Tools I couldn’t market tech without

I’ve written numerous times about what a tough crowd you developers are to market tech products to. You’re smart, witty, cynical people who can smell an insincere salesperson a mile away.

But over the years, I’ve discovered a bit about what works and what doesn’t – and the truth is that I couldn’t do my job without the help of some of the marketing tools available to me.

I know that a bunch of our Raygun customers are developers-turned-entrepreneurs, and marketing tech is a problem faced by many – so I would like to kindly share my wisdom with you so that you may also crush it with your tech marketing skills.

So without further ado, here’s a run down of the tools I use to:

Make marketing tech just a little bit easier!

Buffer

Our team creates A LOT of content on our blog and website, some of it about Raygun news and most of it tech tips and tricks that we want to share with our users. When it comes to sharing that content with the world, in different timezones – I couldn’t do it without Buffer. I’m based in our New Zealand office, which is all the way down the bottom of the earth (think hobbits and rugby) and if I had to send every Tweet, Facebook update, Google+ post and Linkedin message in real time, it would mean I didn’t do any sleeping, and I am just not a nice person when that happens.

Automated swag services

People. Love. Swag. Do not underestimate how valuable swag is for delighting your customers. The things people have said to me because they wanted a Raygun sticker would shock you (or not, I’m not sure how far you’ve delved into the depths of the internet). We also do T-shirts (which our customers like so much they go canoeing in them), and little DIY wooden Raygun kits. Services like Printfection and Startupthreads have APIs that you can integrate with which do practically all the work for you. No more sitting in your office until midnight packing t-shirts into boxes – your customers can fill out a web form with their address and T-shirt size which goes directly to the swag service – who choose what is needed from your inventory and send it straight to your fans. (In case you were interested, we get our stickers made at Stickermule, and yes you can have one).

Intercom

I feel like this probably isn’t their official marketing message – but I think of Intercom as my ‘customer happiness tool’. Our entire team use it to communicate with anyone interacting with our product, from new users to users who have been with us from the start. A happy customer is one who doesn’t slip through the cracks when they reach out to you. You just have to be there for them, man.

Moz

When it comes to SEO, MOZ has all the answers. I first learnt what search engine optimisation even was from the MOZ blog, and we’ve used MOZ tools for years to manage anything to do with keyword rankings, links, social, brand, content and traffic (along with Google Analytics). Also, the founder of MOZ, Rand is a super nice guy whose regular Whiteboard Friday videos are some of the best marketing advice you will ever find. As a side note, his wife Geraldine writes a hilarious travel blog that I love and is one of the best things on the internet, in my opinion.

Clicky

If you’re into data driven marketing, you need to be tracking every campaign you do – and Clicky does a great job of that. Like I always say, coffee is for trackers only (actually I usually say coffee is for bloggers only – but I can be flexible with my threats). Clicky helps me find out pretty much everything I want to know about our website visitors; like where they came from, are they organic or paid visitors, how long they stay and what pages they visit.

So these are just a handful of the tools that I love for making my job a whole lot easier. And that’s just for my marketing efforts, the Raygun dev team have a pretty impressive list of tools they rely on to make our service as polished as possible. We even use our own product for error tracking on itself. We often see an error report inside Raygun, that’s been identified by Raygun and sent to Raygun. Pretty trippy right!?

Now while you’re trying to get your head around that, you should sign up for a free 14 day trial of Raygun, and see for yourself how it can improve your workflow and make error tracking a breeze.