Building a stronger online presence to attract buyers will require a number of tools to improve marketing automation and assessing your approach. Here are 7 of the top tools in the martech (marketing technology) industry that we see our B2B clients using most frequently to achieve and measure marketing success.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
As a customer relationship management tool, Salesforce CRM offers a clearer picture of sales details and customer information. Additionally, Salesforce Marketing Cloud adds the marketing horsepower your sales team needs to generate digital leads and connect with prospects early in their buying cycle. Salesforce is a reliable company with broad system integration for enterprise resource planning (ERP).
On the downside, it can be a bit pricey and advanced for small business owners. The best use cases are for companies that have a dedicated Salesforce administrator who can utilize the features that your company needs that actually add value. There are lots of bells and whistles that can appear very exciting, but the time needed to integrate them into your business will depend on your goals and resources to support and maintain them.
Hubspot
As a platform with a number of services available: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub, Hubspot has strong authority in the market. The platform is user-friendly and the intuitive design is one of the things so alluring to many companies. With Hubspot, you can have everything in place as well as access to an in-depth educational library and their marketplace of predesigned templates.
Once a bargain, Hubspot changed it’s pricing model starting at a set price and requiring you buy additional features or upgrades. A/B testing options aren’t even available until the larger packages and you have to commit to year-long contracts. As you grow and require more features, shopping around may provide better value.
MailChimp
One of the more affordable and versatile options is MailChimp. They have expanded their original email marketing platform to include more campaign options and easy website creation. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to design professional-looking emails plus they offer a number of responsive design templates. Their free plan offers up to 10k emails per month to a total of 2k subscribers and they have a built-in CRM. They integrate easily into WordPress and other popular apps, but automations aren’t as easy to set up. It’s recommended to hire a freelancer to build your automations so they work and you don’t waste time trying to learn it. As we tell clients, it’s almost always cheaper and less stressful to stay in your lane! Let a specialist bang it out in hours vs you wasting days that you could dedicate elsewhere.
Marketo
As a marketing automation tool, Marketo is really created for the medium to enterprise business needs. It’s easy to use and ideal for larger teams, but not on the pricing scale of an enterprise solution. Though this can change not that it’s been acquired by Adobe to expand their offerings.
Marketo integrates well with Salesforce and has a quick setup. There are some issues with reports and analytics—many experience buggy issues with the software and reports can take a little time. The pricing takes a steep hike if you need to purchase additional features on a higher tier. It’s also a bit irritating that you can’t assess prices without contacting sales.
Constant Contact
As one of the staple players on the field, Constant Contact has been around since 1995 for email list solutions. They offer surveys and social campaigns that competitors don’t have. You can schedule emails to send at specific times or reoccur as needed. Their pricing isn’t that cheap, but they do offer some nice e-commerce options and website building. They do have very high deliverability rates for an email provider most likely due to their extremely rigorous list review process. If you think you can sneak your purchased, scraped, or non-compliant trade show list into their system – you are going to be very unhappy. They have very strict authorization protocols.
Hootsuite
If you are trying to up your social game, Hootsuite offers a dashboard to help you manage your platforms. You can schedule various social posts and keep everything connected under the same hub. It can tell you the ideal posting times for increasing engagement with your audience and provide you a central place to engage with commenters. You will need to monitor the connections. There are some platforms, like LinkedIn and Facebook Groups, that disconnect frequently.
Depending on how much you rely on social for leads and awareness, many companies can get by with their free version. When you need paid features, you probably will want to compare other platforms like Sprout Social, Loomly, or Later.
Zapier
When you have several apps, like Gmail, MailChimp, Dropbox and social accounts and want them to share data, Zapier can help automate and connect them. You can establish Zaps (or automated workflow actions) that are triggered by specific events. It sounds pretty easy, but if you aren’t a martech geek that likes to solve problems you can get frustrated fast. To really take advantage of Zapier, you may want to hire a freelancer to help you for those one-off connections.
Are you looking for the best tools and the most cost-effective plan to automate your digital marketing? Let’s talk! The Pollock Marketing Group can help you make sure you get the right tools that deliver and take the fewest resources.