In a day or age when speed and accuracy of delivery are what define the success or failure of any company, all marketing activities cannot be left in the realm of manual work, which is not only time consuming, it is also ineffective. Manual work can only take you so far. Hence it becomes pertinent that a business looks forward to adopting some form of marketing automation.
Fortunately, there are a good many high-quality marketing automation software available in the market. But this is also a bad news, as many people get confused by the abundance of choice. For that reason, in this article, I am going to talk about three marketing automation software that are known to be the top performing leaders in the domain.
HubSpot
HubSpot is the company which made the phrase “inbound marketing” famous on the web. It is known among users as well as subscribers for the free knowledge resources (especially PDFs and webinars) it shares, but in no way HubSpot is limited to that only. The company offers an all-in-one marketing automation software which powers more than 7,500 companies in 46 countries and enable them attract lead and convert them into profitable customers.
Key features of Hubspot Marketing Software
SEO
HubSpot, an all-in-one marketing software allows a company to optimize its website for higher search engine visibility by helping the company find profitable keywords and showing them link building opportunity.
Blogging and Social media
The software also helps a company create a blog on the company’s website, which helps the company create a knowledge edge by sharing insightful content with its audience. The software also helps in measuring the effectiveness of blog, and it also helps in social media optimization, which in turns pull visitors from major social channel to the website.
Lead generation and management
We all know that one-time visitor is not a source of much profit for the company. Actual profit comes from visitors who take some action on the website or who visits the website more than once. HubSpot does a remarkable job on this front as well. It helps a marketer create a high-converting lead-generation landing page and seed content to get high-quality leads. Its A/B testing feature helps a marketer track the performance of each element of the landing page.
It also helps a company establish a connection with the leads captured using the software by automating the email marketing process and list segmentation and list management.
Analytics
In marketing, what is not measured has not been achieved. This is what HubSpot team believes in. For that reason, the software helps a marketer analyze each of her marketing effort to the utmost detail.
Marketo
Marketo is another major player in the segment, which helps marketing and sales team of a company to collaborate with each other to meet the business goal of the company by closely analyzing the sales cycle. The software is popular with technology companies and it is capable of handling clients with a large user base. It is considered a category leader by many leading organization for its innovative features and strong automation capability.
It helps a company in database management, social media integration, lead nurturing, lead management, campaign management and analytics, and territory assignment. The software package is built on LAMP stack and its EXT JS JavaScript Library creates a very user-friendly interface.
It is a web-based deployment which hosts data in Rackspace’s secure data centers. The “Sandbox” application of the software package allows its customers to create a copy of software for testing, modification, development and training purposes, which ease the learning curve of Marketo. The software can be integrated with a huge range of third-party application as well as various data sources.
The software offers features like:
Marketing Automation
- Email marketing
- Event marketing
- Landing page creation
- Marketing Automation
Social Marketing
- Social media marketing
- Inbound marketing
- Content marketing
- Blogging
Lead management
- Lead generation
- Lead nurturing
- Lead scoring
- Sales insight
- Revenue cycle analysis
The software claims to be easy-to-use with a very convenient learning curve.
Eloqua
Despite its known strength in marketing automation for B2B and B2C market, Eloqua was not known for its ease of use, but fortunately this is a thing of past since its version 10. The new interface is very intuitive which has improved user experience with leaps and bounds.
Eloqua, with its comprehensive set of tools, comes handy for companies that want to execute and monitor targeted multi-channel marketing campaigns. The software helps a company not only identify and capture leads (prospects), but it also help the company screen the leads based on a pre-determined scale, which then could be used to target email marketing and social media campaigns. The software costs on the higher side, but then the set of tools it provides along with a dedicated customer success manager explains the reason for its being a little steeply priced.
The software is a known leader in email deliverability. Its strength also includes targeted message delivery in both digital (RSS Feeds, instant messaging, email, and personalized microsites) and offline channels (fax, direct mail, SMS and call center outbound calls and messages) and multichannel measurement.
It has a strong lead management and nurturing application as well as a Marketing Resource Management (MRM) feature, which makes Eloqua very handy for its users. Integrating the software with other applications like Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM is relatively easier.
Conclusion
As the description suggests, each of the three software sets are capable enough to automate a large number of online marketing processes from social media optimization to content delivery to lead management, etc. You can choose any of the three marketing automation software packages discussed above and get the most out of your company’s time and resources.
[...] indeed, is a useful marketing automation software package that helps a business establish and strengthen its online presence and generate leads and [...]