80% of Founders Skip These 8 Basic Marketing Tools

Recently, everyone has been talking about the new AI tools that they're implementing in their business, myself included. But, about 80% of the people I talked to haven't even implemented the most basic tools in their business in order to get sales. For example, they don't even know if a customer opened their email, or they don't even have data on where people navigate on their website. So, today I want to show you eight tools that have nothing to do with AI, but they will absolutely skyrocket your business and really improve your marketing and sales. So, let's go through them one by one.

The first one is HubSpot email tracking. And this is the one that I use every single day. And the way you set it up is super easy. You just install their free sales extension for Gmail or for Outlook. And from then on, the moment someone opens an email you have sent, or clicks a link inside it, you get a notification in the corner of your screen.

The way I use it is for timing. Because if I send a proposal and it's been opened three times in the space of an hour, it's probably being forwarded around the team, and they're interested. So, that's my sign to follow up. And the follow-up that I do is going to be completely different based on whether they have opened it or not. The second one is Microsoft Clarity.

And this genuinely changed how I think about my website. This tool provides heat maps and session recordings. And whenever someone comes on my I'm able to track exactly where they click step by step. And that makes it so much easier to improve my website. You can set it up in a minute.

You just paste one small snippet of code into your website, and Cloud can do that. And from then on, you can see exactly where people click, how far down the page they scroll before they give up, and actual recordings of real visitors moving around your website. And it means that the changes that you make to your website are not based on your opinions or feelings, but actual data. Because, for example, you can think that your pricing section is the problem, but then you watch 10 recordings and you realize that most people never even scroll far enough to see it. The two things that I always look for are rage clicks and dead clicks.

And a rage click is when someone clicks the same thing over and over because they think it's a button and it isn't. And a dead click is when they click on something that does nothing at all. And these two reports alone usually give me three or four fixes in 20 minutes. For example, I found out that only 10% of people actually scroll down the website in order to provide their email address. So, I had to move it up and the amount of leads that I got went up by like 60%.

It's absolutely insane what you can do with this tool and it's free. The third one is Meta and LinkedIn ad libraries. This is one of my favorite ways to spy on competitors, completely legally, because both Meta and LinkedIn have public ad libraries. So, you can type in any competitor's name and see every ad that they are running right now, including the copy, the images and the videos. And the trick here is to look for ads that have been running for a long time, because nobody keeps paying for an ad that doesn't work.

So, if a competitor has had the same ad live for 3 months, it's clearly making them money and it tells you a lot about what your shared audience responds to. And I'm not saying copy it, but it's a much better starting point than a blank page. Number four is Answer the Public. It's a tool that takes Google's auto complete data and shows you the real questions that people are typing in about your topic. So, you can put in something like LinkedIn for founders, and it gives you back hundreds of questions grouped by who, what, why, and how.

And the reason that I love this is that it's your own customers' words. So, every one of those questions is a potential post, a video, or a section on your sales page. You're basically getting a month of content ideas just with doing one search, and you get a few free searches a day, which is plenty to get started. Number five is Google Search Console, which is free and which a surprising number of founders have never even opened. Answer the Public shows you what people search for in general, but Google Search Console shows you the exact words that people type into Google before they found your website.

It also shows you how often you show up and how often they actually click. My favorite way to use it is to sort it by impressions, meaning I look for searches where I'm showing up a lot, but I'm getting very few clicks, because those are some of your easiest wins. It means that Google already thinks that you're relevant. You just need a better page title or a page that actually answers that question properly. Number six is LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and this one lives inside LinkedIn Sales Navigator and it's called Sales Navigator, where instead of attaching your deck or case study to a message, you upload it into Sales Navigator and you send it as a link.

And when someone opens it, you can see who viewed it, when they viewed it, and how long they spent on each page. Now, this one isn't free. It needs a paid Sales Navigator plan. So, I would only use it if LinkedIn is already one of your main sales channels. And it's incredibly useful, because if someone skipped everything and they went straight to your pricing page, you know exactly what the next conversation with that customer should be about.

Number seven page speed insights, which is a free tool from Google. You can paste in any page from your website, and it tells you how fast it loads on a phone and on a computer. And you get a score out of 100 and a list of exactly what's slowing it down. This pairs really well with Clarity because a slow site loses people before you can even watch what they do. Most of your visitors are probably on their phone.

And if your page takes 5 seconds to load, most of them have already gone back to Instagram. And some of the fixes are super simple, like compressing a huge image or removing a pop-up plugin that you forgot to install. So, always check that score. Number eight is UTM links. And this one is really unglamorous, but almost nobody I talked to is doing it properly.

If you're not familiar with the term, UTM is just a few extra words on the end of a link that tell Google Analytics where a visitor came from. So, instead of just seeing social in your reports, you can see that this person came from your LinkedIn post that you posted on Tuesday afternoon. And the other customer came from your newsletter. And you can make those full free with Google's campaign URL builder. And I've saved it for last because I feel like it ties everything else together.

It tells you which post, email, or channel actually brought you a customer. Because without it, you put effort into the channel that feels busiest rather than the one that actually brings in the money. And those are very often not the same thing. And let's come back to the AI conversation. Everyone nowadays wants the new AI tool.

But once you have the data from these sources, AI then becomes so much more powerful because you can take what you notice in your Clarity recordings, your Search Console queries, or your answer the public questions, and you give that to Claude or ChatGPT to analyze. You're then able to rewrite your page based on what real people are actually doing, rather than AI just using basic information that it found on the internet. And if you want the full list of these tools with the links and my setup notes, I've put it in the description. And please subscribe to this channel. I've looked up analytics, and only 6% of people watching my videos are subscribed, and it makes a huge difference.

I'll see you in the next one.