Introduction
The marketing automation industry has climbed sharply from a $500m in 2018 and projected $5.5bn in the next four years. According to Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report, 67% of the marketing leaders are already using a minimum of one marketing automation platform and a further 21% are planning to start using one in 2019. Altogether, the list of marketing automation platforms continues to grow with more and more new tools hitting the scene every single year, making it harder than ever to find the right platform for you and your company. Reputation management companies know that if you intend on staying competitive, you must start to use automation, as the industry is 24/7 and it is near impossible to keep up if you are still doing this manually.
Best Platforms
Despite an endless variety of marketing automation services to pick from, we are going to place an emphasis on five of the most prevalent and highly-rated services for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). So, without further ado, we present to you the list of the best automated tools and platforms for marketing automation.
- ActiveCampaign – ActiveCampaign starts at $9 per month and will help you to grow your contact list. They do not have a mandatory training package or any other hidden costs, unlike some other services. They provide users with frequent updates that keep them ahead of the competition. They give users a very stable platform with little to no bugs. By far one of the best when it comes to being intuitive. Customer support is top notch. Honestly, we couldn’t think of anything bad to say about ActiveCampaign.
- Hubspot – The only reason that we have listed Hubpot on this list is that of its wide-spread use. We find it highly overrated if we are honest. Mostly everything that Hubspot offers is offered on another platform and they are doing it better. That being said, we still think it is a useful tool if you want a product that is highly intuitive and very easy to get the hang of. We find it especially useful to users that are not as tech savvy as others. Meaning, a company that does not have a dedicated marketing team could very easily use this platform to grow their contacts.
- Ontraport – We feel that Ontraport is a bit of an underdog in the automated marketing world. While you hear of some many marketers using Hubspot, you rarely hear about people using Ontraport. However, there are many users out there and they have nothing but good things to say about Ontraport. In the interest of full disclosure, we got an Ontraport account to try it out and were mostly impressed. If we had one bad thing to say about it, it would have to be that the dashboard was just mostly KPI metrics, which could be developed to provide more information to the user.
Conclusion
So, there you have it, the list of our favourite three automated marketing tools. If you are one of the reputation management companies out there, it is very important that you get onboard with one of these platforms to better serve your clients.
