A marketing cloud is an integration of cloud-based marketing tools like analytics, audience management, social media management, customer profiling and targeting.

Marketing cloud eases a marketer’s effort by tracking and measuring relevant data like customer behavior and preferences, campaign performance and lots more. It also allows marketers to automate time-consuming tasks.

• What are the Top 10 Marketing Cloud Platforms
• What is Included in Adobe Marketing Cloud?
• What is the best Marketing Software?
• Which Software is used for Marketing?

What are the Top 10 Marketing Cloud Platforms

There is stiff competition among the leading Marketing Cloud providers, with most of the vendors providing similar features or services. One solution may not fit all of a business’ requirements.

Here are some of the (reputed) top marketing clouds:

1. Adobe Marketing Cloud serves as a one-stop solution for organizing, accessing and personalizing marketing content. It gives deep insights on what is working for your customers, helps personalize the customer experience throughout the customer journey, and also helps orchestrate content across channels.

Read Also: What is Marketing Integration?

Marketing decisions are data-driven, where advanced analytics garners a holistic view of customers and predicts customer needs.

The portfolio has 8 Marketing Solutions for every marketing need:

• Analytics to gather, analyze and act on customer data across all channels.
• Audience Manager to identify valuable segments by audience profiling.
• Campaign delivers personalized messages based on customer preferences.
• Experience Manager to simplify management and content delivery.
• Media Optimizer to assess, manage and automate your ad campaigns.
• Primetime for creating and monetizing TV/Video experiences.
• Social for managing social content and campaigns
• Target is for testing digital experiences to understand the most successful content.
   

2. SalesForce’s Marketing Cloud Einstein drives intelligent marketing using AI to predict the optimal timing, channel, content, and audience for a campaign.

A bouquet of tools on SalesForce’s unified platform delivers Data-Driven Marketing using AI.

• Journey Builder guides customers on 1:1 journeys across various channels and devices to deliver the right message at the right time.
• You can use Paradot for B2B marketing automation, lead nurturing and advanced analytics for insights and build personalized email campaigns with Email Studio.
• SalesForce DMP lets you predict the next best content by capturing data from anywhere on the platform.
• Social Studio engine helps drive your brand’s social presence and engage and service customers on social media.

Power up your digital advertising, campaigns and re-engagement with Advertising Studio.

3. Oracle Marketing Cloud: helps marketers connect with the customer, build the right customer experience and create loyal customers.

• Oracle Eloqua powers up your  marketing automation.
• For creating memorable and relevant customer experiences Oracle Responsys is a great solution.
• Oracle BlueKai is the Data Management Platform for garnering insights from marketing data to target the right audience.
• Test and Optimize with Oracle Maxymiser.
• Oracle Infinity is a digital analytics solution that collects, processes and delivers actionable customer intelligence at scale.

Content and Social Marketing creates customer profiles, engages customers, builds content and aligns with campaigns.

4. Marketo With Marketo you can do a lot: customer segmentation and engagement, as well as observe and track behavior. You can use behavioral analysis for customer profiling and personalizing messages, to market across channels, to run email marketing, analyze programs and campaigns.

Predictive intelligence is at your service to understand what works better for your customers. Marketo seamlessly integrates with hundreds of popular solutions.

5. AgileOne Cloud: is a predictive marketing cloud that orchestrates omnichannel customer experiences using customer profiles. The Enterprise Platform lets you configure business rules, data elements, metadata, and scripting. Unified Customer View combines customer data, transactions and engagement information from all channels and locations to gain insights and create valuable customer experiences.

You can cleanse and enrich data, do customer profiling based on customer activities and bring events and campaigns onto a common platform. Predictive campaigns include Predictive Cart Recovery, Predictive Email Targeting, Cluster-Based Targeting, Loyalty Appreciation, Customer Reactivation.

Machine Learning and Analytics power up predictions for customer events like purchase, subscription, engagement. Out of the box calculations determine the next best actions for customers on 1:1 basis. The sleek interface eases access to data using dashboards and reports.

6. HubSpot’s all in one Inbound Marketing software lets you manage your marketing analytics, blogs, automation, SEO, landing pages, leads, emails, websites and social media.

You can track your entire marketing funnel in one place.

From recommending the right time to publish content and SEO suggestions to designing CTAs and personalizing messages to tracking customer interactions with your campaign, you can do it all in one place. Lead Intelligence helps you establish a personalized path for converting visitors to leads and eventually customers.

7. SailThru: offers personalized customer experiences across multiple channels – email, websites, and mobile.

Some of the key features include

• High-Performance Personalized Emails for effective and profitable email marketing.
• Co-ordination across channels for 1:1 product and content recommendations for customers based on quality customer profiles, helps personalize and renew messages that resonate with customers.
• Advanced Personalization to engage customers based on behavior, preferences and the context with which they interact with your brand.
• Predictive Analytics to improve segmentation.
• Long-Term Measurement using real-time campaign statistics with multiple data sets to track the impact of campaigns on your business.

8. Experian Marketing Services uses insight-driven marketing to connect you with your customers. The Consumer View feature offers rich consumer data for effective targeting and segmentation. Intelligent data analytics gives you deep insight into the most profitable audience.

OmniActivation and Audience Engine help you reach your audience wherever you need to for 1:1 targeting. You can measure your campaign performance, gain customized insights and turn social media activity into actionable marketing intelligence.

9. IBM Cloud: IBM marketing cloud offers a lot of capabilities like lead helps in overall marketing management, mobile engagement, email marketing and marketing automation. Analytical insights using customer data keep you updated and provide better cross-channel experiences for email, web, and mobile.

Lead management is easy and effective with multi-channel approaches to score new leads and nurture old ones.

The portfolio includes several options like

• IBM Campaign to deliver personalized marketing messages.
• IBM Interact determines right messages in real time for inbound marketing channels.
• IBM eMessage is for customer engagement.
• To streamline and improve marketing processes you have IBM Marketing Operations.
• IBM Email Optimization offers optimized email marketing solutions.
   

10. SAP Hybris Marketing Cloud: is an end-to-end enterprise solution that offers deep customer insights and personalized engagement at every step of the customer journey. Cloud for Sales, Cloud for Sales Retail Execution, Cloud for Service, Cloud for Social Engagement, Social Collaboration, Social Media Analytics and Precision Marketing in-Cloud are some of the services offered.

What is Included in Adobe Marketing Cloud?

Adobe Marketing Cloud is an integrated all-in-one marketing suite that allows companies of all sizes to personalize, optimize, and measure digital campaigns and customer experiences for optimal performance.

The suite features a complete set of solutions, including Adobe Campaign, Adobe Social, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Media Optimizer, Adobe Target and Adobe Analytics, as well as an intuitive interface that allows users to sync content, insights and data across multiple marketing channels.

In terms of marketing automation, Adobe Marketing Cloud lets users automate their targeting process, so they can increase conversions while reducing their workload.

In addition, users can automate their multilingual campaigns and connect their email with other digital channels using one of Adobe Marketing Cloud’s integrated solutions. Needless to say, the tool offers everything a business marketer needs to orchestrate the customer journey and deliver experiences that are meaningful to each customer.

Below, we’ve shared several key features of Adobe Marketing Cloud:

• Marketing Automation – One of Adobe Marketing Cloud’s digital marketing solutions, Adobe Campaign, allows users to implement marketing automation to increase their campaign productivity and deliver a compelling customer experience. Users can also build individual customer profiles based on the interests and actions tracked through different marketing channels.
• A/B Testing – The only way for users to know how their marketing can be improved is to get a clear idea of its performance. But if all their data is in separate locations, it’s difficult to know which image, text or video leads to more conversions. Adobe Marketing Cloud helps through Adobe Target, an integrated solution that can be used to conduct A/B testing to discover which creative asset leads to conversion.
• Real-Time Digital Analytics – Adobe Marketing Cloud’s product suite also includes Adobe Analytics, a product that empowers business marketers to understand their customers as people by discovering what they believe, need and want. Users are also provided with the option to use experiential data from multi-channel campaigns to get the complete picture of their customers’ journey.
• Social Insights – For those looking to improve their social marketing results, Adobe Marketing Cloud offers Adobe Social. It’s a social management platform that allows users to moderate and monitor conversations, promote and publish content, and analyze conversion and engagement data in a single mobile-supported interface. Additionally, the system automatically attaches tracking codes to users’ social content to identify what content drives engagement.

Implementation/Integration

Adobe Marketing Cloud operates is a cloud-based solution, making implementation a streamlined process. The Adobe website offers robust documentation for installing and deploying each of the solutions in the suite.

Users can easily integrate their existing accounts with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target by using the opt-in wizard, which will create the configurations and frameworks needed to get started.

The various Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions are designed to integrate with each other for a 360-degree view of the company’s marketing performance and opportunities.

For example, Adobe Campaign messages and landing pages can be configured to include contents from Adobe Experience Manager and dynamic images from Adobe Target. Adobe Analytics integrates with several Adobe apps, including Adobe Campaigns, Adobe Social and Adobe Media Optimizer.

Once the apps are implemented and integrated, Adobe offers a database of video tutorials for user training.

Pricing

Adobe’s website states that pricing is on a custom basis and will vary depending on the company’s size and needs. Additionally, special rates may apply to organizations that are interested in two or more of the six Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions.

To get pricing information and a quote, contact the Adobe sales team by requesting a consultation online or calling their toll free line at 877-722-7088. 

What is the best Marketing Software?

Marketing technology has been changing drastically over the last several years thanks to targeted advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), social media, and even older staples, like email marketing. With ever more value to offer, marketing automation has emerged as a key driver for sales and building brands.

This evolution continues in 2020 with SMS marketing as well a renewed focus on omnichannel campaigns, which add both complexity and nuance to marketing strategy.

With all these new avenues opening up, however, the challenge for many has become choosing the best messaging route to specific customer segments and relationships as well as how to ensure loyalty in those connections once forged.  

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation started out as a way to free marketers from tedious and repetitive tasks while assisting them in delivering effective marketing messages in a timely way. The addition of artificial intelligence (AI) as well as machine earning (ML) has helped marketers optimize the effectiveness and timeliness of  their marketing messages using automation. 

By tracking users’ behaviors on websites and on other channels, marketers can then use this data to understand their interests and intent. AI can then automatically suggest what kind of content and marketing message will be most relevant to these leads, the best time to send these messages to yield the best results.

When deployed properly, marketing automation can set businesses apart from their competitors with automated yet highly personalized emails that boost sales through customer engagement. 

These solutions can handle the complex, grueling work that is integral to a marketing campaign while pulling from multiple data sources.

Marketing automation software culls information like the number of opened emails, e-commerce carts left behind, and web form data to make your marketing decisions easier. If you truly take advantage of the features a marketing automation platform delivers, then you can boost your company’s bottom line.

Similar to standard email marketing software vendors, marketing automation software vendors have created workflow templates that help guide you through the automation process. This way, you don’t have to build new sequences from scratch.

Basic templates usually start with an interaction, such as a “Welcome” or a “Thank you for making a purchase” message. Once a contact receives the initial email, he or she is guided through a sequence based on his or her actions.

For example, if Clark receives a welcome message and he clicks a link to an offer, then that action automatically pulls him onto a distinct email marketing journey. Conversely, if Lois deletes her welcome message, then she may automatically be pulled off the workflow to conserve your email output.

How complicated and how deep your campaigns run is determined by which vendor you choose. For example, HubSpot and Pardot both offer unlimited email and unlimited sequencing options.

This means you can create a workflow with multiple branches for each stage of the sequence, and you can create an unlimited number of sequences (not that you would).

Conversely, Zoho Campaigns is mostly designed for users who want to follow customary workflows that guide users on basic sequences.

As a result, Zoho Campaigns don’t offer unlimited sequencing or branching. This tool is perfectly suitable for marketers who just want to make an offer after a welcome email or for marketers who want to wish people a happy birthday once a year.

More complex applications are tied in to potential sales. A customer who abandons a shopping cart on your online store will set off an alert. This can trigger an email to that customer with a generous discount code or other offers to sweeten the deal.

Being able to deploy automated marketing messages on-the-fly speaks to the urgency of retaining a customer who has made a buying decision, but may be price-sensitive or be looking elsewhere. Now, multiply these opportunities with the size of your contact list, and it becomes evident that marketing automation becomes a necessary tool for businesses.

Top of The Marketing Automation Chain

Email marketing is a great first step toward developing solid communications with your customers and prospects. But once you have moved past one-off messages and have decided to create prolonged, personalized messages powered by customer data, it’s time to try marketing automation.

No tools better exemplify the simplicity, effectiveness, and scalability of marketing automation software than two of our three Editors’ Choice tools: HubSpot and Pardot.

Both HubSpot and Pardot offer a vast array of functionality that should suit your business regardless of how intricate your marketing strategy might be.

We found HubSpot to be better equipped for small businesses that are steadily growing their marketing activity, whereas Pardot is ideal for large enterprises with complicated marketing plans already in place. In total, we tested 10 marketing automation tools, each of which offer some unique features that make them stand out from the field.

Mailchimp, which is an Editors’ Choice selection for email marketing, is extending its overall service in the direction of becoming a full marketing automation platform. Mailchimp’s arsenal now includes postcards, landing pages, integration with Instagram and Facebook, Google Ads, social posting, and even a marketing calendar.

Spreading expertise and ease-of-use within a familiar and user-friendly interface seems to have worked well for Mailchimp and is a strategy that remains consistent to its brand.

Pricing and Plans

Marketing automation software is typically priced one of two ways: by the number of contacts in your database or by the number of emails you send each month. For example, the Growth Pardot plan costs $1,250 per month for email marketing, prospect tracking, lead nurturing and scoring, reporting, forms and landing pages, and standard Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM).

This plan can be upgraded to two higher tiers, each of which offers additional features, plug-ins, and add-ons. However, all three Pardot plans give you capacity for 10,000 contacts.

Don’t be alarmed by Pardot’s price tag as it’s easily the most expensive tool we reviewed. HubSpot’s Marketing Hub lets you store 1,000 contacts for $50 per month in its Starter plan, $800 per month for its second-most feature-rich plan, and $3,200 for the Enterprise plan. 

On the lower end of the pricing spectrum, you’ll find products such as Infusionsoft, which costs $299 per month for five users, 5,000 contacts, and unlimited emails per month. The Complete package also includes Infusionsoft’s four core feature sets (CRM, e-commerce, marketing automation, and sales automation) at no extra charge.

SendinBlue and Zoho Campaigns both offer free plans for anyone who is unwilling to spend even a dime for marketing workflows. Both tools scale upward for added capacity and complexity, and each offers pay-as-you-go plans for companies just dipping their toes into email marketing and marketing automation.

Powerful Templates

In addition to an organic integration with Salesforce, Pardot offers one of the cleanest user interfaces (UIs) and one of the largest variety of prebuilt templates on the market. But its best features are designed to improve your workflows once they’ve been created.

For example, you can pretest the process of an automated program to see how it reacts. This is essentially a fire drill automation campaign to ensure your complex branching doesn’t lead to a dead end or a duplicate email. Pardot also lets you schedule social media campaigns and post in real time to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter simultaneously.

If you really want to manage your marketing program from within one solution, then Pardot also offers a search marketing tool that plugs into Bing, Google, and Yahoo. You can check search engine rankings, monthly volumes, and ranking difficulties as well as run competitor analysis and monitor your paid search campaigns. No other tool we reviewed offers search marketing functionality.

HubSpot heavily relies on list building to help you manage your workflows. The tool lets you shrink (or grow) your lists in the same way you would narrow down products on Amazon or eBay, a feature which is incredibly straightforward and fast.

When you add a URL to a contact record, HubSpot will automatically pull in demographic information, such as the contact’s company location and number of employees.

You can email a contact directly from the Contact Record, and you can make a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) call if you have turned on this paid feature of HubSpot Sales.

This integration lets you log and save call information within each contact record so there is a transparent history of which marketers and sales professionals interacted with contacts. You can also schedule interactions with contacts. You won’t find these features on the other platforms we reviewed.

Infusionsoft is the only drag-and-drop tool we tested, which is a nifty feature for marketers who may wish to work on touchscreens or don’t have time to deal with lengthy drop-down menus.

It also provides unique tag removal that automatically pulls contacts from campaigns if they perform a certain action. For example, if contacts don’t open three emails in a row, then you can set the tool to remove all such contacts from the workflow.

This way, you’re not sending messages into a vacuum. The tool also gives you the most useful real-time alert dashboard of any that we tested in this class. It lets you see every contact interaction with anyone in your database.

So, if you sent an email to someone a week ago but they just opened it this second, then you’ll see their name pop up at the top of your dashboard. From this tab, you can send a follow-up email or adjust the contact’s standing within the specific workflow.

Some solutions such as Infusionsoft have solidified their lead management offerings. Infusionsoft’s Pipeline lead management tool lets companies organize and manage prospects and deals in a single dashboard.

Using Pipeline, you can customize sales stages, add a contact or business to a card, follow up with leads, and prioritize your work. The use of pipelines and funnels makes it easier to grasp how leads can be optimized and converted to sales.

These are just some of the amazing features you’ll find when using marketing automation software. As a result, it’s important for you to determine your most needed features before making a purchase decision.

None of the tools we tested are bad. In fact, each of them will provide you with more power than your standard email marketing platform will. Some will offer additional customer insights and increase chances of closing sales.

Some are better than others, some are more expensive, and some do a better job letting you customize your workflows to suit your specific needs for the present and also for the future.

Which Software is used for Marketing?

If you’re trying to find the right marketing software to accomplish your business’ goals, but aren’t sure which vendor to go with, here are some recommendations for choosing the right software.

1. Level-set: If you’re generating 20k monthly sessions, you might not need to go with the enterprise-level SEO software. Start small. Choose software that supports your size and aspirations.
2. Identify your goals: Why are you looking for a software solution in the first place? What numbers should this investment help improve? It’s a simple step, but by identifying this and tying numbers to software, you’ll have a better feel for which vendors can support those goals.
3. Identify who will use it: Which teams need access? How many total members of your team will need seats? How do their challenges differ? Considering the impact that any vendor will have on your team is a critical step toward making the right decision.
4. Identify who will own it: Who will own implementation? Management? Involve this person early on in the evaluation process in order to ensure onboarding and implementation go smoothly.
5. Read reviews: Use sites like G2 in order to research reviews for the software you’re evaluating and even see who the market leaders are for the categories you’re looking at investing in.
6. Read case studies: Visit any vendor’s website and review any case studies they’ve published. If you can’t find them, ask vendors to share some with you.
7. Demo the product: It’s always a good idea to get a demonstration of the software before investing money into it. Ideally, this won’t just be screenshare. You’ll want your team to get into the software and confirm it can do what’s needed.

Let’s proceed to our list of the 5 best marketing software for small businesses. We picked the products based on their ease of use, robust features, and wide usage; after all, if it’s popular, then it must work for most users.

The best marketing software for small businesses may not necessarily be the cheapest, but they must always provide value for money.

1. HubSpot Marketing

HubSpot Marketing provides an advanced system that brings all of your marketing efforts together, helping your team grow traffic and increase conversions. It has drag-and-drop functionality to design attractive websites with responsive pages regardless of the device used by your visitors.

Website design is only the first step. The software will further assist you in preparing and optimizing relevant and engaging content and distribute it to the right audiences. It allows you to create compelling calls-to-action and personalize messages to address the specific needs of your visitors.

The vendor has an appealing free trial where you can tinker with the features at no cost.

HubSpot Marketing gives you tools like contact forms and A/B tests to develop successful lead generation strategies and decide which visitors have the genuine potential to become qualified leads.

The process doesn’t stop here, as it also allows you to give all valuable leads personalized paths to purchase and turn them into paying customers. From there, it will generate a report on your strategy’s impact and contribution to sales.

HubSpot Marketing starts with a free plan as part of the company’s intent to facilitate the end-to-end critical operations of sales teams, offering a dedicated CRM that is free to use and a Sales Hub with a plan likewise starting at $0 per month.

2. monday.com

monday.com provides visually stunning templates and marketing tools for your business. It enables you to manage your marketing assets and campaigns in one collaborative space, helping different teams to work together and stay on the same page.

It gives you neat and easy-to-use timelines and dashboards for a complete view of your marketing plans and projects. You can use its marketing calendar, project overview, or campaign tracking template to stay on top of everything.

Moreover, it has a client management feature that lets you save your contacts and capture calls, emails, and meetings. It stores all client data in the system so you can easily locate important information in one place. In one centralized dashboard, you can upload files and make them available to your team members.

You can use all the features for free for a period of time to see if the software matches your needs.

3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive digital marketing software suite providing businesses with tools to better personalized their customer engagement. It provides highly valuable customer insights based on real-time information sourced from various data pools.

Thus, users can engage customers using the right message and tone at the perfect time. This is all done using its proprietary AI-powered analysis and prediction engine.

Marketing Cloud also helps in creating a seamless experience for customers across various channels. Being a suite, it is comprised of many different tools for different purposes.

Its Interaction Studio provides means to visualize, track, and manage customer experiences in real-time. The Social Studio allows you to monitor and engage audiences on social media through a single interface. Features like Customer 360 Audiences and Datorama offer analytics insights for business intelligence.

Other features include modules for email marketing, SMS, chat, and 1-on-1 advertising. Moreover, it integrates perfectly with other programs and, of course, Salesforce software like Analytics Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Commerce Cloud. You can also access it through its mobile apps.

There is a free trial available and prices of premium plans for different tools vary. As it is deployed according to your specification, it is best to contact the vendor for a personalized quote-based plan.

4. Wrike for Marketing

Wrike combines marketing and project management tools in one solution designed to handle complex marketing projects. It is an all-encompassing platform that helps the marketing department by streamlining processes and project management. It equips teams with calendars, built-in communication tools, and marketing templates for your workflows.

Read Also: What is Call Tracking Marketing?

With Wrike, your team can effectively collaborate in achieving your campaign goals and completing your marketing plans. You can customize workflows, create dynamic forms, and use the Wrike Proof feature for group discussions and file sharing. Plus, Wrike allows you to customize reports, helping you visualize data straightforwardly.

5. Textedly

Textedly is an SMS marketing platform that allows businesses to deliver their marketing campaigns via text messages. With it, you can send as many text messages as you need to a mobile number.

It is capable of several useful functions: it allows you to build a list of your subscribers, schedule text messages for when they needed to be sent, and track the delivery of your messages to see if they have reached their recipients.

Additionally, Textedly has a message inbox that lets you and your clients send messages back and forth. It also lets you store an unlimited number of contacts. This makes it easier for you to communicate with your clients and subscribers on one platform. Also, you import contacts from other applications and manage your lists in your account.