Marketing software is often the backbone of an integrated digital marketing strategy. Learn about marketing software platforms that can help you achieve better digital marketing results.
Marketing software platforms make it easier to manage your marketing, sales, and service operations. These comprehensive offerings offer cloud-based services, marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM), social media marketing, industry-specific solutions, data management, analytics, business intelligence, multi-channel communications capabilities, mobile solutions…and more–all under one umbrella.
EngageBay
EngageBay is a fully integrated all-in-one marketing, sales, and service platform that provides small to medium businesses with modular solutions. The platform has various tools to automate redundant and manual tasks, build and organize contacts, visualize deals, manage sales, and support customers—all from a single, easy-to-use platform.
EngageBay’s software is neatly categorized into three stacks for marketing, sales, and service. Each of these stacks is called a ‘Bay.’
The Marketing Bay has many compelling features, ranging from automation and scheduling to landing page and form builders. You can also keep your content up-to-date on various social media platforms using their ‘Stream’ feature.
The CRM & Sales Bay has impressive tools to streamline your company’s sales process, and gives you a bird’s eye view of your leads and the statuses of your deals. You can connect with third-party calendar applications to schedule appointments with customers, and get a holistic view of your sales progress using visual charts and insightful metrics right from EngageBay’s dashboard.
The Service Bay offers a prudent way to manage and issue customer tickets quickly and efficiently, all from one place. With remarkable features such as canned responses, support groups, and autoresponders, your business can quickly view, prioritize and solve tickets in a customer-friendly manner. Additionally, you can interact with your customers in real-time with EngageBay’s Live Chat feature.
With a completely free CRM, migration services, and onboarding sessions, EngageBay is one of the best options for small businesses and startups looking for a comprehensive solution to their marketing, sales, and customer support needs.
Insightly
Insightly is a sales and marketing platform for unified growth teams that includes key tools such as task automation, a robust CRM, and popular app integrations. It is a past recipient of the 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Sales Force Automation, receiving a 4.4 out of 5-star user rating.
Their standout growth features include a customizable marketing automation roadmap that allows marketing and sales teams to visually plot out a full cycle strategy for various customer segments. While you can purchase the marketing and sales features separately, growth teams who wish to bundle the two offers can contact sales for a custom quote.
Take a page out of NimbleRX’s book and align multiple departments by using Keap’s highly customizable CRM to create personalized layouts, reports, and dashboards that scale high-value customer interactions.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a marketing automation tool whose main focus is on inbound marketing, i.e., content and search marketing automation. The platform also offers Sales and Customer Service Hubs, which means different departments within your organisation, such as sales, marketing, etc. can collaborate and share data within the same platform. The HubSpot hub does a little bit of everything, and this all-in-one approach turns out to be convenient and popular with many businesses.
Ideal Use Case
HubSpot is great for the small business owner. If you’re looking for an all-in-one marketing platform that offers you the functionality of several different marketing systems, then HubSpot is the right choice.
Pricing
Starts from $50 – $3,200+ per month depending on the plan and features you choose.
SharpSpring
Many all-inclusive marketing automation tools claim to be all-in-one, but in reality, they end up with only one strong aspect. SharpSpring is an end-to-end marketing service that allows you to identify and expand your lead base to understand where that lead generation is coming from so that you can capitalise on those engagements. It has many features and functionality for marketing and sales automation.
More engagements mean more sales because your brand is always top of mind, and this is where SharpSpring shines. It offers behaviour-based email marketing and integrations with hundreds of applications, including Google Ads, Twitter, Salesforce, Weebly, WordPress, Zoho, Weebly, WordPress, and much more.
Ideal Use Case
The platform is for small and mid-sized companies that are looking for automatic ways to engage with prospects and clients. Automatic drip emails based on the prospect’s interests and alerts on engagements or lack thereof makes this tool stand out.
Pricing
Starts from $550 – $1,250 per month, based on the number of contacts you have.
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is used by over 90,000 small businesses and is one of the overall best marketing automation platforms. They were also the first to pioneer the visual automation sequence builder.
At Venture Harbour, we decided to move all of our ventures to ActiveCampaign in 2016. As a team of six running nine ventures, you can imagine how important a role automation plays – and so our bar was quite high when reviewing marketing automation tools.
But ActiveCampaign has delivered – and then some.
As a result of being so intuitive, our team is able to build complex automation sequences with virtually no support or training required. Predictive sending, predictive content and automation split tests enable us to let our automation sequences optimise themselves using machine learning.
Impressively, ActiveCampaign’s pricing makes them one of the most affordable marketing automation tools on the market. And unlike tools like HubSpot, which start cheap and become eye-watering expensive, ActiveCampaign remains affordable as you grow.
The final point worth noting about ActiveCampaign is that they’re constantly releasing new features to stay in the lead. In the last year, ActiveCampaign’s released predictive content, attribution, site messages and more. Another recent feature that we’ve found to be a great time-saver is being able to import and share automation ‘recipes’ in a couple of clicks to build on sequences built by the ActiveCampaign community.
Frankly, I can’t really think of anything negative to say about ActiveCampaign without being too pernickety. The worst part of ActiveCampaign is probably their reporting, though it’s still better than most automation providers.
As a little extra, we’ve negotiated on your behalf for Venture Harbour readers to get up to $5,000 in free services, including free implementation and migration, your second month free of charge, free CRM with sales automation, and more.
Important: To lock in this offer, you need to book your demo on this page. As this page doesn’t contain too much information about the ActiveCampaign platform itself, you can see more of that here.
Conclusion
Marketing software platforms are becoming more and more common for startups all around the world. These platforms allow businesses to focus on their product or service, rather than on the software that goes along with it. But not all marketing software platforms are created equal. Some are better suited to certain businesses than others. That’s why researching these types of tools is so important, especially if your startup is software based, but isn’t necessarily a high-tech startup.