As technology continues to evolve, so does the way users interact with it, making new and innovative user acquisition strategies necessary as well. Growth engineering requires equal parts marketing, technology and creativity, which is why the best toolboxes are as diverse as they are ever-changing.
Though a growth engineer's toolbox is never complete, the following nine tools are a great starting place:
FullContact
A cloud-based contact management solution, FullContact's People API pulls data -- including location, gender, job title and social profiles -- from over 100 sources. With just an email address, gain comprehensive contact information and insight into your users' demographics.
Facebook Custom Audiences
Because you can target ads based on users' email addresses and phone numbers, Custom Audiences are particularly useful in connecting with users whose contact information you've already acquired elsewhere (especially offline). This approach can be helpful not just for converting new customers but also energizing those whose engagement with your product has dropped.
Moz
Using Moz's free tools, anyone can access SEO metrics and track social media performance. Pro members have access to advanced research tools like Fresh Web Explorer, Rank Tracker, On-page Grader, Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis, and Crawl Test -- all of which help to ensure you're delivering the most relevant content in the most effective way and increasing your presence in search engines.
Similarweb
A freemium web ranking and competitive analysis tool, Similarweb provides performance statistics for your competitors, including website ranking, analysis of traffic sources, leading referring sites, top keywords, and geographic breakdown. Make smarter ad investments and better position yourself to engage your target market by emulating and improving upon the strategies that are working for your competitors.
Whatrunswhere
Another tool that leverages your competitors' data, Whatrunswhere tells you which ad placements are working well for them. Spend wisely on ads for your own company by learning from what has worked for others.
Clicktale, Crazyegg and Inspectlet
While analytics provide invaluable data, visual maps of user behavior from Clicktale, Crazyegg, and Inspectlet can be instrumental in making sense of those numbers. Observe your users' behavior through video playback and heatmapping -- including scrollmaps, eye tracking, click tracking and mouse tracking. Some packages even offer analytics integration and segmentation based on traffic source, device type, and so on.
Segment.io
An API that controls other analytics tools, Segment.io collects the data from your various websites and apps and passes it on to your analytics services, allowing you to store, process, and query the raw logs of your data all in one place. Quickly and painlessly add to your toolbox or switch between services without changing a line of code.
Geckoboard
Another means of streamlining data from multiple services, Geckoboard aggregates, teases out the main ideas and important numbers, and displays them in simple status boards that can be understood at a glance.
RJMetrics
Like Geckoboard, RJMetrics pulls together data from various sources in a simple, easy-to-understand dashboard. In addition to summarizing, however, RJMetrics offers advanced analysis -- including customer lifetime value, cohort analysis, and segmentation -- allowing you to build automatically updating charts based on any variable and create dashboards for sharing with team members, investors, and anyone else.
Because of the wide scope of growth engineering, this list is by no means comprehensive but these essential tools can help you to collect, analyze, interpret, organize, and act on all the data and insight that's so essential to growing your business. Which tools do you consider essential to your growth engineering tool box?