Online Marketing Platforms

Digital Marketing Software

Digital marketing software encompasses different types of digital marketing tools that allow online marketing efforts to meet customers and different touch points along their customer journey. The importance of digital marketing tools is they allow digital marketers to use content to help their customers engage with their brand and move down the funnel to a point of sale. With all the different types of digital marketing channels and different digital marketing platforms there has been an increase in the MarTech software market to help marketers stay agile and efficient with digital marketing. Some digital marketers will use marketing software that helps automate social posts or email replies. While other digital marketing software allows marketers to analyze the backend data that is being collected through different digital channels - brand website, SEO, email engagement, etc.

There are many well known digital marketing platforms 2019 such as Drift, Salesforce, and Buffer. Continually though, there is innovation happening to help with niches in the digital marketing phenomenon to hopefully make a marketers job a little bit easier as the digital landscape continues to change and expand. Take a look at Lumavate for example. They have become one of the leading no code progressive web app builders that help companies create apps that work across all devices, in low connectivity areas, and at a low cost compared to a native app. In the Mobile Matters episode with Rochelle Hartigan, GE Lighting Marketing Director of Brand and Advertising, she speaks to how important it is to team up with your agency partners to help figure out the best tools you can test. They should have a good pulse on your company along with what other companies may be testing out as well. There is innovation happening in the digital marketing software industry at all times and it’s important to stay up to date so your company can stay competitive and agile as the landscape continues to change.

Digital Marketing Company

Along with digital marketing software and tools come some very important digital marketing companies that work in the agency space. They help clients understand some of the best marketing platforms and know the full digital marketing platform list that can be used to their clients’ full advantage. Here is a list of some of the top 10 digital marketing agencies in the world - Accenture Interactive, PwC Digital Services, IBM iX, Entsu, Web Net Creatives, iProspect, WebFX, Disruptive Advertising, Ignite Visibility, and SEO Brand. Beyond looking at working with world-renowned digital agencies you can also look into some top digital agencies in cities near you! It can be extremely helpful as we mentioned above to gain a personal relationship with the agency you work with to know and trust that they have a good pulse on your brand and the goals you want to achieve to determine your digital marketing success.

Now let’s look into some of the digital marketing platforms lists that can help you research more about digital marketing companies that are top of 2020, free, and even created for small-to-mid-sized companies.

Online Marketing Platforms

Now let’s dive into the specific online marketing platforms and digital marketing analysis tools that are either well known, free, or great for small businesses. We hope the online marketing tools list can help you begin your research in the right direction.

Digital Marketing Tools 2020 List: These are some of the top well known digital marketing tools that are making waves in the year 2020.

1. Salesforce - Salesforce is a CRM software company that is focused on customer service, marketing automation, analytics, and application development. They are used by small, mid-sized, and enterprise organizations.
2. Drift - Leading conversational marketing and sales platform. Drift is used by many companies to generate better qualified leads, accelerate the sales cycle, and provide a conversational buying process via chatbots.
3. Marketo - Marketo is one of the leading CRM and marketing automation platforms. They specialize in helping companies with account-based marketing (ABM) and other services such as SEO and content marketing.

Free Marketing Automation Tools List: There are a handful of free digital marketing tools 2020 that offer the ability to use their plan for free but it’s a freemium plan. Here are a few free marketing automation tools that you could test out under a free plan and then pay for premium features.

1. MailChimp - Mailchimp offers a free plan for beginners who want to grow their audience along with testing out the different features Mailchimp has to offer. Mailchimp is known for their email marketing software.
2. HubSpot - HubSpot offers a full platform of marketing, sales, customer service and CRM software. They are known for their HubSpot marketing automation tools. They offer a free account but have limited features.
3. Drip - Drip allows you to have a fourteen day free trial to test their platform and features.

Online Marketing Tools for Small Business: Below are some of the well known online marketing companies that are best for small businesses who aren’t looking for a high priced contract. These companies can be enterprise but also work great for smaller sized companies.

1. HubSpot - If you are a small business focused on inbound marketing it would be great to look into HubSpot. It may come in on the pricier side than some other platforms but HubSpot will offer mostly everything you may need when it comes to inbound marketing automation.
2. ActiveCampaign - ActiveCampaign is a cloud software platform that offers software for customer experience automation by combining CRM, sales automation, email marketing, and marketing automation all in one place. You could say it's an all in one marketing platform. It was created specifically for small-to-mid-sized businesses.
3. >Trello - A tool for editorial content planning. It doesn’t allow you to schedule your content but more of a collaborative brainstorming place to plan content.

Digital Marketing News

The online marketing tools are always changing. (I cannot emphasize this enough!) It is imperative to your company and your marketing team’s success that you stay up to date on the newest digital marketing news, top digital marketing trends 2020, and even social media marketing trends 2020. Staying up to date on mobile trends is going to be important to how you run the marketing department. In a Mobile Matters Episode with Rochelle Hartigan, Rochelle discusses how important it is to test and try new concepts and innovative ideas in the marketing space but also understand when it is time to pivot away from failure. (By the way, failures are okay when testing new strategies or concepts. Just do it quickly!) There are mobile marketing articles that can help list digital marketing tools list 2020 or top B2B marketing trends 2020 to get you up to speed quickly. There are also blogs, podcasts, and other online resources that can offer some great advice and insight into top mobile marketing practices and trends and help you become a digital marketing tools mastery. Let’s look at some of the top mobile marketing news outlets that can help bring your team today’s mobile marketing trends today.

• Medium - Medium is a blend of mobile marketing blogs, mobile marketing articles, etc, similar to an online magazine. You can be a reader of Medium or a publisher!
• Mobile Marketer - Mobile Marketer is a great place to stay up to date on top mobile marketing news and mobile marketing articles 2020. From successful and not so successful campaigns to innovative marketing approaches. Great weekly or daily email subscription to sign up for.
• Marketing Dive - Marketing Dive is also a great email subscription to be on daily or weekly. They share a lot of trends and top stories as well in the marketing space. Is not specific to mobile.
• Mobile Marketing Watch - Mobile Marketing Watch covers all areas of the mobile marketing ecosystem.
• Marketing Tech - Marketing Tech is just a great all around helpful resource for anything marketing. They are focused on keeping you updated on marketing technology and strategies.

Mobile marketing can seem extensive (because it is) and a lot of work (which it also is) but you will see the impact on your brand once you try even a few new practices. The great thing about mobile marketing is it won't stay the same and you can always change it up. There are always tests that can be run to try to understand a new trend or practice better! Don’t shy away from mobile marketing because it is pivotal to your company’s success!

Digital Marketing Strategy

As you can tell there are many different types of digital marketing tools to use for your digital marketing strategy. And to choose the right type of digital marketing strategy will depend a lot on your brand voice and whether you are a B2B, B2C, or B2B2C company. It’s important to know what your goals of digital marketing are and how your digital marketing strategy for all digital content, campaigns, and marketing material will intertwine with your goals.

Let’s first look at best practices for digital marketing in 2020. First, you need to think about cross-channel marketing. You will be marketing to users on all different types of devices and across different platforms so you need to keep in mind using a mobile responsive design. (Do not make your users scroll horizontally on their mobile device!) You’ll also want to make sure you create mobile-specific designs for your campaigns focusing on the fact you will only get 1-2 seconds to engage with your audience and there cannot be too small of detail. Next, when looking at paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing focus make sure to at least run mobile campaigns and then on top of that when choosing keywords to pay for looking into broader matches. Are you going after misspellings and use match cases? There are countless best practices or tips for digital marketing strategy but the most important thing to remember is to test, test often, and never stop testing. Things change so often it’s important to stay on top of the new algorithms, technologies, and ways to market on mobile. It’s important to not only have the best marketing software for your team to use but an efficient and effective digital marketing strategy to take advantage of your marketing tools.

Once you understand the best practices of mobile marketing and how it can affect your consumers’ buying decisions we can now move onto developing effective mobile marketing programs. It’s important when developing effective mobile marketing programs you build it with a mobile first mentality. You can’t just make your website adaptable to different devices, the campaign and program NEEDS to be built for mobile. Below are a few high level tips on how to build an effective mobile marketing strategy.

• Identify your goals for the program. Are you looking to increase traffic to your website? Is the CTA to purchase something? What customer tension point are you fixing with your mobile efforts? It’s crucial to identify the effects of mobile marketing you want to see with your mobile marketing strategy.
• Figure out who your target audience is. You may know your target audience as a brand but is that the same audience on mobile? It’s important to know who is interested in hearing about your brand via mobile!
• Determine what approach makes most sense for your goal. Are you going to be building an app to fix the tension point? Do you need to run a target ad campaign to get people into your store? Are you sending out an SMS message to update consumers on a deal or a contest? What are the essential digital marketing tools you will need to use to create an effective strategy? Make sure you understand what channel makes the most sense to reach your goals of mobile marketing and what marketing tools will help you.

Hopefully you have now gained some better insight into how to do mobile marketing and it seems a little less daunting. Lumavate has created a helpful digital marketing infographic to download to help answer some of the big questions surrounding how to evolve your mobile marketing strategy based on current trends and your mobile marketing goals.  Mobile marketing technology has been on the rise and many companies are looking at ways to improve their tech stack while keeping it efficient. You will continue to hear about new MarTech companies that can help build out your mobile campaign development. It’s important to stay up to date on the new trends, technologies and software to know what your company may need to test out!