing tools like Google Analytics, AdWords, Facebook pixels, and a ton of other services for both our websites and for our clients. It’s a dead-simple, easy to use service that removes the need to add code manually.
Use Cases:
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
All our SEO work starts with getting set up on Google Search Console. From adding a sitemap to tracking keywords that we rank, Search Console is our go-to dashboard for SEO research.
Use Cases:
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
We started using Funnel as an extremely powerful and robust way to do internal tracking of advertising performance, but quickly realized that it’s also one of the best marketing tools for reporting purposes with clients.
Use Cases:
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
For our mobile clients, we use Mixpanel as a quick and easy way to set up event-based analytics. Mixpanel data helps us suggest targeted app improvements based on the way users behave in apps.
Use Cases:
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
Mode Analytics is one of the marketing tools we use when we need to do some serious data science. We don’t need to bother our clients with the nitty gritty – just get them a data visualization that tells the full story.
Mode Analytics Overview from Mode on Vimeo.
Use Cases:
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
We use Hotjar to see how people are interacting with the websites we’re working on. Click tracking heatmaps tell us what people are clicking on and give us insight into where they’re looking on different landing pages.
Hotjar’s features let us optimize for conversion across the entire funnel, following potential customers across entire websites step-by-step to see how they’re behaving and what may be driving them away.
Use Cases:
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
Facebook’s Ads platform is among our favorite marketing tools. From our own advertising to running ads for clients, we use Facebook to reach a highly targeted audience based on a variety of different behaviors and parameters.
Depending on the client’s need and the audience they cater to, Facebook may or may not be a good place to advertise. We run small tests with different audiences to see what works and what doesn’t, doubling down or moving on depending on the data we gather.
Use Cases:
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
AdWords is critical to both our own advertising efforts and those of our clients. We use AdWords to target high-value, low-competition keywords, as well as to conduct brand defense advertising to prevent competitors from showing up on our / clients’ brand name searches.
Use Cases:
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
Twitter’s ads platform ranks with other important marketing tools in our advertising arsenal. From promoting content-related posts to creating lead generation ads, Twitter lets us narrow targeting based on interests and behavior to reach a specific audience.
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Purpose:
Why We Use It:
In a similar vein to Google AdWords, we use Bing to have our/our clients’ businesses and ads show up on relevant searches.
Use Cases:
See Google AdWords
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
Pinterest is a special use case for clients that sell products that make sense for the type of audience that visits the site. While it doesn’t work for, say, B2B clients, it certainly works for some eCommerce clients, helping us drive traffic to and grow their Pinterest following.
Use Cases:
Purpose:
Why We Use It:
LinkedIn ads can be expensive, but they can also be ridiculously powerful when properly targeted. We especially love using LinkedIn ads to grow our B2B and SaaS clients, as we’re able to tap into the exact audience they’re looking for.
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Purpose:
Why We Use It:
UserTesting is one of those critical marketing tools that applies to any platform that wants to retain users. A lot of businesses create web and mobile apps without doing any user experience research to start with. The end result is a lot of assumptions about what works best.
Using UserTesting to see the real, live actions and feedback of a group of early adopters can give valuable information about how and why a client’s app may confuse or drive away users.
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Purpose:
Why We Use It:
Out of the many marketing tools available for landing page builders, Unbounce is Ladder’s go-to. Whenever conversion rate optimization is the goal, we build a landing page for our clients. This lets us control for CTAs, copy, and design, allowing our in-house design team & strategists to collaborate on conversion-focused LPs.
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