What is Marketing Planning Software and How Can it Help Your Business?
Technology has enabled marketing to become increasingly automated. Technology once only reserved for big, capital-intensive companies, has now become more accessible for small to medium businesses. In particular, marketing planning software is an example of one of these technologies which is being offered at an affordable price point.
Marketing planning software is used to easily understand your target market, design targeted marketing campaigns and evaluate their effectiveness. It is a useful tool to assist in a business’ marketing, saving time and money, which can be reinvested into other aspects of your business.
What are the benefits of using marketing planning software?
Building on the points above, there are a variety of benefits you can gain when using marketing planning software. Time spent on tedious and often small impact tasks can be streamlined through this software. You will no longer need to juggle manual tasks but rather spend more time on other projects. Another benefit is the ability to coordinate all of your marketing campaigns through one platform. This will save you the hassle of going to different platforms to manage your campaigns. Furthermore, the use of data visualization can also be beneficial in helping break down potentially complicated analytics.
Features of marketing planning software
Features will often differ depending on the program that you opt for. Here is a list of key features to look out for when considering different marketing planning software.
- Collaboration
- Coordinate, delegate and work with other team members on the same project in real-time.
- Planning & scheduling
- Using in-built calendar tools to plan and schedule campaigns, marketing communications and social media content
- Marketing dashboards
- Track how your marketing campaigns are performing in real-time and compare against set benchmarks
- Budgeting & forecasting
- Use real-time marketing analytics to set, track and modify current and future budgets.
- Integrations
- Pre-built integrations mean that the marketing software tool can be used in conjunction with other marketing tools such as Google AdWords
Considerations
As with any investment, there are many factors you should take into account when determining how marketing planning software can help your business.
- Your primary marketing strategy
Different programs will be suited for different businesses. Firstly, consider what your business marketing objectives and goals currently are.
- Inbound marketing
Marketing planning software can help inbound marketing evaluate marketing channels such as blogs, websites and social media. Marketing features such as website analytics and search engine optimization will also be analyzed through marketing planning software.
- Outbound marketing
Marketing planning software can help optimize paid search engine marketing, website ads, email marketing and improve click-through rates.
- Social media marketing
Social media campaigns can be easily scheduled, tracked, and evaluated through planning software.
Marketing Planning Software Tools
Here is a list of the pros and cons of marketing planning software tools available on the market.
Wrike
Wrike is a popular cloud-based project management platform. It can be used for a variety of businesses from small to large businesses. It can be used remotely and includes many features such as Gantt charts, calendars, custom dashboards and real-time updates and is used by companies such as Google, Mars, Siemens, Tiffany and Co and more.
Pros
- Highly sophisticated product
- Can be used across multiple platforms (e.g. computer, mobile)
- Overall easy usability for those who may not be experienced in using such software
Cons
- Certain features such as personalization can be complex to use
- More expensive than their competitors
Asana
Asana is another cloud-based software that operates as a virtual workspace for project management. Asana is used across 190 countries with over 100,000 organizations using the platform. Asana enables marketers to plan, organize and track progress. Asana has a range of marketing templates that help marketers to plan, manage and track campaigns.
Pros
- Asana is particularly strong in enabling team collaboration. It is not merely a marketing tool and can be helpful in all planning and task allocation of a project.
- User interface is simple and easy to use
- Asana can integrate with a number of third-party apps such as Salesforce, Slack, Dropbox and Google Calendar.
Cons
- Can be overwhelming to use for inexperienced users due to the sheer number of features available
- It does not track the time spent by members working on the tasks.
Monday Marketing
The third marketing planning software, Monday Marketing differentiates itself through its easy-to-use, visual-focused dashboards used to organize workflow. Monday enables over 40+ integrations across different departments.
Pros
- Can integrate with third-party apps such as GoogleDrive, Dropbox, Pipedrive, Google Calendar, MailChimp and more
- Detailed tutorial videos on how to use the platform
- 24/7 customer support availability
Cons
- Lacks features to enable repeated or scheduled tasks
Better suited for smaller teams. The dashboard can be overloaded with notifications and tasks with a larger team, resulting in longer load times.
Robotic Marketer Technology
Robotic Marketer is a world-first, cutting edge marketing strategy software that is based off artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data. The use of these different types of software enables Robotic Marketer to help businesses transform information for their company in order to better and more efficiently achieve business goals as well as turn a marketing plan into an actionable marketing strategy.
Robotic Marketer provides marketing services such as marketing strategy formulation, marketing workshops, marketing consulting and marketing audits and also services for competitor analysis, website developments and more. Robotic Marketer’ goal is for every business, not matter how small or how new to have the opportunity for a tailored marketing plan that helps them achieve their business goals through their marketing. Robotic Marketer is able to provide exactly those services without the time, cost and resource restrictions that can often hold small businesses back. It’s time to take advantage of the world’s technology advancement.
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