Marketing Tech is fundamentally changing the way we sell and market products and services to enterprises. With the advancement in digital technologies like mobile, social, cloud and reliance of the new-age customer on all these technologies; outreach is no more a challenge.

Today, we will look at all the marketing tech which is available to us. The reason i decided to write this blog post is to provide some perspective on different types of marketing software. There are so many of them that it becomes difficult to rationalize on which does what and whether do we really need to spend a fortune on enterprise-grade marketing software when similar alternatives exist at a fraction of the cost.

First, let us understand different types of marketing software needed by a company which has Digital Marketing as one of its primary strategy.

CRM Software – This is the primary system of record where you will store all your customer information starting from profile information, contact details, relationship history, etc. This is your base system which can extend to more forms depending on what you plan to achieve with your marketing programs.

Email Marketing Software – This is your mass mailing application, using which you will reach out to existing and potential customers. Whether it’s your newsletter, new offer, blog, focus campaign or something else. Email Marketing Software will be your vehicle to take your communication in front of the customer. Modern email marketing software can not only track opens and clicks of your email, they go one step further and can track every visit the customer makes to your website thereafter. Which essentially means you have installed a spy on your customers web browser which will report their activities on your website.

Content Management System – It’s advisable to build your website using CMS like WordPress or Drupal or Joomla so that you can make changes on demand without having to rely on a developer or external agency. Nevertheless, you will still need a powerful CMS to publish your blogs.

Web Analytics – You definitely want to track who is visiting your website, what are they up to and how you can convert them to paying customers. Your web analytics platform will give you valuable insights on the same.

Social Media – As with Business blogging, it is imperative to have engaged, active social media presence. This not only ensures you have a continuous flow of qualified leads but also provides social credibility to your brand.

A Social Media marketing tool will make your life easier by automating your posts, follow-back, provide social insights, etc.

Add-ons – You will also need Live Chat software for your website, SEO Analytics tool to analyze and optimize your content, Website widgets for displaying context based offers, Lead Analytics and Scoring to know potential buyers.

All the above marketing tools are inherent in many sophisticated Marketing Automation platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, etc. The problem is, these software can eat up your marketing budget before you event start using them. For e.g. HubSpot whose primary market is SMB will cost you $12,500 in yearly subscription paid in advance. And mind you this is their lower range offering with 1000 contacts/ leads cap. Their enterprise offering is priced at $28,000 which can be quite steep for many SMB’s and startups.

Alternatively, there are many aggressively priced marketing automation as well as point solutions which can provide you equal capabilities at fraction of the cost.

In my next blog post, I will be doing a detailed comparison of leading marketing automation platforms followed by recommendations on each of the above-mentioned category/types of marketing software.

Thank you for reading this blog post. Do consider sharing it on your social channels if you liked it.

More on this in my next post.