How To Choose The Best Marketing Automation For You?

Dear MDT: There are about a million and one different marketing automation platforms. How do I know which one to choose?

If it feels like your options for marketing automation software are as lengthy as a Cheesecake Factory menu, we get you. It’s overwhelming.

From MailChimp to Marketo, everything promotes itself as a marketing automation software. How do you know what is the right option for you?

To help whittle down the options, this is the best question to ask yourself:

How big of an investment are you looking to make into building a marketing automation workflow?

If you’re a small business that is just looking to build a straightforward, automated flow of email deployments, a platform like MailChimp is simple and cheap.

If you’re a large business ready to make a big investment into an extensive, robust automated campaign build, Marketo is really the industry leader when it comes to its technology. But that also comes with a price, it’s probably the most expensive solution on the market.

For companies somewhere in the middle, we highly recommend HubSpot. HubSpot is the platform we use for our marketing automation campaigns. What we really like about their software is that it is simple enough for smaller businesses to use who may be new to marketing automation, but the technology really scales, enabling you to develop highly sophisticated campaigns.

What is your CRM Software?

Now, your decision will also likely factor in your current CRM software, since CRMs and Marketing Automation software need to be fully integrated. So, if you’re already a client of Salesforce’s CRM and you have no plans on changing that, it’d make a lot of sense to look at their Pardot platform.

That said, most of these platforms bend over backwards to enable 3rd party integrations, so if you’re a Salesforce CRM client but want to use MailChimp, you shouldn’t have an issue.

Are we missing a few options?

These are just four platforms in the sea of solutions, but these are the platforms we’ve had the most exposure to and know the best.

For a more detailed breakdown, including a much larger list of software options, there’s a great article on HubSpot here: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-automation-software-tools

As HubSpot certified partners, if you have any questions on how HubSpot’s marketing automation platform can help you, schedule a time to meet-up with our team here.

We’re happy to help, even if it means guiding you towards another platform that’s a better fit for your business.