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What’s Right For You? A Guide to Digital Marketing Software
Trying to calibrate your email campaigns? Blog posts not reaching your target audience? Do you find it difficult to develop a real voice on social media platforms? All these are common issues that come up as you’re trying to either start or grow your company.
With the advent of new tech and software, it’s on the company to use its marketing efforts to reach more customers than ever. And thanks to digital marketing software solutions coming out of the woodwork, you’ve got plenty of options.
The variety of options might seem a little daunting, so we’ve condensed it into a handy dandy list for your reference. We have our favorites (cough HubSpot cough), but we recognize that each business has unique needs that might require another solution
What follows is a guide to the top digital marketing platforms and softwares to help you cultivate your specific marketing strategy and reach your company’s individual goals.
Before diving into our analysis and recommendations on specific B2B digital marketing softwares, why not contact us for a free, no obligation tech stack audit? We’d love to take a look at the systems you’re running and give you our expert analysis — for free.
HubSpot
An ideal business ecosystem marries different parts of a company to optimize performance and keep your KPIs visible for those on the lookout. From sales to marketing, services to operations, all of these function uniquely within your company but still have to gel enough to function optimally.
That’s what makes HubSpot such a great option for so many different needs. It’s both a software and a marketing automation platform that encompasses all these needs.
Each software module (or Hub, as those in the biz call it) is built on the same powerful customer relationship management platform. That will keep up your rapport with your ideal customer, whether you run a B2C or B2B business. Using the same language across teams will help tailor your email marketing and social marketing strategies, making things more user-friendly and attractive to the customer.
Plus, HubSpot gets along with everyone. Many successful businesses use HubSpot as its go-to for their technology stack. It facilitates complex marketing campaigns and integrates with hundreds of other softwares out-of-the-box. And if you know what you need, custom integrations are provided on demand, letting marketing teams run wild and watch engagement and growth in real time.
Getting your small business started has never been easier using HubSpot’s Free and Starter tiers. Naturally, you’re building to expand. With that expansion, HubSpot grows with you. You could be going it alone at your start-up one day then starting your international conglomerate the next, and HubSpot will be there for you. You won’t outgrow it, promise.
With HubSpot you can Scale Mountains…or at least scale up.
P.S. If you believe the hype about HubSpot, stay tuned and use our free tool to check out what it would take to migrate to HubSpot today.
Salesforce Pardot2
Though it may be a more costly option, Salesforce Pardot 2 certainly gets the job done. Salesforce’s automation strategies come with the added benefit of being easy to use and easy to integrate.
Pardot2 uses AI-based tech, Einstein, to develop marketing intel on existing customers and ideal customers alike.
Created to fit within the Salesforce ecosystem, Pardot2 is all about sales automation for the needs identified by your marketing teams.
Especially in this mobile age, Pardot2 also offers mobile marketing solutions to utilize SMS data and hit customers where they notice it first: their phone.
Such management solutions help with tracking, analysis, and integration all around. If you can afford the premium, Salesforce Pardot2 comes highly recommended.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud2
Salesforce marketing tools are utilized by many marketing firms and teams, especially the Marketing Cloud2.
With features geared towards real time data collection, analysis, and engagement, Salesforce Marketing Cloud2 is all about seeing how your customers engage in real time.
This precision-oriented data helps you launch just the right marketing campaign at just the right time.
Also an AI Einstein based platform, it helps you connect with customers and what they like and don’t like. Plus, you learn more about them, which helps to create and curate content for them.
So if you’re looking for digital marketing software that keeps your friends close and your customers closer, check out Salesforce Marketing Cloud2.
Marketo
More digital marketing automation software? Do you need more of that? You may not need MORE, but we did tell you different things offer different benefits.
Marketo offers digital marketing automation software, and often comes up in the same conversation with Pardot as being the most popular and lauded. So it may be helpful to compare the two to find out what meets your specific needs.
Because Pardot is a successful software launched within Salesforce, it is easily integrated with Salesforce softwares and products. Should you not be familiar with Salesforce or use their suite of products, Marketo might be easier of a transition for your business.
Social media engagement is where Marketo really shines. Their Engage function lets you use social media sharing buttons to generate behavioral data from a variety of sources.
Whether they use LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google — if it uses ad platforms, Marketo will help curate targeted messages.
This will help exponentially with your content marketing strategy, devising it for a user’s already established interests. This is a huge boost for those looking to transition into inbound marketing strategies, too.
Regardless of what you plan on using it for, Marketo would be a great addition to your content marketing tools if you need more personalization and are looking to integrate with multiple tools out-of-the-box.
SEMRush
SEMRush is amazing for search engine optimization. So if you’re looking to grow, be noticed, and up your engagement with new customers, check out SEMRush all things SEO.
SEMRush is especially helpful when it comes to recognizing your competition. You probably don’t like to think of your competition, but they’re out there, and they’re already spying on you.
Recognizing what they’re offering and how they’re reaching your target customers will definitely help you improve your position. With its SEO analytics, you can see what keywords are using and how you can better deploy them to achieve your goals!
Additionally, its positioning tool clues you in on what is at the top of the Google analytics list. This lets you manage your SEO efforts and track your Google ranking, a key part of how detectable your business is to customers old and new alike.
Google Search Console
Speaking of SEO, have you heard of Google Search Console? It prioritizes your search engine analytics similar to SEMRush but happens to be free!
Through its coverage feature, this software tool points out how Google discovered the page, whether it was able to crawl the result, and using structured data to enhance your business’s visibility in results.
If you’re looking to elevate your business’s performance in searches, this software helps understand your site’s relationship with Google.
Zoom
Zoom had its breakout moment when we needed it most, but there’s more to get out of it. Zoom’s conferencing features can be used for digital marketing, especially for recording content.
The best part about it is that you most likely already have it, you know how to use it, and you can now use the audio and video files for more content.
Whether it’s testimonials, how-tos, or meet and greets, you can use Zoom to capture real time interactions as they happen over Zoom calls and put that content all over social media or your business’s website.
Saves you time, easy to use, and you’re already using it for one thing so now you can make the most of it to capture and create content!
HotJar
Looking for insight into your customer’s journey? Hotjar will give you useful information on how your customers are interacting with your website which will point you in the right direction on what’s working and what isn’t.
Hotjar generates engagement data via qualitative data, not quantitative like Google analytics. So it doesn’t drown you in numbers, just fills you in on what potential customers find appealing about your website.
Heatmaps is its most well-known feature, highlighting clicks and time spent on what portion of a page. There’s also a session recording feature that shows you recorded data of how customers navigated through a page.
This will help identify snags, totally ignored areas of your website, and what catches a user’s attention most.
Knowing all this will help you curate a customer journey that is more user-friendly, prone to engagement, and ultimately more profitable for you.
LeadFeeder
In your B2B marketing strategy, leads are more important than ever.
By analyzing your website visitor data, Leadfeeder tracks what B2C or B2B companies have their sights on you and how they got there.
Helpfully, it interacts well with most CRM software to fill you in on what aspects of your company other companies are looking to you for.
It also helps you sort through these results and create an ideal target profile, how to prioritize those results based on potential engagement, and how best to connect to them.
Once you have that info, you can play up your more enticing qualities to already interested partners to turn this lead into a relationship.
Google Analytics
Still entranced by the idea of free? Google Analytics checks that box and more. By offering powerful, easy features for understanding your website traffic, you can monitor your site’s health with no trouble.
If you want to know who’s visiting your business, how they got there, and how to do more of the same to attract even more customers.
This comes in handy if you’re just starting out, not quite sure how to utilize analytics, thus don’t want to pay a fortune on software.
Sprout Social
If you’re looking for a robust, enterprise-level social media marketing tool, check out Sprout Social. This platform allows you to automate your social media management in an easy-to-use system.
Sprout can seriously do it all when it comes to social media. If you’re looking to improve your customer experience or lead generation via social channels, Sprout can schedule, publish and analyze for all your social channels including:
- TikTok
- YouTube
With such a robust platform, Sprout is basically the Swiss Army Knife of digital marketing software.
Here’s what you do NOW
Regardless of which way you’re leaning, it’s likely that if you read all this, you know you need digital marketing software. The right one can expand your reach and get customers access to your business.
The perfect digital marketing software focuses on your needs. Which one you choose depends on your company’s goals, strategies, scale, and a laundry list of other factors.
If you’re looking for a one stop shop that’s comprehensive, integrates well with the tech of your sales team, and keeps you in the loop the whole way, give HubSpot a shot.
You can’t go wrong with a platform that does so much for you. That’s why we’re always ready to talk to you and perform an audit on your current martech stack.
The most important thing you can do for your company is know what it needs. Regardless of if you’re launching it or growing it, the right digital marketing tool will get you where you need to go.
Jake Fisher
Jake Fisher, is President and Co-Founder of BridgeRev. He helps our clients with their revenue and growth goals by providing better strategies, better processes, and better technology. He also makes videos and written content to help entrepreneurs, business owners, and managers achieve their own revenue goals. And, he talks to business and industry leaders at conferences and association events.