When you buy marketing software, there’s one important component you’ll probably never see the marketing software landscape. Building a Mobile App is, essentially, the engine that drives your business. Without the correct marketing software, your entire business will disintegrate.
If you’ve ever shopped for marketing software, you know that the landscape is incredibly broad and complex. There are dozens of different types of programs, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, some marketers prefer proprietary applications that keep them locked into a certain methodology while others use open source programs that are more flexible and adaptable.
Still, others employ both types of software, often combining different functions into one. Regardless of the specifics of your own preferred approach, however, the marketability of your marketing software is critical.
Contents
5 Components Of The Marketing Software
1. Landscape
Before shopping for marketing software, it’s important to understand what makes up the marketing software landscape. A basic division is made between these three major components:
Digital Marketing, Web Marketing, and Social Media Marketing. Digital marketing refers to any type of online advertising or sales copy that uses digital channels to reach your audience. Web marketing refers to those tactics used to “drive traffic” to websites as well as search engine optimization, or even methods to buy YouTube likes.
2. Buckets
To understand the marketing software landscape, let’s break it down into its three components. First, there are buckets. These are groups of items such as keywords, tags, and offers that serve a single purpose, which is to get you to click through to a particular web page or offer. Each bucket gets results, but not all of them. For example, if you look at a site like OpenRoad Gems, you’ll find a single listing under each of its tags that links to ten different pages on the website.
3. Channels
Each channel connects you to prospects, gives you the ability to manage and track them, and then lets you monetize them in a variety of ways. Some marketers use widgets, other marketers use landing pages, and some use squeeze pages to get visitors to subscribe to their feeds, and so forth.
The most common channels include mobile apps, social media outlets, and email marketing campaigns. Each platform has its own set of benefits and limitations, so marketers need to think carefully about how to optimize their channels in order to get the most out of the marketing software landscape.
4. Services
Services cover everything from analytics and reporting to pay-per-click management and SEO. Different vendors handle different parts of this broad technology stack, which means that marketers can expect to encounter a wide variety of solutions.
If your organization is planning to hire its first consultant, then you should also know what vendors are responsible for managing that consulting relationship, how those vendors plan to integrate with one another, and how much they charge. This information will give you an idea of the extent of your organizational competence, which is especially critical if you’re about to go into stealth mode and rely on new technology to drive your strategy.
5. Capabilities
Once the marketing automation software has connected you to channels, tracked your leads, and offered you ways to monetize them, the question is, “What else can it do?” Most vendors offer more than 100 capabilities across the board and many more beyond that.
You might be interested in email marketing campaign integration, SEO tracking, or even a complex analytical capability. Whatever you require, you should be able to find it among the many offerings from vendors who design and build marketing automation software. This landscape is both broad and deep, meaning that marketers have a lot of flexibility to choose the features that work for them.
Summary
The marketing software landscape includes chat Bots, web analytics, email marketing campaigns, mobile apps, and social media integration. The landscape is vast. It’s up to you to decide which features you need and which you can do without. And though chat Bots and web analytics may be tempting, they may not be enough. Do your research!