Marketing professionals spend several hours a day collecting, organizing and analysing market data. Doing this same pesky task every day, they get less time for implementing new techniques and ideas for the development and growth of their business.
We, the marketing team at Promptcloud, always glance through the web looking for a smarter solution to execute colossal marketing tasks. Admittedly, we can’t stretch the diurnal motion but, we can reduce our workload by implying some intelligent market automation tools to do these repetitive work.
Top 5 Marketing Tools
Here are top 5 market automation tools which will ease your workload in 2016.
1. Hubspot
Hubspot inbound marketing tool is one of the top rated tools used for marketing automation. It comes with a plethora of features to help its clients to save time and effort. Let’s take a look at the features it offers.
Hubspot inbound marketing tool is not a single tool, it is a collection of toolboxes and works in three phases- Attracting visitors, converting them to potential leads and turning them into your close customers. Now, we will take a brief insight of the tools involved for each of these stages.
Tools involved in attracting visitors:
Blogging: Helps to create stunning contents easily that helps your business get found.
Social Inbox: See social analytics across Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other networks.
SEO: Helps to improve search ranking.
Tools involved in Lead conversion:
Call to action: Helps to build beautiful buttons and callouts which help to convert traffics to leads. .
Landing pages: Helps to create more pages to improve conversion rates and generate leads.
Forms: Ask the right question at the right time to optimize lead conversion.
Lead Management: Segments leads based on the user activities on your sites.
Tools involved for the final stage: a new customer
Email: It personalizes your email from the marketing database.
Marketing automation: Helps to trigger timed follow up emails to your contacts.
Analytics: Shows which traffic source generates most leads.
Salesforce sync: It segments contacts using salesforce data.
In addition to the above said tools it can easily be integrated with other tools and platforms like Salesforce.com, GotoWebinar, Zaphire etc.
However, the price that Hubspot charges is not quite high for availing all of these necessary marketing tools under one roof. The pricing starts from $200/month.
2. Buzzsumo
Content is the core component of any successful digital marketing company but, is every article gets same popularity? No, because generating a content without a proper market research is like a shot in the dark. Buzzsumo pro is the tool that lets you do the research in a friendly atmosphere thus, it should be kept in every marketer’s arsenal.
The intuitive and clean interface of this tool provides you a necessary edge along with a handful of features. It keeps you informed about the contents that are getting popular. Not only this, it also provides the insight of networks which are getting the most traction. You can dig deep to know which headlines are hot cakes. It gives you the insight of the various content length and their impact on popularity. Additionally, it keeps track of the days of the week on which successful contents were published.
Apart from all these features, Buzzsumo provides a real-time content alert system which notifies marketers immediately whenever a new content is published by their competitors or authors. These content alerts also provide backlink alerts, therefore, the marketers get informed when a certain site or blog links to their competitor’s site or domain.
3. Pardot
Pardot is a B2B marketing automation tool from Salesforce. It supplies all the tools needed to nurture your business and comes with a user-friendly dashboard with drag and drop features. This tool is basically used by small and medium businesses.
Features:
Generates high quality leads: This suite of powerful tools helps you to create landing pages and forms, runs highly targeted email campaign and personalizes the buyer’s experience.
Streamline lead management: It helps to minimize a load of most of the manual tasks by triggering on the autopilot mode.It will help you to free up sales and you will be able to focus on the things that really matters in your business.
Faster connectivity from anywhere: You can pull the throttle of your sales cycle by providing needed intelligence it needs to close deals. It will also help you to track engagement with a campaign, improve follow-up speed etc. It also combines the power of marketing and sales to turn leads into customers for life.
Calculate marketing ROI: It helps you to turn your winning art to science. It gives you an insight of how things are working from their original campaign. It also helps you to better understand how different teams are contributing to the success and what’s needed to be done to crush revenue goals again and again.
Apart from all these features it also provides a 24*7 online support, guide tutorial, and videos so that you don’t get stumbled upon on any phase while using this tool. However, the price range starts from $1000/month to $3000/month and it’s fairly an issue for the small and medium scale businesses.
4. Marketo
Marketo is another marketing automation tool which is continuously serving industries for boosting their sales and building a healthy customer base since 2007. Its user interface is so simple that even new users don’t face any difficulties of using it.
It can help you to enlarge your business through various means like:
Bring in the right customers: According to Forrester, 66-90% customer journey are self-directed. Therefore, finding the right customer is a challenge. Marketo helps you to find and engage the right customers. Once they start their journey in the right direction, you can concentrate on other things like social media, landing page, behavioural tracking etc.
Build long term relationship with customers: You can easily build and scale automated marketing channels which engage your customers in a personalised manner by email marketing, nurturing, ad targeting and mobile engagement.
Increase sales by focusing on the hot topic: The marketing automation helps you to identify the best prospects and customers and close more business by triggering a sales call at exactly the right time.
Measure and optimize your marketing program: It helps you to quickly determine what is working and what is not and you can make changes accordingly to maximize the impact of the sales and revenue. The pricing starts from $900 to $1400/months and depends on the number of customers.
5. Oracle Eloqua
Eloqua is another B2B marketing automation software from Oracle. The new cleaner intuitive design provides the dashboard a faster usability. Like the other tools, it also has its share of brilliance.
Customer segmentation: Eloqua can locate and deliver to group customers by location, preferences, or by other key criteria.
Social media monitoring: Using Eloqua’s social media listening tool we can gauge customer sentiment, track data of their likes/dislikes and service requests.
Campaign execution: Create and maintain various campaigns like email marketing, demand generation, content marketing, organize webinars, landing page and forms etc.
Preference management: You can use ‘email marketing bounce and opt-out manager’ to ensure your target audience receives the most relevant contents.
Customer activity profile: You can view a graphical summary of customer behaviour, their online activities and receive real time website visitor alarms.
This tool is available on a subscription-based model and its pricing starts from $2000.
I know this list of marketing tools isn’t complete and I bet, you have a better list as with each passing day numerous brand new tools and platforms are stepping in the digital marketing arena. I have made this list with those tools which appeared handy to me and offered a great help to me in this little journey of mine as a digital marketer. Lastly, always feel free to enrich us with your ideas and knowledge.
