Marketing automation software has become a pillar for building and implementing advertising campaigns. It is one of the top five most effective digital marketing methods, along with content marketing, Big Data, AI, and social media marketing. Businesses are increasingly adopting automation tools, and the twofold investment growth in 2023 compared to 2017 is evidence of this. Companies that automate their processes evolve faster and build solid marketing strategies. Speed and accuracy give them a competitive edge. Let’s take a look at 9 digital marketing tools that will help your company succeed.
Since marketers carry out many tasks, they may need digital “assistants” for social media promotion, email marketing, search engine optimization, and other essential tasks. In this article, we will discuss 9 social media, email, and SEO audit tools.
Social media management tools
47% of marketers use marketing automation software to conduct social marketing activities. In addition to the popular Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp, marketers have at least 10 additional promotion channels. It is difficult to place ads and posts separately on different dates. You should find a reliable social media management tool to understand what type of content you need to create for your subscribers, how often it should be published, and how many managers you need to carry out this task.
Selection criteria depend on the tasks of an SMM group, budget allocation, and marketing goals. It is convenient if a platform supports work with several social networks, making it easy to manage company profiles and interact with subscribers. Software product discovery steps should include the main set of functions, so you won’t need to add the necessary options afterward. There are plenty of social media management tools on the market. We’ll pay attention to three of them.
Buffer
If your business is present on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, or Linkedin, you should get started with Buffer. This platform allows users to schedule up to 100 social media posts, including videos, GIFs, or photos. Choose one of the available subscription plans (Buffer Pro, Buffer Premium, or Buffer Business) to solve business problems. A subscription will allow you to administer multiple profiles on different platforms and publish more content. To see which plan suits your team, you can try Buffer Pro for a week for free or choose a two-week trial for Buffer Premium or Buffer Business.
The platform includes three powerful social media management features: Buffer Publish for scheduling posts, Buffer Reply for messaging, and Buffer Analyze for analytics. The app provides a single interface to access multiple social platforms. This is convenient because you do not need to separately log into different accounts and track messages or comments on several tabs. In addition, an employee can add tags to conversations to keep track of the most important conversations.
If you need to approve the content of a post before publication, you can set up an automatic approval process. You must specify who will review posts and approve their publication. An approved post is sent to the Buffer calendar and published at the scheduled time. Check Buffer Analyze to track the success of a post (the number of likes, comments, and reposts). Analytics will allow you to evaluate the quality of the team’s work and adjust the work considering the preferences of the target audience.
Mention
The Mention platform provides not so much social media management as an opportunity to track your brand reputation on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the Internet in general. As a rule, any network mentions of a company’s name are “scanned” according to more than 10 parameters.
During registration, you should indicate the name of your company, the type of activity, and links to profiles on Twitter and Facebook so that the service can find information and reviews of your brand. The platform also allows you to monitor competitors, their marketing campaigns, and their online reputation. The software searches billions of sources in 40+ languages to find brand mentions and notify marketers. Thus, employees can react promptly and respond to reviews to smooth out the negative things.
The platform is also convenient because it works on smartphones, personal computers, and in the cloud. There is a free version as well. However, serious businesses can choose a paid monthly or annual subscription.
SocialPilot
SocialPilot is an analog of Buffer, it includes many special features. It allows you to create and plan content from a common interface for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Pinterest, Tumblr, and VKontakte.
The platform offers 4 plans: Agency, Studio, Small Team, and Professional. For each of them, there is a limit on managing accounts and the number of publications. To see which option suits your organization, you can take advantage of a free 14-day trial.
SocialPilot is also unique as it uploads an image along with a publication or offers to create a new one right there, through the integrated Canva. In addition, in a couple of clicks, you can set the post to be republished up to 10 times within a few days. After you have logged in to your account, the service automatically creates a publication schedule, so you only need to adjust it to your preferences. Account statistics and reports can be viewed in the Analytics tab.
PPC Automation Software
Optmyzr
PPC automation is the use of software and technology to streamline and automate numerous pay-per-click (PPC) advertising-related processes. Tasks like bid management, ad text testing, keyword research, and campaign targeting fall under this category. PPC automation aims to increase PPC campaigns’ efficacy and efficiency while saving time.
Optmyzr’s PPC automation tools have a number of benefits and outcomes to take a look at:
- Allocating ad budgets or ad spend efficiently to high-performing assets
- Saving time, especially by automating repetitive, PPC tasks
- Monitoring performance even while completing other tasks
- Developing PPC reports without having to manually collect and organize data
- Analyzing large amounts of data with zero risk of error
- Completing anomaly investigations much faster than doing them manually
Some of their features are extremely versatile too. With the company’s tool, ‘Rule Engine,” you can automate almost any routine tasks or process that you can write down! This can save your company lots of time, stress, and money.
Email marketing automation software
According to the 2021 Demand Gen Report, 53% of marketers say email is the most effective early-stage lead generation channel. To increase the number of customers coming through this channel and effectively run email campaigns, you should optimize resources with the help of marketing automation software.
You need a tool that will allow you to build different communication chains with your clients, depending on their actions. The interaction with customers must not cease after the subscription, so it’s important to involve consumers in some kind of activity. Therefore, you should find a platform that provides detailed statistics on user actions to understand at what stage your potential clients left your site or unsubscribed. It’s nice when marketing automation software is integrated into a website or online store to send alerts about customer behavior. For example, it can report when a person has completed a purchase, abandoned a product in the cart, viewed the same product several times, and so on. Here are some examples of apps that marketers use to automate email campaigns.
Sendinblue
The free version of Sendinblue offers unlimited contacts and 300 emails per day. The marketing automation software option with unlimited contacts becomes available when you subscribe to the Premium plan. Therefore, you should decide whether this option is beneficial if you have a short list of contacts but need to send a lot of emails. You can choose another option if your list of clients is long but you communicate with them less frequently.
Sendinblue allows you to run multiple workflows at the same time with different entry points (email activity, contact details, website activity, etc). These processes can be combined into chains so that a contact person automatically moves from one activity to another. Next, the marketer can add several actions that will be performed depending on the conditions. For example, they can send an email with one content if a contact person clicks on the “Subscribe” or “Buy” button. And send a mail with different text if the sale fails. Overall, Sendinblue is a great choice for marketers who want to learn and quickly implement email marketing automation.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp, as opposed to Sendinblue, offers unlimited emails but a contact limit. The free plan is only available for one user, and a maximum of 2,500 emails can be sent per month to 500 contacts. You will unlock unlimited opportunities with the ability to send 150,000 emails per month if you subscribe to the Premium plan.
Mailchimp will help you initiate various activities. With it, you can:
- send welcome letters;
- send birthday greetings;
- remind users about abandoned carts;
- track purchases;
- set up notifications about confirmed orders;
- thank regular customers;
- restore relations with buyers who refused your services.
To start the automation process, a marketer just needs to click the “Create a Customer Journey” button. Next, they need to create a customer journey map by adding starting points, conditions, and customer transition paths. Then they can activate the path – and personalized marketing chains will start. Now, they only need to monitor statistics, the task execution queue and, if necessary, edit the client path.
Drip
Drip is an all-in-one digital marketing tool suitable for email marketing beginners and advanced users alike. Automation configures through two sections: Rules and Workflows. Rules define a condition that triggers the execution of a single action. This option allows you to sort subscribers into lists by their actions or return customers who left the site without making a purchase. Workflows trigger whole chains of actions that determine the content of emails.
For beginner marketers, Drip offers ready-made workflow templates that you can use in your work. You will refine your automation strategy over time, as you get better at it. But the service itself is not difficult to perceive and work with.
SEO automation tools
SEO is an important part of digital marketing because it generates organic traffic that attracts web users. Organic traffic is an important part of the buying funnel. According to Sistrix research, the site listed first in search results has a click-through rate of 28.5%. The second and third positions in the search engine are opened by 15% and 11% of users. Only 2.5% of people reach the tenth position. Accordingly, the better SEO is configured and automated, the easier it is to attract visitors to a site and turn them into leads.
SEO specialists have enough tasks that can be automated. This way they can:
- check the visibility and credibility of their site in the search engine;
- track traffic to the site;
- find out by which keys the resource is ranked;
- scan the web platform to find technical errors;
- correct the shortcomings;
- double-check whether positions in the search engine have improved after corrections;
- make sure there are more visitors and whether they are generated into leads.
To test hypotheses, build promotion strategies, and monitor progress, you need to automate repetitive tasks using special software. Here are several platforms that can facilitate the main functions of SEO specialists.
SEO PowerSuite
SEO PowerSuite is a web assistant for Windows, macOS, and Linux, it makes automation easier for SEO beginners as a marketing automation software. The tool contains 4 options: Rank Tracker, WebSite Auditor, SEO SpyGlass, and LinkAssistant.
Rank Tracker takes care of tracking the positions of a web resource in the search engine and changing them after certain SEO actions. It also suggests which keywords you should work on to promote the site to a higher position. By connecting the platform to Google Analytics, you can also get data on how many visitors came to your site using certain keywords and what the bounce rate for different requests is.
The website auditor helps to find problem areas on a platform so that employees can fix them and increase the rating of a resource. This “doctor” algorithm diagnoses broken links, non-existent pages, duplicates, 500 Internal Server errors, and other technical problems. This tool has some other useful options: robot.txt file management, sitemap generation, keyword density calculation, and so on.
SEO SpyGlass is responsible for working with links and checking backlinks, it allows you to learn from competitors and improve your strategies. The tool analyzes links by 40 indicators, including anchor content, domain age and authority, link weight, and other information.
Link Assistant helps you find partners for link building and coverage management. This feature allows you to search for:
– quality sources that can be cited;
– web resources that link to competitors;
– sources that link to your site;
– scan the link profile for a specific site.
To summarize, SEO PowerSuite provides all the features you need to plan and implement your SEO strategy, with the ability to track progress and check results.
SE Ranking
The SE Ranking cloud platform offers a similar set of options: site position analysis, internal and technical SEO audit, backlink monitoring, keyword evaluation, selection of queries by frequency, and so on. Apart from these general features, the platform has unique offerings:
– White Label – an option with which an organization can transfer Se Ranking to its domain and design it in its corporate style. It will be the company’s ready-made SEO service, without the need for product discovery steps and development from scratch.
– Marketing plan – the service offers beginners a ready-made promotion plan and a checklist with pre-prepared SEO practices. So beginners can move step by step to avoid missing important stages of website promotion. They can edit a ready checklist by adding additional tasks, if necessary.
It is also convenient to link SE Ranking with Google Analytics and Search Console to evaluate SEO and PPC. The service integrates with Facebook and Twitter to automatically publish posts. Thus, the service helps beginners, website owners, experienced SEOs, and large firms to develop their businesses in the digital world.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog was created to automate and speed up the search and elimination of technical errors on sites. This algorithm is a desktop SEO spider tool that looks for broken links, 404 pages, redirects, duplicates, and other technical problems. The free version of the program allows you to scan up to 500 pages and use about 7 functions. The paid one offers unlimited scanning and approximately 30 options, including spelling and grammar checks, page loading speed checks, and free technical support.
There are 15 tabs available in the program interface. By switching between them you can get information about a scanned site including:
- internal links of the source;
- external links;
- HTTP, HTTPS-pages;
- server response code;
- problem pages;
- erroneous titles and descriptions;
- problems with H1 and H2;
- used images;
- errors with canonical links.
There is an export function to an Excel file to work with the information you have received. It is also convenient to create a sitemap in the application, which helps search bots crawl the website more efficiently. Thus, an SEO specialist can effortlessly stay up to date with the technical peculiarities of a site, quickly fixing problems and maintaining the position of the resource in the search engine.
Conclusion
In this article, we have named 9 basic social media marketing automation software, Email, and SEO. Of course, this list could be longer because there are dozens and hundreds of platforms for solving various marketing tasks. The main thing is to find the best option that will facilitate the marketers’ work and improve the efficiency of their promotion strategy. Marketers are already seeing the benefits of automation. In 49% of cases, it helped specialists to save time. It also made it possible to provide high-quality personalized customer service (in 49% of cases) and increase ROI (45%).
