Top Marketing Software to Incorporate Into Your 2023 Strategy

In the year 2022, businesses continued to shift focus to digital marketing instead of traditional methods and are using a multitude of various digital tactics to stand out and stay ahead of their competitors. Companies utilize different marketing software solutions to help streamline their digital marketing efforts and expand their marketing capabilities.

In this blog, we’ll reveal the top digital marketing platforms businesses are expecting to utilize in 2023 including an overview of how each tool can help streamline and improve business success.

Importance of Marketing Software

Marketing software continues to grow and expand, covering every gap that marketers can’t cover. Software solutions are pertinent in automating and saving time to make marketers more efficient and effective at reaching their customers. 

A marketer’s daily struggle is to effectively use their time and resources to expand the marketing funnel. It can be challenging and time-consuming for marketers to manage all of their different campaigns and digital marketing channels. According to 43% of marketers, using marketing automation has boosted their customer experience.

Using tools to streamline the marketing processes, such as email marketing software, team communication, and collaboration tools, and SEO optimization tools, to name a few, can help scale your marketing efforts, save you time, increase your efficiency, and increase the number of quality leads you to convert.

Top Digital Marketing Software for Marketers in 2023

Here are the top digital marketing software solutions you should utilize to help streamline your marketing efforts:

CRM software

A CRM (customer relationship management) such as HubSpot, Salesforce, or Zoho CRM to track their customers’ interactions and manage their customer accounts. CRMs house all your leads and customer information, such as a lead address, names, phone numbers, and past interactions they’ve had with your company, making it a great knowledge base and communication channel for marketing and sales teams to follow-up with prospects, nurture leads down the funnel, and serve their clients better.

Picking the right CRM is essential. There are a lot of different CRM tools available based on your business’s unique needs. HubSpot is one of our favorites here at Pyxl. We chose HubSpot because of the all-in-one marketing and sales software, training and resources, scalability, CMS inbound marketing, and user-friendliness. Check out our CRM Comparison Guide to help determine which CRM is best for you:

CMS 

The difference between a CMS and a CRM is that a CMS focuses on managing your content while a CRM manages the customer relationship. According to Pyxl’s survey report of 2023, 37% of businesses are using a CMS (content management system) like WordPress, Drupal, or HubSpot to easily create, edit, archive, collaborate, report, publish, inform, distribute, and manage your website’s content.

A good CMS has powerful publishing tools, built-in SEO tools, customer support, and more. Picking the right CMS that is right for your business’s unique needs can be solved by downloading our CMS comparison guide:

Data reporting and analytics software

Data reporting and analytics software work to show relevant data for a specific subset of your business. The data sources gather information and provide insights into easy-to-understand graphs and charts to give your company useful insights into how your business is performing. Use these reports and metrics to measure the ROI of each of your marketing efforts, and make any necessary changes for improvements.

The best reporting tools currently available include Zoho Analytics, Google Analytics, HubSpot Analytics, and Microsoft BI. 

Email marketing software

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing, on average, has shown a 4,300% return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the United States. Email marketing is quite effective for conversion and it’s conversion rates are three times that of social media marketing.

Email marketing software has the ability to create highly engaging emails and schedule them in advance for a wide range of people.  Email marketing software integrated with CRM platforms makes it easy to personalize emails with name tokens and smart content to customize messages based on where they are in the lifecycle stage. There is usually also a feature called A/B testing that tests different variables within your emails to gather data on what stimulates clicks and opens.

Some of the platforms used in email marketing include Constant Contact, Mailchimp, and Sendinblue. 

Team communication and collaboration tools

Communication and productivity are two items that teams work toward improving as 97% of employees and executives believe lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project. Collaboration can be difficult when team members are located in different time zones or in various departments. With communication and collaboration tools, teams can send messages back and forth and stay up to date with various projects and assignments. 

Some of the best collaboration tools include Slack, Miro, WebEx, and Teams.

SEO optimization tools

SEO optimization was reported as one of the categories with the highest marketing spend in 2021. In 2021 (to date), Google accounted for just over 70% of all global desktop search traffic, followed by Baidu at 13%, Bing at 12%, and Yahoo at 2%. It’s no surprise that 61% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority this year.

SEO works by targeting different features in your content, such as the URL slug, title, pictures, and text, to pinpoint the subject and distribute it to search engines. Not only do these SEO tools help optimize your content so you can show up in search engine results, but they also provide insights into the keywords with the highest traffic potential and what keywords your website, and your competitor’s websites, are currently ranking for.

Platforms such as SEMrush, Moz, Yoast, and Google Keyword Planner are great tools to boost your content optimization and help search for trending keywords in your specific field.

Content creation and design tools

Content creation was reported as the marketing category with the second-highest marketing budget allocation, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing to help with their marketing strategy. 

Staying ahead and creating new and visually appealing content is one of the most critical items to consider when looking for marketing software. Content creation is the ultimate inbound marketing practice and brings in 3X as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.

Programs such as WordPress and HubSpot Blog allow content creators to produce valuable and relevant content that builds credibility as leaders in their industry. These software tools also enable the ability to improve your social media presence with captivating content. 

Lumen 5, Canva, and Figma are great design tools to help easily create engaging designs that elevate your content and create an association between the potential customer and your company. 

Marketing attribution software

A majority of businesses reported said they’ll be using marketing attribution methods to measure the ROI of their marketing efforts, and 52% of marketers are currently using attribution reporting.

Companies use marketing attribution software to determine how actions, events, or touchpoints during the sales process contribute to the marketing and sales team’s success. This process is fundamental when allocating specific funding to each marketing channel and discovering the specific strategies that are effective in converting leads. 

Platforms for marketing attribution can include HubSpot Attribution Reporting, Google Attribution, Bizible, and Singular. These tools will allow marketers to have visibility into the complex world of marketing and create a baseline of their business’s best channels. 

Project management software

Across teams in your organization, it is vital to communicate and collaborate on projects without wasting time with emails. This software allows project managers to control their management and document the allocation of tasks to members. 43.9% of businesses will be utilizing project management software to keep track of various projects and due dates.

Platforms that have good project management software include Asana, Basecamp, and Monday.com. 

Social scheduling software

LinkedIn is the second-most popular social media platform used by B2B marketers, ranking only behind Facebook. There are 8 million active advertisers on Facebook, the vast majority of which are small and medium-sized businesses. One of the most time-consuming things to do as a social media manager is to log in and out of different social accounts each time you want to post throughout the day. With a social media scheduling tool, you can save time and schedule all your posts in advance and operate your different social accounts efficiently within one tool.

Companies should refer to social media guides for the best times and frequency for posting to maximize views on each platform. Social scheduling software that can boost your social media efforts includes Hootsuite, Buffer, and HubSpot Social. 

Marketing automation

Marketing automation software is essential to help marketers save time and streamline all of their repetitive and time-consuming tasks so they can focus on higher priority and higher ROI projects. Research and Markets anticipated the global marketing automation market size to reach USD 8.42 billion by 2027. With so many businesses struggling with time and resources, it’s unusual that companies aren’t using automation software to help streamline their repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

To keep up with all these digital marketing tactics required of marketers to stay competitive in today’s market, it’s essential to utilize automation tools to help do the heavy lifting for you.

A few marketing automation platforms to consider are Marketo, HubSpot Automation, and Zendesk. Consider utilizing automation tools such as a chatbot or automated demos to help continue the customer experience even after office hours. 

Lead generation

Lead generation software helps you generate and collect leads from specific channels automatically and send leads directly to the sales team for conversion. The right software helps to achieve higher conversion rates with better quality leads. 

A couple of lead generation platforms to utilize are Pardot by Salesforce, HubSpot Marketing Hub, and Leadfuze. This software offers builder tools to create forms and a range of templates to create landing pages, CTAs, and surveys on your website. 

Chatbots

When it comes to reaching customers while offline, Chatbots have proven to be the most reliable. Chatbots are functional 24/7 and work to connect customers during and after business hours. 64% of businesses believe that chatbots will allow them to provide a more customized support experience for their customers.

When it’s after hours, you can leave your chatbot on and provide users with an automated and personalized experience that resembles that of an actual human, even when no human representative is available. Examples of chatbot tools to integrate on your website are Mobile Monkey, HubSpot Chat, or Drift. 

Video marketing

Even though video software adoption falls at the bottom of the list at 19.5%, the use of video marketing has grown exponentially within the last year. 72% of customers say they would prefer to learn about a product or service by way of video, so it’s no surprise that 81% of marketers plan to use video marketing in their overall strategy for the coming years.

There are a bunch of video tools such as Lumen5, Vimeo, and YouTube to help create and distribute highly engaging videos that convert. One of our favorite uses of video marketing is through Mindstamp, an interactive video platform. Mindstamp provides a wide range of video features that let you turn any marketing and sales video into something completely interactive and engaging, making it an even more valuable tool for marketers in 2023.

Next Steps

Need help deciphering the best marketing software for your business? Download our Best Marketing Tools for Every Business for a deep dive into the tools and platforms listed above.

Pyxl has a team of experienced marketing professionals with experience in providing the best marketing solutions and tools for your business. Contact Pyxl to see how we can incorporate some of the top marketing tools and strategies to really take your business to the next level. 

Updated: Feb 27, 2023