Setting up a new business is exciting. The name, the brand, the shiny new website! 😁
Setting up a marketing business? Slightly more daunting because you’re painfully aware that everything you do is effectively a live case study. No pressure.
When I was planning the launch of Breaker Communications, I dived headfirst into marketing tools. Website platform, branding, analytics, design, video tools….the list grows faster than your browser tabs. Some tools were brilliant, some threatened the future existence of my laptop.
So, for anyone starting a new business, and especially fellow marketers, here’s my honest take on the good, the bad and the ugly of the marketing tools I personally used to get up and running.
Website and CRM: HubSpot
HubSpot was a fairly easy choice for me, though it definitely wouldn’t be the obvious one as there are much more basic platforms out there for small businesses. I’ve worked with HubSpot throughout my career, but I’d never set it up entirely from scratch, so I thought what better experience to gain for future clients?
First, the good. Having your website, data capture forms and CRM all in one place is incredibly powerful, and just easier when you’re starting out. It forces good data habits from day one, lets you start simple and gives you plenty of scope to grow into more advanced features later.
Setting up brand colours, basic automations, and integrating with Google Analytics is surprisingly quick – you can get the foundations in place in minutes.
The bad? Let’s be honest. HubSpot is not beginner friendly, and I wouldn’t recommend it to a non-marketer.
From choosing a theme and then discovering you can’t change some of the colours without upgrading to a paid version, to restrictive page blocks, to data and privacy settings that feel needlessly complex - this part absolutely tested my patience. That said, lessons were learned and I now feel far more confident in the platform set up.
Now onto the cost. If you don’t mind HubSpot branding, you can do pretty much everything a very small business needs for free, and upgrade once you hit the contact limit or want to use more advanced functionality. Or the Starter package comes in at around £100 for the year, which is decent value if you’re committed to the platform.
Domain purchase: GoDaddy
I purchased my website and email domains from GoDaddy, for a fairly small cost. The process was simple, and connecting with HubSpot was painless.
My only learning? Ignore the ‘ready instantly’ messaging. Give it a good 24 hours before expecting everything to work properly.
Branding: Looka
Branding can be one of the biggest blockers when you’re starting out. You usually know exactly what you don’t want, but creating a visual that you do want is a different story.
I wanted a very simple logo, with a bright and energetic colour palette. Looka got me there in a very short space of time. Is it perfect? No. Is it professional and good enough to move forward? Absolutely.
My mistake - not just downloading the logo and walking away. After some research, I opted for the branding package that included multiple logo formats, colour palette, brand guidelines and a whole suite of business templates which I thought would help save time – invoices, social assets, the lot.
Sounds great…until you realise it’s all delivered in PDF format, making editing them awkward at best.
Helpful as a starting point, but probably not the best long-term solution. If you know a designer, that’s likely going to be a simpler and more flexible route for creating your branding assets.
Design and assets: Canva
If you’re not using Canva by now, I’m not sure where you’ve been hiding.
Canva makes it ridiculously easy to resize logos/images, create social assets, design presentations, and even knock together basic videos – all without expensive design software or specialist skills.
Canva Pro is around £100 a year and lets you upload your brand colours, get on-brand design suggestions, and create video assets quickly (once you’ve got to grips with how it works).
For small businesses, speed matters, and Canva delivers every single time. Huge thumbs up from me!
Analytics: Google Analytics
And here’s where it gets really ugly. 😱
At a basic level, Google Analytics is brilliant. It integrates easily with HubSpot (and most other mainstream platforms), and if all you want is a simple view of where visitors come from and what they’re looking at on your website, it does the job nicely.
But if you want to go deeper - analysing conversions, building reports, doing anything remotely sophisticated – welcome to the post-Universal Analytics world. Since GA4 was forced on us in 2023, many marketers have been quietly (or not so quietly) screaming into the void.
The good news? It’s completely free.
The bad news? The hours you could lose setting up the reports you actually want. This is my next battle and I’ll report back.
The biggest challenge of all
The biggest challenge I found wasn’t with one specific platform, it was the sheer volume of choice. There are endless website builders, countless branding tools, and a shiny new ‘must-have’ AI tool every five minutes.
At some point, research turns into procrastination. So sometimes the best tool is simply the one that lets you move forward.
My biggest learning? You don’t need the perfect marketing stack, you need a practical one. Start with the tools that solve a real problem, fit your budget, and have the potential to grow with your business. You can always upgrade or replace tools later, what matters at the beginning is momentum.
And if you’re a marketer setting all this up for yourself? Be kind to yourself, it won’t all be perfect. Even when you know the tools inside out, it’s very different when you’re the client too.