As a marketer in today’s world responsible for attracting prospective buyers and nurturing their interest past the point of conversion while keeping an eye on the latest trends, you need marketing platforms to support your activities.
You can’t expect to do it all on your own. That’s a recipe for inefficient processes that will dramatically undermine your ability to compete effectively in the marketplace.
The right software will help you optimize your performance to maximize results and achieve your overarching brand goals.
Definition Of Marketing Platforms
Marketing Platforms
Robust tools or software solutions that help marketers orchestrate experiences across different channels to strengthen the relationship between your brand and its customers or prospects.
They are designed to carry out multiple functions to enable you to drive engagement, build awareness, expand your reach, zero in on your target audience, and convert leads into sales in a streamlined manner.
Features Of Marketing Platforms
Any effective marketing tool aims to speed up productivity and make your job easier. Marketing platforms are packed with useful features you can leverage to fulfill various aspects of your marketing duties, from core activities to small repetitive tasks.
Here are some of the things you can do with marketing platforms:
- Visibility into the entire workflow. You can consolidate your marketing activities in one place for ease of organization and management.
- Team communication. Collaborate effectively with team members, assign tasks, track project status, reduce friction, and ensure everyone is on the same page while working together on marketing campaigns.
- Track sales and progress. Ensure your performances are moving you closer to your marketing and organizational goals.
- Pull reports. Measure campaign ROI and overall marketing performance. Utilize insights to set future goals and optimize performance.
- Automate marketing tasks and campaigns. Save time and effort by automating manual tasks like content scheduling, brand monitoring, email follow-ups, and customer query responses with your chosen marketing platform.
- Email marketing management. Create engaging, targeted messages, categorize customers into segments, and deliver relevant campaigns at the right times with the right software.
- Social media marketing management. Take the hassle out of creating and publishing social content, building an engaged community, monitoring engagement, and tracking campaign results across several apps.
- Resource management. Plan, schedule, and allocate resources efficiently to maximize their potential and ensure the successful execution of projects.
- Lead management. This feature streamlines lead acquisition, segmentation, scoring, qualification, distribution, nurturing, and pipeline tracking for enhanced sales efficiency and conversions.
Benefits Of Using Marketing Management Platforms
Track Performance
Easily track how you and your team are performing when it comes to completing tasks, assigning out projects, and roadmapping upcoming priorities.
Increase Efficiency
With everything you and your team need in the same place, you can easily communicate, plan, schedule and complete work up to 10x faster than usual.
Find & Fill Gaps In Planning
Marketing management platforms can help businesses find and fill gaps in their planning by providing a centralized view of all marketing activities and data.
There is no shortage of technologies for the different types of marketing activities that you may get up, but not all of them will be a good fit for your business or specific needs. Here are steps you can take when shopping for a marketing platform to help you pick the one that is best for you.
- Define Your Goals & Objectives. What do you hope to achieve with your marketing efforts? Improve your customer experiences, engage your audience, manage resources, and figure out what people say about you on social media? Your marketing goals will lead you to the type of platforms for the job.
- Identify Your Audience. Who do you intend to serve with your marketing platform, and what will they get out of it? The platform you choose should be aligned with your audience’s needs, wants, and preferences.
- Know Your Budget. Think about the value a marketing platform can bring your business and how much you can afford to invest in the right one. Then choose a quality platform that falls within that price range.
- Determine Necessary Features. Create a list of essential features, then find platforms that offer them, ensuring compatibility with existing tools and fast customer support.
- Research Your Competitors. Find out what platforms are used by marketing teams in your industry to gain insights to make an informed decision.
1. Traditional Marketing Platforms
Traditional marketing platforms are physical mediums that allow you to raise brand awareness, interact with your target market, and drive sales growth offline.
These are traditional marketing channels and tools that don’t rely on internet access for audiences to consume marketing messages and brand experiences, such as SMS, billboards, flyers, and more.
Example:
- TextMagic: SMS marketing platforms like TextMagic enable you to send personalized notifications, alerts, confirmations, and other marketing messages to prospects and customers via text messages. It also allows you to optimize and automate your SMS marketing campaigns.
2. Digital Marketing Platforms
A digital marketing platform is a comprehensive tool that utilizes technology to support various online marketing functions, including customer retention, performance measurement, campaign optimization, and brand communication refinement.
While digital marketing platforms offer extensive functionalities, not all may cover every element of digital marketing. However, an excellent automation platform should support customer outreach, brand awareness, and conversions.
Example:
- Adobe Marketo Engage: Ideal for small or large-scale businesses, this platform helps you engage with prospects and manage customer relationships from the initial point of interest until they become advocates for your brand.
3. Content Marketing Platforms
Content marketing platforms are tools that enable you to strategize, create, distribute, and promote content to ensure that your audience receives relevant and valuable messages that can help them solve their problems and deepen their connection to your brand.
Content marketing software can also help you track KPIs and quantify the ROI of your content operation and how it’s contributing to your business objectives.
Example:
- Percolate: This platform lets you organize and store all your content assets in one place. It allows you to schedule blog and social media posts, create a content calendar, and evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns.
4. Email Marketing Platforms
Email is a cost-effective way to promote your brand, engage audiences, and generate sales. However, manually managing emails for each subscriber is time-consuming or even impossible.
Email marketing platforms provide tools to design templates, segment lists, personalize messages, conduct A/B tests, schedule emails, measure performance, and automate workflows.
Example:
- ActiveCampaign: Leverage custom email templates, drag-and-drop email editing, list management, social analytics, automated triggers, landing page builder, click tracking heatmaps, and automated email delivery features to refine your email campaigns.
5. Social Media Marketing Platforms
Social media marketers need technological assistance to handle content creation and community management across various platforms.
Social media marketing platforms can schedule posts, perform social listening, monitor campaign performance, manage social media advertising, store content, facilitate team collaboration, and enhance audience engagement.
Example:
- Hootsuite: Implement social media strategies and manage multiple social accounts from a central location with this popular platform. It can do everything from automating posts to brand sentiment analysis.
6. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platforms
Tracking customer data and communications is the key to creating consistent, seamless experiences and building better relationships with your leads and clients.
With CRM platforms, you can connect all your customer information and interactions in one place. This central location makes it easier for you to analyze the data and provide your customers with personalized services that meet their needs in real-time.
Example:
- Zoho CRM: Increase efficiency, shorten sales cycles, impress clients, and save yourself the stress of pulling customer data from multiple sources and touchpoints with this powerful customer relationship management platform.
7. Marketing Resource Management (MRM) Platforms
Marketing resource management platforms assist marketers in planning, organizing, optimizing, and executing various strategies and channels to reach, engage, and acquire customers efficiently.
These platforms also empower you to properly distribute resources and manage marketing projects internally and externally to execute projects successfully.
Example:
- Wrike: A collaborative and easy-to-use MRM platform for customizing workflows, tracking time and expenses, visualizing to-dos, and allocating and managing resources for various marketing tasks.
8. Digital Asset Management (DAM) Platforms
Sifting through multiple drives, folders, and applications whenever you need to find a digital asset can be disruptive to your creative process and workflow.
Digital asset management platforms centralize all company assets like videos, photos, graphics, audio files, and more. With convenient sorting and categorization, you can quickly search and locate the right asset in seconds, streamlining your creative process and workflow.
Example:
- Canto: This tool provides simple and advanced search tools, smart albums, custom shared libraries, user permissions, visual previews, sharing links, download options, and more to efficiently store and manage your digital assets.
9. Marketing Work Management (MWM) Platforms
How do you manage resources, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and structure your work day-to-day to ensure you reach your goals? With the help of marketing work management platforms, of course.
MWM platforms provide extensive capabilities such as budgeting, strategic planning, request management, multiple project views, task assignments, automated workflow templates, team communication, file sharing, time tracking, asset and resource management, and more.
Example:
- CoSchedule Marketing Suite: This Gartner-recommended platform helps you to coordinate all your marketing activities, processes, and projects from one place. It allows you to stretch your existing resources to get more work done, organize your brand assets, complete projects in record time, and reinvigorate your team by taking repetitive tasks off their hands.
What Is The Best Marketing Platform?
The best marketing platform is the one that suits your needs and aligns with your overall business and marketing objectives. It has to fit within your budget and possess all the necessary properties to reach your target and complete your marketing tasks. Extra points if your competitors swear by it.
What Are The 4 Ps Of Marketing?
Product, price, promotion, and place form the four Ps of the marketing mix. These are the key factors in introducing a product or service to the public. They are the actions that will determine what you sell, how much you sell it for, where you sell it, and how you advertise what you’re selling.
What Is A Social Media Marketing Platform?
Any product suite facilitates social media content creation, account management, post scheduling, performance tracking, brand sentiment analysis, and other social media marketing-related activities.
What Are Examples Of Digital Platforms?
Digital marketing platforms help you carry out various online marketing activities like building awareness, customer engagement, running campaigns, and tracking KPIs. Examples include Adobe Marketo Engage, Sharpspring, and Keap.