• About Us
  • Solutions
    The Bridge.

    Backup and Restore HubSpot Data

    The Mothership.

    Multiple HubSpot Portals. Integrated.

  • Products
    StrutoSPHERE

    Extend your website to create better digital experiences.

    StrutoCORE

    Connect, sync and integrate HubSpot with just about anything.

  • Services
    HubSpot Platform Enablement

    Get the most out of your HubSpot platform. Deploy, adopt, embed and optimise HubSpot to create better customer experiences.

    Onboarding

    HubSpot onboarding for all Professional and Enterprise Hubs.

    CRM Implementation

    Multi-site, multi-team, multi-jurisdictional HubSpot rollouts.

    Coaching-as-a-Service

    Take control of your content creation with “They Ask, You Answer”

    RevOps-as-a-Service

    Partner with our HubSpot Platform Enablement squad to power your RevOps.

    Data Migration

    Migrate and consolidate your data to HubSpot.

    Websites and Applications

    Website and application design and development on the HubSpot CMS.

    Website grader

    Grade your website in seconds and learn how to improve it for free.

    Elevate your website using a customised free report, complete with recommendations just for your business.

    Get started
  • Learning Centre
    Learning Centre

    Learnings and insights from our team to yours - all from the Struto universe.

    Blog

    Educational pieces including hot-off-the-press news, comparison pieces and thought leadership articles.

    Resources

    A library of useful resources, go-to guides and takeaway eBooks.

    Case Studies

    Learn all about the projects we have completed for businesses just like yours.

    Download the Guide to Buying HubSpot

    This whitepaper outlines a comprehensive guide on how to buy HubSpot for every business.

    Download guide
  • Contact Us

Essential Marketing Software Tools

Estee Hall | 13 April 2020

This blog was originally published on 5 January 2017, and has been re-published to reflect up-to-date content.

So you're looking to get your inbound marketing game in top form? First thing you need is to get the right marketing software tools for the job. Digital marketing involves so many different aspects with countless tools for each - knowing which tool is the best for your marketing goals is an art. Luckily, we're here to help!

Let's take a look at the various elements of marketing

Social

Social Media marketing is your most powerful tool to connect with clients/potential customers. Optimising your social media includes pertinent issues like automating posts, scheduling, monitoring and analytics tools.

Email

Rated as the best converting channel, your email marketing should never be overlooked. For many companies it is the number one conversion portal and is responsible for the majority of their transactions, even more so than search traffic or PPC. A successful email campaign very often proves to be your most valuable means of collecting information or responses from customers and allows them a means of reaction as well. Email differs from social media in that it allows your customers a deeper level of privacy when replying and allows you a tailored audience. Email tools enable you to collect and collate client data, schedule mailers, segment and setup email workflows.

Content

The information available on your website, in your emails, on your social media, in your advertising, etc., acts as the voice of your company and brand. Content raises brand awareness, so what would you like your content to say about you and your business? Content is important in developing a relationship with your customers, so it is vital that you create content that says the right thing about who you are and why you do what you do. You will need a tool that allows you to distribute your content across all your social media, and allows you to add meta descriptions, tags and allows for essential SEO plugins.

Website

If content is the voice, then your website is the face. Building a great website not only reflects how much you care about your brand and its services but also about your customers. Creating a site that is easy to navigate through, offers user testimonials or materials, and resources to delight customers; will almost definitely see repeat visits and traffic that's always flowing. Critical tools here are SEO-tools to drive traffic to your site, and analytics tools to report engagement on your web pages and content.

Tools to include in your Marketing Software Stack

Social Media

Buffer

Buffer is a great tool for scheduling your posts and analysing the results. The tool is great if your social media strategy is very visual or if you need to collaborate with your team or get approvals on your social content. Buffer posts to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn. It's not badly priced, but you have to sign up for both the Buffer Publish and the Buffer Analyze tools. 

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is great for social monitoring and content insights. It helps you discover high-performing content so you can get more likes, links and shares and helps identify influencers to power-up your brand and campaigns. They have a couple of plans to choose from and they let you switch plans at any time.

HootSuite

Hootsuite is another great social scheduling tool, and helps with your content curation with their monitoring tool. Depending on your plan, comprehensive social analytics and reporting are included. You can also Boost posts from within HootSuite. 

RivalIQ

RivalIQ is a social media analytics tool and includes competitive analysis, influencer tracking, reporting and social media audit tools. A great tool if you're looking to take your social media marketing to the next level. 

Email

MailChimp

Mailchimp is a very popular email marketing tool. It has an easy-to-use email builder and great design tools. The email automation tool enables you to implement lead nurturing and the real-time analytics helps you optimise your emails. 

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is an email marketing tool for SMB's. It has a drag-and-drop editor, email automation and lists. It includes a feature for A/B testing and dynamic content.

Content

Grammarly

Grammarly is a writer's best friend. It assists with grammar, spelling, style and helps you avoid plagiarism. The plug-ins allows checking as you write in your favourite apps, like Chrome and MS Office or you can submit your completed content in the App or online version. 

Google Trends

Google Trends analyses the popularity of the top search queries in Google Search and uses graphs to compare the search volume of different queries across various regions and languages, over time. It helps writers find out what to write and when.

UnBounce

Unbounce is a tool that helps you create landing pages for you visitors to convert on, without the need for coding. Unbounce gives you more than 100 templates to choose from and helps you to focus in on your one goals for the page and optimise or run A/B tests. 

SEO

Moz

Moz is a great SEO tool and includes a tool for site audits, rank tracking, backlilnk analysis, keyword research and Local SEO.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is an SEO Spider or website crawler. It allows you to crawl websites to analyse and audit technical and onsite SEO. It helps you find broken links, audit your redirects, analyses page titles and meta data and discover duplicate content... the list goes on! Anything you need in terms of technical SEO, help is on hand from Screaming Frog. 

SEMRush

SEMRush is the SEO tool if you're looking to compete for the top spot. It gives you insights into your competitors' strategies in paid- or organic media. You can conduct a deep link analysis, do keyword research, and analyse any websites traffic and online performance. 

CMS (Content management System)

WordPress

Wordpress is a free and open-source CMS that is highly customisable. It includes a plugin architecture and themes to tailor your website to your needs, easily. The plugins and themes are created by the open-source community and will likely carry a cost. 

Wix

Wix is a free website builder that allows you to build a website without any coding experience needed. It limits the customisabilty to an extent, but is a great builder for start-ups.  

SiteCore 

Sitecore is a tool that helps you build websites with great and highly custom experiences. It's a very powerful CMS and helps you lay a solid foundation for your digital marketing. 

Analytics

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports on website traffic. This is a need-to-have and it's free!

Google Data Studio

If you want to go beyond the data and dashboards offered by Google Analytics, then Google Data Studio is for you. It turns your data into customisable reports with compelling visualisations that allow you to compare, filter and organise the exact data you need, in one report. 

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another Google web service. It allows you to check your indexing status and helps you to optimise your website's visibility. 

Arming yourself with all or a couple of these tools ensures that your digital assets will be ready and fully optimised to give your visitors a great experience. While some of these marketing tools are free or offer free versions, they often come with limitations. The full cost of your marketing software stack is highly dependent on your needs and the plan you go for, but it can easily add-up. Using these tools could get quite expensive, and you need to take into account the amount of time your team will spend on combining data and analytics from each tool into an overall marketing report.

While we at Struto love all of the above tools, our go-to option for our Marketing Software is, and always will be, HubSpot.

HubSpot: an all-in-one solution

HubSpot saves an incredible amount of time and energy by neatly housing each aspect of marketing, in its handy Marketing Hub. The convenience of doing all your marketing from one central portal is great for focus and productivity. HubSpot Marketing Hub includes tools for:

  • Email
  • Marketing Automation
  • Social scheduling and monitoring
  • SEO strategy
  • Landing Pages
  • Blogs
  • Marketing Database (in the free CRM)
  • Ads
  • Lead capture (Forms, pop-up forms and CTAs)
  • Comprehensive reporting and analytics

HubSpot also has a CMS Hub to enable a website easy enough for marketers to edit and powerful enough for developers to build great tools. The Sales Hub empowers your sales team to do what they do best by arming them with customer insights and tools to minimise the time spent on admin. The Customer Service Hub completes the circle with a ticketing service, knowledge base setup and customer feedback surveys.

Check out our comprehensive guide to HubSpot for more.

By addressing all of customer-facing needs, HubSpot gives you the tools to deliver a great customer experience from start-to-finish and it's all in one central place, making your analytics and reporting easy and efficient. 

What is HubSpot Software?

More Articles

Insights, learnings and takeaways passed on from our team to yours.
From educational pieces to comparison articles to hot off-the-press news all from the Struto universe.