This best marketing software review explores the top marketing tools along with a comparison to improve your product sales:
Marketing plays an essential role in an organization. It is described as an activity that promotes the products and services offered by the enterprise to increase its sales.
There are many marketing tools and software available to help you with your business. Marketing tools have various features and strategies to help businesses reach the largest audience. They help create content for social media, publish, engage audiences, provide performance insights, automate workflows, etc.
What You Will Learn:
Marketing Tools Review
Fact Check: According to the research by Grand View Research, the market share of marketing tools in 2019 was $43.8 billion and is expected to rise by a CAGR of 17.4% from 2020 to 2027.
The below graph shows the report of the U.S. global digital marketing software market size:
Pro-Tip: To select a marketing software, one must ensure the organization’s goal, growth need, type of security required, and employees’ needs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q #1) What are the marketing tools?
Answer: The marketing tools are the software that helps promote the enterprise’s products and services to increase sales. They provide various facilities for users to attract a maximum audience, such as creating content, posting or publishing, automating workflow, brand management, lead management, lead engagement.
Q #2) What are the best marketing tools?
Answer: We have listed the best marketing tools below:
- Sprout Social
- Buffer
- Loomly
- Zoho CRM
- ActiveCampaign
Q #3) What are effective marketing tools?
Answer: Effective marketing tools provide users with a boost in ROI. In other words, the tools that give the users the best features can be termed effective marketing tools. This tool may contain a strategy to attract an audience, creative content writing, social media management, etc.
Q #4) What are the three stages of marketing?
Answer: The three stages of marketing are strategies, implementation, and measurement. In the first stage, the market strategies are created based on the research for a specific segment. In the second stage, they are implemented, and in the third stage, the performance is measured.
Q #5) What is a CRM in marketing?
Answer: CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. CRM marketing is a strategy for managing customer relations with the business. All the planning that is made keeping in mind the customer’s relationship comes under CRM marketing. It helps in greater customer retention and customer loyalty.
With the help of this strategy, the company can interact with the customers and audience better.
List of Top Marketing Tools
Here is the list of popular and best marketing software:
- TrustedForm Insights by ActiveProspect
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- Podium
- SocialBee
- Sprout Social
- Buffer
- Loomly
- Zoho CRM
- ActiveCampaign
- Mailchimp
- Google Analytics
- Marketo
- Trello
Comparison of the Best Marketing Software
Tools | Platforms | Deployment | Best For | Pricing |
---|---|---|---|---|
HubSpot Marketing Hub | Web-based | Cloud-based | Small, medium & large businesses. | Free plan & the price starts at $45/month. |
Podium | Web-based, Android, iOS | Cloud-based | Medium to large businesses | Essentials: $289/month, Standard: $449/month, Professional: $649/month |
SocialBee | Web-Based, iOS, Android | Cloud-Based, Mobile | Small, Medium Businesses, Digital Marketing Agencies, Freelancers. | Between $19 to $79/month. |
Sprout Social | Windows Android iPhone/iPad Mac Web-based | Open API | Small and medium-sized businesses | Between $89-249 per month |
Buffer | Windows Mac Web-based | Cloud Hosted | Social media marketing | Between $0-5 per month |
Loomly | Windows Android iPhone/iPad Mac Web-based | Cloud Hosted | Brand and content management | Between $34-332 per month |
Zoho CRM | Windows Linux Android iPhone/iPad Mac Web-based | Cloud Hosted Open API | Journey orchestration | Between $0-52 per month |
ActiveCampaign | Windows Linux Android iPhone/iPad Mac Web-based Mobile | Cloud Hosted | Lead management | Between $15-279 per month |
Review of the marketing tools:
#1) TrustedForm Insights by ActiveProspect
ActiveProspect is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, whose suite of products addresses the challenges of running successful consent-based lead generation campaigns such as: integrating and managing partners, verifying and documenting consent, verifying lead authenticity, lead routing, and real-time decision-making/bidding.
ActiveProspect offers four products: LeadConduit, LeadsBridge, SuppresionList, and TrustedForm.
TrustedForm provides unbiased, third-party documentation of consent, plus real-time, actionable insights about the leads you’re acquiring. TrustedForm certificates provide data about each lead generation event, giving you more insight into the leads.
For lead buyers, TrustedForm Insights allows you to identify and understand the attributes of your ideal lead, increase the actionability of your leads, gain access to certificate data about every lead event, and use this data to optimize your lead-buying strategies.
With TrustedForm Insights you can:
- Save money by buying the right leads at the right price.
- Make more money by identifying the leads most likely to convert.
- Identify the highest-performing lead sources.
- Stop buying leads that don’t meet your criteria.
- Focus on leads that show high intent.
Notable Benefits:
- Originating Domain: Identify the best lead sources for your business by tracking leads back to the site that generated them, regardless of where you bought them.
- Time on Page: Understand intent – a longer time on the page can indicate higher intent to purchase and a higher-value lead.
- Geolocation & IP Address: Only purchase the leads that are generated in your geographic footprint (and are most likely to become customers).
- Lead Age: Timing is critical for all real-time leads. Lead Age ensures the leads you’re purchasing are actively shopping for your product or service so you can determine purchasing and pricing strategies.
- Browser, Device, and Operating System: Hone in on the characteristics of your target prospect using attributes to help ensure you pay the right price for the right leads.
- Security: ActiveProspect is the most privacy-centric company when it comes to customers and their data.
Pricing: TrustedForm Insights is only available under ActiveProspect’s Enterprise Plan, which offers the most comprehensive list of benefits and features.
Verdict: TrustedForm Insights is an essential tool for marketers who want to optimize their lead-buying strategy.
#2) HubSpot Marketing Hub
Best for small, medium, and large-sized businesses.
HubSpot is a powerful and easy-to-use marketing software application. HubSpot’s online tools attract attention, convert leads, and customize for better reporting. It helps to automate the marketing process that eliminates manual work and increases efficiency.
It provides insights into leads that allow the user to know exactly where the leads stand at a given point in time.
Features:
- Creates engaging content to reach the maximum audience.
- It helps in converting more leads by creating attractive landing pages, automating operations, sending personalized emails, providing ABM tools, and so on.
- Provides insights into leads.
- It offers a facility to create a custom dashboard to share with the team.
Verdict: HubSpot’s marketing hub is recommended as it grows with you, i.e. in the beginning, it is free, and as you grow, it charges you more. The best feature of this software is reporting that translates data into strategies.
Pricing:
- Free: $0 per month
- Starter: $45 per month
- Professional: $800 per month
- Enterprise: $3,200 per month
#3) Podium
Best for Text marketing and capturing website leads.
Podium provides its users with a plethora of advanced but easy-to-use tools, all in a bid to bring more customers to their business. The platform works wonders in increasing the volume of reviews that your business receives. Podium goes out of its way in making sure this reviews can be easily found on Google, Facebook, and more such platforms.
In addition, the platform integrates your website with a web chat tool that can kick-start conversation with your visitors. This makes Podium ideal for generating promising leads. Podium also serves as an effective campaign launcher. You’ll be able to launch custom campaigns that targets specific group of customers within minutes with this platform.
Features:
- Increase review volume in a short span of time.
- Capture leads from website
- Launch custom campaigns
- See all messages in one place
Verdict: With Podium, you get a marketing tool that leverages the power of positive reviews, lead generation, and custom-targeted campaigns to drive customers to a business. As such, it has our recommendation.
Price:
- Essentials: $289/month
- Standard: $449/month
- Professional: $649/month
- 14-day free trial is available.
#4) SocialBee
Best for Small, Medium Businesses, Digital Marketing Agencies, and Freelancers.
SocialBee is a social media marketing tool that allows you to create posts from scratch and plan their publishing across multiple social media channels. The tool supports integration with popular platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. SocialBee arms you with tools that allow you to directly post content on these platforms and monitor them.
The monitoring part happens on the fantastic content calendar it offers you. The calendar is customizable and gives you a bird’s-eye view of all your active posts. Here, you have to ability to assign posts to specific categories in order to make controlling them simpler. You also get insightful analytics to get an idea of how your posts are performing.
Features:
- Category Based scheduling
- Pause or stop posting automatically based on a few set rules.
- Edit multiple posts from a single category at once
- Post Previews before posting
- Insightful Performance analytics
Verdict: SocialBee is a marketing tool I would recommend to users who wish to automate their entire social media content planning process. The platform allows you to control posting on almost all popular social media platforms out there. The tool provides you with everything you need to up your social media game.
Price:
- Bootstrap Plan: $19/month
- Accelerate Plan: $39/month
- Pro: $79/month
- 14 Day free trial
#5) Sprout Social
Best for small and medium businesses.
Sprout Social is a software application that provides powerful online marketing tools to increase the growth of the business. It is an all-one marketing platform that manages social media engagement.
Features:
- It provides various engagement tools to connect with customers, such as smart inbox, message tagging, and review management.
- It provides publishing tools to effectively connect with customers, including training to post on social media, organizing posts, measuring content performance, scheduling posts, etc.
- It provides analytics by eliminating time-consuming manual work. This includes profile performance reports, tag reports, post-performance reports, and so on.
- It provides listening tools like customer feedback, competitor comparison, audience analysis, etc.
Verdict: Sprout social is a free marketing software with a 30-day trial. It is recommended for its feature of managing social media engagement of the business from the beginning to the end.
Pricing:
- Standard: $89 per user per month
- Professional: $149 per user per month
- Advanced: $249 per user per month
#6) Buffer
Best for social media marketing.
Buffer is a marketing software that helps users in social media marketing effectively and efficiently. It uses a four-step strategy to connect with people, that is, analyze, publish, engage and celebrate. The key feature of this software is content creation. It helps users in creating the best content and tracks its status.
Features:
- Check the status of the content you have posted on social media in just a few clicks.
- Schedule posts and send them later at the right time.
- Provides better customer engagement by enabling you to respond to them quickly by granting various labels and hotkeys.
- It helps in tracking the performance.
- Helps in drafting the content and approves the quality before sending it.
Verdict: Buffer is recommended for scheduling posts. It allows you to post the content later on at the right time. It comes with a free basic plan wherein you can manage three accounts at no cost.
Pricing:
- Free: $0 per channel per month
- Essentials: $5 per channel per month
- Team Pack: This is an add-on plan.
#7) Loomly
Best for brand and content management.
Loomly is a marketing software application to manage your brand, social media content, and ads on a single platform. It helps in measuring the performance of the content posted. You can see which content is most desirable to the audience. It helps in scheduling posts to get posted at the right time with no hindrance.
Features:
- Helps in creating unique content according to the trends in the market.
- Manages and organizes all images, videos, notes, and links in its library.
- Generates previews of the posts and ads you are going to post.
- It helps in scheduling to post your ads automatically and posts later at the right time.
- It helps in efficiently interacting with the audience on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Verdict: Loomly is recommended for its content management feature. It helps in posting the best content needed. It also comes with a free 14-day trial, wherein you can use it at no cost and can further subscribe for a more extensive plan as per your need.
Pricing:
- Base: $34 per 2 users per month
- Standard: $76 per 6 users per month
- Advanced: $159 per 16 users per month
- Premium: $332 per 26 users per month
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing.
Further Reading => List of the BEST Affiliate Marketing Websites
#8) Zoho CRM
Best for journey orchestration.
Zoho CRM is a marketing software that helps in lead management, process management, and measuring performance. It automates the workflow of sales and marketing departments and eliminates waste of time. It helps prepare and maintain insights reports to analyze them and allows the users to make better decisions.
Features:
- Automates the workflow of sales, marketing, and support functions.
- Helps in lead management from acquiring leads to follow-ups.
- It tracks the leads and provides them with a better brand experience.
- Manages all email activities within the software tool.
- It prepares performance reports, analyzes them, and helps in forecasting.
Verdict: Zoho CRM is recommended as it provides a bundle of features on a single platform. The best element of this software is journey orchestration, i.e. it tracks the lead position and provides a better brand experience.
Pricing:
- Free: $0
- Standard: $14 per user per month
- Professional: $23 per user per month
- Enterprise: $40 per user per month
- Ultimate: $52 per user per month
Website: Zoho CRM
#9) ActiveCampaign
Best for lead management.
ActiveCampaign is a software application with great marketing tools to reach and engage leads, nurture and educate them, convert them into customers, and support them, which ultimately leads to business growth.
Features:
- Provides an email marketing facility with multiuser editing, revision history, link actions, custom data, site tracking, and so on.
- It provides marketing automation that helps automate email follow-ups, finds the most engaged contacts, and integrates apps.
- It automates sales processes and customer relationship management.
- It tracks customer behavior with previous emails, live chats, and purchases.
Verdict: This software application is recommended for its feature of site tracking. You can track the customer’s response and activities on your site to offer them the services of their needs. The automation feature is beneficial, you can automate marketing, sales, and CRM processes.
Pricing:
- Lite: $15 per month for 500 contacts
- Plus: $70 per month for 500 contacts
- Professional: $159 per month for 500 contacts
- Enterprise: $279 per month for 500 contacts
Website: ActiveCampaign
Suggested Reading => A Comprehensive Review of the Top Affiliate Marketing Websites
#10) Mailchimp
Best for automating the marketing process.
Mailchimp is a platform that provides various marketing, and commerce tools to take the business to another level. It helps in collecting data, creating marketing channels, and providing insights to grow the business. It helps in automating the marketing process to eliminate excess time taken and other essential tasks.
Features:
- With this software, you can create a custom domain for online businesses.
- It provides various marketing tools, such as social ads and landing pages.
- You can create custom designs for your website.
- It offers the facility of automating the marketing process by sending automated messages to the clients at the right time.
- Provides actionable insights so you can find deviations if any.
Verdict: This software is recommended as it is a free marketing application that provides a free plan for beginners. The best feature of this software is the automation of marketing processes.
Pricing:
- Free: $0 per month with 2,000 contacts
- Essentials: $10 per month with 500 contacts
- Standard: $15 per month with 500 contacts
- Premium: $305 per month with 10,000 contacts
Website: Mailchimp
#11) Google Analytics
Best for small, medium, and large-sized businesses.
Google Analytics is a platform for understanding the customers better by preparing insights with data. It helps in making better decisions by knowing your customer’s behavior through various related data reports. It also provides multiple interpretations based on the analytics.
Features:
- It creates insights with the data to understand the performance of the business.
- It offers various reporting tools to share insights with team members about customer behavior.
- It manages your data by providing better access, organizing, and analyzing it.
- It provides various interpretations based on insights prepared that help in making better decisions.
Verdict: This is easy-to-use software recommended for its feature of sharing reports throughout the organization. It helps you to decide better by collectively analyzing the insights prepared.
Pricing: Contact for pricing.
Website: Google Analytics
#12) Marketo
Best for account-based marketing.
Marketo is a marketing tool to speed up the customer experience. It helps to manage leads from attracting them to converting and nurturing them through various marketing and CRM tools.
It provides multiple automation features to enable minimum time taken on any task. It helps in lead management and customer relationship management.
Features:
- It helps to attract and convert clients through various marketing tools.
- It offers customer relationship management through better communication, selling complementary products, and so on.
- Automates workflow and eliminates errors which lead to an increase in ROI.
- It helps in account-based marketing by creating target lists, measuring engagement, nurturing, and pursuing them.
Verdict: Marketo is recommended for its automation of workflow and lead management features. With these features, the business can grow to the next level.
Pricing: Contact for pricing.
Website: Marketo
#13) Trello
Best for creating data more clearly and actionably.
Trello is a unique platform that manages projects and organizes data in cards, lists, and board forms. It helps in managing work with ease and is suitable for any type of project or team. It is a tool to simplify the data to understand them better.
It can be integrated with other applications which the user will need for a single platform. It helps automate various processes to get the work done in less time and focus on more important tasks.
Features:
- Simplifies work by categorizing it into cards, lists, and boards.
- Cards provide details of every single thing, such as calendars, attachments, due dates.
- Automates workflows like moving lists, creating custom buttons, scheduling teammate’s assignments, etc.
- It can integrate with other applications, such as
- Confluence
- Slack
- Dropbox
- Google Drive
- Evernote
Verdict: Trello is recommended as it is very reasonable to price. It offers its basic plan free of cost, wherein you can have 10 boards, 1 power-up board, and in-built automation. The best feature of this software is simplicity. You just need to create panels of activities.
Also Read => Best Digital Frames with Wi-Fi
Pricing:
- Free: $0 per user per month
- Business-class: $10 per user per month
- Enterprise: $17.50 per user per month
Website: Trello
Other Noteworthy Marketing Tools
#14) Canva
Best for photo editing, graphs, and charts.
Canva is a software application for designing. It includes features such as photo editing and creating attractive and easy-to-understand graphs, charts, or diagrams. It also helps design logos, posters, business cards, flyers, resumes, infographics, etc.
Pricing:
- Free: $0
- Pro: $12.99 per month
- Enterprise: $30 per month
Website: Canva
#15) ProofHub
Best for project planning and collaboration.
ProofHub is a project management tool with team collaboration. It includes powerful tools like Kanban boards, Gantt charts, custom workflows, calendars, files and document libraries, timesheets, interfaces, reports, etc.
Pricing:
- Ultimate control: $89 per month
- Essential: $45 per month
Website: ProofHub
#16) Cision
Best for public relations management and better communication.
Cision is public relations management software that enables you to communicate effectively with your consumers to cover a larger audience. It helps in creating better content to attract the audience. It helps in analyzing the brand’s performance and creates interactive reports.
Pricing: Contact for pricing.
Website: Cision
#17) PromoPrep
Best for managing the calendar.
PromoPrep is an online platform for marketing management. It provides several features like controlling the visibility of the content you want, file sharing, sales tracking, uploading past promos, team messaging, holiday planning, intuitive calendar, automated alerts, etc. It helps in managing the marketing calendar.
Pricing:
- Individual: $0
- Team: Between $0 and $199 per month
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing.
Website: PromoPrep
#18) AdStage
Best for reporting and automation.
AdStage is a software application that enables the user to make better decisions by providing them with performance insights in automatically generated reports and graphs. It offers several valuable services. This includes reporting, automation, data API, maintaining cross-channel data in seconds, campaign optimization, etc.
Pricing:
- Starter: $199 per month
- Standard: $299 per month
- Professional: $499 per month
Website: AdStage
#19) Hootsuite
Best for social media management.
Hootsuite is a social media marketing software application that helps in creating better content and publishing it. It also manages all messages and comments from the audience and engages them.
This online tool monitors your performance as well as your competitors’. It also helps in advertising your brand to reach the maximum audience. It analyzes your performance and generates reports for decision-making.
Pricing:
- Professional: $49 per month
- Team: $129 per month
- Business: $599 per month
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing.
Website: Hootsuite
Conclusion
From the research, we conclude that marketing tools are very essential for any business to grow. In the era of social media, any enterprise needs to be updated and should create content according to what the audience likes.
As mentioned above, different tools have different features that ultimately help in better marketing.
Some tools help in creating content, such as Hootsuite, HubSpot, Loomly, and Buffet. Some provide valuable insights such as AdStage, ProofHub, Google Analytics, Mailchimp. Other tools that can help with automation include AdStage, PromoPrep, Trello, Marketo, ActiveCampaign, etc.
Every tool comes with different pricing plans. Some offer a free basic plan while others offer a free trial period.
Review Process:
- Time taken to research this article: This article has been researched for 52 hours and written with the top best tools shortlisted as mentioned above.
- Total tools researched: 25
- Top tools shortlisted: 16
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