As digital marketing has involved from being a niche activity to one at the core of most marketing plans, so too has the market for software design evolved to help digital marketing get the best results. From publishing tools, CMS, Social listening and content personalisation tools, there are loads of tools within each category, and it can be tricky to know which one will be right for your business.
Just in case your not fully aware of the daunting size of the scale of the problem of selecting digital marketing software, this infographic from Scott Brinker does a good job of highlighting the massive variety of marketing technology available today. You won't be able to see without clicking for an enlarged version, but there are more than 3000 tools in the infographic! Hardly simple!
So how can you decide on what tools to invest in? We produced a guide that gives you information on the purpose and usefulness of 150 different marketing tools across 30 different sections. The infographic below gives a neat summary of which tools fall into what sections. But we realise for a big business decision like what CRM to use of whether or not to invest in an expensive but capable social listening tool, you are going to need more to go off than a crib sheet.
What you need is more information, and ways to compare similar tools against one another to see which best fits your organisation's needs. Unfortunately we can't give you that, but we can point you in the direction of some places that can!
G2Cloud is a great site for finding business software reviews. It boasts over 70,000 individual reviews and handy grids for each software category. These divide up the options into leaders, contenders, high performers and niche vendors. A useful starting point for further research.
Caperra is great if you need software in a niche that is less common and therefore poorly covered by other sites. With over 300 categories of software, and hundreds of tools within each category, you'd be hard-pressed to find an area where it was lacking in options.
Trust Radius is a great tool for software research, and one I'd wholeheartedly recommend having used it to help research our guide to digital marketing tools. With over 30,000 in-depth software reviews is a great place to see how others are finding different marketing tools. It offers alternatives for every tool on the site, which can be a great way to research your different options and discover tools you may not otherwise have heard of.
Alternative-to possitions itself as offering alternatives for people who aren't statistifed their current provider of a given peice of software. It doesn't give as many in-depth reviews as Capterra or TrustRadius, but it is good for finding tools to replace ones you might not like.
Good luck researching digital marketing software. If you have any recomendations of tools you find particularly useful do let us know in the comments.
Download resource – Essential Digital Marketing Tools
This free 100+ page guide explains why we have chosen the 5 tools in each category and gives links to all the tools.
Access the Essential digital marketing tools
By Robert Allen
Rob Allen is Marketing Manager for Numiko, a digital agency that design and build websites for purpose driven organisations, such as the Science Museum Group, Cancer Research UK, University of London and the Electoral Commission. Rob was blog editor at Smart Insights from 2015-2017. You can follow Rob on LinkedIn.
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