SOURCE: https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/

CONTENT/INBOUND MARKETING LINKS

Reader demand for businesses to provide excellent content continues to rise. Seventy five percent of content marketers are increasing their content marketing investment to meet this demand, according to Curata’s 2016 content marketing industry survey. Because of this, the content marketing tools universe has expanded.

Curata has created a map of content marketing tools to help guide you through the many content marketing tools and technologies available to find the one that best fits your needs.

This list has been updated as of February 21, 2017. Of particular note is the continued emergence of the Content Marketing Platform category.

For more on choosing a Content Marketing Platform vendor, check out our eBook.

Why am I Doing This?

There has been major growth in the content marketing tools available to content marketers. While many of these tools existed for years prior to the advent of content marketing—and would normally be deemed as simply internet marketing tools, many of them are rechristening themselves as content marketing tools.

However, many of these tools are quite different from each other and serve vastly different purposes within content marketing. Some technologies may help create content, some may help distribute content, yet others help measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. Having attended dozens of content marketing conferences over the years, I have seen countless marketers and even analysts not know where to start, or how to make sense of the universe of content marketing tools.

Hasn’t This Been Done Before?

A few dedicated folks have attempted to assemble comprehensive collections of content marketing tools. Each of these attempts have arguably fallen short in one regard or another. Some have been limited in the amount of tools they covered, while others have been comprehensive but not grouped the tools together in an intuitive manner.

Regardless, here’s a list of people and organizations who have made honorable attempts in the past:

• Everything PR. In January of 2013, Everything PR put together a list of 100 Content Marketing tools. While it’s one of the most comprehensive lists, I have seen, it doesn’t strictly list “tools” in the sense of technologies. Many of the entries are resource sites and blogs such as the Content Rules Blog, or events such as Content Marketing World 2013. While such resources can be helpful for marketers, they are not strictly tools. The list also makes no attempt to organize and group tools together.

• Oracle Marketing Cloud. In December of 2012, Eloqua published an infographic called the Social Business Shift. While it’s a nice graphic, it doesn’t strictly focus on content marketing; it instead focuses on tools with a social component such as Kiva and Kickstarter for crowd funding, or Taleo for talent sourcing.

• Altimeter. In April of 2013, Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter started a list of 15 content marketing vendors. We were flattered to have Curata included in the initial list. More recently, Altimeter has published a content marketing vendor landscape which includes over 100 content marketing tools. However, the list does not include some of the broader categories we have included here.

• Content Amp. Also in April of 2013, U.K.-based content marketing agency Content Amp created an impressive and visually appealing infographic featuring a wide variety of content marketing tools, with an attempt at groupings as well. While this is perhaps the best map of the content marketing vendor set I have seen, it is lacking in the number of vendors and categories covered. For example, it misses content curation tools entirely, and has a confusing category called Curated Content & Forums that includes technologies such as the commenting system Disqus, which has no relevance to curated content. The infographic is not strictly restricted to “tools” and has a category for content marketing agencies.

Disclaimer

I have pieced together this graphic over time, but few could keep up with the rapidly evolving space of content marketing tools. Here are some disclaimers and areas where things could be better.

• It’s not comprehensive. For every tool you see in the map, there is a long tail of many other tools that are similar or perform parts of functions of the tool included in this graphic. I have included the content marketing tools I feel stand out the most in their categories. For a further breakdown of some of these categories, check out the following: Content Writing Services: The Ultimate List, Content Promotion Tools: The Ultimate List, Content Curation Tools: The Ultimate List, and Content Marketing Agencies: The Ultimate List.

• It’s not as clear cut as it seems. There are many content marketing tools that fall into multiple categories, but I have placed them in the category that best represents them. For example, Marketing AI measures analytics for your content, then helps you better optimize your content. In this case, should Marketing AI fall into the Analytics or Optimization tools group? In this case, I placed them in the Analytics group. However, Parse.ly is a relatively similar tool I decided to place into the Optimization category.

It’s not complete. I am sure there are entire categories missing here. I hope you will recommend and suggest additional content marketing tools for this map in the comments below.

 

Content Marketing Tools: The Ultimate List

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Content Marketing Tools: The Ultimate List

TOOLS & TECHNOLOGY

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Reader demand for businesses to provide excellent content continues to rise. Seventy five percent of content marketers are increasing their content marketing investment to meet this demand, according to Curata’s 2016 content marketing industry survey. Because of this, the content marketing tools universe has expanded.

Curata has created a map of content marketing tools to help guide you through the many content marketing tools and technologies available to find the one that best fits your needs.

This list has been updated as of February 21, 2017. Of particular note is the continued emergence of the Content Marketing Platform category.

For more on choosing a Content Marketing Platform vendor, check out our eBook.

Why am I Doing This?

There has been major growth in the content marketing tools available to content marketers. While many of these tools existed for years prior to the advent of content marketing—and would normally be deemed as simply internet marketing tools, many of them are rechristening themselves as content marketing tools.

However, many of these tools are quite different from each other and serve vastly different purposes within content marketing. Some technologies may help create content, some may help distribute content, yet others help measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. Having attended dozens of content marketing conferences over the years, I have seen countless marketers and even analysts not know where to start, or how to make sense of the universe of content marketing tools.

Hasn’t This Been Done Before?

A few dedicated folks have attempted to assemble comprehensive collections of content marketing tools. Each of these attempts have arguably fallen short in one regard or another. Some have been limited in the amount of tools they covered, while others have been comprehensive but not grouped the tools together in an intuitive manner.

Regardless, here’s a list of people and organizations who have made honorable attempts in the past:

• Everything PR. In January of 2013, Everything PR put together a list of 100 Content Marketing tools. While it’s one of the most comprehensive lists, I have seen, it doesn’t strictly list “tools” in the sense of technologies. Many of the entries are resource sites and blogs such as the Content Rules Blog, or events such as Content Marketing World 2013. While such resources can be helpful for marketers, they are not strictly tools. The list also makes no attempt to organize and group tools together.
• Oracle Marketing Cloud. In December of 2012, Eloqua published an infographic called the Social Business Shift. While it’s a nice graphic, it doesn’t strictly focus on content marketing; it instead focuses on tools with a social component such as Kiva and Kickstarter for crowd funding, or Taleo for talent sourcing.
• Altimeter. In April of 2013, Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter started a list of 15 content marketing vendors. We were flattered to have Curata included in the initial list. More recently, Altimeter has published a content marketing vendor landscape which includes over 100 content marketing tools. However, the list does not include some of the broader categories we have included here.
• Content Amp. Also in April of 2013, U.K.-based content marketing agency Content Amp created an impressive and visually appealing infographic featuring a wide variety of content marketing tools, with an attempt at groupings as well. While this is perhaps the best map of the content marketing vendor set I have seen, it is lacking in the number of vendors and categories covered. For example, it misses content curation tools entirely, and has a confusing category called Curated Content & Forums that includes technologies such as the commenting system Disqus, which has no relevance to curated content. The infographic is not strictly restricted to “tools” and has a category for content marketing agencies.

Disclaimer

I have pieced together this graphic over time, but few could keep up with the rapidly evolving space of content marketing tools. Here are some disclaimers and areas where things could be better.

• It’s not comprehensive. For every tool you see in the map, there is a long tail of many other tools that are similar or perform parts of functions of the tool included in this graphic. I have included the content marketing tools I feel stand out the most in their categories. For a further breakdown of some of these categories, check out the following: Content Writing Services: The Ultimate List, Content Promotion Tools: The Ultimate List, Content Curation Tools: The Ultimate List, and Content Marketing Agencies: The Ultimate List.
• It’s not as clear cut as it seems. There are many content marketing tools that fall into multiple categories, but I have placed them in the category that best represents them. For example, Marketing AI measures analytics for your content, then helps you better optimize your content. In this case, should Marketing AI fall into the Analytics or Optimization tools group? In this case, I placed them in the Analytics group. However, Parse.ly is a relatively similar tool I decided to place into the Optimization category.

It’s not complete. I am sure there are entire categories missing here. I hope you will recommend and suggest additional content marketing tools for this map in the comments below.

Content Marketing Tools

 

FUNNEL ANALYTICS TOOLS

Full Circle Insights – A marketing performance management tool that gives Salesforce users insight into their overall marketing impact.

Squeeze CMM – Measure the ROI of content with this tool that generates reports and tracks audience activity and interests.

Insight Squared – An all in one analytics software for sales, finance, marketing and support data.

Bright Funnel – B2B Platform that allows CMOs to attribute, forecast, and benchmark their demand generation efforts

SEO ANALYTICS TOOLS

Raven Tools– Report on all marketing campaigns using metrics that pertain to SEO, PPC and social media.

SEM Rush – Gives users the ability to track keywords across both paid and organic search campaigns.

moz – Enables users to monitor social media, manage SEO campaigns, and more.

BrightEdge – Measure and improve the SEO of your site with this content performance tool.

MarketMuse – Crawls your site to identify gaps in content. Finds prominent keywords, and determines how your site stacks up against competitors.

gShift – Gauge your company’s web presence with this analysis tool. Then use the insights to improve the discoverability of your brand on search and social.

SerpStat – Conducts in-depth competitive analysis based on SEO performance through domain lookup.

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EMAIL MARKETING TOOLS

Constant Contact – Design professional-looking emails, grow and manage your email list, and track results. In addition to email, Constant Contact offers tools for social campaigns, online surveys, and more.

iContact – Create HTML emails and signup forms, send campaigns to customers inboxes, track email campaigns, and more. Also offers social social media marketing tools.

Campaign Monitor – Customize your email template, send campaigns, conduct A/B testing, integrate with your blog, and more.

Vertical Response – This free tool enables companies to send emails and newsletters that are responsive on all platforms.

RapidMail – RapidMail is an email newsletter software that also delivers statistics and insights needed to grow a subscriber base.

Sales Panda – Create better marketing collateral, improve SEO, and share relevant content on social media to build your sales pipeline.

GetResponse – GetResponse is an email marketing software that assists in the design and distribution of content for better consumer engagement.

Emma – This email marketing software offers several different editions, customized for businesses, agencies, non-profits and universities.

MailChimp – Use this email marketing software to create a subscriber base, automate and personalize emails.

 

BLOGGING AND CMS TOOLS

Percussion – This streamlined CMS offers editable templates, shared assets, versioning, automatic link management, drag and drop editing, and more. Enables content producers to simplify their content editing and publishing process.

Tumblr – Known for its community of content creators and curators and its capabilities for sharing multimedia content. This microblogging platform hosts over 100 million blogs.

WordPress – The world’s most popular CMS and blogging software lets users create custom themes, add plugins, publish content, moderate comments, and more.

Livejournal – With over 63 million journals and communities, Livejournal offers a free, open-source platform for blogging and sharing content.

Drupal – This open-source CMS powers millions of websites and applications. Add-on modules and designs let companies or individuals tailor a site to their needs.

ScribbleLive – Combines content planning and publishing tools to allow marketers to create robust content hubs and websites.

Contentful – Content Management platform helping editors and developers oversee and serve content into mobile and web applications.

Content MX – Platform to help define and implement a content strategy across blogs, social media and email newsletters.

DISTRIBUTION/SYNDICATION TOOLS

Brightcove – Cloud content services provider. Offers an online video platform for adding custom video players to websites, social media profiles, and mobile destinations.

PR Newswire – Distribute news releases to a global media database of more than 700,000 journalists and blogger contacts. Monitor traditional and social media, and engage in real time with journalists, bloggers, and other influencers.

SlideShare – Upload and share slide presentations, gain insight into who’s viewing your presentations, collect business leads, and more.

Cadence9 – A unified solution for managing content marketing. Lets marketers plan content using an editorial calendar, assign tasks to team members, manage content creation and publishing workflow, and more.

Papershare – Cloud-based promotional tool for content marketers that distributes to multiple channels. Alerts marketing and sales teams when content is published. Leads are also integrated into salesforce and marketing automation softwares.

PixxFly – Automate the distribution and syndication of all your content with this outbound marketing automation solution.

INFLUENCER MARKETING TOOLS

Traackr – Manage influencer relationships. Traackr lets users discover influencers, nurture relationships, and demonstrate the impact of these relationships.

Little Bird – A social monitoring tool. Users can create lists of peer-validation ranked influencers across social platforms on various topics to stay on top of the conversation in their industry.

Onalytica – Provides influencer marketing software and supporting services. Helps users identify industry influencers and improve relationships with them.

BuzzSumo – A content performance analysis tool. Can identify the influencers who are creating popular, newsworthy content.

Klout – Scores social media users’ influence on a 100-point scale. Takes into account platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, LinkedIn and more.

Exposely – Pairs brands with influencers willing to sell advertising space on their social channels and other owned platforms.

Tap Influence – Makes it easy for brands to identify and communicate with social media influencers, and collaborate on content creation.

Kred – Users can identify social media influencers with Kred, which measures influence based on Twitter and Facebook output.

Brand24 – Searches for mentions across the web. This is a good way for searching influencers, getting news from your niche, checking opinions, etc.

Dibz – A link building and prospecting tool for independent SEO consultants and full-service marketing agencies.

ADVOCATE MARKETING TOOLS

GaggleAMP – Amplify social media efforts. This tool allows you to create “gaggles” of people who can share company social media updates to their followers.

SocialChorus – Create brand ambassadors out of employees, customers and partners. This tool enables the amplification of social media posts.

Amplifinity – Creates advocacy programs across several mediums such as email, direct mail and social media.

EveryoneSocial – Allow employees and customers to build their own social profiles while simultaneously sharing your company’s created and curated content.

SoAmpli – Encourage employees to become brand advocates. Helps you feed content to employees and reward them accordingly.

Influitive – Create an army of advocates. Fosters a community of customers to share your content across various platforms.

SociaLook – Increase content traffic and conversion rates by sending messages through employees’ social media presence.

Dynamic Signal – Lets employees receive and post company-approved content to their social networks, transforming them into experts, advocates, and contributors. By extending their social media strategies, Dynamic Signal’s clients ignite brand awareness, employee engagement and revenue.

Sociabble – An employee advocacy platform. Enables companies to reach and share more effectively by creating a one-stop information hub for employees.

Social Chorus – A handheld app that connects every employee to a daily digest of work news and content.

PAID PROMOTION TOOLS

ContentGain – This widget places links to third-party content on other websites to boost distribution. The original content publisher shares ad revenue with the website sharing the content.

Disqus – This discussion platform helps bloggers and website publisher engage readers through the comment section.

OneSpot – Automatically turns owned or earned content into optimized ads. Also distributes the content across OneSpot’s ad inventory, retargets users, and monitors results.

Gravity – Using algorithms based on users’ reading and sharing history, Gravity enables websites to deliver personalized recommendations.

Limk – Content distribution and discovery platform that helps websites grow traffic while reaching highly engaged audiences.

Outbrain.com – This content discovery tool recommends your content to readers of other premium publishers. Offers a personalized reader experience and exposes your content to engaged readers.

Vocus – Scans for prospects looking for companies like yours. Suggests relevant social conversations, and distributes your press for traffic and search.

Taboola – This promotional tool takes your content and places it on publishing websites, targeting it towards your selected audience.

nRelate – This platform helps content developers and publishers find an easier path to their target audience. Grow your reader-base from your site or elsewhere on the web.

Content Blvd – Connect with brands and publishers to create relevant and rewarding product placements.

Vibrant Media – This native advertising tool places content directly within other editorial content and all triggers are user-initiated.

issuu – Publish content such as magazines, catalogs, eBooks and more on this free platform.

Shareaholic – Implement sharing buttons and advertise content with this all-in-one content amplification platform.

Cooperatize – Promote sponsored content with this tool that connects brands with the most popular bloggers and publishers across the Internet.

Zemanta – This plug-in creates connections between bloggers, content creators, and publishers that publish content on similar topics.

For a deeper dive into content promotion tools, consult Curata’s ultimate list.

WEBINAR TOOLS

ReadyTalk – This online conferencing tool offers a single interface for web, audio, and video conferencing. Also features the ability to record and share webinars and integrate with mobile conferencing.

Webex – Using Cisco’s webinar products, users can host or attend meetings using HD video, share files, and more.

BrightTalk – Run interactive live webinars with features including real-time polls, downloads, question and answer, and more.

GoToMeeting – This online meeting platform allows users to host unlimited meetings with up to 25 attendees. Is supported for Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, and Android.

iMeet – A cloud-based video conferencing platform that allows up to 15 users to talk via webcams.

EVENT MARKETING TOOLS

CVENT – Offers software solutions to event planners. Includes online event registration, venue selection, event management, mobile apps for events, email marketing and web surveys.

Double Dutch – Mobile event applications, with a unique focus on capturing and surfacing data from live events.

Certain – Designed specifically for marketers and other professionals to easily organize, manage and produce live events.

EventPro – Can be used for all of your event scheduling needs, from booking rooms to catering and beverages.

eTouhes – Helps your whole team collaborate and manage the event planning process from end to end.

Eventbrite – Set up events, control ticket prices and communicate with attendees.

Guidebook – Build and launch branded mobile app guides for corporate meetings, sales kickoffs, trainings, conferences and events.

DIGITAL ASSET MANAGEMENT

Widen – Create, manage, distribute and preserve content with this digital asset management system.

WebDAM – Gives enterprise customers the ability to store, organize, find, retrieve and share digital files.

Canto – Simplifies the management of all digital assets within a company, creating smarter workflow processes and organization opportunities.

Razuna – Stores, shares, secures and indexes digital files and then makes them available in a search tool.

Adobe Experience Manager – Companies can create, manage, and optimize digital customer experiences. Works across a number of channels including web, mobile apps and sites, as well as social communities.

IntelligenceBank – Offers four different asset management apps based on your business size and specific needs. Provides features such as file storage, and risk and compliance.

Media Valet – Access and manage your assets from virtually anywhere with this cloud computing software.

Bynder – Cloud-based brand management software that optimizes and automates internal content processes.

CONTENT AUDIT TOOLS

Content Insight – Develop a content inventory with this auditing tool that provides you with a summary all existing content.

Blaze Content – Inventory, audit, and analyze your content.

SOURCES FOR CONTENT CREATION

Scripted – Subcontract writing projects to an online writing team through this online platform. Also offers copyediting and the ability to request pitches from writers.

Textbroker – Assign writing projects including SEO and website localization through this online platform.

Skyword – This content production system allows companies to manage and pay writers, use an SEO scorecard to optimize content, and more.

Brafton – Features in-house search engine optimization and social media marketing expertise. This online agency creates news content, videos, infographics, and other items for businesses.

Zerys – A project management tool and content marketplace. Allows businesses to locate professional freelance writers, assign and review content, export or auto-publish content, and more.

Pulse Point – Technology platform that combines programmatic targeting, distribution and optimization with content marketing.

DOZ – Sources, qualifies and selects the best local marketing professionals to execute marketing tasks.

Contently – Online platform for content marketing. Find and collaborate with high-quality freelance writers, manage payments and assignments, and more.

Copify – Platform that helps users looking to outsource content creation. Marketers can find qualified copywriters by providing details such as topic and format.

Wordsmith – This software enables you to create an unlimited number of articles or reports using data. Upload your data, design your story structure and generate your content. (Wordsmith by Automated Insights)

For a deeper dive into content writing services, consult our ultimate list.

CONTENT CURATION TOOLS

Curata CCS – Easily find, organize and share relevant content for your business. Position your brand as an industry thought leader, increase brand visibility, and generate leads.

Scribit – Search and browse for articles and videos, share content, and track conversions using this content curation platform.

Magnify – This fully customizable platform allows publishers and brands curate and share online videos.

CONTENT OPTIMIZATION TOOLS

Scribe – Created by the people behind Copyblogger Media. Scribe helps content creators identify topics relevant to the intended audience, measure social media engagement around content, and more.

Wordy – Pairs professional content editors with users to edit, proof and optimize various forms of written content.

Atomic Reach – This content scoring system analyzes content based on quality and relevance for specific audience segments such as “Specialist” or “Academic.”

LOCALIZATION

CloudWords – This translation management tool allows you to localize content. Simply upload it to the system and then select a vendor to translate it.

SmartLing – Speak to customers in their native language. Automates the translation process by connecting content producers with translation professionals.

Translationcloud.net – This is a hub for hiring professionals who translate content to a variety of languages.

Phrase App – Translate content that is stored on websites, mobile and desktop applications with this translation management software.

Crowd in – Manage the localization workflow process. This software helps control the process, and also provides tools for translators to work more efficiently.

OneSky – Translate apps or websites into 47 different languages with this translation service platform.

PoEditor – Allows for a hassle free software localization process through a collaborative translation platform.

CONTENT ENRICHMENT TOOLS

Storify – Collect social media mentions on a chosen topic, trend, or event. Curate the best social media elements in one place.

Silk – Use your company’s data to create structured web pages that automatically draw connections between facts, data, and more.

AcroLinx – Make all content consistent. This tool analyzes each writer’s content for tone of voice, style, SEO, and more to ensure it aligns with a predetermined company standard.

WRITING TOOLS

Byword – This text editor works across desktops, iPads and iPhones. Allows users to compose text with keyboard shortcuts, word counters, and more.

Hemingway – Hemingway brings clarity to your writing. Identifies common mistakes in sentences such as illogical structure, grammatical errors, and overuse of adverbs.

Evernote – A workspace app that syncs across all your devices. Manage notes, ideas, and sketches to create better, more organized writing.

Ulysses – This text editing app lets users focus on writing. Provides the regular features of a word processor without cluttering up the screen.

Quabel – Use Quabel to write distraction-free in full-screen mode. Also keep track of word count and estimated time for someone to read the piece.

Google Docs – Use Google’s online word processor to write, track changes and collaborate with other users.

WriteWell – Online software that helps you write efficiently and effectively with processes and templates.

CONTENT COLLABORATION TOOLS

Compendium – Plan your content using Compendium’s calendar-based tool. Create efficiently placed content across multiple channels, and track the effectiveness of each piece of content.

CoSchedule – An all-in-one collaborative editorial calendar for marketing. Allows you to schedule posts, social media, and team tasks, all from WordPress or the web app.

Divvy – This platform combines web-based calendars, content management and online collaboration. Helps global content teams plan, schedule and produce any type of content across an organization.

ProofHub – Project management tool for organization and collaboration with clients, vendors and stakeholders.

Comindware – Delivers Business Operations Management solutions to enable performance and efficiency optimization.

GatherContent – Organize and streamline your website content. Use drag and drop features, create content guidelines, collaborate with a content team, and export content using this online collaboration tool.

Google Drive – Create, store, and share including spreadsheets, text documents, drawings, forms, and presentations.

Kapost – This content marketing platform allows marketers to collaborate, distribute, and analyze all content types within a single platform.

SocialCast – This collaboration tool organizes workflow into a single location accessible from anywhere on any device.

Marketing-AI – With this platform users are able to collaborate with team members in a calendar, build a content strategy using a framework, promote published content, and measure its impact.

Curata – Curata enables marketers to create better content, and finally know what works to grow leads and revenue. The Curata CMP content marketing platform offers strategy, production (e.g., calendaring, workflow) and comprehensive analytics. Curata CCS offers enterprise level content curation.

Beegit – Use Beegit to organize your content marketing workflow across teams and departments. This all-in-one collaboration tool monitors activity, approval, communications and images.

Brightpod – This project management tool is made specifically for digital marketing activities, monitoring project status, task assignment and more.

Contentful – This cloud-based software allows for live collaboration, image uploading and a publishing tool that optimizes content for any device.

Content Launch – Designed specifically for small and medium sized businesses. Helps manage workflow and distributes content with one click.

Trello – Trello is an easy and visual way to manage your projects and organize anything.

Hightail – Cloud platform for creatives to share files, get feedback, and take projects from conception to completion. Share images, videos, PDFs, presentations, and more.

Conversion Optimization Tools

SumoMe – Add a variety of pop-up and opt-in forms to your website to generate leads and grow your subscriber base.

Pippity – Use Pippity to create pop-up subscription forms for your site. Customize when these forms appear and experiment with A/B testing.

BrightInfo – Assess the conversion rate of your existing website. Create more opportunities for conversion with a variety of opt-in form placements.

Convert – Learn the content preferences of your website visitors using A/B testing. Optimize your site to increase conversions.

Optimizely – Track and analyze all conversion opportunities on your site and make appropriate improvements and changes.

Captora – Captora helps marketers scale and optimize digital marketing campaigns to accelerate pipeline and capture new buyers.

GRAPHIC CREATION TOOLS

Easelly – Uses a theme-based approach to creating infographics and visualizations. This online tool lets users drag and drop art into a theme to create shareable graphics.

Visual.ly – Browse infographics and data visualizations. Create your own to drive traffic to your brand’s website and amplify your social media presence.

Adobe Creative Cloud – Sync and organize your creative assets across multiple devices. Track comments, build and publish websites, apps, and more.

Youzign – Create nine different types of graphics, from infographics to flyers, with this free, online graphic design tool.

Pixlr – Edit and create photos for your website and ensure they are optimized for various devices.

Canva – Online image creation tool that also comes with a stock photo library. Create graphics for your blog, social channels, website and much more.

infogr.am – Helps users create interactive infographics. You can edit data, download infographics and share and embed them.

PicsTouch – Free and easy to use tool for cropping and resizing images.

Piktochart – Provides infographic templates for users and helps you create and share compelling content.

TinyPNG – Allows you to compress png files to host on your website.

Snappa – Easy to use graphics design tool with hundreds of ready made templates to choose from.

Placeit – Drop an image into an iPhone, iPad, or Macbook mockup. No photoshop needed.

Image Changer – This online image manipulation tool lets you crop and resize images, make fun faces, and easily generate memes.

Venngage – An infographic design software geared towards marketers, SMB execs, and educators with over 500 templates.

VIDEO CREATION TOOLS

KnowledgeVision – Turn presentations and web content into an integrated, interactive online video experience. Does not require special software or app downloads.

Brainshark – Sync up marketing and sales people using a systematic, coordinated approach in this content-centric sales platform.

Camtasia – Helps users create high quality videos without prior experience. This tool records on-screen activity and also allows users to import from HD devices to edit and share video content

Jing – This free tool helps users share images and record videos from their screens. Users are able to quickly share this media to email, social and other various platforms.

Wyzowl – This software helps create engaging visual content such as videos to market a brand.

Animatron – Free HTML5 online animation maker, banner maker, and video maker.

idomoo – Personalized video as a service. Provides scalable, secure mass video production. Video is automatically produced and personalized with each customer’s information and/or relevant offers.

Presentation Tools

Prezi – This presentation tool helps users organize and share ideas by creating visualizations.

EBOOK CREATION TOOLS

Lookbook HQ – Compiles all the information you want to display to customers into a visually appealing lookbook that’s embeddable and shareable.

Uberflip – Pulls all of your content: articles, social channels, and videos, into a single centralized content hub.

Zmags – This platform helps e-commerce users create and share online catalogs, lookbooks, magazines, etc. to increase consumer engagement.

AUDIO CREATION TOOLS

Audacity – Record, edit and publish podcasts and interviews with this free software.

Podbean – Share and create podcasts with this tool that also lets you sell podcasts with no transaction fee.

ePodcast Creator – Control and customize every step of the podcast creation process. A full editing studio that creates a professional sound.

INTERACTIVE CONTENT MARKETING TOOLS

Wheeldo – Use Wheeldo to create lead-generating quizzes for your website, email list or social channels.

SnapApp – Helps users create interactive content that runs across all platforms and is customized for each device.

ion Interactive – This software transforms existing content into interactive content, such as lookbooks, calculators, infographics and more.

Qzzr – Users can create quizzes to embed on websites, share on social media and eventually generate leads.

Contest Factory – Create surveys, questionnaires, sweepstakes and more with this software and service provider.

StatSilk – Statsilk is a visualization software that enables users to make interactive maps and other types of visualizations.

Votigo – Build content, sweepstakes and other interactive elements across social platforms with this social marketing management tool.

Kuia – Create calculators to better understand your visitors. Create charts and quizzes that get results.

Zembula – Enables enterprise marketers to build and implement interactive content across multiple channels—and measure success

Content Marketing Tools: The Ultimate List

 

MARKETING AUTOMATION LINKS 2018-19

20 Best Marketing Automation Software Solutions of 2018

Is your marketing program getting harder to manage as it grows bigger? A category of software you can use to automate, streamline, and measure your marketing-related workflows and tasks is marketing automation software. Since there are plenty of products available in the industry, we compiled the 20 best marketing automation software solutions of 2018 to narrow down your search.

Marketing automation solutions changed the way businesses handle the relationship between their brand and customers. By automating various processes that would have otherwise been performed manually, you increase the efficiency and efficacy of your team in your marketing initiatives. This makes it a crucial component of customer relationship management.

Among others, the system uses predictive algorithm to target the right recipients of your marketing campaigns. Through a targeted and personalized approach, you can drive more conversions, turning leads into customers.

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why 91% of respondents described marketing automation systems as crucial to their omnichannel marketing efforts according to a survey by Marketo. Meanwhile, 25% of them rated “very successful” to their marketing automation strategy.

In a separate study in 2014, Harvard Business Review listed marketing automation systems as one of the 7 most important marketing technologies for each company to use. With these statistics, it’s easy to see why businesses choose to invest in this solution.

There are plenty of products available making it tedious to choose one. In addition to conducting a comprehensive business evaluation of your needs, it is helpful to explore and compare the features and functionalities of leading products in the category. To help you narrow the list down, we compared the 20 best marketing automation software solutions you should consider in 2018.

1. HubSpot Marketing

HubSpot Marketing ranks first on the list because of its overall complete functionality in helping you launch effective marketing campaigns. It specializes as an all-in-one inbound marketing solution to drive your traffic, increase lead conversions, and improve your ROI. It’s a tool that can help you from building and modifying your website to measuring the performance of your campaigns. An appealing test drive of all its features is available to you when you sign up for a HubSpot Marketing free trial here.

Known as one of the leaders in inbound marketing, HubSpot enables customers to discover and reach you in various channels—through social media, blogs, and search engines. It ensures quality over quantity by targeting content only to qualified leads and customers.

The platform empowers personalization by enabling users to design and customize their own workflows, content and formats. Furthermore, it optimizes your content for smarter targetting. Landing pages are customizable through the app’s drag-and-drop interface. In addition to marketing automation, its main features include social media monitoring, lead management, and landing pages, among others. 

What is unique about HubSpot Marketing?

1. A hassle-free working environment. HubSpot Marketing is a reasonable alternative for first-time MA users, as it comes with an intuitive, hassle-free interface that performs proficiently even without coding. Users can build a website without IT knowledge, design their own workflows, prepare, format, and publish content, and engage customers in a more personalized way.
2. Compact and ready-to-use marketing funnel. Becoming an expert marketer has never been easier: You simply create an account, place contacts in the most appropriate stage of the funnel, score them, and personalize and distribute your content.
3. Marketing impact reports. The system relies on its tight HubSpot CRM and Salesforce connections to provide first-hand access to traffic data, and pull out valuable stats. You get to report confidently on the impact of each marketing effort, and learn how to improve your sales performance.
4. Delighted customers. What if your marketing system can give users additional reasons to visit your website? HbSPot Marketing specializes in delighting users, providing them keywords and key phrases, blog blueprints for optimized visibility, and content arranged in a way they’d expect it to be.
5. Part of a powerful business growth stack. HubSpot Marketing can be used both independently, and as part of the company’s sales+marketing+CRM stack. This means that you can have a single system in charge of boosting your traffic, motivating visitors to convert, closing deals, and staying organized.

2. SharpSpring

SharpSpring‘s team believes that in-time delivery and streamlined communication are businesses’ main assets to drive growth and conversion, and thus focuses all features and efforts on helping you build relationships that will last. The system is very simple and painless to afford, and lets you distribute the right messages to the right people, at the right time. It is also one of the best integrated tools on this list, fully optimized for mobile usage and easily deployed by non-professionals. You should consider it because of marketing automation trends and tips, social assistance, powerful customer insights, and end-to-end mobile CRM.

What is unique about SharpSpring?

1. A simplified and personalized email marketing experience. SharpSpring makes email automation more than simple. It does not offer blast emails but rather personalized email messages, which are distributed to the right customers in the right time. Therefore, you will have the peace of mind that your correspondence won’t end up in the spam folder.
2. Dynamic forms for lead capturing. Lead capturing dynamic forms grab your visitors’ attention and give them an opportunity to get answers to their inquiries. A well-structured dynamic form becomes an essential part of your website and is easy to fill. It has a smooth drag-and-drop editor that allows you to build, customize and reorder the fields.
3. Streamlined social media integrations. SharpSpring allows you to follow your customers (and prospective customers) on popular social media, and observe their behavior and interests. Third party CRMs can also be integrated without any complicated procedures.
4. Moderate pricing. Instead of offering fixed plans for users coming from different market tiers and industries, SharpSpring works with custom pricing, and tailors an individual plan for each customer based on what he needs ad can afford.
5. Excellent client support. SharpSpring’s friendly and knowledgeable team can be accessed easily via email and phone, be it that you’re a basic or a premium user. They will be there to answer your questions and provide free-of-charge tips. Interested users can also check their free demo to see how this system works.

3. bpm’online marketing

bpm’online is a productive suite that brings together marketing, sales, and CRM functions into an affordable and flexible bundle. The vendor also offers a free trial for those who’d like to try out all the key features first. You can easily sign up for bpm’online free trial here.

The product’s system functions as a core lead generator and a differentiator that analyzes prospect behavior. It then makes it easy to distinguish sales-ready leads regardless of their industry, location, or purchase history. It is also an agent-friendly and well-organized hub that puts valuable data within easy reach, keeping your budget safe from excess expenses all along. The plans are affordable and customer-centered. Additionally, it doesn’t charge any recurring fees.

What is even more important is that bpm’online makes marketing just as agile and business-specific as you need it, allowing you to draft campaigns and target users the way you want to. Such customization ensures invaluable benefits for brand awareness, transforming even the least-known business into a reliable and trustworthy partner. At the same time, you can integrate it easily with the rest of your software system, both when using it as a separate tool or in synergy with other bpm products.

What is unique about bpm’online marketing?

1. End-to-end marketing automation. bpm’online marketing can be described as an agile and flexible system which compares marketing channels to distinguish the ones that generate the best leads, and does the same with prospects to select sales-ready ones, and to assign them to the right users. At the same time, this system modifies marketing streams, and tests the effect of different targeting processes to help you adapt to your business environment.
2. A variety of useful lead nurturing practices. Being an omnichannel product, bpm’online leverages the best lead nurturing practices, so that leads would be automatically routed from one sales stage to the other, be it acquisition, qualification, or distribution.
3. An inbuilt content creator. Creative teams can use bpm’online to develop their own brand-specific promotional materials, including e-books and papers, videos, conference events, newsletters, and many more.
4. Summarizing and analyzing lead information. bpm’online marketing covers all most effective lead management practices to collect and summarize information, making sure that all important customer details are clearly visible to the user. It focuses foremost on customers’ behavior and interaction with your content, and puts in action some sophisticated mapping to ensure accurate customer segmentation.
5. Collaboration features. bpm’online marketing gathers all customer data on a single location, and makes it accessible to all agents regardless of the department where they are working. In this way, the system eliminates miscommunication and duplicate entries, and makes sure everyone is on the same page. Note that the tool is also fully mobile-optimized, and allows agents to use it even when not in the office.
6. Member of a compact productivity bundle. Pushed by the idea to create a fully-functional customer management suite, bpm’online united three productive modules in a single CRM package – Sales, Marketing, and Service. The price of this bundle is very affordable, which is why we recommend it to all companies looking to enhance customer service.

4. LeadSquared

If looking to combine marketing automation and CRM functionality on a fair price, look no further than LeadSquared. This is the tool that lands more leads and sells more products in synergy, and a valuable asset for large and decentralized teams. There is much to like about it, but we’d point out its efficient lead conversion practices, which happen to be unique in this industry: LeadSqaured works independently to push leads deeper down the sales funnel, boosts the sales velocity of your business with accurate lead qualification, and gives you a conversion prediction tool you’ll wish you’d had before. At the same time, LeadSquared will do a good job depicting areas for improvement, focusing primarily on bounce rates small businesses usually struggle with. The vendor also offers a free trial that allows you to test all the major features of the software. You can easily sign up for LeadSquared free trial here.

What is unique about LeadSquared?

1. Fully automated and independent workflows. LeadSquared is an automation-first system, and hence allows users to create interdependent workflows that work in-sync to automate complex business processes. Funnel movements are an excellent example, as they help change lead stages or update any other lead field right when a pre-defined lead activity occurs.
2. No-code campaign personalization. LeadSquared comes packed with beautiful templates, and offers a handy drag-and-drop tool where you can personalize your email marketing campaigns. You can utilize an array of elements like images, content and buttons, and a visual builder to produce vibrant designs with a personal touch. Coding skills won’t be necessary.
3. Drip marketing. In short, LandSquared makes sure you take the right action for the right customer at the right time. It guides leads down the sales funnel quite independently, and that’s what makes it so special – you can sketch your prospect conversation paths and define their journey on a simple visual builder, and automate most of your sales funnel within seconds.
4. End-to-end lead engagement. LeadSquared will not only pull leads into your system, but help you keep them engaged all along. You can send notifications and enable important autoresponders, highlight fresh deals they could be interested in, and make connection as streamlined as they would like it to be.
5. Tracking customers’ behavior. When it comes to lead differentiation, LeadSquared pays the most attention to activity and behavior variables. It allows you to track all leads’ moves, including CTA clicking and page viewing, and gives access to a customizable scoring feature that will distinguish ready buyers.
6. Professional customer support. LeadSquared offers a knowledgeable and friendly support team that will always be at your reach. You can contact them any time you want, via email, phone, or live chat. You will also find ready ticket forms embedded on their website, and plenty of training materials where you can look for answers independently.

5. Marketo

Many industry experts describe Marketo as the ‘best system of its kind’, and they’re fully justified to do so. Marketo is without doubt one of the leaders of market automation, putting in place unique lead gathering practices we could all learn something from. To begin with, the system covers virtually every digital marketing need, and guides the user from acquisition to advocacy. It offers a special module called Customer Marketing to accompany its email marketing and lead management features, developed as an independent instrument of engagement and real-time personalization. You will also appreciate its highly visual drag and drop interface which is very easy to use and does not require any HTML skills to create professional email templates, as well as its small-biz friendly pricing.

What is unique about Marketo?

1. Installing social components to your emails. All emails prepared and distributed via Marketo can include social components, attached using the system’s ‘Forward to a Friend’ function. Users will also be able to test a particular email before they send it, and  make dynamic, last minute changes where needed.
2. Creating beautiful landing pages with data capture forms. Marketo comes with a drag-and-drop interface, and a staggering number of flexible landing page templates. All templates can be tweaked into Facebook pages, and include data capture forms used to aggressively profile potential contacts and convert them into leads.
3. Native integrations with leading CRM and productivity service providers. Marketo can easily be associated with several CRM, business intelligence and collaboration frontrunners, among which Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, Zoho CRM, Unbounce, Riva, and many more.
4. Fully optimized for social marketing. Marketo will easily become your favorite social marketing platform which you can apply in three different areas: social sharing, social engagement, and social promotion. It integrates seamlessly with all leading social media, which means you can reach out to potential clients wherever they’re coming from.
5. All standard analytics and reporting. Marketo won’t really reinvent the wheel when it comes to analytics and reporting, but still provide you will all essential summaries to make sense of your data. You get to work with various customizable metrics, including email and landing page performance, lead performance, and campaign performance among others.

6. Oracle Eloqua

Oracle Eloqua, or as developers like to call it – the MA execution tool that drives dynamic conversions, holds the reputation of users’ favorite experience personalization system. Available worldwide and in several different languages, Eloqua has one of the longest lists of satisfied customers to boast with, all of them impressed by its simplicity that doesn’t seem to harass functionality in anyhow. Eloqua does not only help develop effective strategies, but also modernized and enhances those that are already in place, giving your sales department the long awaited push-up to success. Another thing you will certainly adore about Eloqua is the drag-and-drop canvas interface, where you can transform, normalize, and arrange data, and orchestrate experiences across your paid, owned, and earned channels.

What is unique about Oracle Eloqua?

1. Sales and Marketing aligned. Oracle Eloqua helps you boost your ROI rates by bringing sales and marketing efforts together. For the purpose, it will deploy detailed customer information and unify buyers’ experience, identify and put forward valuable opportunities, and keep customer engaged with the idea of tracking their behavior all along.
2. Next-generation marketing analytics. Oracle Eloqua is a great choice to measure marketing success, as it examines how each campaign affects your bottom line, and maps cross-channel engagement to real revenue. You can use it for closed-loop reporting on pipeline and ROI impact, compare engagement efforts to conversions, and even analyze your website’s performance with Oracle Business Intelligence.
3. Very sophisticated lead management. Oracle Eloqua scores leads in a variety of unique ways, and measures highest lead yield quality to to aggregate behavioral data, and segment contacts for more deals. You will get a comprehensive data management set and digital body language that makes it easy to run different scoring models on the same lead.
4. Personalized experiences for more conversions. With Eloqua, you can deploy complex campaigns in less than no time, and use a simple drag-and-drop functionality to map audience flows on each available channel. In order to move and tweak data in the system, you won’t be expected to posses any IT knowledge.
5. Identification of revenue-driving audiences. Eloqua offers some of the best-looking and richest customer profiles you’ve seen, as it combines disparate data from different sources, and brings it into order. This way, the app makes it easy to segment audiences right away, and turn to those that have the exact buyer sentiment needed to close a deal.

7.  ActiveCampaign

While most marketing software developers looked for that little something that will make their product unique, the team behind ActiveCampaign found it in the most unexpected place – marketing automation done the old good way, just slightly more simple. Ever since, ActiveCampaign has been the synonym of no-clutter marketing automation, and a system that sends nothing but reasoned and effective messages. The system supports unconditioned customization, and brings up valuable sales insights and best practices. At the moment, it serves over 100.000 users who claim having access to all marketing faucet they need,  and delivers more than 150 hands-on integrations for undisturbed data migration.

What is unique about ActiveCampaign?

1. On-site tracking of your contacts’ behavior. ActiveCampaign can literally ‘see’ what a contact is doing on your website. Their entire page view history is attached to their contact record, so that you know what they have and haven’t done on your website, and can orchestrate marketing moves accordingly.
2. Conditional Content features for last-minute modifications. With Conditional Content you are able to dynamically alter content on a per contact basis. For instance, you could display entirely different images or blocks of text in an email based on how a contact is tagged or what web pages they have viewed on your website. It is also this feature that suggests last-viewed products for your customers.
3. An intuitive automation builder. ActiveCampaigns’s automation builder is a drag-and-drop flowchart tool that is intuitive to use, and allows you to create powerful processes and workflows without IT knowledge.
4. Event tracking capabilities. With Event Tracking, you will be able to communicate specific actions your contacts have taken to ActiveCampaign, and then use that information to create highly personalized marketing campaigns.
5. Fuly-featured sales CRM suite. ActiveCampaign’s automation tool extends seamlessly into a CRM, and puts in place a smooth transition from marketing into sales. The same marketing automation tools that can be leveraged during the marketing process, and used to automate many other important tasks.

8. Exponea

Exponea Marketing Cloud is another opportunity-pursuing system that can simplify omnichannel communication, and help you make the most of your marketing operations. It brings together an array of useful marketing automation tools, and combines them with practical AI capabilities and advanced insights to raise conversions within any business environment. It is also a number-one alternative for businesses trying to maximize customer value and optimize acquisition ROI with limited resources, with a relatively cheaper access to first-class functionalities such as Ad control and attribution modeling. What customers also like about it is its long-term and secure data storage.

What is unique about Exponea?

1. One-of-a-kind Marketing scenario designer. The platform offers a powerful Scenario Designer that gives them full control over their marketing efforts, and gives them access to features such as drag-and-drop campaign editors, WYSIWYG email editors, premade templates, A/B testing, and Jinja template engine support.
2. Result-oriented attribution modeling. Exponea is before anything else a fully-integrated marketing cloud, and lets companies leverage the power of detailed customer analyses, and make use of previous experiences to improve performance. Its Attribution Models, Personalized and Running Aggregates, Custom Metrics, and SQL Reporters will all help you achieve the results you need.
3. Modern ad management. Exponea’s Ad management toolkit unites and analyzes the performance of all your online marketing campaigns, and uses interactions and CRM data to retarget look-alike audiences. Your ads are automatically and artificially managed to ensure you can leverage their maximal potential.
4. Data tracking & Long-term storage. Exponea uses tags to track specific online interactions, and imports data from as many third-party systems as you’ve integrated it with. This data is later stored in BigQuery and Hadoop for easy retrieval, can be used any time to trigger any type of customer-centered action.
5. Plug-and-play accessibility. Exponea will be completely installed in an hour or so, and it will take you no more than three weeks to run it at full speed. It will be a breeze to maintain, as it doesn’t require the client’s IT department for ongoing support, and it enables seamless integration between data collection, analytics, and execution.

9. Real Magnet

Real Magnet is an intelligent, forward-looking automation system that serves both proficient and first-time marketers. Its first attribute is simplicity, as this tool won’t overwhelm you with complex navigation and HTML skills, but will rather give you an intuitive environment to modify and build campaign templates. Another thing that makes Real Magnet a preferred solution is end-to-end marketing automation, as its team paid took all tedious operations out of a user’s reach – turn it on, and Real Magnet will take control over email campaigns, social tools and analytics, conversions, and reporting. All along, you will be accompanied by a friendly and knowledgeable team that guarantees some of the shortest response times in this industry.

What is unique about Real Magnet?

1. Editing and designing mobile-friendly campaigns. Real Magnet comes with a content editor platform that allows you to edit and design campaigns. The campaigns are mobile-friendly, which allows you and your customers to access them using mobile gadgets. You can use the same editor to build custom reports.
2. Inbound marketing. Real Magnet will bring all your inbound marketing efforts together and facing a common goal, and help you attract visitors, target and generate prospects, and easily convert those into loyal and paying customers.
3. Search engine optimization. Real Magnet will not only help you discover and target prospects, but also enable web searchers to find your services. You can use this platform to build a fully-optimized website around strategic and effective metadata, and to pick those keywords that will portray your content and services.
4. Survey management. The most distinctive advantage of Real Magnet is that it merges survey and email marketing activities, and provides you with a unique ability to distribute your surveys, polls, and questionnaires to all interested audiences. The feature will be of particular interest to social media marketers.
5. Open API architecture. Real Magnet helps connect with third party applications due to its API feature. Some of those third party applications include the Viacom, Drury Hotels, and American Red Cross, among others.

10. Pardot

There is little chance you haven’t heard of Pardot, a product which gained staggering popularity rates despite of being relatively young (and just as much on-point compared to its enterprise-grade competitors). While there is a serious share of this popularity to ascribe to its Salesforce foundation, there is much more to this system to convince you that you need it – Pardot offers end-to-end lead generation and lead management, effortless email marketing, seamless sales alignment, and a number of detailed ROI reports. You will also be impressed by how it works with the rest of your software ecosystem (in particular if you’re a current Salesforce users), as Pardot was designed to blend seamlessly and inquire minimal IT adjustment.

What is unique about Pardot?

1. A Salesforce-powered product. Pardot is Salesforce’s flagship marketing automation product that holds a great reputation for uptime and usability. This also means that the tool is well-integrated with other Salesforce products, and that it follows the company’s unified mobile usability approach.
2. B2B marketing automation. Pardot works side by side with Salesforce to orientate marketing efforts in the right direction. It places marketing and CRM tools under the same roof to connect the dots of your diverse marketing channels, and ensure that customers have a unified experience on all of them.
3. Insightful ROI reporting. What Pardot is probably best known for is insightful ROI reporting that measures and tracks campaign performance, and ties marketing and sales indicators in comprehensive units. You can also use this system to pull out advanced lifecycle and email reports, and connect it to your favorite BI tools for even more powerful analytics.
4. Seamless sales alignment. With Pardot, you will give your sales agents the unique possibility to distribute marketing-approved mini-campaigns among customers, and drive them to sales in real time. You can drop leads directly into CRM nurturing tracks, and follow Gmail interactions with instant alerts.
5. Generating only high-quality leads. Using Pardot, you can generate high-quality leads with the help of customized and targeted emails. Pardot also boosts your sales pipeline, calculates marketing ROI, and tracks customer behavior.

11. IBM Marketing Cloud

A list like this would not be complete without IBM’s flagship automation tool, developed by a company that first launched and established the pillars of digitized marketing as it is today. IBM Marketing Cloud addresses a number of B2C marketing needs, focusing predominantly on optimizing email campaigns and managing customer data for analytic purposes. It is a safe way to go even when it comes to mobile engagement, as it handles really professionally the cross-channel experiences for email, mobile, and web users. Its biggest contribution will be keeping your marketing efforts consistent, and your customer database under full control. If you’re already using an IBM product, Marketing Cloud is the closest to spotless marketing automation you can possibly get.

What is unique about IBM Marketing Cloud?

1. Building a consistent cross-channel experience. With IBM Marketing Cloud you can develop, automate, and deliver standardized experience for email, mobile, social, and web users, and adopt a more personal approach that motivates audiences to convert.
2. Cognitive analytics. IBM Marketing Cloud specializes in understanding customer behavior, and helps you report on it in various different ways. You can use its cognitive analytics suite to draw conclusions and make data-driven decisions for deepened customer engagement.
3. Interactions on social media. With IBM Marketing Cloud you can interact with your audience over social media, integrate your communications and use automation for social media campaigns. Such communication combined with IBM’s first-class analytics will enable you to reach prospective customers, understand their behavior, and respond to their preferences.
4. Multi-channel approach to lead scoring. Lead management has also been made easy and effective through this IBM product. It comes with a multi-channel approach to scoring new leads and nurture the old. Just as a good lead scorer system, it enables you to understand your customers and empowers better alignment of your sales process.
5. Faster ROI improvement. IBM Marketing Cloud can be easily connected to the rest of your marketing & productivity ecosystem, as it is a very scalable platform that has no trouble integrating with any tool or data source. It is hosted entirely in cloud, and thus requires no updating or maintenance by your side.

12. iContact Pro

iContact Pro is a very affordable, customer-first alternative to premium targeting systems, with plenty of marketing automation features to tickle the imagination of creative marketers. Its core functionality is modern campaign management, as the platform allows users to tweak end-to-end the experience of their subscribers, and then distinguish and nurture the most relevant leads. iContact Pro will also cover your social media posting and monitoring needs, and keep you in line with all social trends. Last, but not least, this system offers a robust analytic suite and lead scoring mechanism that will help you gauge the full sales potential of your contacts.

What is unique about iContact Pro?

1. Facilitated, in-time management of marketing campaigns. iContact Pro offers tools for segmentation, A/B testing, and a message builder to fulfill email marketing needs of your company. It comes with list management tools for easy management of client IDs which often becomes difficult due to an ever increasing client base.
2. Individualized workflows. iCOntact Pro allows you to target subscribers in a highly personalized manner, with individualized workflows that place the right content in front of the right customer, at the right time. For the purpose, the tool monitors and uses data such as customer behavior, interaction history, type, geography, and more.
3. Social media management tools. This cloud-based software also integrates social media management and robust analytics. Social media management tools let you shoot scheduled campaigns over Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn, launch and join important conversations, follow trends, and engage with audiences in real time.
4. Seamlessly integrated marketing automation tools. iContact Pro will combine a variety of useful marketing automation features, including attractive landing pages, analytics, email marketing, sales and social media integrations, and many more.
5. Strategic Salesforce integration. Contact can be integrated with SalesForce to help you manage the sales process. It also offers analytics which is vital for strategic planning and can be used to access the marketing funnel reports. These analytics play a major role in deciding resource allocation for marketing and sales in long term planning.

13. Wishpond

Wishpond will please marketers with one of the cutest interfaces they could possibly use, but still disclose a number of unique growth capabilities for their companies. It combines four essential marketing tools in a single set-and-go platform, namely landing pages, popups & forms, contests & promos, and complete lead nurturing and marketing automation. Wishpond nurtures leads based on their information and real-time and on-site activities, and releases a series of unique, personalized drip emails to those that are ready to buy. It is also well-known for dynamic lead scoring and list segmentation, as well as its connectivity with more than 30 popular software services.  The size of your business won’t matter, as Wishpond works well for small, medium, and large companies.

What is unique about Wishpond?

1. Mobile-responsive landing pages. Wishpond is most appreciated for allowing developers to build and optimize attractive landing pages, which are at the same time fully mobile-responsive. The process will require no IT skills or coding knowledge, and takes place on a no-brainer drag-and-drop editor to save your time.
2. Popups & Forms for lead generation. Wishpond leverages the potential of random site visitors with popups and creative contact forms, as well as unique methods such as sidebars and overlays. This is the fastest and most personalized way to generate leads.
3. Contests and Promotions. Wishpond gives interested followers an additional way to connect with you and benefit from your services – its beautiful contests and promotions. You will be offered features alike photo contests, Instagram photo competitions and promotions, sweepstakes, and many more.
4. Dynamic lead scoring. In order to simplify lead management and segmentation, Wishpond will score leads as they arrive in the system, using no other information than personal details and activity history.
5. Tight integration with more than 30 marketing service providers. To ensure an unobstructed flow of data between different systems and sources, developers made Wishpond work in synergy with 30+ popular marketing apps and systems. The list includes names such as Salesforce, Zapier, MailChimp, Slack, Sugar CRM, and many similar products.

14. GreenRope

GreenRope is in fact a fully featured customer relationship system that offers some of the most advanced marketing automation tools for high-class lead management. We recommend it because of its excellent, fully automated process setup, efficient art automation features, and relatively easy onboarding. It will govern the journey of your customer from awareness to conversion, and create unique paths for him to engage and interact with your service. For the purpose, GreenRope uses an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, and takes into account both the actions and the inactions of your leads. There are many ways in which you can customize these interactions, including follow ups, personalized emails, intricate road maps, and more.

What is unique about GreenRope?

1. Small-biz friendly. With even 7 different pricing packages that cater to the needs of different teams and businesses, GreenRope is made easily affordable even to small businesses and startups. This, however, doesn’t change the fact that all users are provided with enterprise-grade marketing functionalities.
2. Marketing automation bundled in a compact CRM package. GreenRope integrates all important aspects of running a modern small or mid-sized business, and combines marketing automation features with well-organized CRM functionalities. This means that you can enhance your sales and improve communication with customers all from a single system, which also makes data accessible to all team members, and enhances collaboration.
3. Streamlined communication. GreenRope uses a variety of omnichannel strategies to engage leads at scale, and build lasting customer relationships. It provides a modern digital experience for your users, and nurtures leads on your landing pages, websites, and social media.
4. Website builders. A unique opportunity offered by GreenRope is to build informative and engaging websites for customers. Simply choose a suitable template, add your colors, fonts, logos, and layouts, and you are ready to go. The website will then be automatically tracked, and you will receive timely notifications on how users are interacting with your content.
5. Advanced workflow management. GreenRope allows you to implement personalized and business-specific workflows and rules in all sales and marketing operations. In such way, you and your team will stay organized and retain full control over projects, tasks, and follow ups.

15. Constant Contact

Constant Contact works around powerful email marketing techniques, where all that matters, as they say, is to keep contacts engaged and interested. Instead of helping you discover leads and engage prospective customers, Constant Contact brings those to your door, and lets you present them your service in a personalized manner using any of the system’s configurable templates. It builds personalized emails and connections on your behalf, sets up automated triggers for important events, and then simply gets out of the way to let you focus on your business. Your audience, nevertheless, remains well managed and regularly nurtured, and most of the time ready-to-act even without direct contact by your side. Constant Contact will also track the success of your campaigns in real time, and let you make smarter decisions based on actual results.

What is unique about Constant Contact?

1. A cost-effective marketing solution. For small businesses and startups, Constant Contact is a great option. It is a cost effective tool with a very flexible pricing setup where the rates are based on the number of email contacts. Regardless of the plan they’ve chosen, all users will have access to live webinars, classes, and day-long courses to leverage the full power of this system.
2. Easy contact importing. Constant Contact makes it easy for businesses and individuals to gather contacts from across different databases and corral them into a unified list without breaking a sweat. Whether you are importing contacts from Gmail, Outlook or uploading a spreadsheet, Constant Contact makes it happen.
3. A variety of customizable email templates. With Constant Contact involved, there will be very little manual work to do. You get a drag-and-drop builder and lots of configurable templates to draft your emails, with advanced features such as batch scheduling, bulk sending & editing, and management of important events.
4. End-to-end contact management. From an administrative point of view, Constant Contact will facilitate the arrangement and segmentation of your leads, and upload within seconds your ready-to-use lists from Excel, Outlook, and Gmail. From that moment on, Constant Contact will be fully in charge of handling bounces and unsubscribes, and updating inactive emails.
5. PLUS feature for expanded functionality. Constant Contact’s well-known PLUS feature lets users build custom connections, and use the tool in roles different than marketing inbox. You can use it connect it with people via live events, trackable coupons, and online surveys, and manage all valuable lead sources from a single dashboard.

16. AdRoll

35,000 advertisers worldwide are relying on AdRoll’s marketing suite to retarget and prospect platforms of choice, and for a good reason. AdRoll is a whole new world of marketing possibilities – This poweerful operator provides unlimited access to prospects and audiences via any app, device, browser, or operating system, including social media and Google-style native directories. With more than 500 ad exchanges, AdRoll leaves little chances that you won’t be able to target a customer of interest, and gives you the right transparency & control tools to communicate successfully. You will be particularly impressed by its BidIQ™, our proprietary real-time bidding algorithm that will place your ads at the right place, and charge little to do so.

What is unique about AdRoll?

1. Stable cross-device connections. AdRoll makes use of connections across devices, allowing you to retarget those high-intent desktop website visitors on their mobile devices as well. In-app retargeting is also available thanks to AdRoll’s partnerships with leading mobile analytics and measurement providers to make your campaigns easy and effective.
2. Open access to customer data. With AdRoll, you can you can reach and engage your customers across any device, app, or browser, with access to more than 500 ad exchanges, including native inventory like Google, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
3. First-class performance engineering. AdRoll offers a special, one-of-a-kind proprietary and real-time bidding algorithm named BidIQ that ensures your ads get the right placement for the right price.
4. Full transparency and control of your marketing campaigns. AdRoll allows you to place ads, track performance, and refine your campaigns with this easy-to-use platform. You can also seamlessly integrate the application with leading marketing solutions, and count on the tech support team to be your strategic and creative partner all along.
5. Lots of upcoming innovations. AdRoll continues to develop its retargeting capabilities as it plans to offer retargeting via Prospecting and Instagram in the future. Currently, these features are in beta development, but users can still send personal access requests to use them.

17. Salesfusion

Salesfusion will automate core sales and marketing operations, and leverage the maximum capacity of your resources to help you sell more. It is a well-known partner for sales campaign execution, which offers 24/7 assistance to all users, and puts in place a dedicated Marketing Concierge program to share some practical experience. Basically, it will turn into the marketing adviser you always wish you hired.

How exactly does Salesfusion boost your productivity? The platform provides an array of enterprise-class MA tools, among which attracting and capturing leads, creating intricate campaigns, streamlining lead processing and management, and using top notch BI tools to analyze the results of your activities.

What is unique about Salesfusion?

1. Consolidated sales and marketing tasks. Salesfusion eliminates the division between sales and marketing. While traditional marketing automation platforms were designed to consolidate and optimize marketing tasks, they do very little to create a unified sales funnel or facilitate the crucial hand-offs between sales and marketing, and that’s where this system comes the handiest.
2. No wasted leads. Today’s buying process is significantly more complex. Marketers need to ensure that leads aren’t wasted. If they aren’t ready to buy at the time sales engages with them, marketers need to know so they can continue to nurture them in an automated way that is consistent with the interactions they have had through the process.
3. CRM-style relational database. Salesfusion is unique to the industry by addressing this problem with a CRM-style relational database and native integration to the leading CRM platforms. By creating a bi-directional flow between sales and marketing, the app ensures that no lead gets left behind. The marketer will also be able to push leads to conversion based on their needs, preferences, and level of engagement.
4. Long-term relationships with quality leads. Salesfusion is purpose-built for B2B companies that want to align sales and marketing to engage in long-term relationships that drive more qualified leads, improve conversion rates and increase revenue. As a marketing automation platform, the app streamlines processes to accelerate demand creation with an easy to use platform that allows companies to quickly realize the value of marketing automation.
5. All necessary integrations. Salesfusion offers native integrations with Salesforce, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and InforCRM. It also connects to built-in SEO audit and webinar platforms (Go to Webinar, Webex); social listening and publishing to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus; email deliverability tools such as BriteVerify and Litmus; data enrichment systems alike InsideView; and website tracking tools like Google Analytic.

18. ONTRAPORT

Rather than a simple marketing automation hub, ONTRAPORT is a fully-featured business automation solution that peaks into each and every aspect of your market performance. All the way from predicting your bottom line to driving actual opportunities at your side, ONTRAPORT will be there to assume full control over your marketing and lead management efforts. The system has many unique bells and whistles to distinguish it from competitors, including eCommerce, SMS & postcard engagement, landing pages, membership sites, marketing tracking, and more. It also offers a number of prominent integrations and expert partnership, as well as an open API architecture which makes it usable in any software ecosystem.

What is unique about ONTRAPORT?

1. All-in-one business automation. ONTRAPORT is not devoted exclusively to marketers, but to all departments and teams involved in the management of a business. It will automate all your prospects, customers, and partner communications, and enable a consistent and memorable experience for all of them. It will also keep track of all tasks performed within the team, and store them systematically for facilitated reporting.
2. Unified marketing efforts. The distinctive benefits users commonly associate to ONTRAPORT is being able to automate all marketing efforts. This system combines online data sources with offline marketing campaign assets to enhance customers’ experience, and allows you to create one-of-a-kind, personalized funnel journeys.  Its campaigns are powerful, dynamic, and highly-converting.
3. Tracking of marketing campaigns. It will take as much as clicking on a single button to obtain all information on how your campaigns are progressing, and what needs to be done to improve them. You can measure the effect of each and every marketing effort, and thus make more confident business decisions.
4. Direct integration with WordPress. You can integrate your WP membership sites with your ONTRAPORT account in a matter of minutes, and generate passive income from member-exclusive programs.
5. An eCommerce suite. With ONTRAPORT in your toolkit, you can build customizable order and upsell forms, and get your storefront running in minutes by distributing them directly to target audiences. The suite is also equipped for shopping cart management, and secure payment automation.

19. InstaSky

Designed for anyone who wishes to simplify scheduling of instagram posts across multiple Instagram accounts, InstaSky features automated capabilities to publish all types of posts on their preferred scheduling process. Scheduling of posts can also be set to a regular basis, allowing users to publish their content on a weekly, hourly, or daily. It also provides detailed reports for easy monitoring of subscriber growth and the performance of your posts on Instagram. Simply put, the software makes it easy for users to optimize their workflows in order to fully leverage the power of Instagram to promote their products and services.

What is unique about InstaSky?

1. Multi-account management. It allows users to effortlessly manage multiple Instagram accounts on a single platform.
2. Automated posting. It allows you to set your preferred scheduling process on Instagram. This is highly useful for planning your content on Instagram and ensuring that target audiences are engaged.
3. Automated reposting. Users have the option to schedule Instagram posts on a regular basis.
4. Full Instagram capabilities. It functions with all types of layouts and image formats on Instagram as well as @mentions, hastags, and more.
5. Clear reporting. Its detailed analytics and reports allow you to effectively monitor subscriber growth and post performance.

20. MAX

MAX is a powerful automated solution that can handle mundane and difficult marketing processes, from something as simple as remembering who to call or send followup emails to targeting the right individuals and delivering the perfect message. Because of this, users can simply focus on chasing after opportunities to grow their business. To get started, users simply need to set up their campaigns and contacts, and the software will handle the rest. Best of all, wasting time and resources in creating the perfect message is no longer necessary thanks to the platform’s capability to inform users exactly what to say to their audiences as well as when and how to say it. This ensures that you can effectively engage your target audiences at all times.

What is unique about MAX?

1. Audience segmentation. It allows users to quickly identify and segment their target audiences, thus allowing you to tailor your marketing campaigns accordingly.
2. Deliver the perfect message. Send engaging, personalized messages effortlessly with MAX. This solution informs users what message to send and how to say it.
3. Streamlined marketing. With MAX, you can handle essential marketing processes in a single platform. It comes with a build-in CRM tool and allows you to push digital campaigns and assess campaign results.
4. Nurture leads. Nurture your relationships through the platform’s comprehensive CRM tools.
5. Detailed website reports. Quickly determine which pages on your website performed best. This solution also exacts specific information regarding your website visitors.