We compare the best marketing tools for insurance agents. These are online marketing tools and effective tools for online marketers. Comparison of the top online marketing services for Insurance Marketing Services
1. Planning
A vital part of any marketer’s job is the planning. It’s the foundation that everything else is built on, so you need to be sure you’re getting this part right. We wrote about how planning used to be one of our biggest sticking points, so we had to change the way we worked.
After looking at a few options for software which were designed to help organise the process, we finally landed on one which was intuitive, well designed, and simple.
That program is Trello.
For those unfamiliar, Trello is essentially a digital organisation board where you can break bigger tasks down into individual steps, and assign steps to different members of your team. On the surface, it’s super simple to use, but the more familiar you get with the tool, the more you realise how flexible and deep it can be.
One huge benefit we found is that what seems like a huge, complicated task at the beginning can look really simple and manageable when it’s all broken down, and assigned to the different team members.
Deadlines are easily applied, and there’s a satisfying flow to the tool. Once you set a flow for your workload (planning, in progress, awaiting authorisation, and complete, for example), it’s oh-so-satisfying moving the task cards along, until they reach the complete column. Then, when the cards in ‘complete’ start to stack up, you can proudly look back on all you’ve achieved.
Only for a second though…you’ve got to move on to your next project now. The Trello board says so.
ProofHub is a leading project management and team collaboration software that you can use to manage your marketing projects as well as your teams effectively. It combines all the essential tools that you need to plan, collaborate, organize, and deliver projects on time. Define workflows and break projects down into smaller, manageable tasks.
The Kanban boards in ProofHub let you track the progress of each task and see them moving through the different project stages. Moreover, you can attach files and add comments to a task. The integrated chat tool even makes it possible for you and your teammates to have quick conversations over text messages.
Key Features:
Being an all-in-one project management software, ProofHub comes loaded with a wide range of features with the most prominent ones as follows:
Online proofing allows you to review, proof, and approve designs & documents in real-time. To give feedback or suggestions while reviewing a file, all you need is to add comments to the design file or the document. Additionally, the markup tool makes it possible to highlight and add feedback to the specific regions of a file.
Gantt charts incorporated in ProofHub offer a visual representation of the overall project timeline. You can view task schedules, drag and drop tasks to modify their schedules, set task dependencies, and highlight the critical path of a project. In addition, Gantt charts in ProofHub also give you the flexibility to associate milestones with tasks and track the progress of each task.
With ProofHub, you will get cloud storage to bring all your project files to a single place and manage them with relative ease. You can upload files from your computer or from third-party file storage services, including Box, Dropbox, GoogleDrive, and OneDrive. You can store multiple versions of a file and attach files to tasks and share them in chats, discussions, etc.
Tracking time for each task that you are working on becomes convenient with the in-built timers in ProofHub. While timers offer automatic time tracking, you can also make manual time entries to keep an accurate record of your working hours. All the time data gets stored in timesheets that you can access whenever you want and use them for various purposes like payroll, client billing, time management, and much more.
Reporting is an essential part of project management and with ProofHub, creating detailed project reports is just a few clicks away. The software lets you create and customize both project and resource reports. It is quite easy to highlight specific data in reports by picking parameters of your choice. You can even download the reports and use them in meetings to discuss project progress and make plans for better utilization of resources.
Ups:
- Simple and easy-to-understand interface with little to no learning curve
- Activity logs make it easy to keep track of everything happening within projects
- Create custom roles and set different permissions for each role
- IP restriction helps to prevent unauthorized access to your ProofHub account
Downs:
- Limited app integrations
What’s ProofHub Best For?
ProofHub is the ideal tool to have ultimate control over all your projects, tasks, and teams.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using ProofHub?
ProofHub has two simple pricing plans:
- Essential – $45 per month (billed annually)
- Ultimate Control – $89 per month (billed annually)
Capterra/G2 Ratings:
Capterra – (4.3 / 5) stars
G2 – (4.4 / 5) stars
Make sure that none of your marketing tasks slip through the cracks? Start using ProofHub to manage all your projects!
Managing the tasks of a project effectively makes it possible to complete your projects on time and the Todoist app is the right tool for that. It allows you to create interactive to-do lists that you can use to keep a track of all your tasks. You can easily organize and prioritize your tasks with Todoist and make sure that you never get off track.
With the quick add feature, you can create new tasks and organize them in no time. Moreover, it’s quite easy to see the details, like subtasks, added comments, the due date of a task through from the task view. Also, you can bring your teams to the Todoist app and assign them tasks directly through the app.
Ups:
- Real-time notifications for everything happening within a task
- Color-coded graphs help you to visualize your daily and monthly productivity
- Easy access to the completed tasks of a project
Downs:
- A limited set of project management features
- Not suitable for large organizations
What’s Todoist Best For?
Todoist app is great for streamlining all the tasks of a project and keeping your everyday work well-organized.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Todoist?
Todoist has two paid plans:
- Premium – $3 per user per month (billed annually)
- Business – $5 per user per month (billed annually)
Capterra/G2 Ratings:
Capterra – (4.5 / 5) stars
G2 – (4.4 / 5) stars
Social Media Marketing and Management
- Hootsuite
Hootsuite is among the top-rated social media management software providing marketers the ability to manage all their social media campaigns. By having this software on your side, you can easily plan, create, and schedule all your social media campaigns with relative ease.
It’s also possible to manage your social media teams effectively with Hootsuite. You can set different permission levels for individual team members and control what they can access. You can regulate the permissions separately at the organizational level, team level, and social account level.
Ups:
- Performance monitoring of all your social media from one place
- Allows you to create and manage social media ad campaigns
- View customer messages and queries from different social media accounts and reply to them directly from Hootsuite’s Inbox
Downs:
- The user interface seems dull and outdated in terms of design
- A fair amount of time required to get familiar with the software’s functionality
What’s Hootsuite Best For?
Hootsuite is the ideal choice for anyone who wants to integrate and manage several social media accounts from a centralized location.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Hootsuite?
Hootsuite has four different pricing plans:
- Professional – $29 per month (1 user) (10 social profiles)
- Team – $129 per month (3 users) (20 social profiles)
- Business – $599 per month (5+ users) (35 social profiles)
- Enterprise – Custom pricing
Capterra/G2 Ratings:
Capterra – (4.3 / 5) stars
G2 – (4.1 / 5) stars
- Crowdfire
If you want to manage the social media of your business in a simple and effective way, Crowdfire is the ideal app that you need on your side. It is one of the best social media management platforms and offers best-in-class features to help you stay on top of your social media profiles and campaigns.
By using Crowdfire, it’ll become easier for you to boost your social media engagement and growth. Moreover, the platform allows you to publish content on blogs, and you can also interact with customers to provide them excellent customer service. You can also discover relevant content to share with your audience and even schedule posts to publish them automatically at different times.
Ups:
- Easy to learn and use
- You can curate articles as well as images to be used across your social media accounts
- Queue meter helps you ensure that your social profiles stay active
- Customizable reports simplify the way you measure, track and understand your business’s ROI
- Competitive pricing
Downs:
- Doesn’t work well with LinkedIn
- The free version comes with a limited set of features
What’s Crowdfire Best For?
Crowdfire is flexible enough to meet the social media management needs of individuals, agencies, and businesses.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Crowdfire?
Crowdfire has three pricing plans:
- Plus – $7.48 per month (5 social media accounts)
- Premium – $37.48 per month (10 social media accounts)
- VIP – $74.98 per month (25 social media accounts)
Capterra/G2 Ratings:
Capterra – (4.1 / 5) stars
G2 – (3.9 / 5) stars
- Buffer
Buffer is yet another popular app for managing multiple social media accounts using a simple dashboard. You can integrate all the major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn with the app.
You can draft posts, schedule them, and analyze the performance of each social media campaign. With Buffer, you can harness the power of social media to increase the brand awareness of your organization and drive customer engagement.
Ups:
- Remarkable UI and UX design
- The in-built calendar lets you see all your scheduled content on different social platforms at a glance
- You can share posts with your teammates and ask for approval before publishing them
- It’s easy to measure social media performance and create detailed reports for analyzing how your efforts are paying off
Downs:
- Pricey for individuals and small businesses
- Lacks team management features
What’s Buffer Best For?
Buffers make a great choice for marketers who want a simple and intuitive app for managing social media.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Buffer?
Buffer has two different products for publishing and analyzing performance on social media. Here are pricing plans for each product:
Buffer Publish:
- Pro – $15 per month (1 user) (8 social accounts)
- Premium – $65 per month (2 users) (8 social accounts)
- Business – $99 per month (6 users) (25 social accounts)
Buffer Analyze:
- Pro – $35 per month (8 social accounts)
- Premium – $40 per month (10 social accounts)
Capterra/G2 Ratings:
Capterra – (4.5 / 5) stars
G2 – (4.3 / 5) stars
- SocialPilot
If you want to add some automation to your social media management work, SocialPilot is just the right tool. You can add the URL of your business’s website and other websites that you follow to share their blogs automatically on your social media.
With SocialPilot, you can view and reply to messages, comments on multiple Facebook profiles in real-time. The integrated social media analytics lets you analyze the engagement on social posts and also helps to understand the audience’s behavior. Also, you can document the analytic reports of your social platforms by downloading them in the PDF format.
Ups:
- Assign roles to team members and define their access levels
- Content recommendations from across the web
- Bulk scheduling makes it possible to schedule social posts for upcoming weeks or months
Downs:
- It’s somewhat difficult to navigate through the app
What’s SocialPilot Best For?
SocialPilot is particularly great for managing your social media accounts on Facebook.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using SocialPilot?
SocialPilot has four different pricing plans:
- Professional: $25 per month (3 team members) (25 social accounts) [billed annually]
- Small Team: $41.66 per month (5 team members) (50 social accounts) [billed annually]
- Agency: $83.33 per month (10 team members)(100 social accounts)
- Enterprise: custom pricing
Capterra/G2 Ratings:
Capterra – (4.4 / 5) stars
G2 – (4.3 / 5) stars
SEO and SEM
- SEMrush
SEMrjush is one of the top-rated digital marketing tools for business that you can leverage to plan and monitor all your SEO strategies. It allows you to search relevant keywords for your website, analyze competitor’s SEO strategies, and create SEO-friendly webpage and blog content.
Apart from SEO, SEMrush can also help you with PPC (pay-per-click) ad campaigns and boost your business’s sales. It is a comprehensive software that can meet both your SEO and SEM needs, like backlink analysis, organic traffic insights, content audit, competitive research, and much more.
Ups
- Comes with a wide range of useful tools and features
- Suitable for marketing teams of every size
- Data-driven solutions for developing powerful content strategies
Downs
- Pricing is quite high for individuals, freelancers, and startups
What’s SEMrush Best For?
SEMrush can help you with almost all of your digital marketing strategies.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using SEMrush?
SEMrush has four pricing plans:
- Pro – $83.28 per month (billed annually)
- Guru – $166.62 per month (billed annually)
- Business – $333.28 per month (billed annually)
- Enterprise – custom pricing
Capterra/G2 Ratings
Capterra – (4.6 / 5) stars
G2 – (4.5 / 5) stars
Website Optimization and CRO
- Hotjar
As a marketing professional, you need to analyze and understand the behavior of users visiting a website. Hotjar is a specialized behavior analytics software that allows you to gain better knowledge about user behavior with features, like heatmaps and visitor recordings.
The software also makes it possible for you to get feedback directly from users. This feedback data is useful for identifying the factors that trigger them to perform certain actions. With Hotjar, you can embed surveys on a website or share it with users to get their feedback.
Ups:
- Easy to set up and use
- Allows visitor targeting using URLs, device and user attributes
- You can export user responses in CSV or XLSX format
Downs:
- Suitable only for websites, you can’t use it for apps
What’s Hotjar Best For?
Hotjar provides important user behavior information that you can utilize to improve the overall user experience of a website.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Hotjar?
Hotjar has three pricing plans:
- Personal (Plus) – $39 per month (unlimited team members)
- Business – Starts at $99 per month (unlimited team members)
- Agency – Custom pricing
Capterra/G2 Ratings:
Capterra – (4.7 / 5) stars
G2 – (4.3 / 5) stars
Content Creation
- Canva
Canva is the preferred choice for marketing teams to create visual content that can be used in various marketing campaigns. The best thing about this tool is that it offers professional design templates that allow you to create beautiful graphic content without having hardcore graphic designing skills.
Whether you want to create stunning infographics that engage people with your content or videos to help customers learn better about your product/service, Visually can help you create a wide range of content.
Ups
- Allows you to create a wide range of content
- Comes with several advanced image editing features
- You can use free icons to make your designs more impactful
Downs
- Lack of collaborative features
What’s Canva Best For?
With Canva, you can create eye-catching designs for your marketing campaigns easily.
How Much Do You Need to Pay for Using Canva?
Canva has two pricing plans:
- Pro – $9.95 per user per month (billed annually)
- Enterprise – #30.00 per user per month (billed annually)
Capterra/G2 Ratings
Capterra – (4.7 / 5) stars
G2 – (4.7 / 5) stars
Conclusion
In today’s modern age, the use of innovative tools at work is a must for every marketing professional. The tools that I’ve listed above are among the top marketing tools that every marketer should use.