What is a Marketing Platform?
Depending on which company you ask, you could get a different answer about what a marketing platform entails. So, to make this more succinct, I am going to tell you what it should be: A marketing platform is software that encompasses lead generation, social media, contact databases, email marketing, blogging, landing pages, website analytics, keyword analytics, and competitor analysis.
Why use Marketing Software?
Great marketing software allows you manage your digital marketing campaigns from one place. This not only saves a lot of time, but it also provides much more transparency to the effectiveness of what is actually working. It gives this reporting automatically, so there is no need to calculate this.
Having easily accessible data that synced and automated makes it much easier to see ROI from digital marketing efforts. Before, we all knew that we should be making online efforts, so we just did it without seeing the numbers on our return. Today, we don’t have to fly the digital marketing bird blindly. Red Bull might give us wings, but marketing software gives us eyes and ears!
Do I Need Marketing Software?
Anyone planning on doing marketing online needs some type of software if they want to see what is working and what is not. A good marketing platform will give you complete traceability about where your leads have came from, where they go on your website/blog, what information they have downloaded, and how they interact with you on social media.
So, the real answer to whether or not your company needs marketing software is something that only you can answer. How much traceability do you want to see and do you see the value in the time savings that a marketing platform can give you? With that being said, I personally use marketing software and that’s not going to change, because I love to be able to log into my dashboard in the morning and get an instant snapshot of where we’re at. From there, I can dive into any aspect of my online marketing right from my command center!
Which Marketing Platform?
There are a few platforms out there that may do what you are looking for, such as InfusionSoft and Marketo. However, there is only one platform that I am a huge proponent of and work with regularly, which is HubSpot. I run my personal marketing out of this software and I work with companies to align their marketing efforts through HubSpot . I can tell you that this does everything that I mentioned earlier and more. If you are looking for free information on HubSpot, you can sign up for more information here. We would be happy to have a conversation with you.
When looking at integrating a marketing platform, you need to ask yourself, “Do I have time to manage this?” You may be surprised at how much time goes into managing a consistent and concerted digital marketing campaign and setting the marketing software up can also take a considerable amount of time, but it is worth it. If this feels like a lot of work, you don’t know where to begin, or you simply don’t want to manage it yourself, you may consider Inbound Management services. You can find out more about this here.
