Best inbound marketing solutions 2015
Digital transformation is at the order of the day for many organizations. But while few lead marketing automation, others strive to keep up technologically to preserve their businesses. Yes, let's admit it, still most decisions to update or upgrade software and hardware or to automate processes still come from necessity, when there is no other choice but to do it or die.
Key question to a CEO nowadays is “how is your marketing team nurturing sales with qualified leads?”. Many still depend on “the friends” and contacts for their key sales people and until few years ago only those industries with online tradition were concerned about website visitors or Facebook adds. Now the situation has changed radically as it has reached all industries: there is still an old school way of generating leads (called it PR to be politically correct), which takes a lot of time and effort providing a short lead list, and there is the automated way, which allows to generates hundreds of qualified leads.
For those who are new to the concept, it consists in a combination of content marketing and re-targetting with banners to re-route traffic to your website/blogs, and then include registration filters based on download data, landing pages, segmentation, email marketing... Software recovers data and once qualification score filters are in place, you can produce lead lists per geographical areas and qualified to be called and e-mailed.
These are the best marketing automation software you can find available right now:
1-Hubspot. It integrates with many CRM brands, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 2015, Sage, Sugar and some others. It is user-friendly and impressive when combined with good content and targets are properly defined.
2-Pardot, only for Salesforce. Very effective tool to generate cold-calling lead lists, though you will need to requalify them, as score method is not that strong.
3-Marketo, uses customer profile generation based on specific content distribution during the qualification process. It is B2B oriented and integrates with the main CRM suppliers.
4-Eloqua develops segmented leads DBs, through content, emails campaigns, to score leads and nurture CRMs, you can also integrate it with many different CRMs.
5-IBM ExperienceOne, just launched last year, designed to enhance digital customer/visitor experience, ideal for e-commerce sites, though adaptable to all types of industries and integrates well with several CRM brands.
All are cloud-based and offer additional functionalities, like Social Media management dashboards or landing pages generation tools and workflows. Marketo and Eloqua have strong email campaign functionalities, while Pardot and Hubspot provide campaign design tools and downloadable content management.
Now the questions is which software fits your organization best, which will depend on the current CRM in place, the DBs and servers capabilities, the time/project/cost it will take to implement the solution... You can go through that hassle alone, or you can ask an experienced business consultant to run an analysis and give you a solution proposal.
