“Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.” – Bill Gates
Marketing is creativity, working with data, and exploring your target audience. Various applications and technologies were invented for a marketing specialist to allocate more time for exciting work and less time for day-to-day routine tasks. As a result, we collect the best software for automating everyday marketing tasks in this guide. We believe that marketers, business development specialists, IT managers may find it useful.
1. Agile project management for marketing
All marketing projects start with management. Agile project management software helps teams perform complex projects in a very intuitive and time-effective manner. We can advise the following apps in this area:
- Wrike is a project management solution, which improves the speed and quality of work in both co-located and distributed teams. Interactive timelines will display connections between dependencies. And help teams track performance, develop relevant assets for their campaigns and manage launches and numerous different useful events. All of this can help in developing a perfect marketing strategy.
- Zoho Projects is organized in a way to streamline the process of project management from the initial phases up to closing down, including by using automation and various customizable features. One of such signature features is milestone mapping, which helps to split project phases in smaller steps and subtasks. By achieving each of these smaller steps the team will reach the project completion. You can plane down the project to a single minute and penny.
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- Easy Projects helps teams to effectively and timely plan projects and deliver the best working results. This cloud based platform is an effective solution for managing teams and keeping the clients engaged throughout the project lifespan. One of the trademark features of this app is set of powerful financial tools and analytics, which can help to stay within the budget and save costs.
Pay attention
However, there are dozens of other useful project management apps available on the market these days. To consider some more, pay attention to the critical features for such software:
- Task editing
- Time tracking
- Category changes
- Board configuration
- Task assignment
2. Communication & collaboration software
Next step is to take a look at applications, which can help you communicate with your team.
- Slack is your business messenger. Here you can easily write and tag a necessary person, create specialized channels for team communication and share files.
- MS Teams is a famous project communication application provided by Microsoft as part of Office 365. It offers variety of different communication options, such as messaging, audio / video calls, chatting and video conferences and group channels. This app can be also used effectively for project management. In addition, it has its own Task Planner, while ability to integrate other MS Office 365 applications, such as Word, Excel, Power Point, Shared Drive and Yammer. It can make it all-in-one universal communication, project management and office solution.
Also can be interesting
- RingCentral is a platform for communications, which significantly simplifies organization of correspondence. Perfect solution for remote teams and small to mid/sized business. Which are looking for a cost reasonable and easy-to-use video conferences and team collaboration solution. Moreover, the signature cloud phone feature can provide you with phone numbers in more than 40 countries to be reached out by your clients from any place on the globe.
- GoToConnect is the basic app from GoToSoftware, which provides an all-in-one solution for video/audio calls and conferences, as well as the messaging / chatting platform. The application could be easily integrated with the popular business software solutions, such as Google and Microsoft.
Important
There is a lot more to choose for effective communication within your team. Pay attention to these critical features for such software:
- Real-time messaging
- Tag functionality
- Sharing photo and video files
- Archiving
- Search function
3. Customer relationship Management systems
Then your business needs to deal with clients. Customer Relationship Management Software will help you to boost conversations, and improve revenue rates.
- Salesforce CRM is one of the most efficient CRM solutions on the market, offering to track all customer information and interactions in one location to follow more leads. It contains lots of useful internal apps and feature. For example: Marketing Automation, Partner Management, Sales Data and The Lead management, which help to follow the leads until they are prepared for conversion. One of the great things about Salesforce CRM is that it is a multiplatform solution, which could be reached out from any electronic device, whether it’s a laptop, tablet or mobile device.
- HubSpot CRM is a free but robust CRM built on top of the HubSpot sales, marketing, and service suite, which helps you manage the entire customer journey. It’s true that all businesses have customers that they need to build a relationship with; therefore, using a CRM system makes sense. However, some industries benefit more from this type of tool compared to others. Here are the top five sectors that use CRM software the most.
Also take a look at
- Pipedrive is a powerful CRM system which combines sales process intelligence with easy-to-use interface and variable features. It’s a really good solution for the companies, which are focused on the client oriented sales process. The whole pipeline will drive you through the process of establishing new clients to closing the deals.
- NetSuite CRM is well-known CRM platform by Oracle that provides companies of different sizes with a complete 360-degree review of their customers in a real-time experience. The solution contains robus set of features and various review panels. Most importantly they include contact management, marketing automations, partner relations management, and knowledge database – one feature this app is most famous for.
Critical things
Hard to pick up an option among many offers of the market? Here is some critical features to pay attention to:
- Interaction tracking;
- Email integration;
- Document management;
- Pipeline management;
- Workflow automation.
4. Other useful systems and applications to consider
We already talked about some most important pieces of software, which can optimize your work, no matter what your business is up to. However, there are a lot more niche solutions in various fields which can help increase the automation of your processes and reduce the costs. We will talk about some of them.
- Marketing automation software can help your marketing teams with automation of their daily tasks and various routine processes. Such type of software significantly decreases risks of manual errors and boosts efficiency by helping your marketers focus on more important and creative tasks. Try considering Freshmarketer. It has extremely powerful automation tools, which makes it easy to engage with customers throughout their entire lifecycle. There are options to automate conversation using Artificial Intelligence chatbot integrated in popular messaging apps (for example Facebook Messenger). As well create auto-profiles for customer accounts, which will save your marketing team a lot of time. Ando also, which they usually dedicate to these repetitive administrative tasks. You can also look for some applications with similar functionality, such as HubSoft Marketing, Marapost Marketing Cloud and Marketo by Adobe.
2. Digital Asset Management system (DAM)
DAM is a solution, which will help you to organize and store your digital assets (such as photos, images, videos, and many more) in an easy and functional way. If this is something that is required for your business give a try to the Daminion DAM system. This is an industry-leading solution with the best value for money and ability to support the majority of the existing digital assets file formats.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) software helps to perform organic search marketing. It improves the ranking of websites in web search engine results, without paying directly for placement and promotion. The solutions use insight and recommend strategies most suitable to your business, which can help improve website’s positions in the search ranking list. There are lots of SEO solutions available on the market. We want to recommend Semrush here. Apart from its key features, such as modules for analytical reports, keyword search, advertising research, market explorer and traffic analyzer, it is a highly visual solution, which offers automatically generated graphs. Here are some other apps in this area you can have a look on: SE Ranking, MOZ Local.
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4. Social Media Monitoring & Management software is used to engage clients and prospects through social media. It helps tracking inbound and outbound brand mentions and social marketing campaigns, monitor activity of the users. All in all you will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of social media presence and make amendments to your strategy. We want to recommend Postoplan – it is an easy-to-use but powerful solution. It helps to communicate with your target audiences across multiple social media websites from one single platform. Coupled with using numerous useful features such as pre scheduled posts and useful tools for generating content. What makes this solution special is the ability to schedule posts in instant messaging apps, such as Slack, Telegram and WhatsApp. But you can also try some of this great apps for work with social media: Hootsuite and Zoho Social.
Moreover
5. Email management software – is crucial when you have to manage a large volume of inbound email correspondence with clients. There are different solutions on the market depending on your targets from client support channels to marketing campaigns. For instance, the solution we would like to recommend – Sendinblue. It is very marketing oriented. For example, with the help of this app you can build relationships and create leads through the various tools for email campaigns, marketing automation, SMS marketing, and creation of landing pages. In addition, there are more email management apps with similar functionality that you can try: Mailer Lite and Omnisend.
Conclusion
These days using all available MarTech solutions and applications is crucial, for running a successful business. In order to automotize, reduce costs and facilitate the most routine, boring and time-consuming marketing tasks. As a result, we really hope that our guide will be of help for you in your MarTech journey.
