For your business to flourish, in today's world it is not enough just to put up a billboard at the entrance of your shop or cafe. We live in an online age, and therefore modern marketing is inextricably linked with the Internet and software.
Marketing software refers to a range of tools and platforms that are designed to help businesses manage, optimize and execute marketing campaigns. In this blog post, we will discuss the different types of marketing software and how to choose the best one for your business.
Table of Contents
- What Is Marketing Software?
- Types of Marketing Software
- How to Choose the Best Marketing Software?
- Benefits of All-in-One Platforms
- Conclusion
What Is Marketing Software?
Marketing software is a suite of tools designed to help you manage your marketing campaigns. It includes a range of features such as conversational marketing, email marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), social media management, search engine optimization (SEO), and more. Marketing software is meant to help you streamline your marketing operations and make the most of your marketing budget.
Types of Marketing Software
Marketing itself involves a bunch of operations and any of them can be automated with help of software. There are innumerable marketing applications on the Internet, from all-in-one platforms that can do everything to point solutions that help to perform one specific task. Thus you can count almost three dozen types of marketing apps.
But does the average small business owner need to use all this software? Of course, they don't. Let's say, does a coffee house need multi-level marketing tools? Well, probably not. But content marketing tools, such as your own SEO-friendly blog, will be useful.
Some popular types of marketing software are:
Email marketing software. This type of software helps businesses manage their email campaigns. It allows you to create and send email newsletters, segment your subscribers, and track email opens and clicks.
Conversational marketing software. These are chatbots – programs that can simulate human conversation. They replace human staff when it comes to customer support, customer engagement, lead qualification, and other issues that involve human interaction.
Content marketing software. Typically, content marketing refers to blogging or vlogging in the broadest sense. Therefore, some content marketing applications are aimed at promoting on video hosting sites, while others are aimed at creating blogs.
Software for building websites. A website is the most important marketing tool. Even now, in the age of social media. Although creating a website requires coding and knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript, and other stuff, you can also assemble one using a no-code visual editor.
Marketing integration and automation software. This software helps you to make different applications work together. It also automates repetitive marketing tasks such as sending personalized emails, lead nurturing, and lead generation.
Customer relationship management (CRM) software. This type of software allows you to manage your customer data, and sales pipelines, and track customer interactions.
How to Choose the Best Marketing Software?
The first and most important rule — is do not let the cunning software developers mislead you! They will be vying to offer you all kinds of tools for solving microtasks. And trust us, you don't need them! Too many apps will only make your life more difficult, and instead of doing business, you'll spend time learning about apps, customizing them, and integrating them.
As a result, you run the risk of slipping into collecting so-called shelfware — we talked about that in the article Stop Wasting Money: Tips For Reducing Software Expenses For Online Marketing.
How to protect yourself from collecting shelfware? Well, you should be clear on your needs. The same truths work here as in simple life, for example, when buying a car. You don't need to spend money on a Lamborghini if your goals are family trips to nature. Plus, set a budget and never go over it. Even if you really want to.
What else? When choosing the best marketing software for your business, consider the following factors:
User-friendliness. Marketing software should be easy to use, with an intuitive interface that can be easily navigated by team members, regardless of their technical expertise. Furthermore, it should be possible to train team members quickly, allowing them to start using the software without delay. Keep in mind that you can't expect a user-friendly interface from free and open-source software.
Integration with other tools. The integration of marketing software with other tools used in the organization is also important. Ensure that the marketing software is compatible with other marketing tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, email marketing tools, and chatbots to create a seamless integration and avoid the need for duplicate data entry.
Technical support. Make sure you get a quick response from technical support if you have technical problems or questions. It should be reliable, fast, and available during working hours. Well, preferably around the clock actually. This way you won't incur any losses due to failures.
And the last. Use the trial period. What exactly you should do to check the software before paying for it, we described in the article Picking The Right Marketing Software Is Challenging. It's about testing — functionality, usability, integrations, and compatibility.
Benefits of All-in-One Platforms
Frankly, the best solution for small and medium businesses is not a collection of marketing applications at all, but an all-in-one platform. This type of software offers a bunch of features and tools in one place, making it easier to manage your marketing campaigns. Here are the benefits of all-in-one marketing software platforms:
Cost savings. Having all your marketing tools in one place saves you money on different subscriptions.
Time savings. Since the platform is meant to bring multiple applications together in one place, you won't have to spend too much time learning and customizing each one.
Ease of integration. Being parts of the same platform, the applications included in it are naturally integrated with each other.
Our TruVISIBILITY Suite is just such an all-in-one platform. We have combined several great tools here — for email marketing, conversational marketing, and creating websites and blogs.
TruVISIBILITY Suite is:
Chat — an application for creating chatbots of any complexity. You can build simple rule-based chatbots, hybrid AI-powered chatbots, and set up a live chat.
Sites — a simple yet powerful website and landing page visual builder. You can use ready-made templates or make your website from scratch.
Messaging — a tool for designing emails and launching email marketing campaigns.
Blogs — a SEO-friendly environment for publishing articles.
All the TruVISIBILITY applications are part of one platform, and therefore they are easily integrated with each other literally in one click. You can also use them on their own with third-party applications. And all this without a line of code!
By registering with a freemium TruVISIBILITY account, you get unlimited access to fully functional software free of cost. As your business grows, you only pay for what you use without any contract.
The pricing is very simple, it's based on usage over the free monthly allotment. Thus it is extremely affordable for small to medium businesses. You can adjust the number of conversations your chatbots can have, the number of emails and SMS that can be sent per month, the number of websites you can deploy, and the capacity of your cloud storage. Simple and flexible!
Conclusion
With the right marketing software, your business can see tremendous growth in conversions, customer engagement, brand awareness, and more. Not surprisingly, software developers are vying with each other to offer more and more marketing tools in an effort to get your money.
You have to be strong and resist the temptation to sign up for a hundred shelfware subscriptions. Instead, be clear with your needs, stick to your budget, make use of trial periods, check out the user-friendliness of software, its integration capabilities, and technical support team performance.
But it's best to just relax and use the all-in-one platform that offers everything you really need to achieve your marketing goals.
With TruVISIBILITY Suite in place, your business will be set up for success! Sign up and start your digital marketing now!
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