Tools That Create the Perfect Marketing Software Environment

The content marketing software landscape is an unclear one. Since content marketing has so many variations across thousands of different platforms, the exact content marketing software landscape is an endless mishmash of technology platforms, vendors, and marketing systems that make it nearly impossible, if not outright impossible, to make truly apples-to-apples comparisons between competing products. For this reason, marketers often try to compare their own software systems to those of their competition, but this rarely proves fruitful. In fact, trying to do too much comparison is one of the mistakes most fledgling digital marketing agencies make from the very beginning.

Marketing Software Landscape Deals With Customer Management

Many CRM platforms are designed to be used by people, but marketers have a different way of thinking about customers than do their clients. They often want marketers to treat them as though they were customers in person. This means that the key piece of the marketing software landscape deals with recording contacts, keeping track of leads, following up, and closing sales.

Report Generation And Dashboards

In the world of CRM, the term dashboard has a completely different meaning than it does for most buyers. For many marketers, it represents the entire marketing campaign, including leads tracked, actions taken, and sales completed. The goal of CRM-based marketing automation software should be to create a single, easy-to-use interface that can be used to navigate marketing campaigns, manage contacts, follow up, and close sales. Good marketers are already doing this, using custom reporting panels within the CRM. In fact, even difficulties such as a market constraint can be overcome by the use of a CRM-based marketing automation software. 

Automation And Ease Of Use

Integrating marketing automation software into a business needs automation in order to be truly successful. Ideally, you should be able to create new leads, follow up, and close sales on lead request, without ever leaving your desk. Businesses should choose an integrated system that takes these capabilities into account.

Another thing the marketing software landscape considers is how easily it's used. In other words, does it make sense to use marketing technology to help you manage your leads and channel activity? Or does it require too much effort and expense to set up new channels? Some CRM systems can be set up in a day; others may require weeks or months of training. Evaluate your marketing technology priorities, and make sure CRM is at the top of the list.

One last aspect of the marketing software landscape deals with marketing automation in the form of reports. Good marketers are able to analyze their marketing data and derive actionable intelligence from it. Unfortunately, most marketers have access only to company-wide or regional level data, which can be hard to aggregate into useful reports. In this case, cloud computing provides a great solution.

Chat Bots

The marketing software landscape also includes chat Bots, which allow marketers to automate a large number of functions, including tasks like following up, responding to queries, and tracking and analyzing leads. A bot may also automatically send out emails based on predefined parameters, greatly reducing the time spent managing leads. Although chat bots are not considered a "one size fits all" solution, most software vendors see a definite advantage in using them, because they're more customizable than other forms of automation.

Social Media

Finally, the biggest and most overlooked part of the marketing software landscape is the social media landscape. Social media allows marketers to connect with customers in ways they never could before, and this gives them an edge in the market. It's important for businesses to realize the value of social media and use it to its full advantage. Not only is it the best place to find new customers and generate leads, but it also offers marketers a unique opportunity to connect with old customers and fans and to brand themselves as experts in their field. But without the help of top-notch social media management tools and systems, businesses could find themselves struggling in this area.