A few years ago, whenever people would ask me the age-old question “what do you do?” and I answered Growth Hacker, there was such a funny mix of confused looks, blank stares, and “ohhh, I’ve heard of those.” Thankfully with time, more and more of you have been learning more about what it is we love doing, and how our love of User Experience (also known as UX) benefits you

User Experience (also known as UX), a fundamental element of growth, if you’ve never heard of, or worked on UX here’s a quick intro:

What is UX?

User experience (UX) is the interaction and experience users have with a company’s products and services

It’s no secret that growth is the key to success. Without growth, profits remain flat, which is why we have seen so much interest in the process of ‘growth hacking‘ among startups and most recently, the fortune 500 crowd starting taking notice.

When it comes down to it, growth happens through marketing and customer service, and the best happens when you use the best tools with some love thrown in the mix

Here are 3 of the tools we’ve tried, tested, and keep coming back to

Unbounce:

Landing pages are extremely important when it comes to converting visitors into customers, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it can be difficult to build and test them thoroughly. Unbounce makes this process much easier. With a drag-and-drop interface, the program makes it easy to set up pages and create forms – even if you don’t know how to code. Which came in handy when we brought in help with A/B split testing, Tried, true, and reliable as one of the best tools out there

Maptive:

These days, plenty of marketers talk a big game about big data, but few of them actually use the information they have to make meaningful decisions. If they did we wouldn’t exist.  Maptive gives you an easy way to mine your data – allowing you to upload a spreadsheet of addresses and see them laid out on a custom map. We’ve used it in a dozen industries ranging from Real Estate to selling digital products. This tool comes in handy when planning the best spots for upcoming campaigns, or answer any other question you have about the geography of your data.

Related: If Marketing And Advertising Seems Harder Right Now, Try This Today

CrazyEgg:

Want to know how visitors are behaving on your site? CrazyEgg shows you where they click, how far they scroll, what they watch, amongst other cool features. CrazyEgg’s heat-mapping tools allow you to segment your traffic and determine whether certain design or content elements are resonating more with one group than another. Remember the aforementioned A/B testing? This gets you essential feedback on your site in a very short amount of time. Best of all,  It’s easy to use, affordable tool that will make a big difference in your messaging and growth

Bonus round:

Some fun surprises came from this unexpected gem (like increasing our retention and filtering through “dead” leads)

Typeform:

I don’t know about you, but online surveys tend to be dull and robotic – these dry forms certainly don’t encourage interaction and feel like homework. Instead, we’ve started testing out Typeform to create surveys that are fun, interactive, and enjoyable to look at. The better the end-user responds, the better our data! The better the data, the easier it is to unveil patterns and trends.

If you’re reading this, and feeling kind of burnt out (it’s ok if you’re not open about it too) just remember, no one can manage growth alone, which is why it’s so important that you have the right tools.

If you haven’t checked them out yet, we also compiled a powerful list of resources for scrappy creatives, and another one for awesome social media tools we love using 

As a company that was built on the very premise and practice of Growth Hacking, we’re excited to share more of what has been the most beneficial to us, test them out, make some adjustments and you’re well on your way to virtually guaranteeing your company’s growth and success.

Do you use any of these tools (or any others) to encourage growth in your company?

Share your experiences here!

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