Best Marketing Software
Buyer's Guide
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 Is Marketing Software?
- Deployment Methods
- Primary Benefits
- Implementation Goals
- Basic Features & Functionality
- Advanced Features & Functionality
- Marketing Software Trends
- Software Comparison Strategy
- Cost & Pricing Considerations
- The Most Popular Marketing Software
- Questions To Ask Yourself
- Questions To Ask Vendors
- In Conclusion
- Product Comparisons
- Additional Resources
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.
- CRM
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Marketing Automation
- SMS Marketing
- Marketing Analytics
- Brand Management
- SEO Management
- Content Management System
- Supportive Tools
- Video Conferencing Software
- Data Visualization Tools
- Content Marketing Software
- Visual Editing
- Project Management Software
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
- Constant Contact vs. HubSpot
- Marketo vs. Keap
- Constant Contact vs. Pardot
- Constant Contact vs. Marketo
- Pardot vs. Keap
Additional Resources
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