No matter the personal opinions you hold about software as a service (SaaS), the allure of the business model has been around for a while. Why? Because it can offer some hearty benefits, especially for your marketing team and remote workers.
With more people working from home than ever before, SaaS marketing tools enable collaboration and automation to streamline marketing campaign workflows — no matter where employees are based.
Here’s a quick recap of SaaS marketing software followed by the top 10 tools you can use today.
What Is Marketing SaaS Software?
We’ll keep this part brief.
Unlike traditional software (which is purchased outright or licensed and then downloaded locally), SaaS marketing automation software is hosted in the cloud and accessed through a web browser rather than being installed on a physical hard drive.
These tools are often designed to help businesses with various aspects of their marketing effort, such as email marketing, inbound marketing, social media management, customer relationship management (CRM), analytics and more.
The SaaS model offers myriad benefits, including easier scalability and accessibility. Typically, these tools can keep pace with growing brands and are accessible anywhere you can get an internet connection.
The Role of Marketing Automation Tools in Digital Marketing
Automation plays a crucial role in modern digital marketing. These days, it’s practically impossible to work without at least some form of automation. The technology can be applied to various workflows to help businesses:
- Streamline repetitive tasks.
- Improve efficiency.
- Enhance the overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
Here are some examples of where and how automation is often applied in digital marketing:
- Lead nurturing: Here, automation can help send targeted content to leads based on their behavior and interactions with your brand, pushing them through the sales funnel more effectively.
- Analytics and reporting: Automated analytics tools can gather and analyze data and provide insights into the performance of various marketing channels and campaigns.
- Social media: SaaS tools that specialize in social media automation can help schedule posts, track engagement and manage multiple accounts from a centralized platform.
- Internal workflow automation: Marketers can automate internal processes and workflows, such as content creation and approval processes.
- Ad campaigns: Marketing automation software can optimize ad targeting, bidding and placement to maximize the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
- A/B testing: Automated tools facilitate A/B testing of various elements in marketing campaigns, allowing marketers to optimize for better performance based on real-time data.
The 10 Best SaaS Marketing Tools
Without further ado, these are, in our humble opinion, the 10 best SaaS marketing tools out there today.
1. Brafton Content Marketing Platform
Description: Brafton’s content marketing platform operates on 5 core functions, including digital asset management, content calendar, content production planning, resource tracking and marketing campaign measurement. And, it’s built by a world-leading marketing agency with the help of people who live and breathe in this realm.
Standout features: Plan, produce and track performance all in one place with Brafton’s SaaS Content Marketing Platform.
Pricing: $100 per month for up to 50 users, but you can start with a 14-day free trial.
Takeaway: If you need one platform that can handle just about any marketing plan you throw at it, the Brafton CMP is for you.
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2. Hawk SEM’s ConversionIQ
Description: ConversionIQ is purpose-built to help markets capture, connect and cultivate audiences, sales and insights for continuous improvement.
Standout features: Hawk SEM’s proprietary software helps connect the dots between leads and new business to help marketers properly allocate budgets and overhaul campaigns to drive revenue.
Pricing: Talk to an expert at Hawk SEM.
Takeaway: If you’re generating a healthy amount of leads but are having difficulty determining which ones lead to new revenue, ConversionIQ may be for you.
3. Zapier
Description: Zapier is a SaaS company that offers a no-code workflow automation tool and app builder, allowing organizations to build custom workflows quickly.
Standout features: Zaps. That’s what Zapier calls their custom-built automations. How fun! Easily set up new Zaps by selecting a trigger and an action — that’s it!
Pricing: $0-$69 per month for free to team-level subscriptions. Contact sales for company rates.
Takeaway: If easy automation sounds appealing to you, Zapier can help zap manual tasks and turn them into fully automated workflows.
4. Hotjar
Description: Hotjar is a SaaS marketing tool built to help your marketing team make more sense of their data and analytics using heatmaps, recordings, feedback, surveys and more.
Standout features: Hotjar’s heatmaps help site owners and markets better understand where users are clicking, dropping off and experiencing friction using visuals. Take the guesswork out of user engagement analytics and see where people are clicking and engaging.
Pricing: $0-$213 per month.
Takeaway: If you’re “drowning in data” as Hotjar puts it, their software may be able to get you back on land.
5. SpyFu
Description: A veteran of the search engine optimization (SEO) game, SpyFu helps business owners and marketers build out a robust SEO marketing strategy using keyword tracking, backlinking, ranking history, custom reports and more.
Standout features: SpyFu’s newly introduced RivalFlow AI helps website owners discover gaps in their existing content and makes recommendations to come out ahead of competitors.
Pricing: $39-$79 per month.
Takeaway: SpyFu is the looking glass into your competitor’s search marketing strategies. If you need to know what they’re up to so you can improve your own website, SpyFu!
6. Semrush
Description: From SEO to market research and even social media marketing, Semrush is a bit of an amalgamation of the most important or useful marketing tools, all in one solution. Heck, it’s the world’s leading content marketing SaaS platform.
Standout features: Semrush’s keyword research capabilities are among its most well-known. Find the best keywords, discover new opportunities by identifying keyword gaps and get organic traffic insights.
Pricing: $129.95-$499.95 per month.
Takeaway: If content marketing is your game and deploying a world-leading platform is also your game (no names here), you’ll certainly find value in Semrush.
7. Slite
Description: The SaaS company, Slite, is an automated and collaborative knowledge base that helps organizations create, manage and find trusted company information with ease.
Standout features: Slite uses AI to keep your company knowledge up-to-date. AI-driven insights let you know if a document requires attention, i.e., if it’s outdated, expired or there’s a new request. Then, complete a bulk action to remedy your files.
Pricing: $0-$12.50 per member, per month.
Takeaway: If your organization relies on the transfer of knowledge from one person or department to another, Slite removes the burden of traditional knowledge-sharing processes.
8. Loom
Description: Loom is all about video. The platform lets you record and share AI-powered messages with your internal teammates or customers, and champions itself as the “easiest screen record you’ll ever use.”
Standout features: Loom makes it easy to share or embed your videos, too. Whether you work in Google Workspace or Slack, Loom videos will integrate with all your favorite tools.
Pricing: $0-$12.50 per creator, per month. Contact sales for Enterprise pricing.
Takeaway: If your organization could use some help to cut down on the number of meetings that take place, Loom may be exactly what you need.
9. Neil Patel’s AnswerThePublic
Description: Stuck for content ideas? AnswerThePublic is a search listening tool from marketing guru Neil Patel that helps marketing professionals ideate faster by tapping into a “goldmine of content ideas.”
Standout features: AnswerThePublic offers Pro users unlimited daily searches, tools for monitoring and alerting about new opportunities, organization tools and more.
Pricing: $9-$199 per month. Lifetime, one-time-payment options available.
Takeaway: If you’ve ever wanted to get inside the minds of your customers, AnswerThePublic may be the closest you’ll ever get.
10. Adobe’s Marketo Engage
Description: Adobe is a company that needs a little introduction. Marketo Engage is a marketing automation tool from the brand that helps organizations set their “pipeline on fire” by bringing sales and marketing together.
Standout features: Coordinate engagement across more than just one marketing channel to keep customers engaged no matter where they interact with your brand. That includes online and offline channels such as social media, email, webinars and more.
Pricing: Contact Adobe for customized pricing.
Takeaway: Some people prefer to work with a brand that has built an unwavering reputation for itself. If that’s you, or if you’re already a fan of Adobe products, adding Marketo Enage to your toolbelt could be a good call.
So, what’s the perfect SaaS product for marketing? Well, it depends on your business. All of these tools offer something unique and many are specialized for specific areas of content marketing. We suggest doing a deep dive into your business needs to identify what you could use to help with the most. Once you have the answer, come back to this list and choose the automation software that best aligns with your goals.
Happy automating!
