Put yourself in the shoes of the marketing manager for a moment. You are responsible for overseeing all your digital marketing campaigns, align marketing and sales teams, keep an eye on the latest marketing trends and attract more customers and sales. With rapidly changing search, declining organic reach, ever-evolving social media algorithms and lower click-through rate of paid ads, marketing managers have their work cut out.
Marketing is becoming more expensive and competitive. With a small marketing budget and the ever-rising cost of marketing, marketers are embracing marketing automation and for good reason. According to this infographic, 80% of marketing automation users increased their sales and 77% increased their conversions.
It can not only save your time but can also reduce costs. Marketing automation can also streamline your marketing process and make it more efficient by automating mundane tasks. Moreover, it can also improve targeting, send a personalized message to prospects and track user behavior.
In this article, you will learn about seven marketing automation tools that every marketer should be using.
Hootsuite
If you think that you can publish content and it can automatically go viral then, that is not going to happen. You will have to share it on all social channels on a consistent basis. That is where Hootsuite comes in handy. It let you automate your social media posts so that it goes live at the best times and gets more likes, shares, and comments.
With extensive third-party integration, you can schedule social media posts for all social networks. Its useful reporting and analytics features let you see what works and what does not. This will help you refine your social media messaging and get better results in the future. There is also a monitoring tool that enables you to filter information by using keywords, hashtags, and even locations. The most interesting part is that it tells you what customers think about your brand, competitors and your industry.
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HubSpot
If you are already using a customer relationship management tool and want to automate it, then look no further than HubSpot. It is a free tool that helps you manage your sales pipeline efficiently. This gives your sales team more control and visibility over every stage and helps them close more leads.
The dashboard gives you all the information about prospects in one place and even let you chat with them in real-time. This helps you nurture leads by building long term relationships and help you retain more customers too. What’s more, you can also send personalized email messages, populate contact list automatically, book meetings and appointments and receive real-time notifications.
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BuzzSumo
Let’s say you have app ideas that you want to turn into a business. You bought a domain name, created a website and is ready to do some research on competitors and the type of content they are sharing. That is where BuzzSumo comes into play.
BuzzSumo shows you which content is performing best in your niche so you can get an idea about which type of content you should create. In addition to this, it can give you useful content insights, influencer information and send alerts when a similar content piece is published. Its competitive analysis tool helps you spy on your competitors and show you what’s working and what’s not working for them, so you don’t repeat the same mistakes.
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Marketo
Marketo needs no introduction when it comes to marketing automation. It is one of the most popular and mature marketing automation tools out there. Whether you want to manage emails or close leads, Marketo has you covered. It is a great marketing automation solution for companies that want to buy into a market ecosystem. With an active and large knowledge base, it makes the onboarding of new users seamless. The only downside of using Marketo is that you can achieve similar results with cheaper tools.
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Zapier
Are you surprised to see Zapier on this list? If yes, then I don’t blame you. Zapier is not a marketing automation tool but it let you integrate other apps into your workflow. Zapier acts as a bridge that connects users with web apps. The ability to create new processes without coding is a big highlight of Zapier. Users can even setup Zapier to complete certain tasks automatically and pour ideas into workflows in no time. What makes it special is its ability to integrate with more than 1000 applications. Users don’t have to download and install anything or even tinker with the software code to make things possible.
Pardot
Your website is getting a lot of traffic and some of them are even converting but your sales team is unable to close those leads. This might happen due to various reasons and one reason could be using the wrong sales tool. Use Pardot which lets you access actionable insights from SalesForce CRM. Additionally, the tool lets you design smart and targeted campaigns to generate more leads and accelerates your sales process.
The best part about using Pardot is that it presents your sales performance in a visual way, which makes it easy for you to visualize and track your performance. You can dig deeper if you want to look at the granular details, which shows you what areas you excel in and where you are falling behind the eight balls.
When it comes to task automation and segmentation, Pardot is a clear winner. Its smart lead management let you capture more leads. Backed up by advanced marketing analytics, it let you earn the highest ROI for your marketing expenditure.
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GMass
Email marketing is still an effective way to market your products and services. If you are using Gmail for sending emails, you must check out GMass. This tool allows you to schedule and send personalized emails. Users can also see data about how many people opened, clicked and abandoned their emails. It even lets you send follow up emails to remind prospects.
Which marketing automation tools do you use? How did your marketing automation tool help your marketing efforts? Let us know in the comments section below.
By Irfan Ak
