In today’s hyper-accelerated world, no marketing team can survive without software.
Markets evolve fast, advertising platforms saturate even faster, and new competitors enter the game in hordes, making it harder for teams to stand out.
The right software can become a true competitive advantage, but with so many options out there, making a decision can also be overwhelming.
We’ve done the legwork for you and put together a list of platforms for different marketing needs. This will help you find the right software much faster.
To make sure we’re all on the same page, let’s start with a basic question.
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What is marketing software?
Marketing software refers to any platform, tool, or software solution that supports marketing tasks and activities. These activities may include:
- Nurturing leads
- Managing campaigns
- Collaborating with your team
- Personalizing customer communications
- Tracking results more accurately
And many more.
A few decades ago, organizations had to perform such activities manually, which was time-consuming and overwhelming. With the help of software, teams are able to optimize their efforts and work more efficiently.
In today’s day and age, almost any business can benefit from marketing software. Whether you’re the owner of an e-commerce store, a local barbershop, or a manufacturing company, the right platform can help you optimize your processes and improve your results.
What are the different types of marketing software?
As you may imagine, there are different types of marketing software designed to solve different problems. In essence, we can break them down into 5 main categories:
- Ideation: the process of brainstorming and developing great ideas based on real customer data.
- Scheduling: scheduling specific tasks and activities to achieve your goals.
- Lead nurturing: strategically communicating with potential customers to improve your bottom line.
- Automation: automating repetitive tasks to reduce time wasted and maximize your efforts.
- Tracking: monitoring progress and optimizing your marketing strategy accordingly.
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Let’s dig a bit deeper into each of these categories, showing you specific software examples of each.
Ideation marketing software
Ideation refers to the process of analyzing the current state of the market to find gaps you can fill. By collecting data about your audience and competitors, you can come up with more solid ideas for your campaigns.
Many businesses ignore the ideation part of the process and jump straight to execution. That’s one of the reasons roughly 60% of marketing budgets are wasted.
Successful marketing campaigns start with a solid ideation process.
Some helpful marketing solutions in this category include:
Google Trends
Google Trends is a data intelligence platform that helps you find the top trending search queries across different industries, languages, and countries. You can explore a keyword’s history, which allows you to spot behavioral patterns in Google Search.
By exploring some of the most popular topics in your industry, you can produce content and marketing messages that resonate with what’s going on in your audience’s mind.
SEMRush
As the name suggests, SEMRush is a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) platform that helps you analyze different keywords in terms of PPC (Pay Per Click) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
SEMRush allows you to measure the competition of a certain keyword, find potential opportunities, and track SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Some of the top SEMRush’s features include:
- Competitor Analysis: find insights into your competitor’s strategy.
- Market Analysis: analyze the current situation of your market and discover opportunities and threats.
- Paid Advertising: analyze the paid marketing campaigns of your competitors.
Feedly
Feedly is a content discovery platform that helps you monitor trends and topics in the industries that are relevant to your business. By organizing your favorite topics into groups, you can easily spot new ideas on what your audience is interested in.
Having a systematic way to collect and analyze trending topics from trusted blogs and publications is a great way to find solid ideas for your marketing campaigns.
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While the previous platforms work great to spot potential ideas, they lack an essential element: project management.
You see, ideation is more about having a solid workflow than trying to “find a needle in the haystack.” No matter how much data you have available, if your process isn’t functional, you won’t get results.
At staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, we provide you with proven frameworks and templates so you can streamline your ideation process.
For instance, with our campaign planning template, you can bring in your entire marketing team to work under one roof. This way, you can collaborate faster and brainstorm ideas in one place.
You can assign tasks to team members, monitor progress, edit everything, and even add context to each item to make sure everyone’s on the same page.
All of our templates are fully customizable, and you can install them with one click.
In the context of ideation, some of our most popular templates include:
Scheduling software
Once you have marketing ideas in place, it’s time to schedule them in a calendar. Otherwise, your campaigns will be pretty disorganized.
By having a clear schedule with responsibilities and specific deadlines, you’ll increase team accountability and, thus, your overall results.
Some examples of marketing scheduling software include:
Microsoft Excel
Even though Microsoft Excel is a bit “old-school,” it provides you with flexible features to plan and schedule any type of marketing campaign. Excel allows you to create calendars and timelines, which can be helpful to oversee your campaigns.
Just keep in mind that if you’re handling large initiatives, Excel will be a bit overwhelming for your team.
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Calendars and spreadsheets might be “helpful enough” to schedule a marketing project, but it doesn’t mean they’re the most efficient way to do it.
If you want to get the most out of your time and resources, you need more flexibility.
For example, with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you get access to 8 different data visualizations where you can visualize your campaign from different angles and perspectives.
Sure, we offer a calendar view, but that’s just barely scratching the surface.
You also get access to views like Kanban, Gantt, Map, Workload, Timeline, and many others.
The best part?
You can shift between views in just a couple of clicks.
To see how it works, we suggest you try out our marketing calendar template. It’ll help you schedule and oversee your marketing projects with ease.
Automation software
To stay efficient, your team needs to automate at least your most repetitive tasks.
In fact, nearly 8 out of 10 companies already use marketing automation software, and within reason. McKinsey estimates that 60% of all occupations can potentially automate 3 out of 10 activities.
If you don’t want to get left behind, you better tap into AI.
Some popular marketing automation software solutions include:
Zapier
Zapier is a no-code automation platform that helps you integrate different apps and tools into a single platform to streamline repetitive work.
Although Zapier isn’t a marketing platform, per se, it integrates with some of the most popular software in the marketing space, including:
- Facebook Ads
- Google Analytics
- Mailchimp
- Sumo
- Bitly
- Zoom
- staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
And many more.
Dynamic Yield
Dynamic Yield is a marketing personalization and automation tool that focuses on enterprise-level organizations. It helps you optimize the customer experience through dynamic content creation, behavioral messaging, and personalized recommendations.
Dynamic Yield’s core features include:
- A/B testing: optimize your testing process and improve the customer journey.
- Ranking engine: build personalized product listing pages.
- Behavioral messaging: tailor your messaging based on individual customer behavior.
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At staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, we understand how important automation is for your organization, and we take it very seriously.
We go beyond personalization or dynamic content and provide you with a fully immersive automatable environment where you can achieve hyper-efficiency.
For example, thanks to our automations center, you can streamline over 250,000 human actions in just a couple of minutes. We provide you with “If this, then that” automation recipes to automate:
- Recurring tasks
- Status changes
- Notifications
- Dependencies
- Item creation
And many more.
This provides you with all the flexibility you need to build any kind of automated workflow, no matter how complex.
Besides, you can integrate over 40 of your favorite tools and apps to create even more automations.
For example, you could create a recipe so that every time you create a new contact in staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you add it to a Mailchimp list automatically.
Or you could integrate Clearbit to enhance your customer profiles. Like this:
And to be honest, that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
To get a better understanding of our automations center, we suggest you watch this short video overview:
Lead management and nurturing software
Lead management is the process of strategically communicating with your customers — or potential customers — to build trust and drive conversions. This is often achieved through educational content that’s relevant to the audience.
By developing a lead nurturing and management strategy, you’ll move your leads throughout your sales cycle in a more efficient way.
Some examples of software in this category may include:
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform suitable for businesses of all sizes. It helps you send broadcast targeted emails to your audience, as well as build automatic sequences to convert leads into customers.
Mailchimp’s top features include:
- Audience management: store your contact information in one place.
- Insights and analytics: measure the performance of your email marketing.
- Creative tools: get access to creative tools to design your campaigns.
Just as a side note, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud offers a native integration with Mailchimp to update your mailing lists automatically and get insights about your performance.
GetResponse
GetResponse is an inbound marketing and lead nurturing system that helps you create lead forms, landing pages, and email communications without any code. You can also build webinar campaigns, send broadcasts, and set up autoresponders.
GetResponse’s main features include:
- Email creator: create visually appealing emails without needing code.
- Sales funnel: structure sales-driven email sequences with ease.
- List management: build and manage multiple lists of contacts.
- Autoresponder tool: automatically reply to emails
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While email marketing is important, it’s just a small part of the whole Customer Relationship Management (CRM) process. That is, the strategy of optimizing every customer touchpoint to improve the overall customer experience, as well as your revenue.
Sending emails is great, but that alone won’t make much difference.
To get results, you need a true CRM system that helps you understand who your customers are and optimize every interaction accordingly.
With staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s CRM template, for example, you can keep track of your customer communications in one place, monitor the progress of each deal, and even assign specific leads to team members.
staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud merges marketing with all your other departments so you can build a single source of truth for your business. Based on this data, you can build enhanced customer cards with lots of contextual information.
You can also access all the history you’ve had with individual leads to personalize the experience and increase conversion rates.
In short, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud goes beyond email marketing and provides you with all the features you need to strengthen your customer relationships.
Tracking
Finally, we have tracking software.
Because if you don’t measure your marketing activities, you can’t possibly know whether they’re working, which may lead to revenue loss.
Reporting and analytics platforms are essential for any marketing team.
Some examples include:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most popular tracking and reporting platforms in the marketing world. By installing their tracking pixel on your website, you can track all the major customer activity, including:
- Volume: the specific number of visitors you’re getting.
- Session length: how much time each visitor spends on your website.
- Purchases: how many purchases your visitor makes.
And plenty of other relevant information.
Hotjar
Hotjar is a heat mapping software solution that helps you oversee the behavior of your website visitors in real-time.
For example, you can see where customers stop reading your content, where you’re getting the most clicks, and the exact moment when they leave.
Hotjar’s top features include:
- Recordings: get access to live playbacks of users interacting with your site.
- Feedback: collect feedback from users with ease.
- User ratings: get specific ratings for each visit.
Bitly
Bitly is an ad tracking and analytics service that helps you monitor the performance of your digital marketing campaigns. You can use it to monitor clicks and conversions across multiple channels.
Bitly’s top features include:
- Link management: build shortened links to track the performance of your campaigns.
- Branded links: ad custom domains for your links.
- Mobile links: improve the user experience with custom SMS short links.
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Tracking website visits and clicks might be great for digital advertising, but if you want to understand the overall performance of all your marketing efforts, you need something a bit more sophisticated.For example, with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you get access to fully customizable reporting dashboards and analytics to monitor everything involved with your organization.
From team performance to revenue, commissions generated, and even time spent, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud helps you oversee your campaigns with ease.
For example, you can use our campaign tracking template to streamline your campaign workflow.
Then, you can turn that board into a reporting dashboard pretty quickly. With staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud, you can “pull” data from any board to build a dashboard.
Besides, you get access to multiple dashboard widgets to customize your reports and visualize the information that actually matters.
For example, you can use our “Chart widget” to track the exact amount of sales you’re making each month.
You could then add a “stacked” chart on top of the first one to monitor the number of deals closed and compare that with your actual revenue.
You could even add a “Table widget” to integrate your CRM board directly into your reporting dashboard to save time.
And this is just a tiny example of what you can do with our dashboards.
At the time of writing this guide, we have over 20 dashboard widgets available so you can build reports that meet your exact needs.
Time to build a single source of truth
Marketing software should make you more productive, transparent, and efficient. At the end of the day, you’ve to ask yourself:
- Do I really need another tool or app?
- Is there a way to centralize all my work into one place?
- Can I reduce the list of tools my team uses?
- Is my team dispersed?
The answer to these questions will make you conscious of your current software infrastructure and whether you need to make some changes.
Fortunately, with staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s powerful Work OS, building a single source of truth for your marketing team is easier than it seems.
To see for yourself, we suggest you try out our marketing calendar template. It’s fully customizable and will speed up the process.
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