Top 11 Inbound Marketing Platforms Today!

Inbound marketing is all about being present where your customers are. And using inbound marketing services such as content, SEO, ads, email marketing, and marketing automation to cater to their needs. But doing all that requires you to deploy some of the top inbound marketing platforms, which can aid in making your inbound marketing strategy effective.

So what are marketing platforms?

In a nutshell, they are simple, ubiquitous software that allows you to operate through your marketing operations and sell your product/service on the inbound marketing channels of your preference. It utilizes a combination of one or more inbound marketing tools that can help you move down your inbound funnel (i.e., grow visitors, leads, and customers).

In this blog, we will take a look into the top inbound marketing platforms that can help grow your business with the power of inbound!

Types of Inbound Marketing Platforms

While there is a wide variety of marketing platforms available today, most of them are centered around business needs like email marketing, landing page builder, marketing automation, CRM, social media, and analytics. So moving further, we will look into these categories and the best platforms available for each of them.

Marketing Automation Platforms

These software platforms are designed to help streamline, automate, and measure several marketing tasks and workflows. They enable marketing teams and organizations to effectively market on multiple channels online.

Some of the best marketing automation software out there are:

• Marketo – This software comes with a full suite of features that can handle everything. It claims to offer marketing automation that covers any channel and every engagement. With such advanced functionalities and high prices, Marketo is best suitable for large enterprises.
• Eloqua – Another enterprise-level software, Eloqua offers an exceptional level of service and has a great marketplace. It boasts more than 700 integrations, meaning it can make every step of your marketing process more personalized and streamlined. 
• HubSpot – HubSpot describes itself as the “inbound marketing software”, meaning it offers a variety of tools, one of which is marketing automation. It is a reasonably significant investment and a go-to solution for companies looking for all-in-one inbound marketing solutions.

CRM Platforms

CRM platforms are software technologies that enable a company to manage its relationships with visitors, leads, and customers. It captures all key information generated during those engagements and enables sales teams to reach them out at the right time.

The best CRM platforms available today are:

• Salesforce – The world’s most used CRM, Salesforce comes with a wealth of features that give a full view of the customer data. It streamlines sales and helps answer customer questions in just minutes. 
• HubSpot CRM – Hubspot CRM is a free tool, which automatically logs in all your customer data. It makes it easy for inbound marketers to align with their sales team in tracking deals, tasks, email conversations, and contacts and also reach out to them directly from their customer records.
• Pipedrive – It is suitable for sales teams looking for a simple yet powerful sales tool to get them organized. And is mostly suitable for small businesses.

Email Marketing Platforms

They can be an extension of your marketing automation platform or a standalone tool. Some popular email marketing services are:

• MailChimp – A standalone email marketing tool, MailChimp comes with an easy email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It’s suitable for personalized, well-timed, one-on-one communication.
• Constant Contact – An extremely useful email-marketing automation tool with unique features to take your marketing beyond just the basics. It’s best suitable for small businesses, without any need for advanced functionalities down the line.
• HubSpot – It offers a higher degree of personalization in comparison to MailChimp, comes with drag-and-drop as well as custom templates. With its wide range of reports on your email’s performance and automation workflows to scale your email marketing strategy, it’s the best tool to enable quick conversion rates!

Landing Page Builder

A good landing page builder software helps you create effective, easy landing pages to increase your conversions.

• Unbounce – A popular platform, Unbounce allows marketers to build customized landing pages that optimize conversions. It comes with features like A/B testing, ease of use, and offering relevant insights to measure page performance.
• HubSpot – Landing pages is one of its offerings and has most features like Unbounce. However, it doesn’t offer as many customization options or templates as Unbounce.

Social Media Management

Managing your social media presence is another important part of your inbound marketing and can be using tools like:

• Buffer – It makes it quick and easy to bulk schedule posts and is the perfect blend of personalization and automation. However, it doesn’t manage network engagement.
• Hootsuite – It’s an all-in-one platform that allows you to curate and schedule content, measure your ROI from social posts, run social media ads, and much more.

Keeping with its tag of the “inbound marketing software”, HubSpot also offers a social media management software that allows publishing, scheduling, monitoring, and reporting your social media performance.

Website Analysis

What use is your inbound marketing if you can’t keep track of your website performance, lead generation, and conversions from the website? Two popular platforms that ensure reporting are:

• Google Analytics – It offers in-depth analytics about your website performance, revealing insights about customers you won’t believe possible! It’s great for granular data, useful if your focus is on PPC and Adwords.
• HubSpot – It offers an easy interface with a dashboard that enables both marketers and non-marketers to see how a website is performing. It’s best suitable if your goal is to generate inbound leads and works great when used for closed-loop analytics and marketing automation. Often inbound marketers use a combination of both HubSpot and Google Analytics because of the advantages they bring.

So we looked into the top inbound marketing software across all possible platform categories. Now time for the conclusion!

What is the Best Marketing Platform?

The right answer is that it varies from business to business. If you are looking for tools with standalone uses, the best software would be those that primarily focus on a particular category – the ones like Unbounce, or Hootsuite, or MailChimp. But the best inbound marketing platform would be one that comes with all those features combined into one.

And there could be no better inbound marketing platform than HubSpot for this. HubSpot marketing not only includes tools to meet all your inbound marketing needs but is also at par with the standalone tools with respect to features and performance! Not to forget, it's reporting, analytics, content management, and customer support are among the best out there.

HubSpot is the foundation to build out your effective inbound marketing strategy. Head on to this page for a further look at HubSpot pricing for its Marketing, Service, and Sales Hubs. What’s more, some of its tools are even available for free. 

Wish to discuss an inbound marketing strategy for your business? Get in touch with us!