Photo by CD Grunewald
The Beatles once sang, “I get by with a little help from my friends.” When you’re building a company from scratch, attempting to sway fickle consumers, managing a team and still performing all the normal functions humans require to survive, you’re going to need some help from some friends as well.
Luckily, the startup biosphere has become a self-supportive network of ingenious products and brands that exist for the sole purpose of helping your company grow. And as we know, when your company grows, so does your potential to create positive change. Here are four companies that have been invaluable to our business’ growth, and should receive a serious look from any social entrepreneur.
Recording orders, printing labels, keeping track of customers, and tracking shipments are enough jobs to warrant the hiring of a dedicated employee. Unfortunately, most young companies do not have nearly the bandwidth to support a full-time fulfillment and shipping coordinator; for all the rest of us there is ShipStation. Simplifying the entire e-commerce process with perfectly developed extensions and powerful insight analytics tools, ShipStation has been an invaluable part of our team. This will free up serious time to focus on marketing and business development efforts.
Despite all of the recent advancements in digital marketing, email campaigns are still some of the best ways to reach customers in a personal, intelligent fashion. MailChimp provides excellent free email list management services and professional templates, so that any beginner entrepreneur can begin developing a mailing list and communicate with potential customers like a pro.
In the digital market, you can’t let a customer forget about your company just because they decided not to purchase your product on their first visit to your site. AdRoll makes retargeting these customers simple and effective with campaigns across both the entire web and through Facebook, and even has plugins to work synergistically with MailChimp and other mailing list companies. This is an essential tool in any digital marketer’s belt, and should be in yours as well.
Facebook Advertising has become an inescapable facet of the modern startup’s growth, yet it still lacks a great deal of the analytics, management tools, testing, and automation to really make a big impact with a small budget. That’s where AdEspresso steps in, helping automate, test and manage your Facebook ads so that you can make the most of your marketing budget, spend more on ads that are working well, and stop wasting time on ads that aren’t.
As James Cash Penney, the founder of JC Penney said, “growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together.” Hopefully these four companies can be a force for what you’ve already started, and help take your dreams to new heights. Good luck!
FROM THE EDITOR
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