Best Marketing Strategy Software Shortlist
Here are the tools I chose for your consideration after researching their ability to plan new marketing strategies.
- HubSpot
- Google Analytics
- Mailchimp
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Adobe Campaign
- Marketo
- SEMrush
- ActiveCampaign
- Klaviyo
- Sprout Social
Creating marketing strategies involves a lot of work, especially for larger teams that regularly develop new campaigns. Even the strongest marketing strategy can only get a business so far without the proper tools to ensure everything goes as planned, so choosing the right marketing strategy software is crucial. To make this an easier choice, I researched some of the top marketing strategy tools to help. I listed the best marketing strategy software, including why I picked each one, their main features, and the main pros and cons of each option.
What Is Marketing Strategy Software
Marketing strategy software is a tool marketing teams use to plan, create, execute, track, and analyze the events and activities of a marketing campaign. The main objective of these platforms is simple, they help marketing teams effectively manage everything involved in the process of launching and reviewing campaigns. As a result, simplified marketing strategy software will help businesses communicate a single message and provide their target audience with a consistent experience across multiple channels.
Overviews Of The 12 Best Marketing Strategy Software
Here are my summaries of the software I chose for this list and why I think they deserve extensive consideration.
1. HubSpot - Best for inbound marketing strategies
HubSpot provides excellent inbound marketing tools that help organizations attract the right audience and convert visitors into customers. With HubSpot, marketing teams can reach the right target visitors through blogging, social media, digital advertisements, and other effective marketing campaigns.
Why I picked HubSpot: HubSpot is a popular platform that provides inbound marketing strategy capabilities through the HubSpot Marketing Hub tool. During my research, I realized what makes HubSpot stand out the most among other inbound marketing tools is its ability to interconnect with other HubSpot systems, will improve efficiency, and pass along vital information across other organizational teams. With HubSpot, you can create various inbound marketing campaigns, including social media content, blogging, and email strategies.
HubSpot Standout Features and Integrations
Features include workflow automation tools that make sending out emails and completing other tasks when specific dependencies are met, which will save your team time and allow them to focus on more meaningful work. Another feature I believe is beneficial when creating new marketing strategies is HubSpot’s A/B testing capabilities which allows you to send two versions of emails to identify which performs better.
Integrations include connections with popular marketing systems such as Asana, Canva, Google Search Console, Hotjar, Mailchimp, Microsoft Teams, PandaDoc, Salesforce, Slack, Supermetrics, and other software options. If you have a paid Zapier account, you can create custom integrations with your toolset.
HubSpot costs from $18/month and offers a free plan.
Pros
- Simple user interface
- Quickly creates marketing strategies
- Straightforward marketing channel integrations
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Reporting needs improvement
2. Google Analytics - Best for marketing strategy tracking
Google Analytics helps marketing teams discover how their strategies are performing and what people do when visiting their websites. The platform can track details such as page visits and visitor behavior to help organizations understand which marketing strategy best resonates with target audiences.
Why I picked Google Analytics: The reason why I added Google Analytics to this list is because of its ability to track the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. Google Analytics is a powerful platform that will help you understand how your marketing strategies are performing and how visitors interact with your brand. After adding a quick code to the back end of your website, you can get detailed reports that will enable you to make informed decisions about your marketing campaigns and where you need to make improvements.
Google Analytics Standout Features and Integrations
Features include predictive capabilities that use machine learning models to analyze your data and predict actions visitors might make in the future, such as making a purchase. Google Analytics also allows you to ask questions in the dashboard’s search bar to quickly find the insights, metrics, or reports you need.
Integrations include over 1,600 third-party systems that will help you simplify marketing campaigns by using the tools marketers use most. These include connections with systems such as Domo, GetResponse, HoneyBook, Improvado, Jotform, Odoo, Outgrow, Rambox, Salesforce, Smartlook, and other software options.
Google Analytics is free to use.
Pros
- Captures all website details
- Quickly exports data
- Easy to use
Cons
- Sometimes the reporting glitches
- System updates require extensive training
3. Mailchimp - Best for email marketing strategies
Mailchimp helps marketing teams manage email marketing strategies that will help them have engaging conversations with audiences.
Why I picked Mailchimp: To make this list more robust, I wanted to add platforms that focus on specific types of marketing campaigns, which is why I added Mailchimp. This platform is an excellent tool for managing significant email campaigns. Mailchimp will help you get started with your email marketing campaigns immediately, thanks to its pre-built templates, segments, and one-click automation.
Mailchimp Standout Features and Integrations
Features include an advanced email dashboard that will highlight engagement metrics such as click-through rates. Another feature that makes Mailchimp stand out is its creative assistant, which leverages artificial intelligence to generate branded assets across marketing channels.
Integrations include connections with third-party applications to help you do more with Mailchimp. These include tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Formstack, Mixpanel, QuickBooks, Shopify, Stripe, SurveyMonkey, WordPress, Zendesk, and other software options.
Mailchimp costs from $13/month for up to 500 contacts and offers a one-month free trial, and a free plan is available.
Pros
- Easy to use
- Excellent customer support
- Helpful automated customer journeys
Cons
- List management is complex
- Contact forms are challenging to set up
4. Hootsuite - Best for social media marketing campaigns
Hootsuite helps businesses with planning, scheduling, and syndicating social media strategies across multiple networks. This way, marketing teams can focus more of their time on other crucial marketing functions.
Why I picked Hootsuite: The platform is one of the popular social media strategy management tools that many marketing teams use to plan and monitor social media efforts. You can use Hootsuite to monitor mentions, hashtags, keywords, and posts from specific social media networks. I found Hootsuite to be beneficial because it will allow you to monitor the multiple social media channels you’re active on and give you a constant feed of relevant social media activity.
Hootsuite Standout Features and Integrations
Features include team collaboration tools that provide access to multiple team members and allow them to oversee the same social media accounts and schedule posts; it also enables everyone to get edits or insights from others before publishing a post. Hootsuite also provides social media monitoring tools that will help you stay on top of the latest conversations about the topics that matter to you most and keep track of anyone who mentions your brand.
Integrations include over 150 third-party applications that will extend Hootsuite’s functionality and simplify your social media strategies. These include Adobe Creative Cloud Libraries, Airtable, Asana, Basecamp, Dropbox, Figma, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Marketo, monday.com, and other software options.
Hootsuite costs from $99/month for up to 10 social accounts and offers a 30-day free trial.
Pros
- Excellent customer support
- Easily delegates roles
- Regular updates
Cons
- Higher tiers are expensive
- No bulk rescheduling
5. Buffer - Best for scheduling social media content
Buffer allows businesses to schedule and share social media content across the most popular networks. It will help marketing teams automate recurring tasks and ensure all social media content is timely and relevant.
Why I picked Buffer: I wanted to add Buffer to this list because it’s considered to be one of the top social media content platforms. Buffer will help you compose, schedule, and publish social media content across some of the most popular networks, including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and other high-traffic networks. The platform provides comprehensive social media content marketing capabilities, from planning to post analytics and custom reports.
Buffer Standout Features and Integrations
Features include engagement tools that enable you to navigate comments under your social media posts and interact with your audience; you can discover all unanswered comments and highlight the most important ones to keep you aware of important conversations. Buffer also provides an analytics dashboard that will help you track your posts’ performance and understand whether they’re performing well with audiences; you’ll also receive recommendations to help increase reach and engagement.
Integrations include multiple third-party tools that will help your team manage social media accounts and content efficiently, such as Canva, Cronycle, Crowdriff, Dropbox, Feedly, Giphy, Google Drive, Make, Pocket, SocialBee, and other software options. If you have a paid Zapier account, you can make custom connections with over 400 systems.
Buffer costs from $5/channel/month and offers a 14-day free trial, and a free plan is available.
Pros
- Easily manages multiple social accounts
- User-friendly interface
- Excellent customer support
Cons
- No email notifications
- Slows down when uploading multiple images
6. Salesforce Marketing Cloud - Best customer journey builder
Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides customer journey-building capabilities that allow marketing teams to understand their strategy’s strengths and weaknesses.
Why I picked Salesforce Marketing Cloud: The platform is a very popular marketing platform that enables businesses to run and test various types of marketing strategies. But what I believe makes Salesforce Marketing Cloud stand out the most is its customer journey mapping tool. The journey builder tool will help you create cross-channel marketing strategies to personalize experiences through the entire marketing cycle.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Standout Features and Integrations
Features include an artificial intelligence tool called Einstein, which will help you optimize your marketing strategy’s timing and personalization to improve engagement. The platform provides marketing intelligence capabilities that allow you to identify the results from every strategy you implement to improve efficiency and growth.
Integrations include connections with over 100 third-party software, including Brevo, censhare, Driftrock, Google Analytics 360, HubSpot Marketing Hub, Pipeliner CRM, ServiceNow, Tableau CRM, TapClicks, Yotpo, and other software options. You can also use a paid Zapier account or Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s API to create custom integrations.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud costs from $1,250/month and offers a free trial.
Pros
- Excellent content builder tool
- Simple setup process
- Integrates with Salesforce CRM
Cons
- Very expensive
- Limited email builder
7. Adobe Campaign - Best for omnichannel marketing strategies
Adobe Campaign can help marketing teams synchronize omnichannel marketing strategies that will provide audiences with robust experiences.
Why I picked Adobe Campaign: It’s common for marketing strategies to involve multiple channels, such as web, email, mobile, and social media. Adobe Campaign simplifies these strategies so you can deliver content on the channels your target audience might prefer. You can use Adobe Campaign to design, execute, and personalize marketing strategies across multiple channels while improving your audience’s experience on every device and touchpoint.
Adobe Campaign Standout Features and Integrations
Features include campaign planning tools that allow you to plan and manage strategy activities, schedules, budgets, and results. Adobe Campaign provides automation features that help marketing teams automate campaigns based on audience engagement; it can automatically trigger real-time personalized messages depending on how visitors interact with your brand.
Integrations include connections with popular marketing systems to simplify marketing campaigns. These include Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic, Auth0, BlueConic, Decibel, Knak, Playable, ReachFive, Taxi for Email, Tinyclues, Yieldify, and other software options.
Adobe Campaign offers custom pricing upon request and also offers a free demo.
Pros
- Robust analytics
- Scalable and flexible
- Comprehensive feature suite
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Dependency on Adobe Ecosystem
8. Marketo - Best for content intelligence
Marketo helps businesses show they understand audiences by providing personalized content that’s delivered on time. Marketing teams creating new strategies can use Marketo’s real-time behavioral and demographic data as well as artificial intelligence to personalize audience experiences.
Why I picked Marketo: I wanted to add Marketo to this list for your consideration because of its content intelligence capabilities. Marketo helps you manage, deliver, and optimize content that feels relevant to your target audience. It uses artificial intelligence to learn which content works best and automatically optimizes it to increase conversions.
Marketo Standout Features and Integrations
Features include digital marketing tools that help you target the right audiences with personalized ads. You can also use Marketo’s marketing analytics feature to understand how your strategies are performing.
Integrations include third-party applications that help increase productivity and enhance engagement with audiences throughout your marketing strategy. These include over 600 options, such as Bynder, Domo, Improvado, Outgrow, Pipedrive, Rambox, Salesforce, Slack, Wrike, Zoho CRM, and other software options.
Marketo offers custom pricing upon request and also offers a free demo.
Pros
- Excellent marketing automation
- Complete marketing operations platform
- Simple folder and file arrangement
Cons
- Steep learning curve
- Generating reports is complex
9. SEMrush - Best for search engine optimization strategies
SEMrush is a digital marketing platform that helps marketing teams create search engine optimization strategies. It will help businesses improve search engine visibility and rank their websites higher in search engines to get more traffic, leads, and customers.
Why I picked SEMrush: Creating marketing strategies that drive traffic to your website can be challenging, but you can use SEMrush to get perfect opportunities to get better results on search engines like Google. SEMrush provides extensive features that will help you improve your search engine optimization to improve your marketing. The platform provides over 55 tools, products, and add-ons to help you enhance your online presence.
SEMrush Standout Features and Integrations
Features include competitive analysis tools that allow you to discover what your competition is doing to rank their website on search engines so you can do the same. SEMrush also provides rank-tracking capabilities that combine reports and rank-checking tools that will tell you how well your website is doing.
Integrations include connections with top tools that will help you rank your website on search engines through additional functionality. These integrations include AgencyAnalytics, AIOSEO, Bramework, Databox, Kontent.ai, Outranking, Pagecloud, Plerdy, Whatagraph, Zoho, and other software options.
SEMrush costs from $99.95/month and offers a free plan that allows users to track up to 10 keywords.
Pros
- Extensive competitor analysis tools
- Comprehensive keyword research tools
- User-friendly interface
Cons
- Expensive pricing
- Some information is difficult to find
10. ActiveCampaign - Best for automating engagement strategies
ActiveCampaign can help businesses collect data from every marketing touchpoint to help them understand when and where to automate engagement messages.
Why I picked ActiveCampaign: I believe ActiveCampaign is worth your consideration because of its ability to help your teams save time, thanks to its engagement automation tools. ActiveCampaign comes with over 135 triggers and actions that allows you to build automated engagement sequences when creating your marketing strategies. The platform has a customer relationship management tool that will help you trigger email messages based on where deals are in your pipeline.
ActiveCampaign Standout Features and Integrations
Features include split testing capabilities that will test your marketing automation sequences, helping you improve your sequences over time. The email campaign builder is another great feature from ActiveCampaign that uses a drag-and-drop tool that allows you to test almost anything you can think of.
Integrations include over 900 connections with third-party applications that make the most sense for your marketing teams, such as Airtable, Asana, Basecamp, Clickfunnels, Google Analytics, Postmark, Salesforce, Shopify, Slack, WordPress, and other software options. If you have a paid Zapier account, you can create custom integrations with your current systems.
ActiveCampaign costs from $39/month and offers a 14-day free trial.
Pros
- Excellent customer support
- User-friendly navigation
- Wealth of tutorials
Cons
- Expensive for larger teams
- Moving contacts between lists is complex
11. Klaviyo - Best for ecommerce marketing strategies
Klaviyo provides ecommerce businesses with tools to help them create effective, data-driven marketing strategies. The platform uses a real-time, flexible database to centralize customer data and simplify the process of building, delivering, and optimizing marketing strategies.
Why I picked Klaviyo: I wanted to add Klaviyo to the list of those operating ecommerce businesses and searching for a tool that will help them create effective marketing strategies and turn visitors into revenue-generating relationships. With Klaviyo, you can segment audiences to target specific people using a combination of details, such as location, profile info, and behavior. You can also set up dynamic forms and pop-ups to help turn visitors into subscribers.
Klaviyo Standout Features and Integrations
Features include marketing automation that will help you target the right audience, grow your email list, and increase repeat sales. Klaviyo also provides pre-built ecommerce email templates that allow your teams to quickly create high-converting email campaigns.
Integrations include over 300 pre-built integrations such as Funnel, Heap, Jebbit, Justuno, Loop, LoyaltyLion, Octane AI, Rebuy, Supermetrics, Typeform, and other software options. If you have a developer on your team, you can use Klaviyo’s API to create custom integrations with your systems.
Klaviyo costs from $30/month and offers a 60-day free trial, and a free plan is available.
Pros
- Simple automation setup
- Excellent analytics
- Template builder works very well
Cons
- Some occasional glitches
- Building SMS campaigns is complex
12. Sprout Social - Best all-in-one social media strategy tool
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media strategy tool that provides a control center for marketing teams to turn social presence into real results.
Why I picked Sprout Social: In my opinion, many marketing teams should take Sprout Social into consideration because it’s an all-in-one social media management platform that will help you organize your content calendar and assets. Sprout Social can help you schedule and publish content across multiple social media networks. It can perfectly time when you should post content based on when your audience is most active.
Sprout Social Standout Features and Integrations
Features include a smart inbox that provides an overview of all social messages, allowing you to respond in a timely manner. Sprout Social’s analytics tool can help you optimize your content’s performance by identifying which is performing best, uncovering trends, and discovering engagement opportunities.
Integrations include third-party applications that can get access to all the content and data they need to help you best serve your audience. These include Canva, Dropbox, Feedly, Google Analytics, HubSpot, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Slack, Tableau, and other software options.
Sprout Social costs from $249/month for up to five social profiles and offers a 30-day free trial.
Pros
- Clear reports
- Maintains branding
- Easy to use
Cons
- Slow onboarding process
- High priced
Other Options
Now, more than ever before, there are a significant number of marketing strategy software than I could possibly list in this article, so I added this brief list of other options that also deserves some consideration.
- Asana - Best for managing and coordinating marketing strategies.
- monday.com - Best for building custom strategy workflows.
- Wrike - Best for remote teams.
- ClickUp - Best for collaborating on strategies.
- Smartsheet - Best work management platform.
- Moz - Best all-in-one SEO toolset.
- Ahrefs - Best for tracking competitors.
- Canva - Best online graphic design platform.
- CoSchedule - Best for scheduling marketing strategies.
- Trello - Best for task management.
- Mention - Best for monitoring social media.
- BuzzSumo - Best for content influencer strategies.
- Optimizely - Best for testing marketing strategies.
- Crazy Egg - Best for website visitor recordings.
Selection Criteria For Marketing Strategy Software
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best marketing strategy software for this article:
Core Functionality
Each marketing strategy software will cover somewhat different territory when it comes to use cases and features. However, to make it on this list the marketing strategy software must cover the following basic functionality:
- Ability to store and visualize data relating to marketing campaign strategy and execution plans
- Heavy focus on marketing strategy tasks and projects, with software integrations, templates, and tutorials that speak to this
Key Features
The top marketing strategy software will offer some of the following key features:
- Goals and Milestones: Marketing strategy software will allow you to set goals and milestones as part of the planning process to help your campaign development efforts.
- Campaign Simulation: This is an advanced feature that helps businesses predict the outcome of strategies, allowing you to choose the best ideas and prioritize actions.
- Campaign Management: Before starting your new campaign, your marking strategy software will arrange every aspect of your campaign, including team creation, task scheduling, and schedules and timelines.
- Campaign Templates: These will help marketing teams plan marketing strategies faster, especially when creating multiple campaign types.
- Team Collaboration: Strategy development is a collaborative process, and these platforms will enable teams to work together to create winning ideas with tools such as file sharing, messaging, and video calls.
- Automation: This is an important feature that will help marketing teams create strategies faster by handling repetitive campaign creation tasks.
Usability
During my research, I made sure to add as many tools as possible that allow marketing teams to easily manage campaigns after going through the first learning stages. All marketing strategy software will have a learning curve, but once you and your teams are over that curve, the platform’s interface will determine how fast everyone can complete their tasks. If the marketing strategy software isn’t very useful, your team’s productivity will take a significant hit.
Customizability
Marketing strategies require input from multiple team members, so having a solution that enables everyone to work the way they want is essential. It’s also important to use marketing strategy software that can expand as your company grows and accommodate the changes that come with launching larger campaigns with more assets, teams, and prospects to manage. So, to handle these scenarios, I made sure to add marketing strategy tools that are customizable to fit your needs and growth.
Software Integrations
Efficient software integrations will help you monitor team performance and discover areas where you can make improvements to your strategies. The marketing strategy software you use should have as many native integrations with third-party tools that you’re likely already using, such as email marketing platforms and analytics software. In case the solution doesn’t have a native integration with your current systems, it should also allow you to make custom connections, either through an API your developer can use or with a paid Zapier account.
People Also Ask
For many marketing teams, choosing the right marketing strategy software can be overwhelming, and many people have additional questions to ask about these platforms. Here are some of the common questions people ask when searching for new marketing strategy tools and my answers after doing some extensive research and evaluation of the tools on this list.
What are the benefits of marketing strategy software?
What are the different types of marketing strategy software?
How much does marketing strategy software cost?
Other Marketing Software Reviews
If you need other marketing strategy software for your organization, here are some other marketing strategy tool lists that will help you find the best option for your marketing strategy needs.
Strategy & Management
- Best Marketing Software
- Marketing Management Software
- Marketing Planning Software
- Marketing Calendar Software
- Marketing Collaboration Software
- Marketing Planning Tools
- B2B Marketing Software
- Field Marketing Software
Reporting & Analyitcs
Marketing analytics software offers businesses data-driven insights to measure and optimize marketing campaigns for improved results.
Advertising & Socials
The Takeaway
With the right marketing strategy software at your disposal, you can simplify your campaign creation process and automate many of the tasks involved in your strategy. Any one or combination of the tools I evaluated in this article will provide you with a solid foundation for effective marketing strategy planning and implementation. So, don’t be afraid to test some tools and go through trials and demonstrations to find what fits your needs and budget best.
If you need more software suggestions to help you operate other aspects of your marketing department or you want helpful advice from top marketing professionals, try signing up for The CMO newsletter. As a subscriber, you’ll receive the latest software suggestions and advice from some of the best marketers right in your inbox.
Related Read: How To Build A Successful Digital Marketing Strategy (With 10 Essential Tactics)