The Digital Toolkit Every Early-Stage Startup and SMB Needs for Modern Marketing and Sales

An SMB in the wellness space came to us struggling to grow its business, despite significant digital marketing spend.   

To their surprise, we immediately cut their advertising budget by 10%… and then increased their sales by 30% – (we hit similar numbers for a young legal tech startup with practically no budget as well).  

It wasn’t magic. By leveraging a combination of Google and Meta marketing, email campaigns, and a few of our other favourite tools, we made every marketing dollar count.

We focused on the data and what people were actually doing, rather than what they said they’d do.  We put tools in place to understand user behaviour on the site and figure out: 

• How they got to the site
• What kind of content (ad or organic) they had seen before coming to the site
• What they clicked on during their visit
• Which actions on the site preceded a lead becoming qualified
• Which actions on the site led to a sale down to the road
• What encouraged users to take “good actions” on the site

For those who think B2B = LinkedIn, we didn’t start using it until the company had established a baseline of data and experimentation in place ( and after driving cheaper traffic via other channels and retargeting those that took meaningful interactions via the LinkedIn Insights tag.

TL;DR: Sales and marketing can be cruel to those who don’t have the tools in place to adapt. We urge you to embrace the shifting nature of lead generation, AI search, and customer motivations. Whether you are rolling out your first campaign or your 500th, there are new rules to the same old game – and the buzzword “data” is more accessible than you may think.

What The Article Will Cover 

1. The digital toolkit needed for a startup or SMB.
2. How to shape your website to experiment and get leads.
   1. Example & application for Startups
   2. Example & application for SMBs
3. How to make sure your ad accounts don’t get banned.
4. When to run your experiments & how to test your messaging to get it just right.
5. How to keep tweaking and refining with other tools and strategies.
6. What comes next.

For a startup, our toolkit will show you how to take product marketing seriously from the start and define and refine your go-to-market strategy and flow. 

For an SMB, we’ll show you how to take a step back and evaluate what has been working for your marketing efforts, what hasn’t, and, most importantly, why.

The Digital Tool Kit

It doesn’t matter if you’re a nimble startup launching some groundbreaking AI healthtech product or an established SMB looking to optimize your online marketing efforts – make sure the basics are covered:

• Meta Business Manager Account (I promise you your customers are here – more later).
• Meta Pixel (formerly Facebook Pixel)
• Google Ads Account 
• Google Analytics (GA4)
• Google Tag Manager (GTM)Session monitor (We prefer Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar)
• Another specialized channel (for many, this is LinkedIn, but it can be Pinterest, Reddit, email marketing, etc).
• Asset Creation Software (Adobe, Figma, Canva, etc.)
• Time & Patience
• (and a Website)

Ensuring you have the above list checked off will help you understand your audience, track performance, and make the necessary adjustments to optimize conversions. It also might make or break your long-term success.

Without the above foundation, you risk inefficient ad spending, account restrictions, and a fragmented view of your audience’s behaviour. 

It might seem like a long list, but it’s not. It’s the scaffolding that will support every decision you make in your marketing strategy.

For a practical guide on setting up these foundational accounts, including Meta Business Manager and advertising accounts, explore our guide on Lesson 3: Getting Set up – Before you begin

How to shape your website to run experiments and get to sales

In the short term, here are the steps for your digital marketing journey: 

1. Set up your basic accounts and tools
2. Experiment with ‘good enough’ landing pages
3. Begin testing messaging and value propositions
4. Test and iterate
5. Integrate more powerful tools over time 

The ‘Good Enough’ Website

For any startup (and most small to medium-sized businesses), your online marketing efforts typically begin with a website. But it doesn’t have to be perfect. Functional and intentional is the goal, and you don’t want to waste time that could be better spent elsewhere.

With a ‘good enough’ selling site, you can begin to understand: 

• Engagement behavior
• Intent-to-purchase behaviour
• Follow through-to-purchase behaviour (even before you are actively selling!)

This is increasingly important as you build out sales and marketing best practices down the road. In the short term, it will also provide real data on scalability, such as MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), even if you have zero or low revenue numbers. 

If you capture the right data, you can leverage it across the stakeholder spectrum and utilize your existing momentum as a proxy for your business’s future success.

Start-up seeking validation or improving lead generation efforts:

Landing pages to test your offerings (whether the product is live or not). 

Your ‘’good enough’:

1. Should address a core problem directly.
2. Provides a concise explanation of how your solution works.
3. Has social proof or data of some sort.
4. Highlights a clear call to action (e.g., “Join Waitlist,” “Download Beta,” or “Learn More”). 

For each core selling pain point that affects your ideal customer, set up a single landing page. Write a compelling headline for each landing page, and let the language you have heard your customer use (pain points, aspirations, barriers)  inform the rest of the content on the page. Yes, it’s okay to reuse content for some parts of the page.

Startup Example:

If you’re targeting B2B with a new HR software:

1. Your “good enough” site might feature a landing page with a headline like ‘Stop Stressing Over Onboarding Chaos.’ It might go on to explain how your product works with the existing hiring process, and how 100s of companies are sharing the same problem and solving it with your solution today, and how they feel about it. 
2. You might also do another landing page, with a new headline: ‘Get The Most Out of Your Newest Hires, Fast.’ This might go on to explain how your tool will enable employees to get up to speed and contribute quickly.

The first headline example addresses a pain point in HR’s time management and cognitive load. 

The second is about employee productivity. Same solution, different positioning – thus, the experiment.

Seems simple? It is. It’s designed to learn if a specific pain point resonates with your intended audience and then leads to conversion actions. 

Once your different landing pages are set up:

1. Leverage ad channels (and email, and SMS) to drive traffic and measure results.
2. Track each pain point and the following customer actions on the site with UTM codes, Google Tags Manager, and Clarity, to see if different pain points or hero text leads to different outcomes. 

This minimalist approach allows for rapid deployment, enabling you to test core assumptions about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and see which offerings have the potential to gain traction and scale. 

Key Takeaways for Early Stage Startups

• You do not need a multi-page, award-winning website straight away.
• Build a couple of pages that are driving to a conversion that is meaningful for the business. 
• Track data collection and customer conversion behaviours to determine what works and what doesn’t. 

For insights into launching a functional website for early tests and what components it needs, refer to our guide on [Link to Lesson 4: “Launching a ‘Good Enough’ Website – 4”].  For a practical guide on setting up and running initial audience engagement campaigns, refer to our guide on [Link to Lesson 5: “Running a “Likes Campaign” – 5”].

Improving lead generation and sales efforts as an SMB or expanding into a new service:

If you are an SMB, your focus might shift slightly from building your first online presence (and testing your first product offerings) to strategically leveraging or adapting the existing digital channels to validate a new product, or bolster sales of an existing one. 

Even if you are looking to bolster existing offerings, the next section has valuable information to consider when you’re validating your next product.

Example of an SMB Trying To Market a New Product or Service

Imagine you are an established regional accounting firm looking to launch a new advisory service for family-owned businesses struggling with intergenerational wealth transfer. 

1. Your “good enough” landing page could live on the existing website or instead be hidden – unless someone is given the direct URL to reach it – like through an email outreach or an ad.
2. The landing page might feature a headline like ‘Ensure Your Family’s Business Legacy Lives On After You.’ 
3. This page should also offer a clear explanation of your solution, social proof, and a clear call to action (e.g., “Download Case Study,” “Speak With An Expert,” “Request A Free Consultation”).
4. You would then use targeted ads (e.g., Google Search Ads or Meta) for “family business succession planning” or adjacent topics that relate to the periphery of your audience in order to drive traffic to this specific page you are trying to test the messaging of.
   1. You can also use a sample size of your existing customers’ emails.
5. Like everything else we talk about in this article, measure results on the page (see the startup example above) or learn more about tracking conversions and messaging below. 

*A note if you are already having success with ad channels. Be sure not to cannibalize other ads you might be running (or closely related services) that are already experiencing success. Pick a specific geographic area to run the experiments in, or use specific keywords, to narrow the focus and avoid interfering with your other activities. 

Key Takeaways for SMBs:

• Adapt or add focused landing pages rather than overhauling your entire site for every test.
• The landing page should drive towards a single, measurable conversion that validates a new idea, message, or feature.
• Don’t let your past business and success bias what the data is showing you.

For insights into launching a functional website for early tests and what components it needs, refer to our guide on Lesson 4: “Launching a ‘Good Enough’ Website.

If This is Your First Time Advertising on the Channel, Prime Your Accounts So You Don’t Get Banned.

While working on your “good enough” landing pages, you should be warming up your ad accounts in the background so you don’t get banned.  

A smart initial step is to run a simple, low-cost engagement campaign, like a Facebook or Instagram Likes Ccampaign, Google Responsive Search Campaign, Pinterest Awareness campaign or a LinkedIn Awareness Campaign (be careful, though, LinkedIn is expensive).

This serves multiple strategic purposes: it signals to the ad platform that you are a legitimate business with real engagement, it helps build an initial audience base, and it warms up your ad accounts, preventing potential bans. 

Hot Tip: If you are an SMB running a validation experiment to try out a new product or offering, consider setting up a separate alias account brand to test in the earliest stages. 

For a practical guide on setting up and running initial audience engagement campaigns, refer to our guide on Lesson 5: “Running a “Likes Campaign”.

Start To Run Experiments and Test Messaging

Start by figuring out your pain points, and then make simplified ads that highlight your solution via headlines.

You don’t need fancy video or image ads to speak to the heart of the problem you are solving for your potential customer. Yes, you will want to get there, but going back to basics is the fastest and cheapest way to experiment until you get things right.  Move to the fancy ads once you can really make them count.

Other Tools to Add to Your Digital Marketing Data Foundation

I’ve talked about the very beginnings of capturing data and other resources that will help set you up for success for your online marketing and sales funnel. 

Once you have the basics, there are some other and measurement tools you can leverage to better understand on-platform analytics, track deal progress and score leads, create email activation flows –  all intending to let you spend more time on the customers who are going actually to contribute to your bottom line: 

• Core Analytics & Ad Tracking Platforms:
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems:
• Customer Feedback & Experience (CFE) Platforms
• Marketing Automation & Email Platforms:
• Competitive Intelligence Platforms

Tactical Lessons on How to Implement Your Digital Launchpad

Ready to build a robust digital foundation for your business? Explore our comprehensive guides for step-by-step instructions and best practices:

• For Setting up Essential Accounts: Lesson 3: “Getting Set up – Before you begin
• For Building Your First Website/Landing Page: Lesson 4: “Launching a ‘Good Enough’ Website
• For Priming Your Ad Accounts and Audience: Lesson 5: “Running a “Likes Campaign’