Free Online Tools to Cut Marketing Costs for a Startup Business
Starting a business can be an exciting time; it can be so exciting that it sometimes turns into a scary situation when you know you want to cut costs, and everything you look at seems to be a necessity. Here are many great free (or almost free) online tools that will help your cost cutting ideas.
Demandbase
Let’s start with Demandbase. It can be an inexpensive tool that evaluates the IP address of every visitor to your website. It displays these IP addresses in a database to determine which big company they belong to and gives you a list. For example, if you run an effective, fast-food company and Desire Base tells you that there are visitors to your site from the Microsoft building across the street and from a major defense contractor on another block, you know there is attention there.
You can try to market to them as well. The company provides you with a list of each of the companies you’ve seen, plus for less than $2, they’ll give you the name and contact information of a company leader they believe has made the view. A phone tree is a huge waste of time for anyone from a small business trying to call a large company to contact someone. Instead, buy Fonolo. This little tool gets the complete phone tree for several hundred companies. Just have the app on your iPhone, locate the specific desk of the company you’re targeting on the screen, and the device connects you to the desk you want in 10 minutes.
Google Phone
It is released within Gmail and allows you to extend a phone in the program and, with the push of a button, transfer it to any cell phone without interference. All the secretary would have to do is say to the caller, “Hold, please, I’ll connect you to the person in charge,” and the person in charge of that area can let their cell phone ring. Who wants a phone tree? Hiring a programmer to create or customize the software for your business can be an expensive proposition.
It’s a lot like eBay. Just go to the website and put what you need, and watch the supplies get put up. You can probably get a website for as little as two or three million dollars. Finally, for struggling startups that do all the packing and shipping from home, consider the success and economics that outsourcing to Amazon can have. All you have to do is sign up as an Amazon merchant; you’ll still buy and receive your inventory, but Amazon will appear after the logistics.
