Last Reviewed: November 11th, 2024

Best Marketing Software Of 2024

What is Marketing Software?

Marketing software empowers businesses to streamline and amplify their marketing efforts. It tackles challenges like managing campaigns across diverse channels, optimizing targeting, and measuring results – all while automating routine tasks. This frees up resources, allowing marketers to focus on strategy and personalization. Benefits include increased audience reach, improved conversion rates, and valuable data insights. Key functionalities range from email marketing and social media management to content creation and customer relationship management. Emerging features involve artificial intelligence for predictive analytics and automated optimization, further boosting campaign effectiveness. Businesses of all sizes across various industries can benefit, with particular advantages for B2B and e-commerce. However, limitations include potential implementation costs and the ongoing need for skilled users to interpret data and refine strategies. In conclusion, marketing software, while not a silver bullet, provides a powerful toolkit for optimizing campaigns, maximizing reach, and gaining valuable customer insights, ultimately driving business growth.

What Are The Key Benefits of Marketing Software?

  • Increased Efficiency
  • Improved Targeting
  • Boosted Reach & Engagement
  • Automated Repetitive Tasks
  • Data-Driven Insights & Decisions
  • Personalized Customer Journeys
  • Optimized Campaign Performance
  • Higher Conversion Rates
  • Measurable ROI & Impact
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Overall

Based on the latest available data collected by SelectHub for 32 solutions, we determined the following solutions are the best Marketing Software overall:

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Why We Picked Mailchimp

Stepping into the realm of email marketing, Mailchimp emerges as a prominent contender, captivating businesses with its user-friendly interface and extensive features. User feedback from the past year sheds light on Mailchimp's strengths and weaknesses, offering valuable insights for potential adopters. Mailchimp's intuitive design empowers users of all skill levels to craft visually appealing email campaigns. The platform's drag-and-drop editor and diverse template library simplify the creation process, enabling businesses to maintain brand consistency and engage their audience effectively. Affordability is another hallmark of Mailchimp, with tiered pricing plans catering to businesses of varying sizes and budgets. The availability of a free plan further enhances accessibility, making it an attractive option for startups and small businesses.

However, Mailchimp's automation capabilities have drawn mixed reviews. While the platform offers basic automation features, such as welcome emails and abandoned cart sequences, some users find them to be less robust compared to competitors like ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo. Additionally, Mailchimp's segmentation options, while functional, may not provide the same level of granularity as more specialized email marketing platforms. Despite these limitations, Mailchimp's ease of use, affordability, and comprehensive feature set make it a compelling choice for businesses seeking a reliable email marketing solution. Its intuitive interface and extensive template library empower users to create professional-looking emails without extensive design experience. The platform's scalability ensures that it can accommodate the evolving needs of growing businesses, making it an ideal choice for those embarking on their email marketing journey.

Pros & Cons

  • Easy to Use: The platform has a simple interface and can easily be understood by anyone with basic knowledge of email marketing, observe 95% of reviewers referencing this feature.
  • Easy Email and Templates: It’s easy to create and understand emails using templates, send professional email flyers, and run campaigns automatically, according to 83% of users who mention this feature.
  • Email Marketing: Everyone referencing this aspect thinks it’s a comprehensive email marketing tool with features like campaign management, customer journey, transactional email, integrations and more.
  • Customization: Almost 80% of reviewers who talk about this feature feel the built-in templates are easily customizable, and editing them doesn’t require graphic design experience.
  • Paid Version: More than 85% users mentioning this aspect observe that the free version doesn’t include all features and the premium version is expensive compared to other email marketing services.
  • Email Spam: Every user talking about this feature mentions that sometimes clients' e-blasts end up in the spam folder for recipients.
  • Glitches: There are glitches such as difficulty signing in when logged in from another device, frozen modules, slow editing process, poor compatibility with Outlook and more, as every review on this feature mentions.

Key Features

  • Audience Dashboard: Store contact data and track trends to understand the audience better. Clickable sections in the dashboard help instantly launch campaigns based on that data.
  • Segmentation: Ready-made segments based on campaign activity, purchase history and more are offered to send campaigns. Enable up to five layers of segmentation filtering, and update data automatically. Add a set of nested conditions facilitating different combinations of data collected such as purchase activity, gender, age range and more.
  • Behavioral Targeting: An API enables pulling custom event data or actions performed by users, to send targeted messages based on specific activities, such as downloads or account renewal.
  • Lookalike Audience: Works with social ads and postcards to reach more people. Find new people similar to contacts using marketing CRM data and an audience network. Create Facebook and Instagram ads, and target people interested in the company’s products.
  • Content Studio: Stores assets such as photos, documents and other files. Upload or sync assets, edit them directly in the content studio and use them for marketing.
  • Templates: More than 100 predesigned templates are available. Customize templates to launch campaigns.
  • Email Builder: Create posts for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter directly from the email builder. Also add photos, write copy and share the post after the email is sent.
  • Landing Pages: Create a place for contacts or potential contacts to land on when they click through from an email, ad, social post or other location on the web.
  • Email Automation: Automate welcome messages after user subscription, and emails based on dates and events. Drag and drop RSS content into any template to pull in the latest posts.
  • Schedule Campaigns: Send a campaign or schedule it for a specific date and time. Includes: 
    •  Send time optimization, which recommends a time for subscribers based on click time activity. 
    •  Timewarp to send campaigns to recipients based on their time zone. 
    •  Batch delivery to send campaigns in timed batches. 
    •  Ability to pause campaigns. 
  • Reporting: Monitor trends and track performance. The growth, engagement and revenue reports facilitate viewing who’s interacted with marketing, along with their clicks, buys and downloads. Compare open, click and unsubscribe rates to industry peers.
  • Real-Time Analytics: Keep tabs on all marketing campaigns including emails, automations, social ads and more. Manage marketing budget using real-time stats. Track sales from a campaign to purchase by finding out who made a purchase after opening the campaign, viewing what they bought and seeing the money earned by the campaign.
  • Integrations: Integrates with apps and web services including Xero, Zapier, Square, LiveChat and more.
  • A/B Testing: Test up to three variations for campaign and build a working strategy.
  • Security:Includes data center security, protection from data loss or corruption, application-level security, internal IT security and more.
Start Price
$9.99
Monthly
Company Size
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Deployment
Cloud On-Premise
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Why We Picked Constant Contact

Designed for small businesses, Constant Contact delivers web-based email marketing that’s easy to use. Most users find its robust email marketing and campaign management feature beneficial. It offers lots of templates and strong contact management capabilities. The customer support team is quite helpful as well. However, it lacks some important features such as Google Analytics and automation settings, limiting its usefulness in some key areas. Additionally, reviews indicate most of the emails users send are marked as spam. Overall, it’s a decent software for small businesses that are in need of an efficient, lightweight solution.

Pros & Cons

  • Email Campaigns: It’s possible to add tables and buttons, check open and click rates, and schedule, customize and manage emails, according to 90% of reviewers who mention this aspect.
  • Ease of Use: More than 95% of users who talk about this aspect report it’s easy to navigate.
  • Templates: Creating and using pre-built templates, including those for different occasions, aid announcements and sales marketing, as 70% of users referencing this aspect observe.
  • Contact Management: The system helps save and organize contacts in one place, as well as create emails and events to send out to different groups of contacts, according to 90% of reviewers who talk about this feature.
  • Customer Service: The customer support team is helpful and always available to assist, note 82% of users mentioning it.
  • Lack of Features: The system lacks certain features such as Google Analytics tracking, configuration options, CRM capabilities and automation options, note 90% of reviewers talking about this aspect.
  • Spam Emails: Most of the emails sent via the platform go to junk folders, according to 83% of users referencing this issue.

Key Features

  • Drag-and-Drop Editor: Facilitates customizing an email template and designing professional, mobile-responsive emails for every device. 
  • Sign-Up Forms: Supports creating inline sign-up forms that can be embedded into the HTML code on the website or blog to enable collecting sign-ups as people view a specific webpage. Provides sign up-forms and automatic display triggers to maximize list growth. 
  • Surveys and Polls: Facilitates creating custom surveys and polls, and enables viewing individual results from respondents or tracking general data trends from social media or an email survey. 
  • Campaign Report: View email metrics such as sends, opens, clicks and more. Compare campaigns to determine which received the most opens or clicks. 
  • Integrations: Integrates with apps such as Salesforce, Outlook, Mindbody, Shopify, Facebook and more. 
  • A/B Testing: Run an A/B test on two versions of subject lines to maximize email open rates. 
  • Contact Segmentation and Targeted Marketing: Create customized segments based on a contact’s engagement with email campaigns, location and company details, and already-existing lists. Send targeted marketing emails with relevant messages. 
  • Contact Management: Upload contacts from Excel, Outlook, Salesforce and more. 
  • Email Scheduling: Send emails instantly or schedule them to be sent at a future time. Suggests the best time to send emails based on the industry’s open rate. 
  • Landing Pages: Two types are available: 
    • Lead Generation: Collects visitor information and helps set up automated email series to stay connected to new leads. 
    • Shoppable: Enables selling products and supports tracking results such as gross revenue, page visitors, conversion rates and more. 
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Why We Picked Asana

Asana is a work management platform designed to help users organize and streamline operations with a user-friendly, customizable interface, automation and AI. Key features include the ability to create custom fields, deadlines, and subtasks, utilize various project views like Kanban boards and timelines, and leverage AI for summarizing tasks and drafting workflows. During my test of the software, I liked how easy it was to create a task by email and create project and task summaries using their AI tool.

Customization was also a win. I built a task template for my Content Creation project with custom fields, relative due dates, assignees and a bulleted checklist. However, head’s up, adding task templates to existing tasks requires creating a new task with the template and merging it. Hands down, workflow management was one of my favorite parts of testing Asana. Adding in new sections (without having to go to the list view) and creating custom rules for transitions with a little help from their version of prompts was a breeze.

Collaboration is another plus, with in-card comments and mentions, an inbox, group and individual messaging in platform and guest accounts with custom permissions for external users.

On the downside, if you don’t have access to a free trial of the paid version (like I did), the free version may not be as effective. You won’t be able to access AI features, certain project views and resource management. The setup also isn’t exactly intuitive, and you may need training plus multiple visits to the help center to conceptualize your project and pick the right template.

Overall, Asana is a fantastic all-in-one project management solution for users looking for a flexible tool with AI assistance and don’t mind springing for one of the paid plans.

Pros & Cons

  • User Friendly: Reviewers appreciated that the system is easy to use and intuitive with a clean UI, even if you’re new to projects.
  • Overall Functionality: Workflows and automation, task management and collaboration are everything you’d look for in a project management system, according to users.
  • Customization: Users liked the customization options for unique team needs, projects and workflows.
  • >Cost: Users mentioned Asana’s paid plans were too expensive for smaller businesses making it difficult to upgrade from the limited free version.
  • Set-Up: Getting started can be overwhelming with so many customizations and task options. Users said you may need extra time to implement it effectively.
  • Advanced Features: Reviewers noted some features like AI, advanced project views, resource management and multiple task assignees require expensive plan upgrades.

Key Features

  • Task Management: Create tasks with custom fields, deadlines, tags, subtasks, dependencies and descriptions during setup, adding tasks to the section you want when you create your first project or forwarding an email to [email protected]. Save time by converting your custom tasks into a template you can apply to new tasks and using AI to summarize tasks and draft subtasks. Switch between list, board, timeline, calendar and Gantt views to optimize visualization and drag-and-drop tasks between sections.
  • Project Planning and Scheduling: Kick your projects off with a plethora of templates ranging from product rollouts to hiring pipelines, or import your project from a spreadsheet. Convert tasks into milestones on the card and add details about why it’s a milestone. Add tasks to multiple projects and organize strategic initiatives by creating a portfolio where you can track the updates of all your projects.
  • Resource Management: Keep track of what’s on everyone’s plate by switching to the workload view. Drag and drop tasks to manage timelines and assignees and assign custom values like hours or points to tasks to accurately factor in employee effort.
  • Sprint Management: Hit the ground running by applying the sprint template to a new project. Add custom fields, use the timeline tab to map out sprint tasks and deadlines and set start and finish dates in the project view.
  • Collaboration Features: Add updates, questions and notes into the description. Comment on cards with mentions, files, lists, code blocks and even AI assists. Send messages directly to individuals or teams using the inbox. Keep your clients in the loop by creating guest accounts and sharing specific tasks and projects with them.
  • Reports and Insights: Tap into a bird’s eye view of your project by clicking on the dashboard tab where you can monitor overdue, complete and incomplete tasks and burnup charts and create custom charts with their AI tool. Visit the reporting tab to view trends, progress, resourcing and work health.
  • Custom Automations and Workflows: Build a workflow that’s a perfect fit for your project in the workflow tab by adding sections for each step in the process with custom transitions and rules when tasks are moved. Add custom automations and rules from scratch, use the options provided as a starting point or get a helping hand from the AI studio. Check out the automations we built in depth below.
Start Price
$800
Monthly
Company Size
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Cloud On-Premise
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Why We Picked HubSpot

With basic CRM alongside marketing, sales, service and content management, Hubspot offers a lot of functionalities, which users cite as a primary benefit. Its slick interface ensures an intuitive experience and extensive automation simplifies tasks, although some complicated functions make it time-consuming to learn. Users also appreciate how prompt customer support is, and that there’s a free version that’s ideal for small and mid-sized businesses.
However, certain email elements present issues and the paid versions are expensive for what they offer. Overall, businesses that are in need of a robust and scalable product suite, especially those with a focus on inbound marketing, might find this to be a good fit.

Pros & Cons

  • Ease of Use: Every user referencing navigation reports the platform is user-friendly.
  • Customer Support: The support team is reliable and offers quick responses to any need, according to 91% of reviewers referencing this aspect.
  • Automation: Automating email campaigns, lead scoring and workflows, managing sales funnel and social engagement, and creating email templates is easy, according to 95% of reviewers who talk about automation.
  • Feature-Rich: The range of features offered, such as creating landing pages, forms and email campaigns, is a benefit to 85% of users mentioning functionalities.
  • Marketing: Every user who refers to marketing feels it’s easy to market products.
  • Interface: A slick interface makes it easy to navigate, in the experience of 80% of reviewers referencing the UI.
  • Price: Premium products are expensive for the amount of functionality, especially for small and mid-sized companies, according to 86% of reviewers mentioning cost.
  • Training: In 85% of reviews referencing training, users say it’s difficult for average users to perform complicated tasks such as tracking leads and making different mailing lists, causing a learning curve.
  • Email Functionality: All reviews about this issue note that customizing the mobile version of an email affects the desktop version, inserting custom HTML such as a for promo timer isn’t possible and more.

Key Features

  • Pipeline Management:
    •  Reduces data entry through auto-populated data and grants control over pipelines to match how users work. 
    •  User-friendly edit tools alongside a drag-and-drop interface simplify the entire management process. 
    •  Quick access to key metrics is available with a sales dashboard. 
  • Lead Management: Perform CRM activities without the hassle of reconciling different data sets and gain full visibility into contacts by accessing data-rich profiles in one location. Capabilities include lead segmentation, contact activity history and tasks. 
  • Messaging: Facilitates better internal and external communication, promotes strong customer experiences, supports lead generation and enables more timely follow up. Offers Facebook Messenger, a customizable live chat widget, shared email and a chatbot builder. 
  • Conversations Inbox:
    •  Provides context, alignment and transparency for marketing, sales and service teams through a team-wide inbox. 
    •  Aids cross-functional collaboration via a central hub for communicating with prospects, leads and customers. Routing rules deliver emails to the most relevant team or member. 
    •  Offers a seamless experience to customers no matter what stage they’re in. 
  • Contact Activity: Gain deeper insights by leveraging analytics that show website interactions. Track form submissions, page visits and more. 
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Key Features

  • Automated Intelligence and Outreach: With this feature, users no longer have to struggle with manual data updates and can completely automate contact discoveries and company searches with precision. 
  • Webform Optimizations: ZoomInfo FormComplete makes it easy for users to capture contact information without tedious form fields. All users need to capture is the prospect’s email address and the rest of the information is scored accordingly. 
  • Website Visitor Tracking: Users can turn intent into action with the software’s WebSights service, which tracks all anonymous visitors to landing pages or the website. Users never have to miss a visitor's responses again. 
  • Lead Enrichment: The Enrich feature prevents outdated and incomplete data by auto-updating data with new additional information. This process makes database management and lead management much simpler. 
  • Activity and Pipeline Management: The software’s InboxAI tool saves hours of manual work by quickly aligning the sales teams’ email inboxes directly to Salesforce. This data sync allows complete access to the engagement of accounts and activities. 
  • Enterprise API: Managers can customize workflows and data presentation. ZoomInfo’s API helps search, enrich and append existing data, so users never run out of contact discoveries. 
  • Account Targeting: The platform’s advanced targeting capabilities allow users to reach out to key decision-makers. The account targeting watchlist enables account managers to have access to updated insights that help promote business growth. 
  • Campaign Optimization: This feature helps users understand their target audience, enhance their data and develop hyper-targeted campaigns. It provides updated, accurate and actionable CRM data to ensure successful outreaches. 
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Why We Picked Klaviyo

With an easy-to-use design and email templates, Klaviyo simplifies marketing efforts. Vigorous monitoring and analytics were other strong points according to user feedback. Users also leverage it for market segmentation, which provides useful market insights according to the segments chosen. However, getting started with the product may take some time due to the lack of training resources for implementation, and the capabilities may not justify the price tag for smaller companies according to user feedback. All in all, it’s a good choice for companies with a larger budget that require strong automation and segmentation capabilities.

Pros & Cons

  • Analytics: The product offers robust analysis capabilities, according to all reviews about analytics.
  • Ease of Use: A user-friendly interface and email templates are noted by 96% of users who leverage the product.
  • Segmentation: More than 90% of user feedback on this feature suggests that segmentation is a key benefit.
  • Training: All users who mention setup and implementation indicated the lack of training resources as a drawback.
  • Cost: It’s not cost-effective for the functionality offered, according to 79% of users who mention this aspect.

Key Features

  • Customer Relationships: Attend to customers, collect and store important customer information, and use it according to their consent. 
  • Analysis: Understand customer trends through segmented market data, using data science and AI, which provides business insights to speed up growth. 
  • Integrations: Offers unlimited real-time data with robust, ready-to-go integrations for more audience insights and personalization. Connects with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and more. An open API provides the flexibility to create direct integrations with custom e-commerce platforms. 
  • Reporting: Run reports from a single screen and export data with ease. Understand flow performance, campaign performance and signup form performance quickly. Custom analytics assesses the performance of emails and identifies opportunities. 
  • Social Media Advertising: Transfer data to Facebook and Instagram to create relevant messages and deliver consistent experiences. Sync data dynamically and generate more sales to automatically updated target groups with product-specific ads. 
Start Price
$9
Monthly
Company Size
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Deployment
Cloud On-Premise
Platform
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Why We Picked ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services to businesses of any size. It’s easy to use and offers a wide range of features, along with robust automation and campaigning capabilities. The system integrates with all major platforms. Most users also find the customer support team as well as the training materials to be helpful.
However, it takes time to learn the intricate features thoroughly. Reviews also state the system suffers from glitches and the interface could be more user-friendly. Businesses that need a system that caters to CRM as well as marketing needs, and that have the ability to leverage its complex functionality effectively, should consider this as a solid choice.

Pros & Cons

  • User-Friendly: Everyone referencing this aspect states the software is easy to use.
  • Automation: It helps run customer and lead campaigns, triggered automatically based on set specifications, note 98% of reviewers referring to this feature.
  • Customer Support: The support team is easy to reach and very responsive, according to 93% of reviewers talking about this aspect.
  • Functionalities: Every user mentioning features states the system offers robust capabilities including client onboarding, lead funnels, newsletters, contact tracking and more.
  • Email Campaigns: In the view of 85% of reviews about this feature, it’s easy to send weekly emails, replicate earlier emails and develop templates for other uses.
  • Integration: Connecting with Zapier and other platforms makes it easy to transfer leads, according to 88% of reviewers referencing integration.
  • Help Resource: Everyone mentioning training reports there are helpful tutorials and webinars.
  • Learning Curve: According to 77% of reviewers talking about training, it’s tough and time consuming to learn the platform.
  • Glitches: Every user mentioning this aspect notes it can be glitchy at times and quite slow to load during peak business hours.
  • Interface: The interface is slow and not very intuitive, according to 62% of reviewers referencing this aspect.

Key Features

  • Dynamic Content: Keep content fresh and personalized by automatically changing email content depending on where a lead is in the buyer’s journey. 
  • Email Marketing: A robust and fully-featured suite offers broadcasting, triggered and targeted emails, funnels, and robust integrations with popular social media and e-commerce platforms. Also offers: 
    • Drag-and-Drop Builder: Create and automate campaigns with ease. 
    • Scheduled Emails: Enables scheduling emails for specific dates and times. 
    • Email Autoresponders: Enables sending welcome emails, starting a welcome series or delivering lead magnets automatically. 
  • Segmentation: Target specific groups within the contacts list to be more personal in emails and engage people with the right information. 
  • CRM: Notify the sales team, update deals, create tasks and nurture leads automatically. Scores leads, passes off highly-qualified targets to sales and integrates with popular email providers. 
  • Advanced Reporting: Offers custom reporting features, including custom KPIs, sales reporting, tag counting and robust segmentation. Gives insights into email performance. Split testing can also be used to get email opens, clicks and buys. 
  • Fast Training: Schedule one-on-one appointments with the company’s customer service team to help teams get up to speed with training. A series of robust webinars and user docs are available. 
  • Migration Services: Receive assistance migrating from another marketing automation product. Services include contact list and tag import, form recreation, workflow recreation, and email template recreation. 
  • Powerful Integrations: Integrates with PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Facebook, Google Analytics and more than 250 other apps including payment processors, membership websites and e-commerce stores. 
  • Audience Segmentation: Allows personalized messages by adding tags to segments. Tags can be based on purchase history, geographic location, time since last purchased, personal interests and more. 
  • Geo-Tracking: Automatically capture a contact’s location for geo-targeted email marketing campaigns. 
  • Site Tracking: Pulls data in from other websites to assist in tracking the customer’s activity. 
  • Social Sharing: Gives insights into performance on social platforms and enables greater audience engagement. 
  • Split Testing: Try different email subject lines, body copy and more to increase and optimize campaign conversion rates. Add up to five variations for a single campaign. 
  • SMS Marketing: Automate SMS marketing to send notifications and campaigns such as appointment reminders, flash sale notifications and more. 
  • Conversation Features: Provides: 
    •  Live chat to facilitate capturing leads and creating contacts from the website. Includes customizable auto reply, custom branding, contact creation and triggered automations. 
    •  A unified inbox to connect conversations with customers. 
  • Predictive Sending: Automate emails using machine learning algorithms. It ranks the hours in a day based on a contact’s open time and uses these recommendations to schedule an optimal send time. 
  • Contact and Lead Scoring: Sends notifications when leads are getting hot, with automatically triggered email notifications and task assignments based on lead score changes. Helps follow up with deals that are most likely to close. 
  • Win Probabilities: Calculates the conversion chance for a specific lead, giving foresight into lead behavior. 
Start Price
$895
Monthly
Company Size
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Deployment
Cloud On-Premise
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Why We Picked Marketo

As a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo Engage supports both demand and account-based marketing strategies that work in sync with marketing and sales. It offers a range of features that help businesses operations. Notable features that users call out include custom reports, automation tools and lead management. It’s highly customizable and can integrate with a wide range of business systems. Users also appreciate the robust customer service.
Some limitations include an inconvenient mobile app, outdated user interface for campaign dashboards and cumbersome functionality. Overall, businesses looking to automate their sales and marketing efforts will find the system has a lot to offer.

Pros & Cons

  • Lead Management: The ability to route and categorize leads based on requirements is helpful for staying on top of customers inputs, in the view of 60% of users talking about lead management.
  • Customizable: All reviews on this aspect agree that the system is highly customizable and offers email templates that can be created as per requirements.
  • Automation: Marketing and sales automation make it easy to use and eliminate manual entry, according to 83% of users who reviewed this feature.
  • Reporting: Provides custom reports that fit the user requirement and are insightful, say 75% of users referencing reporting.
  • Integrations: Integrations for websites, event platforms, survey platforms, mobile apps and more, along with two-way integration with CRM systems, aid functionality, according to 75% of users mentioning integrations.
  • Customer Support: The training is great and customer support is responsive, according to 66% of reviews on this topic.
  • Not User-Friendly: The functionality is cumbersome and pages take time to load, in the experience of 60% of users who reviewed the usability.
  • Dashboard: Campaign dashboards are outdated and the design needs an upgrade, according to 75% of users specifying this feature.

Key Features

  • Search Engine Optimization: Compares keyword rankings of competitors, provides recommendations for new keywords for higher ranking web pages, and discovers inbound link opportunities based on targeted keywords and competitors’ links. 
  • CRM Integration: Offers native integrations for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications to provide a bi-directional data sync that auto-updates every five minutes. Also facilitates custom-configured integrations for various CRM platforms such as NetSuite, Oracle, SAP Sales Cloud and SugarCRM. 
  • Lead Scoring: Rank customers by assigning positive and negative scores based on demographics or their likelihood to exhibit certain behaviors, such as making a new purchase, being open to cross-sell offers and more. 
  • Email Marketing: Supports both batch and real-time triggered emails. Helps: 
    • Create personalized campaigns for mobile, web, ads and more using a visual editor and responsive templates.
    • Personalize content based on inferred information from website visitors, such as company, country, zip code and city, helping segment and localize content.
    • Use browsing behavior to identify product interest for target accounts.
  • Mobile Marketing: 
    • Helps connect with customers on the go, track inputs from different marketing channels and respond via mobile apps.
    • Sends push notifications and in-app messages, and incorporates beacon and geo-fencing technology to send location-relevant messages to customers.
    • Visual dashboards measure overall performance by opens, installs and session duration across multiple apps.
  • Social Media Marketing: Facilitates running social polls, sweepstakes and referral campaigns with built-in social share buttons and shareable videos. Integrates social metrics into marketing reports to help measure the impact of social activity on conversions and revenue. 
  • Digital Ad Campaigns: Connects with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other advertising platforms, and targets customers with relevant ad campaigns. 
  • Analytics and Reporting: Automatically connect data from different sources into a unified platform. Enables: 
    • Mapping and measuring a customer journey at every stage through shareable, prebuilt dashboards and ad-hoc reporting tools.
    • Designing custom models with the help of AI.
    • Leveraging a suite of attribution models.
Start Price
$1,250
Monthly
Company Size
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Deployment
Cloud On-Premise
Platform
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Why We Picked Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is liked among users for the seamless integration it offers with Salesforce, leading to stronger marketing capabilities. It also offers various functionalities to make email marketing more powerful and is relied upon for lead generation. However, the cost of the product might be too much for smaller companies, especially given the lack of reporting options. The complexities of the platform also make it difficult to get used to according to the majority of reviews. Overall, the product is a good pick for larger enterprises seeking robust marketing automation, particularly those already using Salesforce that can leverage the tight integration for enhanced marketing.

Pros & Cons

  • Integration: More than 90% of users who mention integration noted the benefit of being able to connect Marketing Cloud Account Engagement with the wider Salesforce ecosystem.
  • Email Marketing: Users can seamlessly set up emails, create content, measure performance and report results, according to all reviews about email marketing.
  • Lead Generation: It offers robust tools for lead generation and nurturing, as reported by 85% of user feedback on these features.
  • Cost: The product costs more than the functionality it offers, according to all the users who mention this aspect.
  • Complexity: It’s difficult to understand and involves a lot of clicks, as observed by 95% of users mentioning this aspect.
  • Reporting: The lack of vigorous reporting tools is a matter of concern, according to 85% of user feedback on the topic.

Key Features

  • Campaign Visualizer: Tracks marketing and sales efforts as customers move through the sales funnel and provides a high-level overview of a campaign. 
  • Dynamic Content: Improve lead generation and customer experiences with dynamic and useful content specifically tailored to a target audience’s needs, wants and interests. 
  • Landing Page Builder: Standard, easy-to-use and customizable templates enable better customer service and increase lead counts. 
  • Smart Forms: Collect information at every interaction and enrich data pools with a simple drag-and-drop form builder. 
  • Organic and Paid Search Tools: Integrate with Google AdWords to determine ROI and then analyze keywords to improve performance. 
  • Social Posting: Track prospects and leads in social platforms. Schedule posts at optimal times for the greatest impact. 
  • Email Builder: The email builder is simple to use, yet powerful, and can be attached to any number of automated tools and tracking measures. 
  • Einstein: Gain insights on campaigns to optimize marketing assets and find new audiences using machine learning. 
  • Email Reporting: Track metrics like clicks, opens and more. Provides SPAM analysis and preview services to extend email reporting. 
  • Auto Segmentation: Deliver a personalized experience with dynamic content by leveraging automatic contact segmentation. 
  • Activity Tracking: Track prospect activities and maintain an activity history from a CRM, Gmail or smartphones. 

Pricing

License/Subscription Cost
  • Subscription-based model – per user per month
  • Starts at $1,000 per user per monthSetup fee of $1,000 is charged
  • Cost per extra user is $50 per month
  • Cost may vary based on the plan selected – Standard, Pro and Ultimate
Maintenance Cost
  • Cost is included in the subscription cost
  • Provides on-going customer support via Customer Hub which is an on-demand online resource center providing hundreds of articles, training and other resources to support users
  • Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers ongoing technical support and services via in-app chat and email to users located across the globe with offices in Atlanta, San Francisco, Dublin, London, Sydney and Tokyo
  • Provides unlimited access to the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Knowledge Base to the end user
Installation/Implementation Cost
  • None
Customization Cost
  • Cost may vary depending on the type of functional requirements being added as an add-on or the type of plan being selected out of Standard, Ultimate, and Pro
Data Migration Cost/Change Management/Upfront Switching Cost
  • Cost may vary depending on the current software, amount of data to be migrated, complexity of the data fields, level of automation and data migration tools to be utilized for transfer of data from the old to the new software
Training Costs
  • Cost is over and above the subscription cost and will vary depending on the type of training course opted for
  • Provides Live, weekly and free training, including deep-dive webinars on specific features to the end user
  • Provides Training and Certification courses along with Webinars, eLearning modules, best practices documents for learning Marketing Cloud Account Engagement solution
  • Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers free, virtual training webinars, live events, live onsite session and customized training programs based on user requirements
Recurring/Renewal Costs
  • Cost is equivalent to the recurring monthly subscription fee to be paid on a yearly basis, customization cost, data migration cost plus training cost
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Why We Picked monday.com

monday.com is a cloud-based project management platform that caters to a wide range of industries thanks to its customization, user-friendly interface and templates. It allows users to build boards from templates or from scratch and view projects through multiple views like list, calendar, Ganntt and Kanban. During our test, we enjoyed using the platform's pre-built templates and drag-and-drop feature to set up projects and reorganize tasks.

Its task management features are stellar. We liked how easy it is to custom groups for tasks, assign them to specific team members, and leverage various communication tools like comments, mentions and board discussions. The updates feature means everyone is on the same page and the view option boosts accountability. On the automation front, we successfully used the built-in automation engine, which comes with both pre-made templates and no-code customization options, to build a custom automation for status changes with little to no difficulty.

On the flip side, monday.com may have a slight learning curve for users who aren’t familiar with project management tools. Additionally, some advanced features, such as custom notifications and time tracking, require upgrading to a higher pricing tier, which could become expensive for larger teams.

All in all, we thought monday’s intuitive interface, customization options and no-code automations make it a great option for users without a ton of technical expertise and a flexible budget.

Pros & Cons

  • Task Management: Users appreciated how easy it is to monitor tasks with customized views, an activity feed and task updates.
  • Collaboration: Instant messaging, integrations, board discussions and easy scheduling and planning were a plus for reviewers.
  • User-Friendly: Reviewers said it was simple to set up and use for less tech-savvy users, and liked the attractive, colorful interface with helpful templates.

What Users Like

  • Project Tracking: "The ability to customize columns and task dependencies lets us create a clear, tailored workflow." - Jeffery Zhou, CEO and Founder of Fig Loans
  • Interface: "The timeline and calendar views were particularly useful when we had multiple projects running alongside each other, helping everyone stay aligned without a lot of back-and-forth." - Rob Stevenson, Founder of BackupVault
  • Notifications: “The automation features were especially useful in notifying different people responsible at different steps of the journey while maintaining transparency and accountability with the rest of the team and building a frictionless and trust-based culture.” - Alok Jain, CEO of Reveal
  • Cost: Reviewers noted that advanced features like customized notifications or time tracking required a plan upgrade which could become expensive.
  • Learning Curve: It takes time to get used to the navigation and features according to users.
  • Mobile App: Some users said the mobile app doesn’t have all the features available.

What Users Dislike

  • Complexity: “[monday.com] lacked some flexibility in handling complex, multi-step tasks that needed a lot of customization, which sometimes left us manually tracking those details elsewhere.” - Rob Stevenson, Founder of BackupVault
  • Time-Based Automations: “Creating an automation to notify a user three days after a certain date, for example, was more complex than it needed to be. We had to set up custom date columns to drive these instead of just being able to calculate it as a part of automation.” - Alok Jain, CEO of Reveal

Key Features

  • Custom Dashboard: Build your own custom dashboard using built-in widgets and third-party integrations. Get a bird’s eye view of your boards and teams along with individual team member and board views. Monitor workload, timelines, feed activity and custom charts, like in-progress tasks, from a central location.
  • Multiple Views: Toggle between different views to track your projects using Gantt charts, Kanban boards, calendar views, project reports and custom filters like task owner, status and timeline.
  • Task Management: Create tasks under custom groups like To-Do, In-Progress, On-Hold, and Complete and add personalized fields, assignees, due dates, labels, statuses and priorities. Mention assignees, add comments, files, links and tables directly in the tasks using the Updates tab. Drag and drop tasks and groups to reorganize things.
  • Automations: Streamline workflows with no-code automations using templates or building custom automations from scratch using conditions and actions. Apply automations to specific boards and save your custom automations as a template to use on other boards.
  • Templates: Create boards suited to your project needs by accessing the template center and choosing from a range of templates, including marketing, project management, sales and CRM, design, software development, and HR.
  • Workflow Management: Organize your processes by creating custom workflows. Search for the trigger you’re looking for and add it as a starting block. Build on those blocks by choosing from several options: action, if or else or delay. Select the board where you want the action to happen, add conditions and edit blocks. View active workflows and pause or edit workflows as processes change.

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Asana

by Asana
Asana
Asana is a cloud-based project management platform designed to help teams of all sizes manage and organize projects with customization, automation, AI and collaboration. Users can build custom workflows, templates and tasks, and visualize projects in multiple ways, including list, timeline, calendar, Kanban and Gantt views.You can also build and trigger automation rules when tasks are moved or status or priority is changed. Stay aligned with goals, locate risks and hit project deadlines with reports and collaboration tools. Connect with other solutions using its open API and native integration with dozens of apps.Our Research Process for AsanaTaking software at face value for a product page review is so passe. Luckily, with a little help from my company’s email address, I got a free trial of Asana’s Advanced plan for 30 days.I set up a dummy project for content creation, complete with the stages and automations we currently use, so I’d have a more apples-to-apples comparison of a real-world project.Additionally, I tested some “standout” features our researchers suggested and investigated the pros and cons users mentioned on review sites.To learn the ropes, I visited the help center, watched demo videos and scoured Reddit for shortcuts. This webpage is the result of a week of dedicating all my working hours to living and breathing Asana.
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Buyer's Guide

Marketing Software Is All About Reaching Your Target Audience and Converting Them Into Paying Customers

Marketing Software BG Intro

Marketing software unleashes the full value of your marketing dollars by attracting visitors, converting them into leads and increasing your revenue. Your marketing software allows you to identify, reach, engage and convert your target audience into paying customers and keep them coming back.

While talent, work ethic and creativity have their place, best-in-class marketers adopt technology more readily to engage with their visitors.

Executive Summary

  • Marketing software doesn’t exist in isolation, and businesses should target building a marketing stack in which data flows seamlessly from one tool to the other.
  • Marketing software has become integral to businesses of all sizes to attract prospects and nurture leads till they move to the sales teams.
  • Some of the primary marketing landscape trends are metaverse and AI, chatbots, machine translation, video marketing, influencer marketing and more.
  • A few questions you should ask your team before even considering buying marketing software are about integrations, how data will flow from one tool to the other, mobile support and users.
What This Guide Covers:

What Is Marketing Software?

Marketing software is a set of digital tools that organizations use to attract visitors, convert them into paying customers and keep them coming back. Marketers set up the systems to execute campaigns to reach their target audiences.

The proliferation of mobile devices and the rapid rise in internet penetration has led to print media's slow and steady demise. Reaching your audience was and will always be necessary. This necessity led to the steady growth of marketing software. Traditional marketing efforts have to be complemented by digital marketing efforts.

End-to-end tools are hard to find, making exploring the software landscape complex.

Let’s take a look at the types of marketing software.

Types of Marketing Software

Typically businesses will create a marketing stack, also known as a martech stack, over time, with data flowing from one solution to another if deployed properly. However, a bad integration won’t allow data to flow freely, and reports won’t give the complete picture.

Deployment Methods

Digital marketing campaigns can deploy through cloud-based or on-premise tools. The question is, which one suits your organization? Let’s take a look.

Most marketing software is available for deployment over the cloud. Deploying marketing software on internal servers can be costly and difficult to implement. Also, not all software tools can be implemented in the same way. Depending on the scale of your business and how sensitive your data is, you may prefer implementing software on the cloud.

Primary Benefits

Marketing software offers benefits that go beyond sales and revenue. Businesses benefit from digital marketing software because it automates many time-consuming and repetitive processes. Let’s review the five top benefits of using digital marketing software.

Marketing Software Benefits

Build Your Brand

Brand building is a foundational aspect of marketing because leads engage with brands and are often willing to pay a higher price because of trust. With consistency in messaging and engagement, all marketers focus on reaching their target audiences and ensuring that repeat purchases and word-of-mouth marketing happens.

Marketers can use a centralized database to maintain brand consistency across channels and manage workflows and collaterals. Data gathering and social listening are crucial to effective brand building, and marketing software helps marketers do just that. While brand-building initiatives may not pay off immediately, they have long-term implications.

Align Sales and Marketing

Marketing software helps businesses systemize lead generation ensuring that leads keep coming so that the sales team can reach them and close deals. Without a lead flow system, your sales team will not be able to qualify the leads.

Without such qualifications, the goals set by businesses at the beginning of a year won’t materialize. Marketing software builds sales pipelines with a focus on buyer personas and helps sales teams set up messaging and campaigns that deliver results.

Generate, Score, Manage and Nurture Leads

The ultimate goal of digital marketing software is generating leads, but it doesn’t stop there. It helps your business qualify leads as they move from marketing to sales-qualified leads.

This aspect ensures that your sales team can contact prospects as soon as they qualify and are ready to buy.

Personalize Messaging

We live in the age of hyper-personalization. However, the challenges of the landscape are many. Consumers expect quality content tailored to their interests, and marketers wish to get the most bang for their buck. Governments and allied agencies are adapting to a post-internet world by implementing privacy policies to protect the population from exploitation.

The only way to do it is by tracking and using the data to follow your customer to where they are. The future is a cookieless world, with MAANG’s (Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) interest in first-party cookies and the slow scraping of third-party cookies.

Marketing software helps you navigate all those challenges without landing in a legal quagmire of local, national and international privacy laws while increasing the likelihood of your message reaching your target audience.

Localize

Localization becomes increasingly important as businesses identify niche pockets of people who like and buy their products/services. Marketing software lets you localize the message you send to your target audience. This feature is useful because it lets you adapt your product/service and the messaging around it to attract a specific market segment.

Localization is an important component when we talk about personalization in brand messaging. Localized marketing campaigns can be the key to generating high-quality leads resulting in you achieving your revenue goals.

Let's look at some of the implementation goals you must consider before selecting a software stack for your organization.

Implementation Goals

The first question you should ask yourself is what you wish to achieve with your marketing efforts. Maybe you want to attract quality leads. Maybe you want to boost your brand image. Your implementation goals will guide you toward your true north.

Here are a few suggestions to consider while zeroing in on your implementation goals.

Goal 1

Execute Focused Campaigns

Collect data from social listening, your CRM system, email campaigns and more to create and send personalized messaging to deliver results. Deliver campaigns that build your brand and drive revenue.

Goal 2

Nurture Qualified Leads

Nurture leads to ensure top-of-the-mind recall for your prospects. Regular engagement with prospects and clients establishes your brand and nurtures them so they can move along the buying cycle.

Goal 3

Attract New Customers

Build scalable strategies to expand your reach and attract new customers. Measure your acquisition efforts using metrics such as sign-ups, trials taken, customers acquired and acquisition costs.

Goal 4

Strengthen Industry Presence

Implement marketing campaigns to establish a presence within the industry. With consistent messaging, email newsletters and social media messaging, businesses can become prominent in the industry and attract leads.

Goal 5

Increase Revenue

Use marketing workflows to increase revenue by creating strategies for all stages of the funnel. Use metrics such as win rate, quota attainment, recurring revenues and revenue per user.

Basic Features & Functionality

Lead Management

Attracting prospects involves leading them through the buying journey and meeting them at every step of the way.

Lead conversion rates may vary depending on your product/service and your target audiences, like conversion rates in B2C are between 1.8-19% and B2B ranges between 0.35%-40%.

When your conversion rates are not between industry standards, the biggest concern may be that qualified leads aren’t entering your sales pipeline.

To add to that, you must not lose sales because of incorrect lead qualifications as your prospects move along their journey from marketing-qualified lead (MQL) to sales-qualified lead (SQL).

Alerts and Notifications

Alerts and notifications are the top features of all marketing software.

They’re important because they let your marketing team respond to leads as they arrive.

Not only that, they help resolve issues that come up when implementing campaigns.

Campaign Management

Managing marketing campaigns requires messaging and personalization with a focus on specific and measurable goals.

To implement a successful campaign, marketers must know their target audience’s demographics, goals and budget while developing a prospect segmentation strategy, creating a balance between channels and content, and generating offers.

Once the campaign is implemented, they should also set metrics to determine the success of the campaign. Most marketing tools support implementation and analytics but may not include segmentation capabilities.

Reporting and Analytics

Analytics is the backbone of great decision-making. When setting up the campaigns, you should decide which metrics are important to measure the campaign's effectiveness after the campaign executes.

Reports and analytics help discover how effective campaigns are while identifying areas of improvement. They also provide insight into lead conversions, generation and pipelines.

Social Media Management

Many marketing tools have integrated social media management modules, while others are standalone tools. Social media is an important discovery tool for customers and prospects alike.

Whether you have an agency that implements your campaigns or uses a DIY toolset, most prominent marketing software supports social media posting, scheduling and management.

Such tools typically include posting to various social media platforms, designing profiles, creating and posting ads, building your social media posting calendar, and responding to queries, comments and posts from within the platform.

Social media marketing tools let users schedule posts, while email marketing and marketing automation tools let you automate email workflows. On CMS tools, you can schedule blog posts and landing pages.

Email Marketing

While many argue that email is dead, we are seeing the rise of email marketing.

Because of its direct reach, email communication is the final step towards reaching your customer’s inbox to ensure top-of-the-mind recall and eventual purchase.

Email marketing helps you automate workflows, A/B test your emails and create dynamic content for your clients. Email drives $36 for each dollar spent, with an ROI higher than any other channel.

Prospect Relationship Management

Every point of communication is essential to converting prospects and maintaining relationships with them. A step-by-step approach to lead management is the way to go.

Managing details, such as when you contacted a certain lead, can be hard without marketing software.

With the help of CRM and marketing software, between which data flows seamlessly, you can track and record each interaction with prospects and customers.

Sales Intelligence

Sales intelligence is an important marketing software feature that lets businesses use external and internal data to improve sales processes and increase revenue.

Companies use it to improve the quality and qualification of leads as they travel from the marketing software to sales teams.

It ensures timely outreach by integrating with CRM software and other contact databases. It also improves productivity, helps establish connections that convert into revenues and enrich customer data.

Visitor Tracking

Visitor tracking is a very important feature. While all marketing tools may not support it, it’s usually part of popular tools.

Tracking website visitors is possible through third-party cookies even as the world is transitioning towards first-party cookies.

They track visitor behavior and identity, helping businesses measure website analytics. They also contribute to domain authority and make it easier for your website to rank higher.

Advanced Features & Functionality

Automation

Marketers use marketing software to automate repetitive and time-consuming processes to reduce human resource costs and free up time to strategize about important projects.

Automation is the best way to keep in touch with your customers without extra effort.

Also, marketing software can track website traffic, direct them toward email subscriptions, and follow up with email, SMS and social media campaigns.

Lead Scoring

Scoring your leads is the first step to ensuring your sales team doesn’t follow up on top-of-the-funnel prospects or those who aren’t ready to buy immediately.

Such scoring can be done based on demographic and geographic identifiers. The higher the score, the higher the probability of a purchase.

New Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing saves your sales teams’ time as they don’t need to follow up on non-buying leads, ensuring that they focus on paying customers.

Many marketing tools help implement new lead nurturing with drip marketing campaigns for top-of-the-funnel prospects. It ensures loyalty, retention and upselling.

Forms and Landing Pages

Forms and landing pages are a category of their own within the marketing software ecosystem. They capture leads after they reach your website through social media, search, paid ads or other marketing outreach.

They’re integral to your marketing efforts because they ensure that you have the contact details of a prospect who’s interested in your product.

The contact details can later be used to send personalized messages, enroll them into drip campaigns or even target paid ads.

Segmentation

Not a very old phenomenon, segmentation is a good exercise for businesses with large audiences. It ensures that you push content to people who are ready for it.

Such information can improve your campaigns, resulting in higher ROI and revenue.

Current & Upcoming Trends

According to a Statista report, digital marketing spending stood at $521.02 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach $876 billion in 2026. While these numbers predict the future of digital marketing, we must remember that the landscape is changing aggressively.

More and more people are using the internet to find and reach the businesses they wish to associate with, affecting how companies implement marketing strategies.

Marketing Software Trends

Let’s now take a look at some of the trends that will influence businesses and customers alike.

1. Data Gathering: There have been phenomenal changes in how businesses gather data. As privacy laws become increasingly stringent, businesses are using forms to gather data to reach their customers directly.

This outreach ensures businesses can contact them directly, thus avoiding costly paid ads and increasing ROI.

2. AI and Metaverse: According to a recent survey, the metaverse is gaining momentum, as 56% of buyers are considering it. Virtual experiences are on the rise, and people can attend live events from the comfort of their homes. Some of the goals while implementing such tools are to build a brand and improve customer loyalty.

3. Influencer Marketing: Focus on influencer marketing will continue to rise as influencers reach niche markets that may have been beyond your reach, even via paid ads or content.

Niche influencers generate ROI for businesses via platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Tiktok. However, they have to be careful before approaching influencers as they may end up investing without reach or even relevant audiences.

4. Chatbots: Chatbots are very useful as they reduce the need for manpower to resolve customer issues quickly and at scale. Not only that, chatbots can answer queries even when your team isn’t online. Chatbots are becoming the most popular choice of communication channel.

5. Machine Translation: The proliferation of machine translation makes it possible to reach non-native prospects. While translation tools have been around for a while, their output hasn’t been without flaws.

They have been known to mistranslate content, thus impacting brand perception. MTPE, or machine translation post-editing, combines the expertise of native speakers with advanced technology to generate content in multiple languages to relay your marketing message exactly as intended.

6. Video Marketing: Businesses are increasingly turning towards video to be memorable. About 92% of survey respondents view video marketing as necessary to their marketing strategy, and 86% are already using it to create brand awareness and improve brand perception.

Marketers are increasingly creating videos for LinkedIn as it has high open rates and delivers great ROI.

Software Comparison Strategy

While marketing tools have similar features, zeroing in on a solution can be overwhelming. The first step is to write down what you wish to achieve with it. You could have any or all of the following goals such as brand building, higher revenues, quality leads, establishing authority and more.

Consider your business’s trajectory, research your competitors and identify your buying journey. Then ask yourself: how will you attract prospects to your business? How will you nurture them and hand them over to your sales team?

Cost & Pricing Considerations

While building your martech stack, pricing and its ROI will be a concern. The software you choose will affect your business in the long run.

Before you add a system to your marketing efforts, evaluate its features and the vendors carefully. If you have a small marketing team, check out how many users you need the license for because most vendors offer pricing tiers based on the number of users.

Pricing packages may include customer support, while others may charge extra for implementation and support. Some may even offer on-call support for an extra charge. Vendors may charge you extra for data migration, initial set-up, other add-ons and customization.

The Most Popular Marketing Software

In martech, a lot of tools’ capabilities overlap with others, and conducting an apples-to-apples comparison can be tedious and may feel futile at the end of the endeavor.

Check out our list of power-packed and feature-rich tools below.

HubSpot

A cloud-based software, HubSpot helps businesses be customer-centric. Spread across various pricing tiers, it offers CRM, sales, marketing, CMS and service hubs. It helps businesses scale and can handle lead targeting and retargeting, funnel automations, email marketing, reporting and more.

It’s suitable for small and large businesses alike and scales easily. It’s one of the best all-in-one tools available. Its UI is intuitive and supports no-code implementation.

One of its best features is prospect tracking, giving decision-makers a bird’s-eye-view of lead generation and lead nurturing till the sale is closed. Its top features include pipeline and lead management, surveys, automated workflows, call logging and account-based marketing.

HubSpot

View the performance of your campaigns.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact, a cloud-based email automation tool, fits small businesses. It provides email templates, a drag-and-drop email builder and reporting to track email clicks, shares, opens and more.

It also supports website heat maps, email workflows and landing pages to support decision-making. Its important features include polls and surveys, integrations with popular tools like Salesforce, Shopify, forms, A/B testing, segmentation, contact management and landing pages.

It supports a native mobile application and offers live support.

Constant Contact

Know when your contacts opened your email.

Marketo

Marketo Engage is a cloud-based marketing solution for B2C and B2B businesses of all sizes. It seamlessly integrates social media marketing, lead nurturing, analytics, website personalization, sales insights and more. It also includes AI-based account profiling to personalize ABM campaigns.

Some of its features include search engine optimization, CRM integration, email, mobile and social media marketing, analytics, ad campaigns and lead scoring. However, it may be cumbersome, and the UI isn’t user-friendly.

Marketo

Design forms easily with Marketo.

Pardot

Pardot, a part of Salesforce’s larger product offering called Marketing Cloud, integrates with Salesforce, letting data flow seamlessly. Targeted toward medium and large-sized companies, it helps users automate marketing campaigns, re-engage visitors and streamline lead generation.

Its key features include a campaign visualizer, dynamic content, paid and organic search tools, social media scheduling, reporting and more. Some of its other capabilities are a landing page builder, smart forms and an email builder. It has a steep learning curve.

Pardot

Engage customers with re-engagement nurture workflows.

Keap

Keap, by Infusionsoft, is suitable for small and medium-sized businesses. Its capabilities include client conversion, sales automation, lead collection and pipeline management. It provides insights into customer behavior and sales information. It also integrates with QuickBooks and Xero.

It lets users schedule appointments, automate email workflows, generate reports, engage contacts, automate payments and manage customer relationships.

New users may find it hard to learn. Also, it doesn’t support customizations and organized reporting.

Keap

Assign reminders and tasks to clients.

 

 

Questions To Ask Yourself

Your martech stack is as unique as your organization. What works for another company may not work for your business, even if they are the same size. There are many vendors, and often their offerings may be similar.

Use these questions as a starting point for internal conversations:

  • What is stopping you from achieving your marketing goals?
  • At what pace are you growing? How do you plan to scale?
  • Who will use the new software? What problems do they want to solve with it?
  • What is your budget, and how many leads should your business generate to justify the costs of the marketing stack?
  • What kind of reports will help you assess the ROI on your marketing spend?
  • Do you have existing tools like CRM that the new tool must integrate with?
  • Do the tools you use now offer a mobile application?
  • Do you have IT support to manage the implementation of new software?

Marketing Software Key Questions To Ask

 

 

 

Questions To Ask Vendors

Comparing vendors is very important when choosing new software. Understanding what the vendors are offering and comparing them with other options is key.

Use the following questions as a starting point for conversations with vendors:

About the Software

  • What other software does it integrate with? Are they native integrations?
  • What types of reports can you create with it?
  • Does it express data visually? Is it easy to create dashboards with KPIs and metrics laid out in an organized manner?
  • Does it have a mobile app? If so, which operating systems does it support?
  • Can the data be accessed offline?

About the Vendor

  • Is your infrastructure scalable?
  • Is there an upper limit on data storage and capacity?
  • What kind of assistance does the vendor provide for smoother implementation and adoption?
  • Do they offer an SLA?
  • How often do they update the software?

In Conclusion

We understand that the above is a lot of information to process. As a business owner, all you need is a tool to create, edit, qualify and visualize leads while reaching your target audience and guiding them through the buying journey.

Want to save time finding that perfect fit? Our free comparison report makes it easy to rank and compare top products based on the features you care about.

Building a marketing stack isn’t a one or two-month endeavor. It’s a constantly evolving process that changes as your business grows.

Product Comparisons

Additional Resources

About The Contributors

The following expert team members are responsible for creating, reviewing, and fact checking the accuracy of this content.

Technical Content Writer
An Associate Editor at SelectHub, Christina George creates and edits articles spanning project management, CPQ, CRM, marketing automation and home health software. As a Bachelor of Arts graduate with a triple major in Economics, Political Science and Sociology, her aim is to bring an integrated and simplified approach to long-form technical content. Formerly a food writer, copywriter, and social media sleuth, she has a soft spot for a quality pun. When not crafting articles and editing buyer's guides, you can find her attempting to score goals on the football field, binge-watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, or re-reading Pride and Prejudice for the nth time.
Technical Content Writer
Divya Dugar is a Marketing Analyst at SelectHub. At SelectHub, she writes for three software categories: Marketing Automation, EHR and Construction. She also designs and executes email marketing nurtures and campaigns. An avid reader, she graduated as an English major from Presidency College, Calcutta. She enjoys painting, creative writing and boxing. She geeks out on Robert Greene, Tom Bilyeu and Joe Rogan.
Edited By Joe Evans
Content Editor
Joe Evans is an Editor and Senior Market Analyst at SelectHub. A seasoned professional wordsmith, he has a bachelor's degree in journalism and electronic media and a decade of professional expertise in crafting top-tier digital content for niche online brands. He leads his small yet formidable team in producing helpful, compelling content in vital categories like HR, payroll, talent management, performance management, marketing automation home health, MES. When not editing and writing, he enjoys sports, quality time with family and dogs, and remains constantly in pursuit of something new and interesting to read or listen to.