Startups like Slack and Square have been lifesavers to people around the world. Both were founded during the Great Recession of 2007 - 2009 and are still standing strong today. They survived through a combination of iterating on their original idea and finding the right product-market fit
The current economic recession has put start-ups and the ecosystem in mortal danger. Companies are running out of cash, teams are being disbanded, and customer demand is waning
That’s why it’s time for teams to go back to the drawing board and figure out things like how best to market and the right projects to focus on. Thankfully, you don’t have to do it on your own, and there are tools like the ones below that can help
Marketing Tools
Surviving a recession requires you to have a solid marketing strategy and an implementation process that gives you value for your money. This means you need to have tools that give you value for your money and allow you to monitor, analyse, and evaluate your marketing campaigns.
The major type of marketing tool to consider is a messaging tool, as the one thing you want to be during a recession is on top of your customer’s mind.
These are some amazing messaging tools to consider
1. Lumen
In-app messages, emails, and SMS are great ways to send messages to your customers, and Lumen helps you just do that.
Lumen is an amazing tool that breaks down your customer behaviour and gives you insight into how they interact with your product. You can then send personalized messages via SMS, emails, and push notifications also using Lumen.
The amazing thing about Lumen is that very easy to use, and you don’t need any experience to start sending messages
2. Mailchimp
Email marketing has proved successful when it comes to your customers and if done well inspires brand loyalty and delivers a strong ROI.
A great email marketing tool to consider is MailChimp, especially if you run a startup, as it is very reliable and delivers emails directly to any user’s inbox. It is a tool that comes highly recommended by many experts.
A/B Testing Tools
During a recession, you need customers and conversions. A good way to get both is to test as much as possible. Test the product, website, or business you need to build.
Learn what they like and dislike, track what they react to, and understand what they require. One great way to get this data is A/B testing, and here are some tools to help you:
3. Adobe Target
One of the widely used software tools for performing A/B testing is Adobe target. Adobe Target is a customized software tool, that enables users to find their best content through easy tests.
One great thing about Adobe Target is that it can execute tests anytime and anywhere, and it supports A/B testing images, UI, copy, etc. It also allows users to test multiple versions of their website simultaneously and analyse the result more quickly. You can also carry out website optimization and find the best combination of layouts to convert customers to your website.
4. AB Tasty
AB Tasty is one of the most commonly used software tools for optimizing websites, software, products, or apps, and it is used by more than 900 famous brands.
AB Tasty helps you increase conversions, and revenue by using engagement-based segmentation and psychographic AI to offer features, custom messages, and functionalities to the desired audiences.
AB Tasty supports A/B/n testing, multivariate testing, split URL testing, and predictive testing. It also supports unlimited variations of a single web page or a website.
5. Optimizely
Optimizely was launched in 2010 but is majorly focused on enterprise-level customers. It has a comprehensive suite of CRO tools and offers web experimentation and personalization services.
You can use it to run experiments on mobile apps and messaging platforms, as well as optimize the entire customer experience across all touchpoints. With Optimizely’s web experimentation product, you can also simultaneously run multiple tests on the same page and be assured of accurate results.
Market Research Tools
Having information on critical factors like competitors, market trends, consumers’ buying behaviour, and future scope can make all the difference when it comes to surviving a recession or not
Proper market research allows you to make wise decisions and survive the worst. These are some tools that can help with market research.
6. SEMrush
SEMrush is a powerful market research tool, especially for marketers. It has a portfolio of more than 40 tools that helps you increase website visitors and boost conversion rates. Its tools include on-page SEO, local SEO, and keyword research. It also has various resources for creating, distributing, and optimizing content.
SEMrush primarily exists to help increase web ranking and provide marketing insights, as it allows you to investigate and examine the market's competitors' demographics. This is data that can prove very useful.
7. SurveyMonkey
Survey Monkey is another tool for conducting market research. It is a question platform with a variety of specialist market research and customer experience solutions. With SurveyMonkey you can ask precise questions and craft surveys that allow you to receive professional comments.
You can also use it to test your ideas by asking your target audience questions about them. The information gotten from SurveyMonkey is usually accurate, as it is acquired from the world's 144 million consumers.
8. Statista
Statista has data on over 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources and is available in English, German, French, and Spanish. It also allows you to analyse online shops and e-commerce markets in an instant.
Statista also entertains individual research requests and creates customized infographics, videos, presentations, and publications in the corporate design of your choice.
It's a freemium tool which lets free users access basic statistics but charges $49 per month to premium account users who get full access to all the statistics.
Data analytics tools
Data should be your best friend if you are running a startup during a recession because this data helps you make decisions that might help you stay above water.
You need to collect data about your audience and the market frequently in a structured way, and you need to analyse that data continuously and excessively.
Here are some of the very best data analytics tools for you:
9. Amplitude
Amplitude is an analytic tool that was launched in 2012 and has 1400 customers around the world. It reports on real-time user data, including retention, segmentation, funnels, and revenue reports.
It uses the best data alignment, control, and integrated approach to administer data and keeps your data secure with its enterprise-grade data safety measures
10. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service that Google made public in 2005, and it gives you unique insights into your audience and traffic.
It provides custom reports that give businesses a complete overview of how their website or particular product is performing. It also breaks down entire demographics, geo, and customer behaviour insights.
11. Power BI
Power BI is a business analytics tool that is best known for data visualization and predictive analytics. It started as an Excel plug-in but was redeveloped in the early 2010s as a standalone suite of business data analysis tools. Power BI allows users to create interactive visual reports and dashboards, with a minimal learning curve.
Its main selling point is its great data connectivity—it operates seamlessly with Excel, text files, SQL server, and cloud sources, like Google and Facebook analytics.
12. Tableau
Tableau is a data visualization tool that is used for creating data dashboards and worksheets with no extensive coding expertise, Tableau is one of the best commercial data analysis tools available. The suite handles large amounts of data and is very simple to use.
It has a visual drag-and-drop interface and its visualization is pretty top-notch, making it very popular. It’s also mobile-friendly, which is nice to have if you are always on the move.
SEO tools
This is something you’ve probably heard a lot, but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) really helps with inbound marketing.
It increases your startup's chances of growing organically and building a profitable business.
SEO involves a lot of optimizing your website and content, and most times it doesn’t cost as much as paid advertising.
Here are the top SEO tools to consider:
13. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is one of the most recommended SEO tools online. It does a lot from SEO analysis to l highlighting what parts of your website need improvement.
You can also use Ahrefs to determine your competitor’s backlinks, check and fix broken links on your website, and get an overview of your best-performing pages.
Ahrefs basically comes with a lot of tools that you require to grow your online presence. It has a central dashboard that gives you an overview of your ranking, traffic, and backlinks. It is a great tool to consider if you are ready to take SEO seriously.
14. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest was developed by Neil Patel, a leader in the marketing space, and is a keyword finder tool that helps you identify keywords and shows you the top-ranking SERPs.
With Ubersuggest you can find the right keywords to use and also the keyword volume, competition, CPC, and seasonal trends. It is great for both organic SEO and paid PPC, this tool can help you determine if a keyword is worth targeting and how competitive it is.
15. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is an SEO tool that is aimed at helping you to increase website traffic, rankings, and visibility across search engine results.
It allows you to audit your own site using the Moz Pro spider, which should highlight potential issues and recommend actionable insights. It also has the ability to track your site rankings over hundreds or even thousands of keywords per website. There's also a keyword research tool to help determine which keywords and keyword combinations you should target.
Project management tools
A really good piece of advice for surviving the recession period is focusing on the most important of projects. To do this, you need a structure and a lot of overviews to ensure only the most important tasks are being carried out. Project management tools can help and these are the best ones on the market.
16. Notion
Notion comes equipped with a wide range of project management tools that allow you to assign tasks, track tasks, create calendars, and create roadmap projects across your startup no matter the size.
One major advantage of using Notion for project management is that it’s very versatile and can replace many of the tools you probably have to integrate with your present project management tool, like your CRM or note-taking tool.
17. Asana
Asana is a project management solution that almost everyone has heard of. It has a ton of handy features that helps you boost productivity, and track tasks.
Asana allows you to create to-do lists and reminders, so you always meet deadlines, plus you can add due dates, colleagues, instructions to tasks, and comments on items. You can even share images from other apps (like Google Drive) directly to Asana. And more importantly, you can actually track everything you and your colleagues work on in a bid to ensure the project is running smoothly and to schedule.
18. Trello
Trello is one of the most popular projects management applications. It lets you organize all of your work-based and personal projects through a computer or smartphone.
With Trello, you’re able to set up boards to organize everything you’re working on, delegate tasks among colleagues, get customized workflows, add to-do lists within task cards, attach files and comment on items.
You can manage all aspects of a project within the Trello app, regardless of whether it’s team-based or assigned to an individual.
Wrapping up!
Tools are great, they make our lives easier and make processes smoother but the one you want to consider especially during a recession is how much value it is going to give you especially if you are paying it.
Is it greatly going to boost your marketing efforts, improve your bottom line, give you better insight into your market, or make your team more productive? These are all questions to consider.
With a tool like Lumen, the answer is an easy yes, as it will improve your customer retention in leaps and bounds and give you a better bottom line.
Get started for free here.