Landing page optimisation tools and platforms I love [v1]

Oliver Meakings -

The tools you need to increase productivity, showcase your product, website or course, and turn visitors into fans.

Over recent months attendees of my marketing course, my twitter followers, and people in communities I'm active in, have repeatedly asked me my preferred marketing tools. Today I am compiling a list of the tools I use daily, and the reasons why. I've included referral links with some of them, but tools are only included on their merit, and based on what I use.

[v1]

For feedback

Loom - I use Loom to video record landing page roasts, quick marketing lessons, and for feedback that is more easily explained with video than text (which is almost everything step or processed-based). This tool will change the way you work. And I love it.

For (image) feedback

If I quickly and painlessly need to feed back on an image, screengrab, landing page or website, I use Bubbles. In 30 seconds you can annotate yoor design with comments and share it with those you need.

For CRM / email lists and customer journeys

Autopilot. With my freelance clients I have used Drip, Active Campaign, Hubspot and Mailchimp.

My preferred tool? Autopilot. My personal decision is based on one thing... the ease of building workflows.

For me, Autopilot's drag and drop, visual editor is the most powerful and most intuitive. Using these tools well is about creating great customer journeys and Autopilot makes that easy.

For video hosting

There's only a few leading players in this space that play nice with startups: YouTube vs Vimeo vs Wistia.

Wistia is best because it has AB testing, analytics, a beautiful player, CTA / lead generation. But it's expensive if you only need it for a few videos beyond the free trial.

YouTube is great because it's a hosting and discovery platform. In fact YouTube search is the web's second biggest search engine after Google itself.

For landing pages

I have created a guide to the leading landing page tools which you can review here.

For running a course

I spent a long, long time deciding what platform to use for my First 100 Users course. I ended up with Podia because of its clean UI, well-executed product experience and good quality customer service.

For group calls

Whereby.com. It's simple, and video quality is good. Something that seems almost impossible to achieve.

For analytics, session replays and qualitative feedback

I hate Google Analytics. I've finally said it.

I highly recommend tools that are CRO-focused and event tracking in GA is horrible to setup and review.

Therefore I recommend Hotjar and Heap to my clients. HotJar for the session replays (watch people browse your website, discover rage clicks) and Heap for the amazing funnel building and segmentation.

Another reason I'm a big fan of Hotjar is that it has a suite of free tools that help you get a better grip on what's happening your website - heatmaps, funnels, surveys and polls.

For exit intent, and CTAs

GetsiteControl has beautiful exit intent and CTA forms, with powerful trigger options.

For social scheduling

I recommend Buffer.

For user research

Dovetail is everything modern user research should be. It's beautiful and has everything you need to plan, deliver and review your user research.

For creating and editing images, presentations and basic wireframes

I use Canva Pro. The Pro version gives me access to 1000s of Elements, which saves me hours each month. I also created a Brand Kit and design templates which allows me to create blog post images in a few mins.

For royalty-free images

I recommend Pexels and Unsplash.

For royalty free illustration

I recommend unDraw.

For productised image creation

I recommend DesignJoy.

For productised content creation

I recommend Scribly. A fixed price for really great written content, and they'll work on your ad and landing page copy too. I have been really impressed when using this service with my clients.

I don't recommend any tools in this space as I believe early stage companies should only use tools to optimise paid ad performance after manually creating and measuring campaigns.

For lead enrichment

I am still looking for a tool or service in this space.

For outbound email

I recommend MixMax and Lemlist.

For search engine marketing

The tools you can use are Ahrefs, MOZ and SEMRush, although I've never found a search marketing tool I've loved.

For content marketers: ideas, formats, and measuring performance.

Read my list of tools for content marketers.

For processing payments

I use SPP on top of Stripe for freelance and RMLP payments. SPP gives you extra Stripe powers, supporting the quick setup of new payment types, a client management and support ticketing area, and recurring payments.