Given our increasing reliance on digital devices, it's logical for brands to meet us where we spend most of our time online. A study found out that, on the average, a typical social media user spends 2 hours and 23 minutes on social networks daily. This is where digital marketing platforms come in. They assist companies with digital marketing techniques including email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), etc. Continue reading and explore the 12 essential digital marketing platforms to help you find and engage more customers and increase revenue.
Why Choose a Digital Marketing Platform?
The potential customers you can meet online are a much larger segment you’ll ever be able to attract locally. Below are the benefits of digital marketing:
- Increase your interaction with prospects and determine what they are looking for. Get to know your customers better!
- Reach out to anyone in any location and at any time zone.
- Target the right audience at the right time through hyper-personalization.
- Communicate with your prospects and customers at every stage of the buying process.
- Save money and reach more people for less.
- Understand your audience and drive engagement to boost customer loyalty.
- Track and monitor campaigns in real time so you can optimize or adjust content or target.
Specifically, digital marketing platforms streamline your online marketing efforts by providing the following:
- Centralized dashboards to easily manage multiple marketing platforms, like social media channels, or access various metrics and reports in one place.
- Content planning, scheduling, and multi-platform publishing functions to reduce manual processes.
- Analytics and reporting features offer valuable insights for more data-driven decisions and improvements.
Now, let’s dive into the top digital marketing platforms and channels for different purposes.
1. Agorapulse
Agorapulse offers a comprehensive suite of tools for managing your social media presence, from content creation and scheduling to collaboration and analytics. You can effectively track and optimize your social media campaigns with features like a unified inbox, publishing calendar, social listening, and Google Analytics integration.
2. Sprout Social
Try Sprout Social, an all-in-one social media marketing platform for maximizing your brand's social media impact. The platform covers everything from influencer marketing and review management to employee advocacy and business intelligence (BI). In addition, Sprout Social optimizes customer experience and reduces manual tasks through AI and automation tools.
3. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a comprehensive digital marketing platform packed with various tools for improving online visibility and performance. It provides in-depth insights into keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink auditing, and rank tracking. With Ahrefs, you can identify opportunities to optimize your website's content, build high-quality backlinks, and monitor your search engine rankings.
4. BrightEdge
BrightEdge is a leading SEO platform that empowers marketers to turn online content into scalable business results. Its research features help you identify relevant keywords, analyze your competitors, and forecast future trends. Also, Brightedge's optimization tools provide actionable SEO recommendations to improve your content and identify website issues. Additionally, you'll have access to detailed reporting on site performance, keyword rankings, and page metrics, as well as a StoryBuilder, a powerful marketing dashboard that delivers real-time insights into your website's performance.
5. Mailchimp
Some businesses find writing and designing marketing emails overwhelming. Mailchimp makes it easy to craft emails. This email marketing and automation platform includes a campaign manager tool, pre-built and custom-coded email templates, audience segmentation, automated workflows, and analytics. It also offers marketing CRM and ad management.
6. Drip
Drip is a digital marketing platform that offers Dynamic Segmentation, which automatically updates audience segment lists based on actions in real-time. Other key features include its automated workflows, which are perfect for abandoned carts and post-purchase email sequences. Its on-site marketing tools, like timed forms, pop-ups, and slide-ins, capture and convert website visitors into leads.
7. Salesforce
Salesforce is an industry-leading CRM platform that offers everything from basic lead management to more advanced automation and forecasting. Users can create custom reports and dashboards. Salesforce also integrates with over 3,000 platforms. It suits scaling and enterprise-level sales, marketing, and service teams well. Plus, Salesforce integrates with Sprout, so you can use social data to create meaningful customer journeys and send qualified social leads to your sales team.
8. Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a platform that automates scheduling sales calls, sending follow-up emails, tracking contacts, and updating sales opportunities. Its core features include lead, deal, account, and contact management, automated workflows and follow-up sequences, forecasting, and analytics.
9. Pipedrive
This user-friendly and flexible CRM platform is also popular among businesses of all sizes. Pipedrive has standard CRM functions like lead management, sales automation, analytics, and reporting. It also has email marketing features such as an email builder, segmentation, and marketing automation.
10. Google Analytics
If you have a website, you likely already use Google Analytics, but you might need to learn its full capabilities. Its built-in automation can predict user behavior and detect growth opportunities. Its reporting functions reveal how users find, engage with, and make purchases on your site, and its advertising features show how your Google Ads are performing. Also, its Explorations tool visualizes data to understand trends or patterns in your data better.
11. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics provides vital metrics to identify power users, acquisition sources, top customers, and feature usage across different sites and products. It also offers insights into metrics like customer lifetime value and customer behavior data like active users, page views, and more.
12. WordPress
Initially developed for bloggers, WordPress is now a comprehensive content management platform and website builder. It includes design and editing tools, marketing and monetization features, a full suite of customizable templates, and over 50,000 plugins to personalize and add functionality to your site. With its extensive library of plugins, you can add a store, analytics, newsletter, social media integration, and more.
