Marketing Software: What it is and Our Go-To Picks

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an all-in-one tool that just made your life as a business owner easier? Well, there actually is. Marketing software is designed to help you do whatever you need to do, from email marketing, to converting more leads, there is a tool out there for you. We’re not exaggerating either. Marketing software can be literally anything that accomplishes anything marketing related. It can be for email marketing, conversion campaigns, customer relationship management — anything. We can break it down like this, though. In general, it helps businesses do the following:

• Attract new customers and visitors
• Automate time-consuming, repetitive manual tasks
• Deliver marketing and promotional materials
• Emails
• Blogs
• Ads
• Promotional content
• Drive traffic through your sales funnel
• Surface insights about customers to improve marketing efforts

Benefits of a Marketing Software

If you haven’t already guessed it, marketing software is a must-have tool for every business owner. Whether you are looking for ways to better manage your marketing campaign, make the most out of your resources, or improve your lead nurturing process, a good marketing software makes it that much easier. With it, you can also reduce tedious tasks. Think about all the time you waste each day doing necessary, but tedious tasks such as client data management, sending emails to leads, or scheduling/posting content. It may seem like just minutes, but it all adds up over the week. Now imagine if you could automate all of that and streamlines it — that’s the power of a good marketing software.

Makes Customer Management Easier

You can’t thrive if you forget about your sales funnel. Moving your clients through it takes a lot of time that you may not have, which is why marketing softwares can help keep you on track with automated sequences, messaging, and data tracking. For this, you’ll want a CRM — a customer marketing management software — to track all of your client interactions on every platform, including social media. By using a CRM software or lead nurturing system, you can effortlessly schedule email campaigns, reply to leads promptly, build a better online presence, and keep tabs on current customers, thus increasing your customer management efficiency and their trust in you.

Everything is Faster

If you’ve ever run an advertising campaign, then you know how overwhelming the process can become. You have to check the performance of each ad on every platform, which can quickly turn into an entire day’s progress. The right marketing software puts everything you need right in front of you. You can quickly create accurate progress reports that help you assess the effectiveness of your strategies and determine how to improve them in the future.Additionally, it also makes it faster (and easier) for you to monitor and analyze lead conversions. It’s all right there, thus eliminating the risk of human error or you forgetting a crucial piece of data. Want one for yourself? Today, we at Helix House wanted to share a few of our favorite ones that we used daily or recommend to start-ups and small business owners.

Just Starting Out? Try Business Warrior

So many marketing softwares are aimed towards businesses that already have everything they need, thus overlooking a very important audience: startups and small businesses. Business Warrior is different. It’s designed to show small business owners exactly what they need to get more customers, bring in more sales, and build a foundation for future marketing endeavors. It’s perfect for small business owners who need a free option (yes free!) to boost their sales. Business Warrior is fun too — their software utilizes a feature we’ve never seen before. They score your business on a scale of 1 to 100, based on four key marketing areas:

• Advertising readiness
• Reputation
• Business listings
• Website/SEO

The closer to 100 you are in each category (and in your overall Business Score), the closer you are to effectively advertising your business online. Why do we love it? It makes everything so easy. Business Warrior scours the web for you and shows you exactly what you have, what you don’t, and what you need to do to increase your score in each of those four areas. For example, let’s say you have a great score of 75 in Advertising Readiness. You have Facebook advertising set up, Google Analytics and Tag Manager installed, and you think you’re ready to go. Business Warrior shows you that you’re missing one more crucial thing: a Facebook Retargeting Pixel. Without it, you can’t do a retargeting social ad campaign! Here’s exactly what that looks like on Business Warrior:

It’s so easy to use. You can unlock the base features for free or pay $99 a month for Scout. Scout includes helpful tutorials that walk you through everything, step-by-step. It’s quick and efficient. If you don’t have the time, then Business Warrior Pro is for you. For just $399 a month, Business Warrior professionals will increase your score for you. Not only that, $100 of that fee goes directly into an ad campaign for you. They’ll build it and launch it once your score is good to go, so you can start getting new customers and bringing in more sales immediately.

For the More Advanced Advertising Wizards, Try Hubspot Marketing

HubSpot Marketing is an advanced system that brings all of your marketing efforts together, and helps your team grow traffic and increase conversions. Its popular features include:

• Ad tracking and management
• Blog management
• Live Chat
• SEO
• Social media management
• Video

In a nutshell, Hubspot Marketing has everything you need in it, including landing page development, SEO optimization, contact forms, A/B testing, and code integration. All of this comes with a price though, and some understanding of how everything works and what you need to be successful. Like Business Warrior, Hubspot Marketing also has a free plan. This plan lets you set up and manage email marketing, forms, landing pages, social and paid search ads, contact management, and access to live chat. The drawback to Hubspot Marketing is that many of their features are locked behind a paywall, making them not very start-up or small business friendly. If you want Hubspot branding removed from your campaigns, then you need the Starter version, which costs $50/month. If you want social media and blog management, then you’ll need the Professional plan at $890/month. Their final plan, Enterprise at $3,200/month, supplies adaptive testing, predictive lead scoring, and multi-touch revenue attribution services.

So Marketing Software: Yay or Nay?

Yay, all the way. It is designed to make your life easier, period. We highly recommend checking one out — most have free versions or free trials too!