As you may, know we’ve recently gone through the stressful task of redoing our website to provide you with a much better user experience, a broader set of content to learn everything about Facebook Advertising and, of course, increase our lead generation opportunities.
Now, running a fast growing startup like AdEspresso requires a huge amount of time and there’s an endless amount of things to be taken care of: Making the product amazing, constant improvements, providing an awesome support to our customers, pushing your startup’s growth by increasing the number of signups and customers, keeping all the servers up and running, and so much more.
All of this would not be possible for a small startup without some amazing partners that can take care of some parts of your duties, allowing you to focus on your core business.
That’s why today’s post is dedicated to our beloved partners and how they can make your business better, as well.
WP Engine
Plans start at: $29/mo – WordPress Hosting
I have a love-hate relationship with WordPress. We would have never finished our new website so quickly without it … but gosh, how many headaches did I get when working under the hood?
Anyway, love it or hate, if you’re going to use WordPress my No. 1 suggestion is to not host it on your servers — let the pros handle the hosting!
We’ve used WpEngine since day one for our blog and now for our whole website. The experience has always been amazing. Their interface is simple and clean. You can easily create a development and a production environment, CDN & SSL are setup with a click, network speed is usually very good, and they take care of caching, scaling, backups, and other boring stuff.
But, the thing I love most about them is that they take care of updating WordPress for you. Keeping WordPress up-to-date is critical in order to not to be hacked and WpEngine does a great job testing and updating new WordPress releases for you. It’s a zero effort process: You receive an email notifying when they’ll upgrade you and one when it’s done. I’ve never had an issue and their tech support is amazing, quickly answering at every hour.
HubSpot
Plans start at: $200/mo – Marketing Automation
HubSpot is no doubt the most expensive tool on the list but luckily, they offer a startup program that makes it affordable for the small guys. There’s also a reason for the high price point: The tool is huge, amazing, and basically takes care of all our inbound needs including landing page creation and testing, social monitoring and publishing, reporting, CRM, analytics, and much more. They also follow you through the whole implementation and setup process and schedule frequent calls to help you get on track.
Now that everything is setup, I’m simply amazed by how much we can do with a single tool: Creating a landing page, gathering leads, scoring them based on their activity on our website, sending them personalized emails. HubSpot also keeps improving the product and releasing new features on a weekly basis!
The downside of all this power is the learning curve and integration cost: It takes time to learn how to use HubSpot at its full potential and it costs developers and designers time to fully integrate it with your existing website or product. Still, I think it’s totally worth it in the long term, especially if you’re betting big on inbound marketing for your startup’s growth.
Wistia
Plans start at: Free – Video streaming
Paying for video streaming in the era of YouTube and Vimeo seemed crazy at the beginning. But, when we started to realize how powerful video can be in our marketing strategy, Wistia was our immediate go-to service.
Their service is reasonably priced and they even have a free entry level plan to start playing with it. The interface is super simple, and reporting is just great, giving you a huge amount of data on your video views. How many times was your video watched? From where and who? Which part of the video is more engaging? Which part makes our user stop watching it? All these questions are answered by Wistia.
Add to that full control over your video player and many amazing add-ons like email capturing for lead generation, video resume, plugging link or twitter follow buttons inside your video, and you’ll quickly understand how easily Wistia can turn your videos into powerful lead generating machines. Finally, Wistia also provided HubSpot integration to get all the stats and leads directly into our marketing automation platform…awesome!
Moz
Plans start at: $99/mo – SEO & Inbound Analytics
I don’t think Moz (previously known as SEOMoz) needs any presentation. It’s one of the most known inbound marketing tools on the planet, powering the growth of many startups. Not only do they provide a great tool for improving your SEO efforts and analyzing your inbound activities, Rand Fishkin & Co. have also successfully created an amazing community where you can learn something new every day.
Moz offers you more than 12 tools in their subscription. The main focus is on SEO, with keyword ranking tracking, backlinks analytics, competitor monitoring, and page analysis with improvements tips. However, Moz recently released a new version of their core product and included an awesome inbound analytics dashboard to track how all your marketing efforts are performing.
I’d love to tell you their support team is great, but I really don’t know the answer: The product is so easy, we’ve never needed to reach out to them!
MixPanel
Plans start at: Free – Website & App Analytics
Google Analytics is an amazing tool for quantitative website data, and with the recent updates, it can do much more than that. However, when you need qualitative data MixPanel provides you with options you may not have known about.
We’ve integrated MixPanel, both in our website and application. Not only is it extremely useful to analyze our core metrics like churn, revenues, and every kind of funnel you can imagine, it also helps us understand who our users are and how they interact with our Facebook Ads Manager. Before and after any platform update, we always monitor with MixPanel, particularly if we increased or decreased our users’ interaction with the feature updated.
As a bonus, MixPanel can also send emails and mobile notifications to users based on their behaviors. We’ve used it for all our drip emails before switching to HubSpot and never had a single problem. Remember, your startup’s growth is not just about getting more traffic, it’s also about understanding your user’s needs. Finally, MixPanel provides its amazing service both for web and mobile apps.
GeckoBoard
Plans start at: $17/mo – Data visualization dashboard
As you may have guessed, the team at AdEspresso deals with a huge amount of data spread across multiple platforms every day. How do we keep everything under control in a timely manner? Using GeckoBoard!
GeckoBoard is a great data visualization tool. You simply create a dashboard and define which widgets you want in it. GeckoBoard has data connectors with most online data sources, from Google Analytics, to GitHub, to Mailchimp, as well as hundreds more. For every widget you can define many visualization options. In a few minutes, you’ll have all your key metrics together, updated in near real-time.
Of course, if a service you use is not supported or, like we do, you need to display data from internal sources, you can always plug in your own connector pretty easily. Remember that huge TV you have in the meeting room and always ends up unused? Here’s the solution!
Honorable Mentions
Although these are the services we use most in our everyday journey to grow AdEspresso, there’s a plethora of other services that we use or would like to use in the future. Just to mention a few:
UserVoice: We use it every day and cannot think about running AdEspresso without it. It’s one of the best solutions to manage customer support. But, it also provides forums, knowledge base, feedback, and feature requests from users.
Buffer: Probably the best service to manage your social sharing! Cheap and extremely simple to use. We love it and used it everyday until we moved to HubSpot just for the sake of having everything under the same hood.
SendGrid: Affordable SMTP service we use to deliver all our transactional emails to ensure sure they won’t end up in the spam folder!
KissMetrics: Another great analytics tool. They were a close competitor with MixPanel until the end. We picked MixPanel because of their email notification system, but we may give KissMetrics a try now that we use HubSpot for drip emails. They also have an awesome blog and deliver frequent, high quality webinars.
AdEspresso: This was an easy choice! DogFooding is the best way to be sure you’re providing your users an amazing products. We started working on AdEspresso because, as an agency, we really needed it and now that it’s alive we use it every day for managing Facebook Ads.
What about you? Which other amazing tools have we missed and should use? What can you not live without? Let us know in the comments!
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