Growth hacking, a term coined by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Ellis in 2010, has revolutionized how businesses approach growth. Originally embraced by fast-growing startups, the concept has now transcended its roots, becoming a powerful strategy for businesses of all sizes. But what exactly is growth hacking?
Contrary to some misconceptions, growth hacking isn’t about manipulation or gaming the system. It’s a creative and data-driven approach to scaling your business by examining your product, service, and marketing efforts across multiple channels. For small businesses with limited resources, growth hacking offers a lifeline—unconventional yet highly effective methods to achieve exponential growth.
At its core, growth hacking combines product design, marketing innovation, and data analysis to drive customer acquisition and retention. And the best part? Many tools are available to help you simplify and supercharge your growth hacking efforts. In this post, we’ve curated a list of 11 free and amazing tools every small business owner should know.
1. ContactOut (Contact Discovery)
ContactOut is a go-to email finder tool for small businesses looking to supercharge their outreach and lead generation. It provides accurate contact information, including emails and phone numbers, making it easier to connect with professionals across industries.
By working seamlessly with platforms like LinkedIn, ContactOut simplifies outreach efforts and helps businesses build stronger B2B pipelines.
With features like high data accuracy, pay-per-use pricing, and tools for creating custom ad audiences, ContactOut improves marketing ROI by boosting Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and reducing Cost per Lead (CPL).
Whether you’re running email campaigns or optimizing ads, ContactOut empowers small businesses to connect with the right people and scale effectively.
2. Hotjar (Web Analytics)
Hotjar is a powerful growth hacking tool to reveal true website user behaviour and experiences. The platform gives you great insights and the big picture of how you can improve your site’s user experiences (UX) and conversion rates.
It’s not easy finding a free analytics tool that captures ‘who’ and ‘what’ your visitors are doing on your website. The tool allows you to record real-time user activities (video), collect click events inform of heatmaps, carry out surveys and collect feedback on specific pages of your site.
Also Read: Awesome Free Tools & Resources for Small Business Owners.
3. SumoMe List Builder (Content Marketing)
SumoMe is a powerful growth hacking tool that offers you a collection of apps and tools to help you grow your email list. The tool allows you to ask your website, visitors, for their email addresses without hurting their feelings or disrupting their activities on the site.
SumoMe is compatible with a range of website-building tools, including WordPress, Shopify, Tumblr, Weebly, Squarespace, and Blogspot. It also allows you to easily integrate with popular email marketing tools including MailChimp.
4. Buffer (Social Media)
Buffer is a very cool app that helps brands effectively manage and automate their social media contents. Rather than having to log into all of your accounts separately (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google+), Buffer lets you create posts that are sent directly to these accounts or scheduled for a particular time and day.
With the Buffer free account, you can schedule up to 10 posts at a time across all your social media pages. Buffer also offers a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari that lets you share content from any Web page.
5. SEMrush (SEO / SEM)
SEMrush is a complete SEO tool that lets you do keyword research, track keyword ranking, check backlinks, check competitor ranks, and most importantly, do a complete SEO audit of your website or blog.
SEMrush allows you to get a behind-the-scenes look at your top-performing competitors and use the insights to build profitable keyword strategies and campaigns around your website. Find profitable keyword opportunities, pinpoint high-converting ad and landing page copy, dissect competitor content strategies, audit backlink profiles, and more.
6.MailChimp (E-mail Marketing)
Email Marketing is one of the cheapest forms of marketing for small businesses. A crucial part of making this happen is to invest in a great email service provider. That is why many businesses have adopted Mailchimp for this purpose.
Mailchimp offers excellent features and an easy-to-use interface that make it a top choice whether you are sending out a family newsletter to 20 people or a professional marketing campaign to 20,000.
Also Read: 7 Essential Digital Marketing Strategies For Small Business Owners.
7. BuzzSumo (Content Marketing)
BuzzSumo gets you rid of the barriers of ignorance in your content marketing. It offers you its insights into what content will be the best for a particular keyword, competitor or topic. With this tool, you can learn about strategies and techniques to make your content available to your target audience.
Buzz Sumo also allows you to know about titles that work best for social media marketing and blogging. You can also take the help of this tool to find the influencers in your industry who can promote your brand.
8. Drift (Conversational Marketing)
Your best customers might be visiting your site right now, looking for support documentation to solve their issues. If you don’t solve their problem now, they’ll quit using your product. Drift is a messaging app that makes it easy for businesses to talk to their website visitors and customers in real-time, from anywhere.
With Drift on your website, any conversation can be a conversion. Instead of traditional marketing and sales platforms that rely on forms and follow-ups, Drift connects your business with the best leads in real time. Drift lets you answer all of those people’s questions, right from your website or app. With a tiny popover, customers can start a live chat conversation with your team about their issues or you can get in touch proactively with info targeted to their needs.
9. SEOptimer (SEO Audit)
An SEO audit is a detailed analysis of your website on how it is read by search engines in terms of titles, meta descriptions, keyword density, the uniqueness of content, backlinks, page speed, etc.
SEOptimer is a free SEO audit tool that investigates a given URL’s on-page SEO ranking factors. After you analyze a URL, the tool presents a summary of the most important action items to be taken to improve the SEO of such a website.
Also Read: Email Marketing for Small Businesses – 7 Best Practices & Tips.
10. Google Analytics (Web Analytics)
Google Analytics is an advanced web analytics tool that can help you measure how your business online presence and marketing is doing. It gathers vast amounts of data about user actions on your website.
You can use Google Analytics to investigate basic analytics questions such as how many visitors your site had over a period of time, how often repeat visitors come back to your site, how visitors get to your site (e.g. referral, ads, direct, links or email), which countries are your visitors coming from, which pages on your site have been visited the most, the average time spent viewing your site and many more.
11. Inbound (Community)
Inbound is a community-based news platform that offers a variety of marketing-related articles and industry news. With this growth hacking tool, the user can create their feed of discussions, expert blogs, and other marketing content.
Users can also participate in discussions within the community. Popular topics include Strategy, Content, SEO, Branding, Social Analytics, Blogging, Mobile, and much more. Another alternative to Inbound is GrowthHackers.com founded by Sean Ellis.
Wrapping Up
Want to learn more about growth hacking? I recommend taking this free Udemy course on growth hacking for small businesses. The course will open you up to the practicality of using some of the tools mentioned in this post to grow your business.