A marketing automation platform provides your business with the ability to scale up its marketing through process automation, enabling you to market more effectively on multiple channels and automate the more ‘repetitive’ tasks.
Previously, many marketing departments had to go through the arduous, time-consuming and inefficient process of manually doing repetitive marketing tasks such as social media, sending follow-up emails, website updates and others.
However, today, all your marketing activities can be conducted, recorded, monitored and analysed from one powerful, centralised marketing automation platform, not only making those tasks easier and your marketing operations more efficient, but also delivering a top-down view of your marketing and sales activity.
As a direct result of this, marketers and sales professionals are now able to visualise the entirety of their sales funnel – and how prospects move through it – from the first touch to the last.
Each stage of the sales cycle is mapped out and correlates directly with the marketing campaign, enabling highly effective trigger-based marketing which allows marketers and sales professionals to deliver the right messages, at the right time, for the right customer.
They can now assess, with incredible detail, individual customers based on their engagement with the website, identify the path to conversion and measure the overall efficacy of their marketing and sales activity.
But what software can I rely on for help?
Here’s a detailed view – research house G2 Crowd says HubSpot is the leading marketing automation platform of three main contenders – HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot. Hubspot is given five-and-a-half stars and a G2 Score of 88 points, followed by Pardot with 82 and Marketo with 80.
So, the marketing automation platform in first place: HubSpot
This is all taken from G2 Crowd’s report:
HubSpot is a ‘fabulous all-in-one integrated digital marketing marketing platform’, that helps businesses transform their marketing, helping them to be found online and improve their sales lead generation activity. HubSpot works to help your business attract visitors, convert leads and close customers in a way which is truly effective in the digital age.
Described as the ‘ultimate “all-in-one” package’, HubSpot comes with everything you need to do your marketing activities with one login – from email marketing and social media to lead nurturing, management, automation and workflows. In addition, HubSpot’s products can all be seamlessly integrated with each other, providing you with a marketing platform which is capable of everything.
Second: Marketo
Marketo is a powerful and easy-to-use marketing automation tool which helps marketing and sales professionals to drive revenue, engage customers and prospects and improve their digital marketing activities.
Described as ‘full-featured’ and ‘marketing automation made easy’, Marketo provides sophisticated marketing automation, lead management, lead scoring, SEO, landing pages and analytics. New and more advanced features include website personalisation, mobile engagement, social and web retargeting.
Third: Pardot
Pardot, by Salesforce, is a marketing automation platform which helps marketers to create more leads, close more deals and accurately measure marketing success.
Offering ‘intuitive marketing automation’, Pardot provides users with a full marketing automation suite, including lead management software, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and ROI reporting – helping to align marketing and sales teams and streamline processes.
Which platform do you choose?
HubSpot is orientated around empowering marketers to make their inbound marketing more effective. Rather than focusing on just marketing automation, HubSpot provides you with a centralised set of tools which allow you to manage every part of your campaign: your website, email marketing social promotion, lead management and lead nurturing, analytics, automation, CRM, sales and much more. In addition, it comes with a built-in CRM, meaning you don’t have to pay additional fees to manage your contacts.
The benefit of HubSpot is that you have everything in one place and don’t need to buy additional solutions in order to augment your existing marketing platform, or duct-tape numerous solutions together.
Evidently, not only is HubSpot more cost-effective, especially if you are a small or medium-sized business looking for a powerful marketing automation solution, but HubSpot – of the three – is the only ‘all-in-one’ marketing automation platform among them. There is no doubt that Pardot and Marketo are incredibly sophisticated, feature-rich and adaptable, but when it comes to simplicity, ease-of-use and centralised functionality, HubSpot is a step ahead.
You will also be pleasantly surprised by the pricing!
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