SaaS Tools for Marketing to Make Your Site Just WORK

If you have many (or any) engineers on your team, it’s really tempting to spend those engineering resources building out your marketing site. Don’t do it. Engineering resources are incredibly important and typically scarce, especially in early stage companies. It’s important to keep those focused on your critical path items. Instead, look at SaaS tools for marketing to help ease your workload.
I know this from experience. At my first two startups, we spent a lot of engineering resources building our homepages. Part of this was a point of pride. We wanted a slick page. But the cost was that even minor changes ended up being a huge distraction. The engineering work compounded. For example, any time we wanted to update our Press page with a new article, we had to ask engineering. Then one of our engineers ended up building an admin page so we could manage our press page via a custom dashboard. If this sounds like overkill, you’re right.
At Blissfully we vowed not to make these mistakes. We decided early on not to spend ANY engineering time building or updating our marketing pages. We wanted to be able to make quick copy edits without needing any code. We also wanted a beautiful and consistent design. And of course, we needed powerful integrations and workflows.
What we were looking for in our marketing website + platform:
We chose to build our marketing site on WordPress. It currently powers over 28% of all websites. That’s mind-boggling. It’s an incredibly mature platform that is improving at a solid clip. It has a huge ecosystem of integrations, extensions, designers, and developers.
I realize some folks love the simplicity of platforms like Squarespace and Wix. They are solid, somewhat flexible, and look great. The downside (and upside for some) is that they’re more limited, which might lead to a bigger migration later on.
The power and flexibility of WordPress can be overwhelming. So here’s a set of recommendations to get you started.
Here’s a great set of saas tools for marketing built on WordPress to get you going.
If you’re serious about your site, WP Engine is your best bet by far. They provide flexible plans, have terrific support, automatic regular backups that you can roll back to in one click, and great performance. WordPress.com is great for performance, but it’s incredibly limited in which themes and plugins it supports. And for heaven’s sake, do NOT use GoDaddy WordPress Hosting (or GoDaddy anything). Their DNS servers are garbage, support is awful, plans are cheap but leave out critical features, and they consistently try to upsell you crap. There are other WordPress hosts out there, but finding one requires navigating through an SEO wasteland.
SiteOrigin has a set of amazing tools to help design and customize your WordPress site. Using these tools will give you a great combination of ease of use out of the gate, plus plenty of control and customization options.
You should be using a marketing platform to manage customer conversations, and probably to include live chat on your site so you can engage visitors in real time. WordPress makes it trivial to integrate into your favorite marketing/chat platform. We recommend Intercom, Drift, or Hubspot, each of which has WordPress plugins to make deployment onto your marketing site easy.
We use this stack to create and manage our entire web presence, which you can see at Blissfully.com. In particular, our lead management workflow leverages this, with the addition of Clearbit, to easily enrich our leads and create a great workflow in Hubspot (our CRM).
We use a SINGLE email field when asking people to sign up for early access to reduce friction. Why ask for additional data fields (like name or company) when you can figure all that out with just an email. Then we use Zapier to send that email to Clearbit for enrichment (tons of great qualifying information like company size, revenue, etc.). Next use that enriched information, which comes just from the email, to create a complete Contact, matching Company, and Deal in Hubspot. From that point on, we manage the lead lifecycle in Hubspot which has great SaaS tools for marketing, automating emails, etc. And finally, we use Zapier’s notifications to send a Slack message to our team with the lead info and to send a welcome email to the original lead.
Without any engineering, we were able to create a powerful and scalable workflow.