Technology has made life easier for marketers. But the fact is, not every marketer is able to use it to its full potential. For instance, in this study, only 16% of marketers confirmed that they had the right technologies in place to manage their content. And that’s just content — there are many other marketing processes that can be efficiently managed with good software, but the marketers have either not discovered the right platforms or haven’t had the time to look for one.
In this post, I share with you 5 marketing platforms that are seriously worth considering.
Wishpond
Category: Marketing Automation
If single-purpose platforms aren’t something you prefer, then Wishpond’s state-of-the-art, all-inclusive marketing platform will certainly be something you’ll love.
Wishpond is a potpourri of some of the best marketing platform features and tools on the market. From tools that help with audience identification to ones that help you create the most responsive and keyword-rich landing pages, you’ll find everything here.
The platform enables various integrations to websites. For instance, you can integrate chat boxes and contact forms. The platform makes use of navigation and readership tracking tools like heatmaps and provides insights about what a visitor peruses and how long he stays on the website.
Once you have your leads (and data) in hand, the next step is to contact the leads. This is where Wishpond’s email marketing tool comes handy. Using the insights derived from the website visitor’s movements, Wishpond segregates visitors into different lists based on filters like location, activity and interests.
The platform’s robust email automation feature makes email marketing extremely simple. The analytics reports generated by the platform can help you track and tweak any of the campaigns you run. You can even import leads from another source and upload them onto the platform.
With Wishpond, you can even optimize your social media pages for audience-specific triggers and run contests, opinion polls and surveys that have been custom-designed for that audience group.
Landing page generation is another fabulous feature that Wishpond offers. The platform allows marketers to A/B Test their landing pages and make the modifications they need for different visitor groups. There are hundreds of landing page templates – categorized into different industries. So you won’t find it hard to find a template to match your requirements.
Wishpond also offers Salesforce and Base CRM integrations (amongst many others). This makes sales management and marketing completely hassle-free. The best part about using this platform is that you don’t need to know how to code or have any technical knowledge to use it.
Intercom
Category: Conversational Marketing
You might think that live chat is just a value added feature you offer your customers. But the truth is, live chat can have a much bigger impact on your top line performance. Studies show that customers are 63% more likely to engage with your website if you provide live chat facility. Marketers in various studies have also confirmed seeing a 3.84% spike in conversion rates and a 6% increase in revenues from the implementation of live chat. Intercom is a great tool to leverage this huge potential.
Intercom combines three essential modules which help marketers lead prospects through the sales funnel. It has a live chat support feature which allows marketers to connect with website visitors. The platform also has a set of in-app, page-specific automatic messages which get triggered when a visitor browses that page.
There is a set of educational articles which are automatically shared with the visitor on the chat box, when they use certain words. These articles are built expressly to help address their queries. There is also a set of pre-built onboarding emails which get automatically sent to the visitor once they register their email IDs with the tool; and these automated emails contain everything from service descriptions to discount codes to reminders to try.
These emails are developed campaign-based – for trial, purchase, training, cancellation and reorder. The templates can be edited to suit your needs and scheduled to be sent to hundreds of recipients simultaneously.
The best thing about Intercom is that you can integrate the app into your phone as well. So, even if you aren’t at your desk, you can still view and respond to visitor queries 24/7.
Active Campaign
Category: Email marketing
Did you know that the ROI of email marketing is 32:1? Or that sending 3 reminder emails to shopping cart abandoners can stimulate an increase in purchase orders by 69%? Email marketing is a powerful sales and lead generation medium.
ActiveCampaign packs three of the most important weapons in a marketer’s arsenal – Sales & CRM, Marketing automation and Email marketing – into a single platform. The platform comes equipped with a visual automation editor, which you can use to create the responsive and engaging email workflows. These workflows can be mobile-optimized too, making this tool perfect for an all-rounded marketing campaign.
The platform makes use of “Tags” in order to subdivide and group emails. This also makes email segmenting and recipient segmentation much easier. This platform has a really interactive and insights-rich dashboard. A great thing about ActiveCampaign is that it spells out who your subscribers, unsubscribers and inactive recipients are and what type of engagement (if any) they indulge in.
Once you activate a campaign, the platform generates a scheduled email marketing report where you can monitor the open rates, unsubscribes and site visits from your email. You can then custom-select recipients who haven’t opened the email and send out a broadcast email to them for re-engagement. If you’d like to implement the same campaign on the broadcast mail, you can just click on the “Resend Campaign” button and activate the campaign again.
Another really unique feature of ActiveCampaign is its automation. The platform’s automation building tool requires marketers to answer a few questions, in order to develop the automated campaign. If this campaign works brilliantly and you’d like to share it with another ActiveCampaign user, you can do so by sharing the URL. You can charge payments for these too.
Tagger Media
Category: Influencer marketing
90% of marketers say that the ROI they derive from influencer marketing is better than many other channels of marketing. In fact, content from influencers can improve brand perception amongst audiences by 70%. If you’re interested in improving your influencer marketing campaigns, then you should take Tagger Media for a spin.
This is an opt-in platform that has a database of over 1 million experienced influencers. Influencers need to sign-up to use the platform. Once a company creates an account on the platform, marketers can request influencers for access to their audience analytics, previous content, engagement metrics and more.
Then they can either open their campaigns for any influencer or send a request to specific influencers. Once an influencer joins your campaign, you can actively control the content they submit and schedule its posting. The management dashboard is full of tools to track, measure and tweak the campaigns as they progress.
Tagger Media comes built with a social listening tool that you can use to learn insights about trending topics and content. Affinity Engine tracks and monitors audience interests and provides insights about possible points of conversation. Influencers can then create content accordingly.
The tool is also extremely powerful in finding influencers with a specific set of skills or interests – like a needle in a haystack. For example, an influencer who eats pasta everyday and is passionate about sci-fi and ponchos. The numeros filters allow marketers to sieve through the influencers and find someone who is compatible with their brand.
Narrato
Category: Content Creation
Content marketing is hugely popular among marketers because of the great results it produces and cost-effectiveness. However, it is important to note that a content marketing campaign is only successful when you have good content to power it. So, if you’re looking for a platform that can put your content worries to rest, you should definitely take a look at Narrato.
Narrato is a content creation platform that allows marketers to get superior-quality content written by experienced freelance writers, marketers and industry experts. The platform is easy to use, intuitive and gets work done fast. A neat little perk is the free image recommendations with every article or blog post, which comes in quite handy.
The best part about Narrato is that it uses state-of-the-art AI technology to match your order with a writer who has the most relevant experience. Need an in-depth article about orthopedic prosthetics, with well-researched forecasts for 2020? Narrato’s AI platform can find you an expert writer who has the insights and expertise to produce top-notch content.
Another great feature about this platform is its budget-friendliness and tiered pricing. To top it, you also only pay for the content you like, and have the option to request unlimited revisions within a given period (which is almost a month! in case of top tier). What I really liked about the platform is that it gives you a risk-free $1 rate for a trial article. This allows you to test the service before you place a larger order.
The content delivery timeline is 24 hours, once picked, for content up to 2000 words. And revision requests are turned around in the same timeline too. So you can say goodbye to rushed campaigns.
Final thoughts
Marketing is challenging. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do things more efficiently. Working with the right tools and platforms can make things much easier. Hopefully some of the above platform suggestions would help you get the most out of your marketing effort.
About the Author: Nisha Prakash is a blogger specializing in social media marketing and content management. She is an avid runner and a bibliophile.