Posts Tagged ‘landing pages’

Marketing is an expensive business. There are so many invaluable tools out there that you need. Of course, they do in fact all have a value. And a price. How much would it cost to get all of them? Find out below.

But to spoil the ending: the answer is a lot. Even if you are writing your own copy, doing your own graphic design, doing all of the content, emailing, admin yourself, the cost of all the tools alone is significant. And this doesn’t include stuff like web hosting, CDNs and other “technical” things.

I have listed the marketing tools that people talk about a lot. There are many others, of course, and some of these are specific: you may not do webinars, for example. But many marketers do, so I’ve included it.

Market research

Content production

Free alternatives: YouTube Live gives you everything you need to do a webinar, including recording it.

Content posting

Free alternatives: Buffer has a free plan. Recurpost does the same thing as Meet Edgar.

Facebook marketing

Free alternatives: Many Chat has a free plan with branding. You can just manage your ads yourself using the Facebook Power Editor.

Email marketing

Free alternatives: MailChimp has a free plan.

Landing pages

Opt-in tools

Free alternatives: Hello Bar as a free plan.

Session recording

Free alternatives: Inspectlet and FullStory both have free plans.

Summary

Some marketers have a lot of these tools: maybe one from each category. Others seem to have ALL of them. And the prices I have listed here are just the cheapest paid plans. Semrush, for example, starts at $79 per month. But if you want to track all o your websites, you will be looking at around $500 per month.

Therefore, I think it’s safe to say that people are spending thousands of dollars per month on marketing tools. And for the big marketers, they are spending tens of thousands.

If you are bringing home the bacon, it is money well spent. If you are just starting out, try the free alternatives I have listed.

Unbounce is a WYSIWYG editor for building landing pages. If you have no coding skills, you can whip up a landing page for your business by dragging and drop elements onto pre-built templates.

I have been wondering whether approaching everything as a coder is a distraction from building my businesses online. Maybe I should use more tools like this and concentrate on building the business, not the website code. It certainly does allow you to get up-and-running very quickly.

It also has some good integrations: I can easily drop my MailChimp account in there, for example. It also supports building a desktop version and a mobile version at the same time. As you drag elements in for one version, they appear on the other. You can then toggle between them and adjust each one individually.

Some things I found frustrating. For example, centring text. When coding, I would make the box 100% width, and therefore it would be in the centre regardless of the screen size. However, Unbounce requires you to create boxes with a specific size and then adjust the size for the different breakpoints.

Also, I did not feel it added too much value. Yes, it allowed me to create a page, add some integrations and create A/B variants. That is all useful stuff. But, I could do that myself. It does not provide step-by-step funnels and chain-linking pages that some of the competition seems to offer. I enjoyed my free trial, but ultimately, I have decided I can do without it for now.