Marketing is part art, part science, and if you have the proper skills in both aspect of marketing, your business will do well.

The art aspect of marketing is essential for building a relationship with your audience. You have to have a creative streak to develop engaging content for your blog, express interesting ideas on social media, make informative and entertaining videos on YouTube, and write persuasive segments in your ads to drive traffic to your website.

The science aspect of marketing focuses on measuring your success by engaging your audience. You need to be able to measure, as closely as possible, what’s working and what’s not working. This way you can eliminate ineffective strategies and ramp up things that are doing well.

While the art aspect of marketing is based on training and practice in writing, making videos, and designing ads, the science aspect mainly depends on the type of marketing software you’re using. The better your choice of software, the higher the probability of your business prospering.

When it comes to marketing software, here five suggestions on robust software you can use to improve your marketing:

Software to manage your marketing materials.

Marketing asset management software is suitable for businesses that need to manage their marketing materials across a large organization with many locations. It works well for a larger franchise business or a business with employees in numerous locations.

Software to measure the success of your marketing efforts.

Analytics software converts your data into a detailed report, and it works in conjunction with data collection software. Essentially, what the software does is make all the metrics you’ve collected about your business much more comprehensible. In other words, it breaks down data so that you can analyze it.

In this way, you’ll have a much better idea of what’s working and what’s not working. You’ll find much of this information both surprising and insightful. Things that you expected to work may have failed spectacularly; while, things that you didn’t think had a chance may have done magnificently. Based on this information, you can revise your marketing strategies.

Software to improve customer relationships.

The better your relationship with your customers, the more likely they are to place a new order, try out another one of your products, or recommend your business to family and friends. The way to improve this relationship is to enhance how well and how often you communicate with them.

This is where customer relationship management (CRM) software comes in. This software and others like it provides tools to help you better manage your relationship with your customers, track and measure your interactions with them, including how they responded (or failed to respond) to your marketing campaigns.

Software to improve your social media marketing.

Social media software will make your social media marketing much more efficient and effective. Instead of spending hours on social media, you can post more efficiently, saving time that you can use to develop other aspects of your business.

In addition, the software tracks and reports how your friends, fans, or followers respond to your post. Using this software, you’ll be able to schedule posts in advance, develop an attractive online personality, interest new people in your profile, and reinforce your existing relationships. In short, this software makes it much easier to get total control over almost every aspect of your social media marketing endeavors.

Software to relieve the tedium of routine tasks.

Marketing automation software makes it far easier to get tedious work done. For instance, imagine how tedious it would be to copy-and-paste an email message to every subscriber on your list. The larger your list, the more tedious and time-consuming it would be.

Through marketing automation like broadcast emails and autoresponders, you can easily mail a message to tens of thousands of people within seconds. Your effort would be limited to writing the email and hitting the “send” button to your list. Besides automating your email marketing, automated marketing can be used to manage your blogs, build landing pages, streamline your marketing campaigns, and track your keywords. In short, if there is a way to do something faster and more efficiently in digital marketing, there’s probably some marketing automation software for it.

In brief, marketing is a wonderful blend of art and science, a combination of human ingenuity and the selective use of software to manage and measure your promotional efforts.