Today we are going to take a closer look at the tools we use for or Marketing Automation projects. Marketing is a complex subject and to effectively automate it, the operational tools should be tuned to your business needs. Here is a summary of each of the major players in the marketing automation space. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is a good start for anyone wanting to improve their digital marketing and internal marketing operation.
Marketo is ideal for a well structured growing company who has a technical bend in either their IT department, or Marketing coders. The insight needed to get the most out of Marketo requires a strong balance between marketing campaign tactics, marketing strategy, and digital marketing implementation. Marketo is a powerful tool best suited for teams of 6 or more marketers. If your team does not have the time to support Marketo it is likely to just be an overpriced email marketing tool.
Ideal company size: 150ee's+
Marketing Team Size: 1 Marketing Operations Specialist or 6 team members including a digital marketer.
Price Range: $$$$ out of 5
Setup: Easy to start - challenging to scale without in-house or strong partnership expertise
Advantages: Incredible integration with Marketo Launch
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: By using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, our Marketing Automation solutions perfectly fit in with the customers’ existing customer-relationship-management (CRM) system. Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrates data from the whole Salesforce Ecosystem into your Marketing Management system, thus making it way more powerful than before. It also offers services for data analytics of your marketing campaigns in relation to the specific customers. This makes it a must-have for every Marketing Automation system.
Ideal company size: Medium and Enterprise
Marketing Team Size: 20 - 100's
Price Range: $$$$$ out of 5
Setup: Very complicated - complex integration with existing salesforce systems
Advantages: Link between CRM and Marketing automation, customer-specific data analytics
Hubspot: Hubspot specializes in Software that manages your campaigns and optimizes them one-by-one. Especially when it comes to search-engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing, hubspot is the best campaign management software you will find. It also provides deep analytical insights into the space of SEO with your current reach and an idea what reach you could expect by employing other measures.
Ideal company size: Small to mid-size
Marketing Team Size: 0 - 8
Price Range: $$ out of 5
Setup: Easy setup, no software development knowledge needed
Advantages: Search-Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing
Pardot: Specifically built for B2B-Marketing, Pardot aligns your Marketing team with your Sales team and gives you an overview of your potential leads and their likelihood of buying at any given moment. Pardot also offers engage alerts that remind you when a lead might need a bit of additional attention to commit to buying your product. Therefore, it makes your work more effective, since you can close more deals with less effort only focusing on the leads with the highest likelihood of buying. Being another Tool within the Salesforce Ecosystem, it also connects this helpful background data on your leads with your Salesforce database on them to connect Marketing and Sales team on a single platform.
Ideal company size: Medium and Enterprise
Marketing Team Size: 6 - 100's
Price Range: $$$ out of 5
Setup: easy to set up, hard to implement into existing environment without expertise
Advantages: engage alerts to convert more leads, link marketing and sales team
MailChimp: When it comes to managing and automating email campaigns, MailChimp is our choice. With MailChimp you can create an email campaign that automatically sends out promotional emails or information on your new product to all potential leads. In connection with the other tools already listed above, it also provides deep insights on the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Using MailChimp to send individualized mass emails to a large group of people is very easy and will help you get out the word about your company or your new product much faster.
Ideal company size: suitable for any size
Marketing Team Size: no designated marketing team needed, but ongoing support must be delegated to at least one person.
Price Range: $ out of 5
Setup: easiest to set-up, hard to master and implement into the automation environment
Advantages: scale e-mail campaigns much faster, individualize mass e-mails
Net Results: Looking for your second marketing automation tool - look no further. Net-Results has a reputation for being the first choice for the second marketing automation tool. Designed and suited for mid-market companies who need to get their data in place, segment on it and send out the right message to the right person at the right time.
Net-Results claims to be easier to use than Marketo, Eloqua or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, while still providing the power these tools provide and as an added bonus you get unlimited customer support.
Ideal company size: Medium and Enterprise
Marketing Team Size: 5 - 35
Price Range: $$$ out of 5
Setup: Included
Advantages: Training and support included. Transparent pricing. Customer support who's been in many transitions.
That’s it for today’s blog, hopefully you found the insight on these tools that you were looking for. If you need help with any of the tools above or just don’t know how to get started and wanna build a marketing automation system from scratch with us to improve your sales funnel, you can contact us here.