Top 7 Marketing Software

How long should a sales rep wait before reaching out to a website visitor who filled out an inquiry form? As a marketing manager, you’d agree that the time shouldn’t be too long. However, if your sales team is not receiving this lead data on time, it can result in lost opportunities for your small business. To prevent this, consider implementing marketing software.

Marketing software will facilitate better coordination between sales and marketing teams and ensure that leads are promptly acted upon. This software will also help simplify your marketing efforts with marketing automation. Additionally, it will empower you to make data-driven decisions for your business by providing in-depth performance data.

In this article, we’ve highlighted the top seven marketing software solutions, in alphabetical order, based on verified software reviews. (Read how we selected these products at the bottom of the page.

1. EngageBay: Offers customizable video templates

EngageBay is a marketing solution that helps address the needs of sales and support staff along with marketers. The tool allows you to build and run an email marketing campaign and measure its performance. Customizable form templates are available that you can use to create web forms, such as exit pop-ups and time-based pop-ups, to capture leads. Moreover, EngageBay supports video marketing by offering multiple customizable video templates. The tool comes with applications for Android and iOS mobile devices.

Product features of interest**:

• Landing page builder: Build landing pages from scratch using a drag-and-drop builder. Also offers landing page templates that can be customized per your branding and campaign requirements.

• SMS marketing: Send personalized SMS messages to customers based on trigger points, such as cart abandonment, failed payment, and promotional offers, and segment your audience by applying filters based on customer behavior and attributes.

• Marketing automation: Automate marketing tasks, such as data syncing between systems, event tracking, and sending emails and text messages, with marketing automation tools.

• Social suite: Manage multiple social media accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, launch campaigns on them, and connect with followers from one location.

Customer support options: Knowledge base, help articles and guides, email, and phone

Campaign automation in EngageBay (Source)

2. HubSpot Marketing Hub: Generates detailed reports using integrated analytics

HubSpot Marketing Hub is a marketing software solution that helps businesses attract the right audience through blogging, social media, and ads. The tool supports email marketing, landing page development, and marketing automation. Moreover, this marketing tool has integrated analytics to help understand the quality and quantity of website traffic and generates detailed reports for every marketing channel, including blogs, landing pages, and emails. HubSpot Marketing Hub comes with applications for Android and iOS mobile devices.

Product features of interest**:

• Ad tracking and management: Manage Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn ads using HubSpot’s ad management system that helps create personalized ads based on collected customer data.

• Blog: Write and publish blogs from within HubSpot’s blog editor and improve their quality by inserting images, formatting headers, adding links, and optimizing them for mobile readers.

• Form builder: Build web forms using drag-and-drop builder and add them to your website to capture leads.

• Salesforce integration: Integrate HubSpot with Salesforce and sync the two systems to keep data such as website activity, email opens, form submissions, and more updated.

Customer support options: Knowledge base, training videos, developer documentation, email, and chat

Landing page template in HubSpot Marketing Hub (Source)

3. Marketo Engage: Attracts and nurtures leads with a lead management system

Marketo Engage offers marketing automation, email marketing, and revenue attribution capabilities. The tool’s lead management feature helps you identify the right audience by tracking and analyzing customer behavioral data. This enables you to attract leads by delivering targeted campaigns to your audience. You can also engage your sales team to nurture and close the leads. Marketo Engage comes with applications for Android and iOS mobile devices.

Product features of interest**:

• Cross-channel engagement: Engage with customers over multiple social channels, including SMS messaging, email, social media, events, and webinars.

• Content personalization: Leverage machine learning to recommend personalized emails, web forms, and landing pages, among other content types, to anonymous and known users based on their behavior.

• Sales partnership: Sync data between sales and marketing departments for personalized engagement across channels and help sales reps reach out to the right lead.

• Plug-and-play integrations: Extend the tool's capabilities by integrating it with external tools such as Salesforce, Google, and Instagram.

Customer support options: FAQs, knowledge base, email, and phone

Lead nurturing in Marketo Engage (Source)

4. monday marketer: Aids creative management besides marketing

monday marketer aids in marketing and creative management. The tool helps plan, launch, and monitor marketing campaigns. It keeps track of workflows and automatically informs the responsible person of the tasks due on their end. Besides, the solution helps manage the creative approval process, too, as the tool allows keeping the creative team in the loop. You can add copywriters or designers to the workflow and benefit from features such as annotations and versioning to request changes or share comments. The tool comes with applications for Android and iOS mobile devices.

Product features of interest**:

• Gantt chart: Visually plan and monitor multiple projects simultaneously using Gantt charts and keep everyone on the marketing team informed of scheduled, delayed, and updated tasks.

• Live feedback: Collaborate on creative projects and speed up the approval process by providing feedback directly on the file via annotations to avoid back-and-forth emails.

• File versioning: Create versions of your files and organize every iteration in a timeline and edit their names to differentiate them from each other.

• Customizable forms: Collect creative requests from different departments using forms and set clear deadlines and dependencies.

Customer support options: FAQs, knowledge base, email, chat, and phone

Content planning in monday marketer (Source)

5. SharpSpring: Detects hot prospects with lead scoring

SharpSpring is CRM and marketing automation platform. The tool helps collect leads via forms integrated into your business’s website. You can also use the tool to launch personalized email campaigns based on user behavior. Besides, this marketing automation software helps detect hot prospects with lead scoring. You can create custom metrics that can include pages visited, forms completed, demographics, and campaigns visited, and the tool will score the leads based on the set criteria, helping you identify leads with the highest potential of converting into customers. The solution comes with an application for iOS mobile devices.

Product features of interest**:

• Email marketing: Deliver personalized email campaigns to your customers based on their preferences, buying behavior, and attributes.

• Sales engagement: Send automatic notifications to the sales team to prompt them to take action whenever a sale is made, or a high-quality lead moves forward in its buyer journey.

• Retargeting ads: Run automated ad campaigns on platforms such as Google, Instagram, and Facebook to retarget and advertise your brand to visitors who bounced from your website.

• Tracking and analytics: Track email success, measure ROI, see site visits, and more on a dashboard to understand the performance of your marketing efforts and use the insights to make data-driven business decisions.

Customer support options: FAQs, knowledge base, chat, email, and phone

Campaign insights in SharpSpring (Source)

6. Systeme.io: Helps manage affiliate commissions and payouts

Systeme.io is an all-in-one marketing automation platform that allows you to carry out tasks such as creating a sales funnel and running email marketing campaigns. This tool helps you track your affiliates and manage their commissions and payouts. Moreover, Systeme.io helps you build a website as well. The tool offers website templates you can modify to make your own or use the drag-and-drop builder to build your website from scratch.

Product features of interest**:

• Blogging: Develop an interactive blog for your website and add search-engine-optimized content, which includes pictures, videos, links, and more.

• Email marketing: Categorize your customers and send unlimited tailored emails to them and keep track of their open rates and other important statistics.

• Business automation: Automate repetitive email sequences such as payment confirmation emails or updates about business services based on predefined triggers.

• Online courses: Build your course site using a drag-and-drop editor and integrate your courses with payments. You can also limit the access your students have to your courses by adding duration limits.

Customer support options: Knowledge base, call, and email

Campaign designer in Systeme.io (Source)

7. VBOUT: Post on multiple social media platforms from one place 

VBOUT is a marketing automation tool that offers ready-made automation templates. You can customize these templates to create your unique workflows to deliver emails and SMSs, or to prompt another marketing team member to take certain actions. This tool also helps with social media management as it enables you to control multiple social accounts using one platform. You can view social media activity and compose, schedule, and publish posts on different platforms using a single dashboard.

Product features of interest**:

• Landing page builder: Create responsive landing pages using a drag-and-drop builder and add your branding by customizing the templates and layouts.

• Marketing analytics: Check the performance of your website, social media posts, email marketing campaigns, landing pages, and more using a dashboard.

• Lead management: Design forms from scratch or customize existing templates and embed those forms on your website and landing pages to capture leads.

• Pipeline manager: Create and organize tasks, assign them to different team members, set deadlines, and visualize the projects in the form of a list, table, or grid.

Customer support options: FAQs, live chat, phone, and email

Contact lists in VBOUT (Source)

• Check data visualization capabilities: Marketing automation software captures a wide variety of data that may not be easy to read. Data visualization features convert that data into charts, diagrams, and tables, making it easier for the reader to understand the numbers. If you rely on a marketing solution to track the performance of your marketing efforts, check whether the tool you’re considering has data visualization capabilities.

• Assess supported social media platforms: Social media marketing is a big part of digital marketing, and you cannot afford to miss any social media opportunities. Analyze which social media platform your audience is the most active on and ensure that the marketing platform you are considering supports that particular social media platform.

• Analyze design features: Most marketing solutions allow you to design landing pages and web forms. Since these landing pages and forms help you capture leads, you want to ensure that you can make them as attractive as possible. For that, you have to check the offered design features and ensure you have everything you need to make your landing pages and web forms creative and attention-grabbing.

In case you want to scale your sales and marketing efforts and require more features, check the cost you would have to incur to upgrade to a plan with an advanced set of features. Most products in the market are priced on a "per user, per month" basis and can be broken down into three common pricing tiers based on their starting price.

Price ranges:*

• $9 - $10

• $11 - $29

• $30+

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offering found on vendor websites on January 4, 2023. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentiles of pricing information gathered from vendor websites of sample products.

Hidden costs associated with marketing software

The above pricing list summarizes pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise or premium product that is priced higher may include additional features, for example, list management, dynamic content, live chat, and customer journey mapping. However, even the free plan of a marketing solution may have some hidden charges, such as charges to use certain design elements in your landing pages or charges to send SMS campaigns to a bigger group of audience. Other hidden charges can include software training costs, integration costs, and scalability costs. Before making a choice, ask the software vendor about any such hidden charges to ensure full pricing transparency.

Is the tool scalable?

As your small business grows, your use of the digital marketing solution will also increase. You may want to increase the number of users or add additional features. Before you invest, ask your vendor about the conditions associated with getting more users or features added to your existing plan.

Does the tool support CRM integration?

Customer relationship management software makes managing and tracking leads throughout the customer lifecycle easier. CRM software keeps a record of lead data and scores the leads accordingly, helping you identify those with higher chances of conversion. Ask your vendor if their solution supports CRM integration.

Are there any learning resources?

A marketing platform can be complicated to understand because it offers a wide range of features. All of the features provided by this software are important when it comes to your marketing needs. To use them effectively, ask your vendor if their solution comes with any training or learning resources. Also, ask if they provide product demos or a trial period so that you can judge the usability of the marketing platform.