Growth tools | Justin Wu

So let's just get into the other part, which is just straight up a lot of different tools. But as you can imagine, the marketing tech landscape looks like this. It's a— there's constantly a lot of startups all around building all these different tools and growth hacks out there. So it's in constant overload. There's a lot of noise. And a lot of these tools are cool, but what I always see happening for a lot of entrepreneurs is that they're just sitting down and constantly getting addicted to just reading about new tools, and they never really take action, and they're just like constantly reading the latest trending tools. Maybe they'll subscribe to them, but then they forget about it, and now they're just having an ongoing subscription. And it's just so noisy, and that's really the wrong way to really think about tools. I think everybody's so focused on what's the best growth hack, what's the best tools, without even thinking about the whole process of why they want the tool. So take a pause before you even look at any tools out there. And first, ignore all the tools. Identify what are the exact tasks you need to get done for whatever you're trying to grow. And what I mean by that is first identify the platform. So let's say you want to grow on Pinterest or you want to grow on Instagram. All right, identify I want to grow on Instagram. Okay? All right, what's the action that I need to automate or need to do? Figure out that by hand or manually. All right, I need to schedule posts. Instagram doesn't have that feature. They can let you save a draft. So what's the tools out there? Okay, so then I know that I wanna go find an Instagram tool. I need help with Instagram, and then I need a tool to go schedule. So then that's when I go do research. You can Google, you can go ask a friend, but it's much more easier, but you can see here there's different tools. The first tool is called Schedulegram, and I'll come back to these tools here. OnlyPult, Later. And so there's a lot of different choices out there, and again, you're gonna come down to kind of analysis paralysis where you're seeing all these different tools like, oh, what do I sign up? I don't even know. And you're just gonna bookmark it, save it, subscribe. You're not really gonna really figure that out. But if you narrow it down to the few tools that you actually need to get done for that task, then it's much more easier to decide and compare what you need to do. So the first tool, this one's the one that I personally use for Instagram scheduling. It's called Schedulegram. They allow you to upload in bulk on your desktop and just push out your images and videos. OnlyPulse is another quick, easy tool. It's a little bit cheaper. And then Later is more of like a notifications. A good platform to really compare all the different tools— I always go back to sites like this. It's simply like Yelp for business tools and little growth tools. It's called G2 Crowd. And what G2 Crowd allows you to do, you input a business and it'll show you other similar companies out there. So let's say you put in Mailchimp. It'll show you all the other competitors for Mailchimp. And then it also shows you reviews, what people talk about rating the different software and platforms out there. So then you can go out and see different requirements and research all the things that you need to get done. And it also helps you narrow down. They also have categories. So then it's going back to the other approach where you first identify, like, I need help with email marketing. OK, then I found the email marketing tools. Don't go out and searching like all these different things out there. You're just going to be constantly bombarded. Another great tool that I personally like to use is called Zapier. Zapier allows you to kind of stitch different apps together. Usually it's not all apps out there have an API that you can all hook up into, and sometimes not all apps talk to each other. And so Zapier is kind of like a glue where you can say I want Mailchimp to interact with this Instagram tool. So whenever I get an email, it's gonna post something to Instagram. It can do things and stitch things like that, all of it together. I think they have like a freemium model you can use. But I use Zapier to power all the automation in the background. Another tool that I also like to use is called Autopilot. Now Autopilot, what it does is like an easy drag-and-drop tool. where I can create an automated email system. So what you're seeing here is when somebody signs up, they get hit with a welcome email. Then after that, I wait 3 days. Then I have another automatic sales email that does an outreach directly to them. And to that customer, it seems like I'm actually outreaching to them. It comes signed from my name and says, hey, so-and-so, I didn't see you sign up on our— schedule a call with us. What's going on? And it just keeps hitting the gas pedal. But what it also does too is if somebody actually schedules a call with me but doesn't actually convert as a customer lead, then I can hit them with a different series of emails. So I'm flowing customers in through different logics, different paths, and I'm essentially having an automatic follow-up system, an automatic sales system that is constantly getting people and trying to push them through the door. And I do different things from a welcome email, to a follow-up email, to a webinar where I'm gonna go and handle objections, then after that do another email where I'm giving them a case study. Again, like I'm hitting people at different points and different objections automatically. So then it comes back down to the funnel idea where I can go out and focus on acquisition now because I know that my email flow and signups are gonna go through a predicted path and try to get them to conversion. And Autopilot is a great tool to help you kind of visualize and create So super, super dead simple ways to do an email automation drip. Another really, really powerful tool is called SumoMe. SumoMe is essentially a suite of tools that you can add to your site. And it comes from like heat maps, so you can see where people are going on your website, clicking around. It also has different ways to maximize conversions. There's like pop-ups, different bars. From using SumoMe, I've increased conversions by about 15% on sites from simply adding SumoMe. Because what it does is it can detect people who are about to leave a website and hit them with one last final offer and capture the emails. And then once I capture the emails, that's when I go back to autopilot, push them through my email funnel drip, and really get them to convert. And they have a lot of other tools from having share buttons on the side. Again, it's just trying to get more people coming in the door. So they just have a whole suite of tools where you just pay like a bundle, like $25 a month, and they give you a whole suite of tools, and the pricing just scales accordingly. Another powerful tool that I use is Instapage. And what I want to talk about Instapage is just the concept of landing pages. And landing pages are very powerful in the way that you can really sell a startup or an idea without even having a product. And what I mean by that is you can make a landing page look like it's an actual product. You can have a mockup of your— take your UI, your UX, your wireframes, put it on the site, and just collect signups. And surprisingly enough, I've had kind of just fun ideas that I built landing pages, and some of them went viral. One of my friends made a fake landing page of a fake Chrome app that blocks out all mentioning of the Kardashians. And it got viral. And then he exploded, and he got more traction than a lot of startups building, spending all their time building. And then at that point, he has this traction, now he's gonna build the product and service. Another friend, he built another landing page. It was Tinder for fighting. If you wanna fight somebody on the streets, or you just wanna beat— of course it's not real, but he made the app look real. And it was a landing page, and it just had a sign-up. And he just got a ton of signups and just done a lot of PR. The whole point though is that even if you— before you even built your startup app or idea, I've seen so many times people don't focus on just getting a nice landing page. Get— build a landing page that really sells your product and service, at least the concept and idea, and get people to sign up. And even tell them, hey, you're on the waiting list. And what you're gonna do is you always point people back to your landing page, and from there you can constantly collect your leads and signups, even if you don't send anything to them. Now you're creating your first funnel, and Instapage or any other type of tool out there is your first step to really getting your front page and funnel up. Now another really good tool that I've seen is called Queue-At, and what Queue-At is, is a viral gamification waiting list. So let's say I sign up on a website or your product or service on the landing page. The moment you sign up, it will put you in this long waiting list. And as you see, I'm positioned 49 out of 16,000 people. And what it does is says, if you share, tweet, post, we're gonna give you X amount of points and move you up the ranks. And then you also see other people commenting like, this is cool. So that gives more social proof. And then what this— what you can do is you can offer out prizes, giveaways to people. And I think last week Neil Patel only had about 5,000 people on the signup list. Within one week he has almost 16,000. And as you can see, the moment people are tweeting out, sharing, and it motivates— and this system too, QueueAd, will automatically email your customers and tell them where they're at, reminding them that they're in position 10,000 and that they can move up if they simply tweet. Every few days so that it's constantly getting people to refer. Of course you have to make the prize something interesting. In this case, he's doing one-on-one consultations, giving out free ebooks. But if you're trying to really multiply your email list, getting people to tell other people within target networks, you literally can multiply— I've seen people do like increase their list by 50% within like a week when they keep pumping in acquisition ads and traffic. And then building up a huge list for like 16,000, 20,000. And then they launch a Kickstarter campaign and they get 100% funded in 4 days. It's really about multiplying that list and really growing that virally. Another few tools for like PR hacking and kind of getting your name out to journalists. There's a few different ones. First is like BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo will let you identify, you type in a keyword for like influencers. So let's say you want to try and find fitness influencers. You type in fitness. It'll give you similar to Audience, but where it gives you a list of people. But what BuzzSumo does is actually analyzes those people's tweets. So it actually knows how much influence that, well, kind of, in a sense, how much influence that person has and how much engagements. Whereas Audience just shows you this person's fitness and their profile and not necessarily how much engagement they're getting. Another cool tool is GoPRit. GoPRit literally has a whole database of journalists' email contacts and then they built an email drip system where they have a nice template where you can write your emails and then automatically message and do follow-ups on journalists. They'll help you kind of package that up. And if you really want to go out and get your company out into like Entrepreneur Inc. and featured, you just have to hit the gas pedal and constantly reach out to journalists and find people who are in your target segment. So GoPR, they have a whole engine that categorizes different journalists by different topics and what they talk about. And you can do outreach as well. Then other 2 platforms like StartupLister and Betalist are good ways to just list your startup. And then from there, they'll just syndicate it out to other directories. It's just for like $50. And they'll get you— they probably have an email list of like 10,000 entrepreneurs. And it's just another good way to just get yourself exposure from your initial customer base. So like kind of an example of building your kind of initial funnel with kind of the tools that I talked about. Here's kind of like a stack that I like to share with anybody that before you even launch a product. Again, this is just about building your initial landing page and funnel. This is what my kind of stack looks like where I start out with the landing page and website, Instapage. I attach Google Analytics so I can look at the data. Then I use conversion optimization tools to ramp up conversions, which is SumoMe. Then I use a free email system like MailChimp. It doesn't cost me anything to just capture the emails. Now if I pay $10 extra, MailChimp can do something similar to autopilot where it just sends out series of emails. It's not as powerful, but it's a good start. And there's one thing I forgot to list on here. It's installing what's something called a Facebook pixel. And what a Facebook pixel is, is when somebody comes on your website, let's say you go shop on Amazon, you look at a product, you go back on Facebook, that product is just like on your newsfeed following you everywhere. It's completely free to install a Facebook pixel. And that comes back down to the funnel where you're trying to get people to come back and you can't really sell them on first impression. Just installing a Facebook pixel, you cookie the user, and so if somebody comes in and they leave, you can hit them with an ad and target those people and pay significantly less money because they're much more familiar with your business, and they'll come back most likely to your product and service or landing page. So this is kind of like initial stack that I usually just give somebody to start. It's like, hey, don't worry about that, just build your landing page, get that up. Sub out different tools, whatever you want in between. But this gets you up and going from analytics, retention, and your whole funnel. And here's just some examples of a few different landing pages that we helped for startups. For what we did here was we just had a single conversion, which was at the very top where people can only sign up and learn more. But if they don't want to sign up immediately, that's fine. Then we give them a few value propositions and a video, and then we have another signup. And if they don't want to do that, then we have another, more objections on the very bottom, is like testimonials and use cases. So we're just going down deeper levels of ways to try to convince people to buy the product or service, and we're having different multiple points of conversions. Because if somebody, if you don't have a conversion button and they're all the way down to the site, then you're gonna potentially lose that customer. They're not ready to convert. But having different mediums too, especially like video now, video is becoming a very powerful tool and platform to really storytell and showcase your product and service. Most of the startups I've seen really kind of build like a demo reel or a little walkthrough of their product, and it just really highlights why people should be investing in your product and service. So if you can spend the time or find somebody to help you build a video, I would highly recommend you doing so. Same thing with the Growth Lead site, all I did was just have a landing page, but what I did here was a little bit different. I have multiple conversions on here. It's a little bit hard to see here, but I have the first initial signup for customers who want a consultation with my marketing services, but I also know too, people don't— might not always want to talk to me and might not exactly want to schedule a time to talk to me. So then I have one extra button at the very bottom here. It's a little bit hard to read, but it says, no thanks, but I would like to join a growth newsletter. So my idea is this, is that sometimes scheduling a call and signing up immediately is a huge barrier for people. So I give them one other conversion which is much more casual. It's like, alright, well, if I can't sell you today, I'm gonna try to sell you tomorrow, a month from now, and I'm gonna do that through content marketing. And that's where I'm seeing 25% of my traffic going up to signing up, and actually 3/4 of my conversions actually happening on my no thanks. But as you can imagine, if I did not have that button there, then you're just betting on the customer to say, I want to schedule a time right now. Right now is not a good time, and then they're not going to schedule with me, they're just going to bounce. But because I give them one extra thing and I'm providing them a whole different route, I'm still getting somebody that They might not be ready to convert right now, but now they're on my email list, and now then I got them to 2 different funnels that I am bringing them through. And again here I'm using SumoMe, which is the bar down here, to get extra conversions. This probably gets about 3% conversion. Again, if I didn't put that down there, then it would not— it would have converted at zero. It's just an extra way to get people to join my newsletter, and then I have different— throughout my site I just have different steps of conversions. To get people to outreach to me. Another really, really good resource, which is just, without going into so many tools, growthhackers.com, which is actually built by Sean Ellis, is probably one of the best resources to go out there. Because there's a lot of other growth hackers coming in, sharing their ideas, their articles, and their tools. And the best way to learn is through other kind of people, marketers and growth people who are always on top of the the trends. And if you're looking for more so like a directory of tools, I know I listed only some of them. There's again like the whole marketing tech cloud is so expansive and huge. This kind of site, Growth Tools, identifies the tools based on the platforms or the subjects. So if you want email marketing, it just shows you in a nice ranking. You can go there and look at all the different tools.