The 500 Marketing Stack: 10 Pieces of MarTech Genius to Disrupt your Competitors

About Matt Lerner /

•  Marketing for 3 startups, one exit to Macromedia •  11 years Marketing & GM at PayPal (US & UK) •  Built & ran 3 Growth teams at PayPal •  Mentored ~ 40 startups on the side •  Now runs 500 Startups London

Digital Marketer Turned VC

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About 500 Startups London /

•  500 Startups, founded 2010, in Mountain View, CA: •  $200M in Assets Under Management •  1,200 portfolio co’s in 50 countries

•  London “Distro Dojo” growth program: •  Accept approx. 20 companies/year •  Post-seed, pre-Series-A •  Get an investment + hands-on for 3 months •  No application (referrals only)

Early Stage Seed Fund & Growth Studio

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500 Startups “Distribution Hackers” /

Analysis Paralysis: Making sense of the options /

No shortage of snippets to drop on your pages!

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10 Pieces of MarTech Genius / 1.  BuiltWith 2.  Import.io 3.  AdEspresso (Paid) 4.  MonitorBacklinks (SEO) 5.  BuzzSumo (Content) 6.  HotJar 7.  UserTesting.com 8.  Unbounce 9.  Kickbox.io 10. mail-tester.com

B2B

Conversion

Email

Traffic

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B2B & Lead Generation / 1. BuiltWith:

•  Generate lists of leads •  See what tools competitors and great

sites are using •  What’s trending up/down?

B2B & Lead Generation / 2. import.io:

•  Easy free content scraper •  Good for compiling lead lists, getting

price data, Twitter handles •  Scrape directories, HackerNews

headlines, products & prices from Amazon, etc.

Traffic (Paid) / 3. AdEspresso:

•  Automated design and massive multivariate testing of Facebook ads

•  Test creative, audience demographics, time of day, ad location (mobile, web feed vs. side).

Disclaimer: 500 Startups is an investor in this company.

Traffic (SEO) / 4. monitorbacklinks.com:

•  Keep track of your backlinks (and your competitors’ backlinks!) •  See them evolve over time, how it impacts your rank for various terms •  Recognise and disavow low quality links so you don’t get penalised

Traffic (Content) / 5. BuzzSumo:

•  Find out what’s trending: For any given topic, find out the most shared articles. •  Great ideas for headlines, keywords, topic ideas, lists of influencers on the topic

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Conversion & On-Page / 6. HotJar:

•  Heatmaps •  Individual session recordings •  Funnel & exit tracking •  Which form fields take longest &

which fields cause abandons •  Polls & surveys too

Conversion & On-Page / 7. UserTesting: Get user testing videos of people trying to use your website, great for qualitative feedback, to hear what they’re thinking.

Conversion & On-Page / 8. Unbounce: Quickly/easily create & test landing pages.

Disclaimer: 500 Startups is an investor in this company.

Email / 9. Kickbox.io: Veryify email addresses before you send.

•  Higher quality score •  Saves money •  Improves open rates •  Lowers your bounce rate •  Keeps you from getting blocked

Email / 10. mail-tester.com: Send them a copy of your email, they’ll let you know if it’s likely to get flagged as Spam, and recommend things you can do to improve it.

10 Pieces of MarTech Genius / 1.  BuiltWith 2.  Import.io 3.  AdEspresso (Paid) 4.  MonitorBacklinks (SEO) 5.  BuzzSumo (Content) 6.  HotJar 7.  UserTesting.com 8.  Unbounce 9.  Kickbox.io 10. mail-tester.com

B2B

Conversion

Email

Traffic

Download the Deck @MattHLerner

The Complete List! /

Top 10 list not enough?

Here are 36 of our favorite tools!

B2B Leads & Insights / 1.  BuiltWith - Main thing is leads: Pay for lists of leads (sites in Portugal using Google

Retargeting with Shopify). Bonus: See what tools your competitors and amazing sites are using. What’s trending up/down? What shopping carts are digital goods sites using?

2.  Import.io - Create and deploy custom crawlers to build lead lists - visit a certain type of site only, get contact info or other information. Mainly free. Scrape directories like Yelp, Twitter handles from FollowerWonk, HackerNews headlines, products from Amazon: Price monitoring, or top selling products in several categories, monitoring your rank. It’s basically able to get any of the information from amazon that you can see with your eye.

3.  Conspire.com - Looks through your social network to find the shortest path to a target person you’re trying to reach.  

Landing Pages & site conversion optimization: / 1.  Unbounce - Quickly/easily create & test landing pages. 2.  SumoMe - A bunch of apps to help you, I especially like ListBuilder, get people to

sign up for an email newsletter or other “free” content, so you can get leads - especially if your main offering is expensive, good to have an in-between CTA to get leads. Also good for getting more shares.

3.  Usertesting.com - Get user testing videos of people trying to use your website, great for qualitative feedback, to see what they’re thinking.

4.  Instapage - Great alternative to Unbounce, also easy to use! 5.  LaunchRock - Very simple & quick, no coding, free. :) But allows less customisation,

it’s built for pre-launch/ concept testing. 6.  Optimizely - Quintessential simple tool to run A/B tests on your own site. 7.  Visual Website Optimizer – Powerful, includes multivariate testing, user research,

heatmaps, targeting & personalizatoin 8.  Canva - Quick simple page design tool for the non-designer. 9.  Acorn – Photoshop lite for like £15

Ads & Traffic / 1.  AdEspresso - Automated design and massive multivariate testing of Facebook ads,

creative, audience demographics, time of day, ad location (e.g. mobile vs web). 2.  Snip.ly - Bitly on Steroids: When you share content, make sure you’re driving traffic

back to your site, in addition to the content creator’s site. Take URL, make a short snip.ly link (like bit.ly link), then it frames the content you’re sharing in a message from you with a link back to your site.

3.  BuzzSumo - Find out what’s trending - for any given topic, find out the most shared articles - great ideas for headlines, keywords. Start conversations, content creation ideas, list of influencers to target on a given topic.

4.  SEMRush – Awesome paid search research tool - # of searches, CPC by country and trend, other recommended terms, competitive spend/keyword data.

5.  AdBeat - See what your competitors are buying in-terms of paid media. Massive repository of advertiser data.

SEO / 1.  MonitorBacklinks.com - Keep track of your backlinks (and your competitors!), how

they evolve over time, how it impacts your ranking for various terms, recognize and disavow low quality links so you don’t get penalized.

2.  SEOMoz – The go-to tool for SEO! Track rankings, inbound links, social, brand mentions, competitors, plus recommendations to improve. Great research tools as well: Grade your pages, find which terms are easy to rank for, find link-building opportunities. $99/month for the basic package, not cheap.

3.  SEO Profiler – Great for deep keyword research. 4.  AWR - Advanced web ranking & tracks over time, good for research. 5.  Deepcrawler - very configurable powerful crawler, butexpensive 6.  Cognitive SEO - Expensive but good, ID’s shitty backlinks based on a lot of factors,

very in-depth. If there’s something below the surface, I’d pay the £100 for a one-month to do a real in-depth crawl.

Analytics & Insights / 1.  HotJar - Heatmaps, individual session recordings, funnel & exit tracking, which

form fields take longest, which ones cause abandons, visitor polls & surveys. 2.  Heap Analytics - Capture everything, slice it later (rather than defining success

events before you can track). Great for cohort analysis. Also works on iOS apps. 3.  Mixpanel - Amazing tool because of what it lets you do with your data - e.g.

segment users, do good funnel reports, A/B test results. We use it a lot! 4.  Segment.io - Implement their tracking code snippets, passes your success events

to all the other tools (e.g. Optimizely, MailChimp, Mixpanel) 5.  Google Analytics – Great starter tool for everyone. Don’t be overwhelmed with all

the things you could measure (e.g. bounce rate, time spent on page). Focus on the success events that are relevant for your business!

6.  KISSMetrics – Analytics package that’s great at tracking individual users across devices & browsers, logged in, logged out, past cookie expiry dates.

Email / 1.  Kickbox.io - Veryify email addresses & boost quality score. Save money, improve

open rates. Lower bounce rate, keep yourself from getting blocked. 2.  SendGrid - Great for deliverability of automated system emails (e.g. email

confirmations, transaction confirmations, password resets, etc.) 3.  Mail-Tester - Send them a copy of your email, they’ll let you know if it’s likely to get

flagged as Spam, and recommend things you can do to improve it. 4.  LOB - API for direct mail - as in snail mail - postcards, letters, even checkques. Send

them to a list of addresses (they screen & clean the list) or just send to everyone in specified post codes. All done through API calls.

5.  MailChimp - Solid tool for sending marketing emails. Robust & easy to use, not cheap. We use it at 500 Startups.

6.  Customer.io - Track user behavior on your site, and send targeted emails based on what different segments of users have done and what you want them to do.

7.  Outreach.io - Great sales automation - trigger-based emails for sales, recruiting, bizdev. Updates records in Salesforce, has good analytics.

Thanks!

@MattHLerner