When it comes to digital marketing, one of the skills you can learn is how to use the right digital marketing software. In this article, we’ll give you a quick overview of the top online software for digital marketing. Free software and platform for digital products is an excellent way to get your business set-up at little or no cost.
There are so many digital marketing platforms and software available in the market today. It can be confusing to choose among them if you have not been exposed to this field. But don’t worry. We will help you out by sharing what we believe is the best platform for digital products, tools, and learning modules to promote your brand online.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a marketing automation software that provides email marketing services for small businesses. It has some unique offerings that can be a great plus for small businesses and solopreneurs. Offering all the basic email automation tools like tag, segmentation, CRM, signup forms, and many more; the tool also offers advanced features like behavioural targeting and transactional emails. Startups and companies that have a small budget can use the free plan that allows you to send up to 12,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers. The free package includes most of the key features including the ability to create ad campaigns and access to marketing automation workflows.
Asana
A well-designed platform for keeping your team on track.
Price: Free – $24.99 per user/month.
Pros:
- The free version is enough for many small businesses.
Cons:
- You probably don’t need most of Asana’s features.
CoSchedule
A simple social media platform with social media post scheduling as the main feature and WordPress integration. A lot of nifty advanced features available as well for SM pros.
Price: $29/user per month.
Pros:
- Perfect for bloggers who want to schedule content across social channels.
Cons:
- Most small businesses don’t need advanced content calendars.
Hootsuite
The one-and-done social media online marketing tool with a post scheduling tool and analytics and monitoring features.
Price: 1 User for $49/month, 3 Users for $129/month.
Pros:
- Informs scheduling with insights and analytics.
Cons:
- Hootsuite is good at a few things but not great at any one thing. You may still opt for the simplicity of Buffer even though Hootsuite has a scheduling feature.
- Pricey.
Buffer
Want to Tweet 24/7 from your social media account without having to be on Twitter at all times? Buffer is a great social media marketing tool for that, it makes that possible across all your social channels via scheduled posts.
Price: Free for one user, 3 channels, and ten posts/day.
Paid plans are $15-99/month.
Pros:
- Browser integrations make it easy to share content you find online.
Cons:
- High per-user cost.
- Analytics are just okay.
BuzzSumo
As mentioned above, the secret to getting the most out of data is interpreting it. BuzzSumo lets you run a search to quickly discover content ideas, uncover data insights and identify passionate influencers on social media.
This digital marketing tool adds insights to raw numbers to help you unlock content opportunities and generate ideas.
Price: $99-499+/month
Pros:
- Includes competitive insights (to help you spy on the competition).
- Helps you identify influencers in your space.
Cons:
- Expensive for small businesses.
Kissmetrics
Helps you analyze the conversion funnel from the time a visitor arrives on your page to the time they convert. Instead of using old school link tracking software or a link tracker this tool enables you to identify prospects and nurture leads—a powerful marketing tool in the right hands.
Price: $299-499/month
Pros:
- Designed to give you insights that will help you get the most out of all your marketing tools.
- Goes beyond just a regular click tracking software, allows you to group your audience to buckets according which actions they have taken and where they are in the conversion funnel
- Example: If you are running an ad campaign in facebook or a ppc ad you can create a funnel and view:
- everyone who clicked on the ad into first bucket
- of those in first bucket everyone who visited your landing page into second bucket
- of those in second bucket everyone who bought into third bucket
Cons:
- Not very useful if you’re starting out and don’t have a lot of leads yet.
- If you already know who your customers are (like if you run a small-town bakery), a lot of browsing data is meaningless to you.
- It’s a tracking tool so you do need to install an additional tracking pixel on your website
- Price.
NapoleonCat
Those who run small businesses know that handling most of the whole operation by themselves or with just a small team is not a piece of cake.
👉🏼 Luckily, there are ways to optimize some parts of the business by using smart tools.
NapoleonCat is one of such tools, and it’s an absolute gem when it comes to boosting small business social media marketing capabilities. For instance, its Social Inbox feature allows answering all messages and comments across multiple social media platforms and accounts.
What’s more, you can use its Auto-moderation capability to automate the process of responding to repetitive inquiries or filter out spammers and haters!
NapoleonCat also includes easy-to-use social media analytics and reporting tools and more for an affordable price.
Outfunnel
Outfunnel offers two-way sales and marketing integrations to keep your data in sync. You can pick and choose your favorite tools and easily set up deep data connections between them with Outfunnel.
So why use Outfunnel? Do small businesses really need another marketing automation tool?
The answer is no – what businesses need is a tool that helps unite the efforts of sales and marketing, so they can drive revenue together.
So Outfunnel stepped in to fill the gap, and created one platform that would deeply connect all your sales and marketing software.
It currently works with Pipedrive, Copper, and HubSpot CRM. You can use it to set up seamless integrations such as Mailchimp and HubSpot, Copper and ActiveCampaign, and more.
These integrations allow you to easily target your CRM contacts with marketing campaigns, and record engagement data from these tools (such as clicks, opens, etc) in the CRM.
Additionally, you can use Outfunnel’s Web tracking and Lead scoring functionalities to surface hot, sales-ready leads.
It also provides a simple email tool that automates campaigns and follow-ups.
You can use Outfunnel’s own simple email campaigns tool to send out email sequences based on data changes in the CRM.
Essentially, Outfunnel is the golden thread that unifies all your CRM and marketing tools, forms deep connections, and maximizes the usefulness of data from all of them.
It’s also got a clean interface that’s ultra user-friendly, so it really wins on the user experience front, too!
Oracle Bronto Marketing Platform – Best enterprise marketing software
Bronto, by Oracle, is a part of Netsuite that includes tools for personalization, automation, segmentation, transactional emails, abandoned cart emails, browse abandonment emails, recommendations, pop-ups, integrations, analytics, reporting, and more.
Oracle Bronto is known for its attentive and comprehensive customer service. Additionally, they provide online learning, documentation, and live tutorials. With Oracle backing them, they score well in the evaluation criteria for Usability.
Integrations include AddShoppers, Ascent 360, Baynote, Bounce Exchange, FlowLink, Kibo, Adobe Magento, Pixlee, Playable, Salesforce, Shopify, Stitch, SmarterHQ, Sezzle, Qubit, Mozu, Movable Ink, and more.
Some reporting options could be more comprehensive; for example, a Legacy Report option would assist in identifying hard-versus-soft email bounces. Currently, you have to segment or sort yourself.
Oracle Bronto Marketing Platform starts at $1666/month and has a free demo.
Pros
- Quick to launch drip campaigns on multiple triggers
- Ease of use in sending daily emails
- Excellent organization of customer information
Cons
- Popup manager could be more polished
- Not great for advanced or predictive segmentation
- Not a lot of plugins available
HubSpot Marketing – Best marketing software for agencies
HubSpot is a leader in the digital marketing sphere and their own tool, HubSpot Marketing, boasts features like marketing automation with smart content, content creation tools with SEO strategy built-in, custom event triggers and reporting, website traffic analysis, and more.
With a low monthly cost and a freemium version available, HubSpot scored highly on the Value for Price category of the evaluation criteria. They don’t skimp on features, either.
Integrations include Gmail, RollWorks ABM, Jira, briX, AdRoll, Twitter, Cradle, Dialpad, Zipwhip, Helpdesk Migration, Sakari SMS, Eventbrite, Automate.io, Mailchimp, LeadDyno, Instagram, Workplace by Facebook, GoToWebinar, and over 1000 more through Zapier.
Duplicate entries can become a problem, as HubSpot primarily uses email address the customer identifier. Additionally, their drag-and-drop design functions can be a bit limiting.
HubSpot Marketing starts at $50/month and has a freemium version.
Pros
- East to track the when/where of website leads
- User-friendly email marketing campaigns
- Excellent at organizing/filtering all contacts
Cons
- No integration with Instagram inbox
- Hubspot to Stripe Integration could be improved
- Slightly expensive for SMEs
Maximizer CRM – Best paid email marketing campaigns
With offices in Australia, Canada, and England, Maximizer has been in the CRM sphere since the 1980s. Their current software offering has email marketing, campaign optimization, a web form builder, built-in FAQs and SLAs, feature-rich mobile-friendly CRM, and more.
Maximizer has a huge amount of integrations, including all the big names you would expect. Additionally, they are compatible with Zapier, adding hundreds more. This means they scored well in the Integrations category of the evaluation criteria.
Integrations include Outlook, MailChimp, Quickbooks, Microsoft Excel and Word, Quilio, HubSpot, QuoteWerks, MYOB, VOIP & Telephony, SharePoint, Bing Maps, and over 1000 more through Zapier.
The feature-rich nature of Maximizer may be too complex for users who are only looking for the basics of CRM. It comes with a steep learning curve.
Maximize starts at $40/user/month and has a 30-day free trial and free demo.
Pros
- Well-organized common database of customer information
- Ideal for small to medium size business
- User-friendly, straightforward menus
Cons
- Integration with email could be smoother
- Importing large volume of contacts is slow
- Additional user-friendly shortcuts welcomed
Conclusion:
Using digital marketing platforms and software can look like a black box. You might not know where to start or you’re overwhelmed with all the options. I’m here to help you find out what the best digital marketing software and platforms are – the ones that work best for each stage of your business.