To effectively and efficiently manage your businesses growth, it is imperative to have a marketing software platform that has at least these seven marketing software features.
I have developed this list of features while working on my company’s marketing platform; they are critical to generating the thousands of leads for our organization on a monthly basis.
Leveraging our marketing software with these features, we have continually increased our marketing spend through our acquisition strategies month over month for the past eight years.
When selecting marketing software for your business, consider these seven features for maximum optimization and scalability:
1. Marketing Analytics: This is the No. 1 feature in any platform and is vital to providing relevant metrics that are meaningful in driving the decision-making process. The marketing analytics I am referring to go beyond just normal tracking of site data; I am referring to analytics with built-in optimization alerts and indicators that are benchmarked against current marketing goals within the software. Analytics should integrate across all marketing channels to gain valuable insights and intelligence on how each component of search, remarketing, organic and social influence one another. The key is to gather the correct data that is aligned with your marketing goals and supports the economics of marketing spend.
2. CRM Integration: It is important to have all your conversion data automatically sync into the CRM so that the leads being generated can be nurtured, efficiently worked and followed up with. Having a CRM as a standalone solution requires much more integration and can lead to bad data, which in turn can affect the accuracy of your marketing efforts. If the information is all in one place, it not only simplifies the time management and assigning of lead flow, it also allows for more accurate reporting and optimization of campaigns.
3. Paid Search: There is nothing worse than having to log into multiple sources to gain access to marketing data. For example, if you are running ads on Google, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora and/or YouTube and need to optimize these channels for either spend or conversion reasons, you would need to log into each channel and start that process. In doing so, you would lose visibility into the performance of Google and Bing, as these channels are not connected. If the paid search channel is fully integrated with single account access to all platforms that makes your optimization, reporting and spend efforts easier to manage and scale. In addition, since the conversion data is synced with the CRM, the process of lead assignment is automated.
4. Content Marketing: The way in which we create content to gain organic growth, whether it be a local or national strategy, is ever changing. But at the core of our philosophy is the creation of unique content that leverages video, strong calls to action embedded within the content and infographics. In order to get to a point where you discover the content, you first need data to analyze or have a general idea on how to effectively start the creation process. It is important to have access to other channels that are delivering conversions and then those opportunities can lead to the idea creation process for a strong content marketing strategy. If your content marketing efforts are integrated within other channels, you get the opportunity to track keyword growth, post growth/engagement, top-10 keyword trend analysis, as well as SEO optimization scores with SERP preview analysis.
5. Re-marketing: The ability to build an audience list of past visitors, YouTube viewers, Facebook likes, and design tailored creative is imperative for any successful remarketing campaign. The real challenge, aside from building the audiences and creative, is tracking it central to all other campaigns. To effectively tie other channels that are the drivers behind building these audiences, it is important to have a level of insight that can be measured back to the origination of the visitor.
For example, if you are running remarketing campaigns on Google display you need to build your targeted audiences that are segmented across each channel, as well as understand the conversion data for view-throughs, calls and onsite. Having access to an integrated suite of information better aligns not only the campaign build but ensures more accurate analysis of the data.
6. Social Media Marketing: This is one of the fastest growing marketing channels to date. There have been great advancements on this front with regards to technology that provide the ability to build scalable campaigns. Facebook, Twitter and now Snapchat are all players in the digital space and are a great play for grabbing additional market share.
The ability to have a single access point to all these channels from one software is imperative. You have to be able to track ad performance, conversions and audiences, central to one solution. In doing so your social efforts can be more targeted and optimized economically.
7. On-Demand Services: Now that all your analytics, CRM data, PPC management, content, remarketing and social media are within one platform, it is crucial that the service to execute and grow these channels is accessible at any time. The ability to manage your website, assign creative work, optimize data, set economic benchmarks for better ROI tracking, and have dedicated marketing personnel is important in the process of having a software that can grow and support your business.
Digital marketing is ever changing and the need for better data and technology to support the projected growth of your business will remain a constant.
From my experience, I learned that to grow your business from three people to over 380, it helps to have a multi-channel marketing software integrated with the support of powerful talent and technology.
