29 Traction Tools to reach the Next Level

Do I need Traction Tools?

Building a great company is hard. You can have a brilliant idea but without good execution and a solid customer acquisition plan it will never take off – this is how traction tools come into play.

Most startups fail because they cannot prove enough traction with it’s potential customers. “Build it and they will come” is seldom a successful technique.  Since most products don’t sell themselves, customers need to be convinced to try out your product. Below are some online traction tools that moved the needle for us, but before we go into that I would like to encourage all young startups, blogs etc. to try a combination of traction channels and not only focus on the standard ones. A lot more can be done to grow. Ultimately you need to find your own strategic set of channels and figure out what works for you.

A good starting point for this is Weinberg and Mares Traction book. Here are some of the most important channels they discuss: viral marketing, PR in its more or less conventional way (some of my favourite examples), email, offline marketing, social media, display ads, engineering as marketing (build a tool/app/plugin that will drive traffic), business development, blogs, affiliate programs, trade shows, existing platforms, offline events, speaking engagements, community building and probably a few more that I have missed, but you get the point.

29 Traction Tools that worked for us and our users:

Lead generation marketing:

• Ahrefs:  allows you to discover competitor SEO rankings and replicate their back link strategies.
• Ninja Outreach: an outbound marketing software to help businesses generate leads through prospecting and outreach.
• LaunchBit: a SaaS customer acquisition platform that helps B2B marketers generate new leads from their target audiences.

SEO/SEM and online presence management

• SEMrush: global tool for top-rated keyword research, business intelligence and online competitor analysis.
• Green lotus SEO: provides a huge set of marketing tools for internet marketers.
• Moz Analytics: Moz is a web-based marketing analytics platform that brings all inbound marketing data into one place.
• Authority Labs: a simple and scalable search engine rank monitoring software. Track and analyze performance in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
• Linkfool: an inbound marketing and SEO service to help grow your site’s rankings.
• HitTail: an SEO tool that helps users to increase organic traffic by revealing the best and worst keywords in existing traffic sources.
• CanIRank: an SEO intelligence tool that blends data and metrics to deliver actionable insights, opportunities, and personalized recommendations.
• myPresences: help local businesses get the most from their online presence by helping them build the best online resources & reputation possible and then manage everything in one place.
• Unbounce: build, publish and A/B test landing pages on the fly.

Affiliates:

• Tapfiliate: a cloud-based affiliate tracking software. It enables you to create, track and optimize your own affiliate programs.

Email Marketing:

• Mail chimp: an email marketing service that helps users design email newsletters, share them on social platforms, and track campaign results.
• Campaigner: a web-based application to build, launch and track email marketing campaigns.
• Sendgrid: a web-based transactional email delivery and management system.
• Campaign Monitor: a creative email marketing platform to help attract new subscribers, send newsletters and receive detailed progress reports.

Social Media:

• Buffer: simplifies social media sharing and scheduling to increase the time you have to create and curate great online content.
• Sniply: a conversion driving link shortener that embeds calls-to-action into every page you share.
• Swayy: helps users discover the most engaging content to share with users on social media and around the web.
• Scoop.it: a content marketing platform that helps users discover, curate and publish great online content.
• Crowdfire: a social media marketing product that allows you to clean and grow Twitter and Instagram accounts with ease.
• Sprout Social: a social media management platform assisting businesses with their social media engagement, publishing and analytics.
• Twitfox: a growth hacking tool that automates Twitter favoriting, retweeting and un-favoriting to generate real followers and high-quality traffic. (Update: this tool has unfortunately been banned by Twitter)
• Morefollow: a Twitter management tool that makes social media marketing easy. Quickly grow and manage your followers, schedule your tweets, and analyze your results.

Business Development/CRM:

• Rapportive: a social CRM tool that shows you more information about your contacts right inside your inbox.
• Streak: solves the frustration of constantly switching between your inbox & external systems – making it simpler to manage your everyday work processes.
• Insightly: easy to use and cheap CRM with an additional project management capability
• ProsperWorks: an easy-to-use CRM system for small businesses that helps them capture contacts and sales leads directly from Gmail.

Understanding these tools and how to use them together to best serve YOUR specific purpose WILL take a while! but the reward will be worth it: check out our own case study here: 18 Growth Hacking Apps that Tripled Our Users!

See traction tools like these visualised into the 5 Best Tools in for each major category here and comment below to let us know your thoughts!